Read Online Red the First by C. D. Verhoff - Free Book Online Page A

static.
    Red grabbed the mic. “Hello, hello—can
you hear me?”
    “ Affirmative,” came the
voice on the other end. “Is this a real person?”
    “ Last time I
checked.”
    “ Good Lord Almighty, you are
a real person. Thought I might have raised a Celerun again. They
have no sense of humor.”
    “ The name’s Red. Who are
you?”
    “ Call me Hank. Are you
alone, Red?”
    “ No, Hank.”
    “ How many are with you?
Wait, no, don’t tell me, because if there’s very many of you,
they’ll make you a priority target.”
    “ A target for the
Celeruns?”
    “ Yes. Are you familiar with
them?”
    “ Maybe. You’re breaking up
real bad, so tell me what to do before we lose our
connection.”
    “ We have to keep this very
short.”
    “ In that case, Hank, I
better give our location before we lose you.”
    “ Stop! Don’t say it!” The
signal dropped, but Blanche thrust the antennae in Jerome’s hand
and motioned for him to heft it higher. Jerome climbed on top of a
table, shoving honey cakes and wine out of the way. The signal
returned. “I have a sophisticated scrambler, which will shield the
both of us, but the Celeruns might have figured out how to
circumvent it by now.” Hank’s voice sounded even and steady, like a
man in control. “They understand human language quite well, but
wordplay, metaphors, and picturesque speech confounds
them.”
    “ I don’t
understand.”
    “ If you say someone looks
like a bow-wow, they’ll take it to mean she looks like a dog’s
bark. If you say your heart is on fire, they’ll think that the
circulatory organ in your chest is aflame. These are common
references though, so they can quickly look up their correct
meanings. The key to confusing their interpreters is originality.
The more unusual the turn of phrase, the more it slows down their
intelligence gathering.”
    “ I still don’t understand
what you want from us.”
    “ Tell me where your heart
is.”
    “ Huh?”
    “ Don’t give me any landmarks
or names of places,” Hank said. “Use unique imagery; paint a
picture, a reference to something you wouldn’t find in a
dictionary, a thesaurus, or Wikipedia.”
    “ Wikipedia—but the internet
is gone.”
    “ They saved everything on
it,” Hank said.
    “ I’m still not
following.”
    “ Home is where your heart
is,” Professor Linkletter said. “I think Hank wants to know our
location, but he wants you to do it without giving names of places
or landmarks the Celeruns might recognize.”
    Red looked to the others at the party.
“How should I tell him how to find us without using coordinates or
names?”
    He was met with shrugs and
indecisiveness.
    “ We’re losing him,” Blanche
informed. “Better come up with something fast.”
    “ Don’t worry,” Michael
stepped up. “I got this.”
    He seemed so sure of himself that Red
let him take the microphone. Michael didn’t waste a
moment.
    “ Hey, mister, think about
these things: what a kid says before he eats Brussels sprouts.” He
didn’t pause for a breath. “What you do on the playground when a
girl tries to kiss you.” He looked to Red for assurance that he was
doing well. Red shrugged and returned a scowl, but Elizabeth gave
Michael a nod of encouragement.
    “ One more clue,” Michael
said. “A little hello in the middle of two cops eating
breakfast.”
    “ Gimme that,” Red snatched
away the microphone. “Hank, sorry about that. I’ll think of another
way...”
    “ Oh, shoot,” Blanche
informed. “I lost the transmission.”
    “ What were you thinking,
Michael? How in the world is he going to figure out Akron, Ohio
from all of that?”
    Michael turned to a boy about his own
age.
    “ What do you say before you
eat Brussels sprouts?”
    The boy said. “Yuck.”
    “ Anyone else?”
    “ Yum?” A ten-year-old girl
volunteered.
    Michael looked at her as if a turd had
fallen out of her mouth.
    “ Ack,” Nate said. “I say
ack.”
    “ Me too,” Michael
nodded.
    “ And