Zeke Bartholomew Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 by Jason Pinter

  Cover illustrations © Brandon Dorman

  Cover and internal design © 2011 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by William Riley/Sourcebooks

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567–4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.jabberwockykids.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Source of Production: Webcom, Toronto, Canada

  Date of Production: October 2011

  Run Number: 16053

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Preview of Zeke Bartholomew and the Summer Camp of Doom

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To Brian Jacques, Terry Brooks, and Stephen King,

  who showed me that discovering amazing new worlds is as easy as turning the page

  To Who It May Concern

  (Wait…is it “who” or “whom”? Ugh, I can never remember. If I live long enough, remind me to ask Mr. Statler in homeroom tomorrow.)

  My name is Ezekiel J. Bartholomew. I figure my parents gave me that name because they were really popular and had a lot of friends growing up and by naming me Zeke it would balance out our family’s popularity. Most kids in my school have names like Tom or Mike or Freddie or Bill. In fact, I’ve never met another Ezekiel in my life. Most of my regular friends call me Zeke, so I guess you can call me that too. I say “regular” friends because I have another friend too. My friend will soon call me Sea Otter. I know, I know. The name Sea Otter doesn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of my enemies, but you’ll learn who my other friend is and why I’m called Sea Otter very shortly. In the end it will all make sense.

  When I was in the third grade, my gym teacher wrote on my report card: “Zeke is medium everything.” So after everything that happened, even after everything was explained to me, I’ve often asked myself: how could a twelve-year-old “medium everything” become the most wanted kid in the world? I’m still not totally sure. But what I do know is this: if you’re reading this letter, he’s found me. The most dangerous person in the world. My nemesis. (Or the person reading this is my dad, and you snooped around my room when I’ve told you a million times that it’s totally off limits when I’m not home. So if you’re my dad, ignore everything I’m about to say and stop reading right now. It’s just your silly, daydreaming son, Zeke, pretending to be a superspy again. But if this isn’t my dad, then you’d better listen closely, because the fate of the world is at stake.)

  You might think everything I’m about to tell you is a big lie. “Zeke loves to make up exciting adventures because he’s never going to have any of his own!” you might say. Or, “There goes Zeke again, Zeke the daydreamer, the joke of an inventor, thinking he’s some sort of kick-butt spy, when in reality I’d pick an inflatable mattress over him to be on my dodgeball team.” I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. My fourth-grade English teacher, Ms. Wilderman, wrote that my short stories “lack creativity.” See, right from the mouth of a teaching professional. I’m not creative enough to make up what I’m about to tell you even if I wanted to. I’ve never been creative on paper, but I also never thought my creativity might save the world.

  So I can understand why you might not believe me. But I promise you that this is all true.

  If you’re reading this, it means he’s still out there. The most dangerous person in the world. He knows I’m still alive. But I also know that he knows I’m still alive. I’m not sure why he wants me to know he’s still alive, unless he just wants me to be pee-my-pants scared over the possibility of him coming for me, but to be honest, after everything that’s happened, I say bring it on.

  So this is the truth. This is how the fate of the world fell into the hands of an unimportant dorky kid from nowheresville. This is how it all began. But before I start, you need to know his name. The true identity of my nemesis. My foe. The person who will stop at anything to kill me.

  So whatever you do, if you find this note, know that he is out there. And he is…uh-oh, I can hear my dad coming up the stairs. But this letter isn’t ready yet. I’d better hide it where nobody will ever find it…

  Once there was a boy destined for greatness. He had a very distinctive scar, and anyone who saw it immediately knew who he was and how he got it. He possessed amazing magical powers and was fated to save the world. He lived in a wondrous realm, full of adventure and derring-do, and every day brought fantastical quests, creatures that seemed to have leaped from dreams, prophecies that would change the course of millions of lives.

  This boy’s name was known throughout his realm, and ours, and it is still spoken by children and adults alike. Books were written about this boy. Movies were made about him and his friends. His life is known by everyone with a pulse.

  I am not that boy.

  My name is Zeke Bartholomew, and the only thing I have in common with “you know who” is an identifiable scar. Only mine wasn’t carved by some evil wizard…mine was caused through sheer stupidity. Let me explain.

  When I was seven, I tried to create a zip line. I’d seen it in a spy movie once, the hero skimming effortlessly along a razor-thin wire from a skyscraper to the street while a fire raged below him, firing at bad guys with precision aim. Looked easy enough, and I was a fairly smart kid, so I understood the physics behind it.

  That zip line was the first cold slap in my face letting me know that I wasn’t an action hero, just a regular kid.

  When my dad wasn’t looking, I climbed out through the attic window with a fifty-foot piece of rope I’d found in a dumpster. I’d also found a discarded bike handlebar in the trash, and what was one person’s trash was another person’s treasure.

  I tossed one end of the rope to my best friend, Kyle Quint. Kyle tied that end to a tree while I secured the other around the chimney. Once both sides were taut, I yelled to Kyle.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready, Zeke!”

  I swung the handlebar over the rope, making sure the zip line fit snugly between the metal. I tugged it. The contraption felt good. I gave Kyle a thumbs-up.

  “Go for it, Zeke!”

  I gripped the handlebar, got a running start, and lifted my feet off the ground. At first it was incredible. I was sailing through
the air, just like James Bond might have done.

  “It’s working!” I yelled to Kyle. “We did it!”

  And that’s when the handlebar detached from the rope. In my excitement, I’d neglected to secure the underside of the handlebar. Not very James Bondian. Before I knew it, I was upside down, hurtling through the air. But rather than in a cool, downward fashion that would have left me standing triumphantly, I was plunging straight down into a tree.

  I smacked against the branches, felt something tear at my face, then tumbled to the ground. That’s the last thing I remembered before waking up in the hospital with a broken arm and fifteen stitches where they sewed my upper lip back together.

  Now, five years later, my arm has healed. And if you look closely you can still see the scar on my lip. At the time, that zip-line adventure was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. Unlike “that” boy (you know, the one with the cool forehead scar and magical powers) a failed zip line was the height of my adventures. So I lived through books and movies and TV shows. Wanting to be that boy everyone knew. The boy who could save lives and change the world. But it wasn’t meant to be.

  Until the day he moved in next door. My own “he who shall not be named.” And from that day forward, my life was never the same.

  It all started on a day like any other. The sun rose. I had waffles for breakfast. And I caught my dad absently scratching his butt while eating a bowl of cereal. It was a rerun of pretty much every day of my life.

  Except for the moving vans.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said, peering through the fence in my front yard. My best friend, Kyle, was kneeling next to me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It didn’t seem possible. I couldn’t tell if this would be the best day or my life or the worst.

  “Some real estate broker must have a really good sense of humor, Kyle,” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure a family of spies just moved into the house next door to me.”

  Kyle looked at me, in a way that said, Here we go again.

  “Sure,” he said. “Just like that tribe of gypsies living beneath the community swimming pool that turned out to be a knitting group.”

  “They looked suspicious,” I replied.

  “Or the gang of motorcycle hooligans plotting to poison the town’s water supply.”

  “In my defense, he had a bicycle and was doing something to the water that wasn’t right.”

  “Come on, man. Let it go. It’s a family with a few cool cars. If you’re lucky, their kids will have all the new video games.”

  I wanted to argue with Kyle, because I couldn’t shake that feeling. There they were. A family of three unloading box after box from a car the size of the school gym. A woman and man who appeared to be married, and the silhouette of another person still inside the car. I couldn’t tell who the third person was or how old he or she was, but the person didn’t appear to be in a hurry to help. The man and woman weren’t unloading regular cardboard boxes. You know, the kind with masking tape peeling off of them and big, sloppily written words on the sides that say things like Caroline—old baby clothes and Ralph—bowling trophies.

  No, this family was unloading huge aluminum containers onto dollies with the kind of delicacy and precision usually reserved for plutonium. I looked at my jeans with the ketchup stain on the right knee, my sneakers with the rubber soles coming loose. I didn’t own anything worthy of being transported inside a cool-looking bomb-proof container.

  “Those containers are rust-proof,” I said to Kyle. “Whatever’s in there must be important.”

  “You know there’s a rational explanation for all of this. Maybe it’s like a collection of really old baseball cards or family albums.”

  “It’s definitely not family albums,” I said as the man gingerly placed a crate onto a dolly, biting his lip as he did so.

  My family had lived at 5 Sunnyvale Drive all of my twelve years. The house next door had been unoccupied for the last three, ever since the Wickershams moved to New York City when Mr. Wickersham got a job at an advertising firm (or as my dad put it, he “went off to be the Grand Pooh-bah at some hoity-toity ivory tower. Hmph”).

  I was friends with their son, Wally Wickersham, and it sucked when they left, because that meant Kyle Quint was my only friend left on Sunnyvale Drive. Kyle’s a great guy and all, but he’s six-foot-four, and Wally and I could only beat him in basketball when we played two-on-one. And even then Wally had to cling onto Kyle’s leg while I made a layup.

  Kyle is the tallest kid in the seventh grade by almost a foot. We met in kindergarten when we were both the shortest kids in our grade. Since then he’s grown at double the speed of everybody else. He’s one of the best athletes in the class and always gets picked first or second in pickup games. But he’s also one of the shyest kids you’ll ever meet. On the court he’s a six-four demon, swatting shots and running like a llama. Or a gazelle. One of the two, I’m not good with animals. But off the court he blends into the background and is forgotten about as soon as the game ends.

  Over the last few years, I’d gotten used to the house next door—7 Sunnyvale Drive—being empty. On Halloween it was the only house that didn’t get egged or covered in toilet paper. What’s the fun in TP’ing a house if nobody lives there to get all upset?

  But then one night the moving vans came. They showed up around ten o’clock. A pretty strange time to move in. The moving men were all dressed in black jumpsuits and wearing dark baseball caps. They all had earpieces attached to cords that disappeared into their black pants. These guys definitely didn’t want anybody paying attention to them. I watched the whole thing through the window in my bedroom, thinking there was something weird happening on Sunnyvale Drive.

  Then around eight o’clock the next morning, one huge black SUV pulled up to the house. Kyle had come over for our daily walk to the bus stop. We watched as a man got out of the car. He was about my dad’s age—well, only if my dad looked like he could finish a triathlon in his sleep, used a pound of Jell-O to hold his hair in place, and had a jawline that could cut glass. Then a woman got out. She looked like she could be a model in a shampoo commercial and could finish a triathlon while simultaneously making scrambled eggs and toast.

  The couple held hands for a moment while staring at the house. Then the woman turned back to the car and shouted, “Derek, let’s go!”

  “Come on, son!” the dad yelled.

  And then, out he came.

  A boy stepped out of the car. Slowly. He was wearing a suit. A nice suit. Much shinier and less rumpled (not to mention with fewer holes) than the one I had worn to my aunt Gertrude’s wedding. The kid’s jet-black hair was parted so severely that it looked like it could hold a piece of paper straight up in the air. I sniffed. My hair was a kind of reddish brown, and no matter how many times I combed it, it always tended to look like I’d just been caught in a hurricane.

  His eyes were hidden behind a pair of reflective sunglasses. The boy, Derek, joined his parents. Then suddenly he stopped, flipped off the sunglasses…and looked straight at Kyle and me.

  I grabbed Kyle by the jacket and yanked him inside our house. We huddled in the doorway, staring out the window, waiting for this Derek kid to enter 7 Sunnyvale Drive. He joined his parents, walked inside, and when the door closed behind him we finally caught our breath.

  “Hey, boys. Oh, hey, Kyle,” came my dad’s voice. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee while wearing a bathrobe that was open enough to reveal a circular patch of hair around his belly button. “Zeke, don’t you have school today?”

  “Hey, Mr. Bartholomew,” Kyle said. “We were just watching the—”

  I elbowed Kyle in the side. He made a meek grunting noise. “We were just watching the grass, and it made me realize that I forgot my social studies homework.”

  “Good thin
king,” my dad said, absently scratching his patch of belly button hair. “Have a good day at school. Kyle, make sure Zeke pays attention.”

  “Will do, Mr. Bartholomew,” Kyle said. I debated elbowing him again but decided he’d had enough.

  “See you later, kids,” Dad said, slurping his coffee, a few drops spilling onto the newspaper.

  My dad has taken care of me by himself since my mom died when I was six. He never really talks about her, but I know he misses her. And he never really goes out, just comes home from work, reads or watches TV, and goes to sleep. He makes the best meals on the planet, even though he didn’t learn to cook until after my mom was gone. I was young, but I still miss her, miss the few memories I have, and the memories I missed out on. And every now and then I catch my dad leafing through old photo albums, his eyes red, lip trembling. I love him so much. I want to be the best son I can be. Sometimes I wonder if he’s proud of me. He always tells me he is, but I’m not any good at baseball, can’t run very fast, and my singing voice scares away all the neighborhood cats. Maybe that’s why I love reading about spies. Maybe I want to save the world. Let everyone know that Bartholomew kid is just as good as his dad.

  I led Kyle up the stairs to my room. I had to keep up appearances that I had actually forgotten my homework. I opened the door to my room.

  “What are the chances,” Kyle said, “that a spy would move in next to you?”

  “A million to one,” I said.

  “More like a billion to one. I mean, look at your room, Zeke. Just look at it.”

  Kyle was right. The odds probably were closer to a billion to one.

  I’m going to come clean: I love spies. Love everything about them. I love the exciting adventures. The dangerous missions. The exotic locations. The bad guys. The danger. Anyone who enters my room can tell within half a nanosecond.

  Plastered all over my walls are posters of dashing rogues and femmes fatales. Piled high on my shelf are DVDs of every spy movie ever made. Underneath that are dozens of books on spies, spy craft, gadgets, and tactics, along with novels packed with adventure and derring-do. Books about men and women sent on incredible journeys to prevent the world from being taken over by rich madmen bent on doing something horrible and devious, often involving a laser death ray or an earth-core drilling mechanism.