“This is it,” Zada whispered.
Kaci’s team crowded together.
“Think it’ll break again, Dr. Boudreaux?” Jess said.
“Darn near certainty.” Kaci pointed to the catapult. “See how tight they’ve got it wound down?” She geeked out, rattling physics principles and design theories until she realized she’d lost them, then fell silent and waited for that beautiful sound of wood cracking and pumpkin crunching into pie in the sky.
One of the guys pulled the release, and the catapult sprang straight with that perfect, reverberatingka-THUD!
But there was no accompanying squish.
No pumpkin guts.
Just a beautiful orange gourd slicing through the blue sky, a perfect arc, perfect height, perfect angle, perfect speed.
“Nuh-uh,” Kaci whispered.
“Wow,” one of the girls murmured.
“That can’t beat us, can it?” Zada said.
The black-shirted boys were all hollering, arms up, fists pumping, chest-bumping each other like Neanderthals.
Their pumpkin started its descent to the ground, a pinprick in the distance, too far away for the satisfying crunch of smashing pumpkin on impact.
And the boys were still hollering.
“That thing went a mile!”
“Did it land on the road?”
“If it did, that road’s sprouting pumpkins next spring.”
Zada angled closer to Kaci, her brown eyes thick with worry. “That went at least as far as ours, didn’t it?”
It didn’t make sense.
That pumpkin should’ve been guts on the ground before it ever took flight.
“Y’all did great,” Kaci said to the team. “I am so proud of every single one of you.”
“Greatmagic formula, Thumper,” one of the guys crowed.
Several others hushed him.
The judge, a pretty lady in her mid-forties, winked at him.
The head judge’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Two thousand eighty-six feet,” he announced.
The black-shirted bandits all erupted in deafening shouts.
The best Ichabod had done for Kaci’s girls was a penny past two thousand.
Those boys had just beaten her girls by eighty feet.
“But—but…” Jess mumbled.
Given the materials, height, and leveragemechanism those danged military guys had used to construct their pumpkin chucker, not to mention the launch velocity and the way they’d cranked the arm down even lower for the last shot, it should’ve been physically impossible.
