by J. A. Dauber
But they did announce that they were giving everyone a cut day on the day of winter formal, so everything was forgiven after that.
Admittedly, my plan with Caroline would have been more complicated if my mom had asked questions—like, when had I had my first tuxedo fitting?—but she didn’t. And she certainly didn’t suspect that I was taking someone else to winter formal.
But I guess the idea that Caroline and I were dating made her happy, so I got a full-on explosion of classic Momitude that night. There was the I always knew you would see she was good for you routine. There was the Sometimes you have to be friends before you discover there’s something more there routine. And there was the whole Your dad and I went down the same road routine, which I just…. Could. Not. Hear. It was a little bit rich, coming from someone who’d given up on that road.
Before she launched into another story about how the two of them first realized there was a spark there—something about practicing their lines in a furniture store during a rainstorm, where they acted out the scenes in the fake living room and realized they were meant to be or whatever by the time the storm was over—I tried to change the subject.
But she started talking about how much I looked like my dad, and that I wasn’t much younger than my dad when she met him. I was angry at myself for not shouting at her, for not saying anything about her lack of faith, because I knew getting into that might somehow derail our plan.
Okay. Yeah. That’s all true. But fair is fair. I also didn’t say anything because I thought, maybe, maybe, I could see her eyes getting wet. And some part of me realized that even if she had said she was moving on, she really hadn’t.
I hope that’s the truth.
* * *
Caroline and I spent most of the time on the way to Clapham Junction talking to each other. You’d think it would have been about the big things—what this town could be, my history of robbing banks, Jimmy Anderson. But it wasn’t. It was a little bit about movies, and a little bit of what we were thinking about for college, and some about our teachers, and there was this game where we tried to replace everyone in the Rolling Stones with their minidog equivalent. Like, Mick Jagger was an Aussiepom, for example. Caroline was particularly proud of coming up with the title “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (Because I Need to Go Walkies and My Owner’s at Work).” Which was pretty good.
We used Caroline’s Uber account, the one her parents had set up after the divorce. I thought it was crazy—I couldn’t even imagine what it was going to cost—but Caroline insisted and said we’d figure out some way to explain it, like we had to go a hundred miles to get a specific paisley cummerbund or something. “I mean,” she said, “the worst that’ll happen is I get grounded, right?”
I should have turned around right then. I should have refused to get in the car. I should have snuck into the Mayhem suit and blown up the car.
Well, no, that’s not fair. It wasn’t the driver’s fault.
I know who’s to blame.
So.
We were about fifteen minutes out when we realized something even weirder about Clapham Junction than its virtual absence from the Internet. Actually, the Uber driver pointed it out, and then Caroline confirmed it on her phone. The GPS wasn’t working.
Not that Clapham Junction wasn’t on the map. Or, not exactly. It was more that when you tried to get there, the GPS rerouted you away from it. Over and over. You really had to want to get there. This made me worry that the GPS was reporting the data to someone…. I think we can assume it was.
There were no highway signs and no turnoff routes. If it weren’t for the fact that we had our eyes peeled, we wouldn’t even have noticed the off-road, and we still didn’t see it until we were already past it. The way it was sharply banked, and kind of hiding behind a gas station, didn’t suggest the kind of place where people would ever want to get out and explore. Which, again, was part of the point.
I thought I saw cameras swerve and track our car as we had the driver turn around, but I’m sure that was a figment of my imagination. Any cameras would have been hidden, impossible to see from the road.
One thing I’m thankful for in this whole mess: I made the driver, who was already getting freaked out, drop us off before we walked into town. At least he got away. That’s something.
Not much, but it’s something.
The truth is, we didn’t have a plan. I mean, we weren’t naive enough to think there’d be a big building with SECRET HIDEOUT painted on it in giant letters. But I think neither of us had expected the place to be as…normal as it was. It was a small community, one of those planned exurbs, with just one or two circular roads around a series of houses that all looked exactly the same. Same low-to-the-ground fake adobe buildings, same small windows, same fences blocking alleys to the backyards, same flat roofs—no difference in age or weathering, at least none that I could see. Then I noticed the cars in the driveways were all the same, too. Chrysler Jeeps. That was creepy.
We walked around and around the circular streets. There was no one outside, though, and no indication of anyone coming in and out of the houses. I had this increasingly terrible feeling that we were sitting ducks, that there were missiles or something trained on us. I even considered slipping into the Mayhem suit and getting ready to armorize it right there.
But before I did, on our third trip around, I noticed something. A little thing, but everything else had been so routinely the same that it stuck out like a sore thumb.
One of the Chrysler Jeeps looked different from the others.
It was parked a foot off-center in the driveway, with two of its wheels resting on the grass of the front yard. The house looked exactly like every other house in the neighborhood. But that car’s position made the whole thing look creepy. I mean, creepy in a different way.
We snuck up to it and looked inside the car. It was much less…sterile, I guess, than anything else we’d seen. Maybe because its owner had little kids. You could tell from the car seat and the cracker crumbs all over everything, and from the toy bulldozer wedged into the back seat.
I didn’t know what was going on. This didn’t seem like the kind of place where Mr. Jones would fit in. Not that I really knew his tastes in real estate, or cars, or, well, much of anything, but still…it didn’t give off that Mr. Jones vibe. But something was clearly up. Something that needed exploring.
We snuck up to the house and tried to peek through the windows. The shades were down, so you couldn’t see a thing. There wasn’t even a mail slot to peek through.
“You should armor up,” Caroline said. Clearly she was as creeped out as I was.
I told her I wasn’t sure if that was such a good idea. It made the odds of Mr. Jones knowing we were there that much higher. Maybe he hadn’t noticed that Caroline had downloaded his computer’s location. Maybe he wasn’t monitoring my every move when I was out of the suit. And maybe, maybe he couldn’t track the armor when it wasn’t turned on. But once it was…
She thought about it for a second. “Look at it this way,” she said finally. “No one’s going to spill their beans to two teenagers.” And she was right, of course. “You knew you were going to have to get in the suit when we came here,” she said. And she was right about that, too. “So just hurry up and do it.”
And so I did.
Standing next to Caroline then, I realized, maybe for the first time, just how impressive it looked. It added several feet to my height. At least. The voice scramblers made me sound like an adult. And the contours of the armor made it look like I had these muscles…. The point is, I looked badass. And I felt badass.
That feeling would be gone in a few minutes. But, of course, I didn’t know that then.
* * *
I had broken into half a dozen banks and trashed at least one world-class jewelry store. But I still felt weirdly uncomfortable knocking down the door of this house. Af
ter all, it felt different. Civilian was the word that came to mind. But there was something very weird going on here, and maybe the house would provide some answers. I had to start somewhere, and this seemed like the best option.
I told Caroline to stand behind me while I smashed the door. And I felt a stab of happiness, not in causing destruction, not in the way Caroline looked at me as I did it, but in the sweetest thing ever: being proven right.
Since the house’s front room did not contain a couch or a TV or a dining set or even any furniture at all, but instead what looked to my inexperienced eye like several million dollars’ worth of guns.
Not just guns. Rocket launchers, bazookas, a stack of what I think might have been antipersonnel mines, and crates of what I was pretty sure was plastic explosive. I seemed to remember the stencil on one of the crates—C-4—from an old television show my dad liked, The A-Team.
At first I didn’t get it. This felt even less like Mr. Jones, if that was possible. He’d never even used the Mayhem suit himself—he certainly wasn’t the kind of guy to run around holding a bazooka. And how many rocket launchers does one man need? Something this size, it was much more than Mr. Jones could possibly use. This was enough for a small army.
And then Caroline gasped and pointed, and I realized which small army these weapons belonged to.
The black-and-white banner of the Bloody Front was hanging on the wall. Right where a TV set would have been.
* * *
“Wait a minute,” Caroline said. I turned to her, speechless.
“Look.” She pointed through the living room, toward the back of the house. There was what I think the real estate shows call an open kitchen—lots of space and no interior walls. It was clear no one had used it to cook for a while, since the countertops were covered with more crates of explosives.
But beyond that, through the kitchen windows, was the backyard.
Or what would have been the backyard, if this were a normal house in a normal town. Instead it was some crazy arrangement of tents and tunnels—almost like a…gigantic hamster cage, I guess. And they all looked like they linked up with the other houses. At least all the ones I could see.
I remember reading about the Secret Service, and how they protect the president. If he has to leave his armored car and go someplace where there could be a sharpshooter, they put up a big tent so that no one can see exactly when he leaves the car. There’s no shot to take.
Whoever—or whatever—was passing between these houses, you wouldn’t be able see them from the street—the high fences took care of that—and you couldn’t see them from the sky, thanks to the tents. The tents must have looked pretty suspicious, of course, but I was betting that they were hidden by some version of the GPS trick, or cloaking, or old-fashioned camouflage. A terrorist group would know all about that stuff.
“This town is the Bloody Front’s headquarters,” Caroline said. “It’s gotta be. Right?”
I nodded. It couldn’t be anything else. And if it was, that meant my dad was here. And I would tear down everything and everyone in order to find him.
But Caroline continued. “So why is it where Mr. Jones’s messages were coming from?”
And that stopped me cold.
Because suddenly I had another theory for why Mr. Jones had known when the Front were going to strike in New York.
And I didn’t like it one bit.
It didn’t make sense, though. If Mr. Jones was working with the Bloody Front, why did he have me stop them? And if they had kidnapped my dad, why would he tell me about it? And if that was a lie—who knew what else was—then why did he send me on those missions? Just to get money? To do what?
And where was my dad?
The reasonable thing to do, under the circumstances, would have been to back away slowly and place an anonymous call to the police or Homeland Security. But we were far past reasonable.
I was going to get some answers.
But of course—saying this is like choking on knives now—I didn’t want Caroline to get hurt, so we tried to be careful.
We searched the house, creeping along as subtly as an over-eight-foot-tall armored man can, Caroline trying to slip ahead of me, me trying to cut her off when she did. We looked like the Frankenstein monster playing with that little girl in the movie. Looking for clues. To where my dad was, to anything. If there was nothing there, we’d hit the tunnels and try another house. And another. And another, until we found what we were looking for. That was the plan.
And it looked like that was what we were going to have to do. Because everything else in the house itself looked normal. I mean, aside from all that firepower, which was admittedly a big exception. But not only was there no sign of my dad, there was no sign of anyone living there, of any personality. It was more like a show house, the kind you’d look at if you were going to buy real estate in the community. Not that anyone would be able to find the place on a map.
I’d kept Caroline behind me the whole time. That Jeep hadn’t moved itself, after all, and I was worried someone would jump out of a closet or a shower firing a gun. If they aimed at me, all they’d get would be a ricochet back into their own head.
Which would not, of course, be optimal. I was hoping I’d be able to frighten them into telling us where my dad was kept. And then I’d save him, and get him back to my mom in time for winter formal night, and they could both stand there in the front hall with the camera and make embarrassing oohing and aahing noises about how wonderful I looked in my tux before I met Rebecca and then we’d slow-dance, maybe even to the music of the mp3s.
This was a ridiculous fantasy of course, but it was attractive. And, notwithstanding everything, a little distracting. So despite theoretically being on high alert, I was caught off guard when the suit’s monitors flashed a proximity motion warning. I looked out the upstairs window and saw someone walking out of the house across the way, heading for the Jeep, the one with the cracker crumbs.
I didn’t bother with the backyards, or the tunnels. I used the window, rocketing out like a flash and shouting at Caroline to avoid the shattering glass.
The person—a woman, I could see—heard the noise but didn’t seem to panic. She just turned on her heel without looking up and went back into the house before I could intercept her, closing the door. And, presumably, locking it.
I didn’t bother to find out. I just ripped the door off its hinges, taking most of the frame with it, and then I stomped after the woman, who was already disappearing up a staircase. Looking up, I could see high heels, followed by a long white coat.
Which made sense, because the inside of this house didn’t look like a show house at all. It looked more like a lab. Glass walls, steel lab tables, lots of workstations with those uncomfortable-looking metal stools.
None of that mattered. What was important was that I had found someone I could talk to. Or at.
“GET DOWN HERE,” I rumbled, and the woman turned around. No trace of surprise at seeing Mayhem in front of her.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
While I was trying to process this, Caroline arrived, panting heavily, and the woman looked at her. “And who is this? Your daughter or something?”
“OH,” I said, “SHE’S NOT—I MEAN, IT ISN’T—”
The woman just looked at us, shrugged, and headed back up the stairs. I heard a door slam behind her.
Caroline looked at me, said, “Your daughter?” and started laughing. Hard. So hard she almost choked.
And then she was choking more, and turning red, and there was blood coming out of her mouth, and she collapsed, shaking and foaming.
This is the worst part.
NOW. FRIDAY. 10:34 P.M.
You know, it’s beautiful out here, in the desert. Beautiful and lonely.
I should just get out of the suit and…walk away. J
ust leave. Forget about food, water…everything. For a while.
I think maybe that’s what I should do.
But I have to get through the next part.
It’s almost finished. I can’t stop now.
THIS MORNING
I had never done CPR training. Plus I was in the suit. I had no idea what to do.
So I smashed through the ceiling, battering down the closed door upstairs.
The woman was sitting at a long desk covered with computer monitors, test tubes, bottles, gadgets, and lab equipment. She looked up at me and frowned. “What’s with all the—” she said, or something like that. But whatever she said, she didn’t finish, because I had slammed her into the wall—not hard enough to knock her out, but hard enough to let her know I was serious.
She sat down on the floor heavily. Her head sort of rolled to the side, and I thought for a second of Jimmy Anderson, but she’d just had her bell rung, as our gym teacher used to say.
The weird thing was, she didn’t seem surprised. By any of this.
“THE GIRL I’M WITH,” I shouted. I could hear my voice bouncing off the walls. “SHE’S BLEEDING. AND CHOKING. DO SOMETHING. NOW.”
And she looked at me, not scared, not surprised, just focused, and asked me—I’ll never forget these words, as long as I live—“You brought her into a level-seven hot zone without giving her the vaccine first?”
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” I demanded.
“I know you do your own thing, that’s how it’s set up, but weren’t you briefed about this? This whole house is a biohazard,” she said. “The girl’s already dead.”
Then she looked alarmed and said, “Wait—” but I didn’t waste time listening and I didn’t pay attention—then—to the first thing she said. I just grabbed her arm—carefully—and told her to get me the antidote right away. “It’s not an antidote,” she said. “It’s a vaccine. It’s too late now.”