Read Online Hamish X Goes to Providence Rhode Island by Sean Cullen - Free Book Online

Captain was going to do. He turned and hammered on the dented hatch.
    â€œWhat do you think you’re doing? You’ll wreck us on the rocks!”
    â€œYou won’t get my ship, you booted freak-boy,” came the muffled, manic reply. “You won’t get my ship! Tee hee! Tee hee!”
    Hamish X feverishly began to hammer the hatch with his boots. He had to stop the Captain from wrecking the ship on the rocks. “Hurry, Maggie,” he muttered to himself.
    Down below, Maggie hurried. She pelted through the corridors of the ship. Everywhere she looked, there were signs of a titanic struggle. She ran through the mess hall and found the tables overturned, chairs broken, dishes shattered. She ran down a corridor past the crew cabins. The doors hung open or dangled from shattered hinges. In a heap, four crewmen lay tied together with electrical tape and nylon rope, a child standing guard over them. She was about to ask the boy where her brother was when she heard shouting and the sound of metal clashing against metal. She followed the din and came to a steep metal ladder. The sounds were coming from below. She grippedthe handrails and slid down the ladder, landing lightly on the metal floor.
    She found herself on the lowest deck of the ship. The remnants of a heavy battle were strewn along the corridor. Two sailors lay unconscious. A little girl sat with her back to the wall, holding a rag doll against a cut on her forehead.
    â€œWhere’s Thomas?” Maggie demanded. The girl pointed down the corridor and Maggie sped off. She came to the end and turned the corner, almost running into a knot of children gathered in front of a large metal door. Lined up against the wall, bound and gagged, was a group of vanquished crewmen.
    The door was scratched and dented but seemed solid. Thomas swung a massive wrench. It bounced off the door with a sound like a metal gong, shivering the wrench from his grasp. The tool fell to the metal deck with a clatter. Thomas danced out of the way, avoiding a crushed toe, then examined the hatch. The wrench had barely scratched the surface.
    â€œOw!” Thomas winced and twisted his wrists experimentally. “This is hopeless! We can’t get in!” He shook his head.
    â€œWhat’s going on?”
    â€œThe last of the crew is holed up in the engine room, Maggie. They’ve locked the hatch and we can’t get through. We’ll have to starve them out.”
    â€œHamish X says we have to shut down the engines,” Maggie insisted.
    â€œWell, unless he has a blowtorch,” Thomas snapped, “or a bazooka, we are not getting into the engine room.”
    Maggie shook her head. “Hamish X is trying to get into the bridge, but the place is like a fortress. Keep trying.” She turned on her heel and ran back the way she came.

    Thomas watched her go and shrugged. “Let’s find a bigger wrench.”
    HAMISH X WAS DRENCHED WITH SWEAT . He had kicked the hatch with all his might for the last minute and, though it was severely dented, the portal would not yield. He staggered back and looked at the rocks. They loomed ever closer. Even without the enhanced vision afforded him by whatever alterations the ODA had made to his eyesight, he could make out the deadly obstacle in the growing dawn light. He calculated that, at their current speed, the ship would crash into it in a minute, maybe less.
    Maggie burst out of the lower deck hatch and ran towards Hamish X. “The engine room door isn’t going to break down any time soon. We can’t shut down the engines.”
    Hamish X felt panic well up inside him. Fear wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed.
    Maggie stood looking up at him, her blue eyes huge in her grimy face. She needed him to do something.
    Before, when he remembered nothing about the past, he never felt this fear. When he was alone in the world on his adventures, he had never known fear because there was nothing