Mission Unstoppable by Dan Gutman Page A

eating each other). Only a few members of the party survived.
    Some party, huh?
    Dr. McDonald spotted a sign for a campground in the town of Truckee, California, so he pulled off the highway.
    “Maybe they have a Donner Party museum here,” Pep said hopefully.
    “Donner Party museum?” Coke said, snorting. “Are you kidding? Nobody’s gonna make a museum about a bunch of cannibals.”
    “Why not?” Pep asked. “Somebody made a museum about a bunch of yo-yos. Somebody made a museum about a bunch of Pez dispensers. Why not a museum devoted to the memory of the Donner Party?”
    That’s when they saw a sign at the side of the road.

    “See!” Pep hollered. “They do have a Donner Party museum! Can we go there? Please, Dad? Please, please, please?”
    Dr. McDonald pulled into Donner Memorial State Park and found the museum parking lot.
    “It is historical, I suppose,” he said.
    “I might be able to use this on Amazing but True ,” Mrs. McDonald added.
    “I can imagine the souvenirs they sell in the gift shop,” Coke remarked. “Do you think it has a meat department?”
    The exhibit was actually pretty interesting. There was a twenty-five-minute video about the Donner Party and a musket that one of the desperate pioneers had used to shoot an eight-hundred-pound grizzly bear. Outside was a memorial that showed how high the snow had gotten that tragic winter: twenty-two feet.
    “I’m not entirely sure that museum was appropriate for children,” Mrs. McDonald said when the family piled back inside the RV.
    “The Donner Party were heroes,” Pep said. “They did what they had to do to survive.”
    “Yeah, lighten up, Mom,” Coke agreed. “Cannibals are cool.”
    “It was educational,” Dr. McDonald admitted. “Because of what happened to the Donner Party, Californians sent relief teams with food and water for people who were heading west during the gold rush a couple of years later. So in the long run, they saved a lot of lives.”

    After a few wrong turns, the McDonalds found a campground where they could spend the night. They had driven more than two hundred miles, almost all the way across California. Mrs. McDonald baked some freeze-dried chicken in the RV’s little microwave oven, and the family eagerly wolfed it down while sitting at a picnic table next to their campsite.
    “Do you want me to do a dump here, Dad?” Coke asked, remembering that his chore for the trip was to empty the holding tank below the toilet.
    “No, we can wait a few days for that,” Dr. McDonald replied. “Let the tank fill up a little.”
    It was a simple campground. Once the sun went down, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Without any wood to make a campfire, the McDonalds climbed into their four sleeping nooks and curled up with books. One by one, they dropped off to sleep.
    Around three o’clock in the morning, a man wearing a black suit and a bowler hat tiptoed over to the RV. He had a piece of paper with him, about three inches by seven inches, which he carefully slipped under the left windshield wiper. Then he crept away silently in the night.
    This is what it said on the piece of paper:
    JNTET FFHNO LCDNB LTYUL
    VSEED NTHTU EWNYI TOECO
    KOTEA EORIEDPNOITOR

Chapter 14
The Singing Sand
    T he twins woke up the next morning—June 20—to hear their father ranting to nobody in particular.
    “A ticket?” Dr. McDonald bellowed. “I can’t believe the cops gave me a parking ticket. In a campground! That’s un-American!”
    Coke buried his face in his pillow and tried to go back to sleep.
    When Dr. McDonald went outside and peeled the “ticket” off the windshield, he realized it wasn’t a ticket at all. No ticket would say
    JNTET FFHNO LCDNB LTYUL
    VSEED NTHTU EWNYI TOECO
    KOTEA EORIEDPNOITOR
    “What do you make of this, Bridge?” he asked.
    “It’s not a ticket,” Mrs. McDonald replied. “Maybe it’s a new kind of sudoku puzzle or some word game. It looks like some sort of a code.”
    With the word