by J. A. Dauber
But there was one other route, as long as Mr. Jones wasn’t giving them real-time 3-D GPS updates.
I took a deep breath, pointed my head downward, and started tunneling. I was going underground.
My light-bulb inspiration had consisted of digging under the hill and coming up right beneath the bad guys. I actually owed the idea to Mr. Jones, I’m sure he’d be happy to know. It was a variation on one of the training routines he’d had me run.
It was different than in Mr. Jones’s warehouse, though, where I’d been tunneling through the bottom of one of those fake buildings. And a lot trickier than it seemed to be in Bugs Bunny cartoons. For one thing, it was really difficult to displace the dirt. Between kicking the motors into overdrive and operating the flamethrowers at full blast I was able to blast out a tunnel, but even with all that effort I was barely able to make the hole big enough for me.
Which meant it was very dark—I was almost instantly blind, the monitors showing pure black. I had to switch to radar, which I wasn’t sure was operating perfectly—and since I didn’t have any time to pack the ground, the tunnel was filling up behind me as I went. Not fully—I mean, the oxygen monitors never dipped into the yellow, so I must have been getting plenty of air—but enough to be completely terrifying.
And it took a while, because I had to tunnel under the hill, and then wait there—and believe me, it was no fun hanging out there buried alive—while I tracked the thermal signatures of the three trucks and figured out when they were close enough for me to burst out from under them.
It was probably ninety seconds. But it lasted forever.
I spent the time thinking about my dad, and my mom, and Caroline, and Logan, and even Jimmy Anderson. So many people I’d hurt, in one way or another, whether they knew it or not. They were inside the suit and under the ground with me, telling me things. Things I didn’t want to hear. They weren’t real sentences, exactly, but I got the gist: Your fault, Bailey. Your failures. You’re no good. You deserve to rot there in the ground.
And there was a part of me that didn’t disagree.
But then I thought about my dad, maybe in a cell somewhere, and my mom, crying alone, and some dark, cloudy plan with Mr. Jones and the Bloody Front in the center of it all, and I was like: Screw that noise. I can’t do everything. But I can save something.
And I pushed, and clawed, and went up.
The dirt sapped my momentum, so instead of doing one of those superhero things where I smashed through an entire truck, I sort of pushed it to the side. The move wasn’t as dramatic as I had hoped, and sadly not as effective, either. By dumb good luck, though, that first Jeep crashed into the second one, which put a few of the terrorists out of commission.
The ones who were left were clever, figuring out what was going on and jumping out of their trucks right away.
And, of course, they took cover behind the Jeeps and started shooting.
I used the last of my flamethrower capability to blow up the trucks—which took the terrorists’ heaviest weaponry, the rocket launchers, with them—but I got caught in the backdraft and the emergency defense mechanisms that kept me from getting boiled like a lobster inside the suit lowered my power close to zero.
So I was a sitting duck.
I stood there, looking as menacing as I could, waiting for them to realize I was no longer a threat, and then come closer and peel me out of my shell.
Obviously, that’s not what happened. Since I’m here to tell you about it. Spoiler alert. I guess.
What did happen was that Assassin turned around and shouted at the rest of the remaining guys to hop into the last truck. The ones who couldn’t, the groaning and wounded ones, they left behind.
Maybe they’d gotten spooked by my threatening stance. But I didn’t think so. I could see Assassin as he sped off, ripping a Bluetooth device out of his ear. He looked like a man who’d gotten orders he really didn’t like.
Why was Mr. Jones leaving me alive after going to so much trouble to try to kill me?
Unless that wasn’t what he was doing.
Unless he wanted to make sure I didn’t somehow capture them, or Assassin, at least. Mr. Jones didn’t have access to the suit anymore. He didn’t know precisely how low my power levels were. And he couldn’t take the risk. Because Assassin knew something Mr. Jones didn’t want me—or the world—to know.
Like the plan.
There wasn’t much juice left in the suit, but there was more than enough to scare a few bad guys. I wasn’t going to kill anyone else. I’d made that promise, and I was going to stick to it. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t willing to pretend.
Dangling a grown man by the feet over a burning truck tends to encourage honesty. At least I think it does. At any rate, I believed all three panicky variations of “I’m just a grunt, nobody tells me anything!” When I asked them about a prisoner, they looked blank. When I asked them about their grand plan, they looked blanker. And when I asked them about Mr. Jones, they looked blankest of all. That made me think Assassin was very smart about only giving people the information they needed to know.
But it left me pretty much where I’d been before.
I made one of the terrorists call 911 on his cell phone and tell them three members of the Bloody Front were waiting to be collected by the authorities out in the national park. Then I twisted a few panels from the truck into makeshift restraints, pounded them down into the sand around the bad guys, and then—because it had been a long morning, and why not—made the same guy take a selfie of all of us on the same phone, me sitting next to them giving a thumbs-up. Then I left it for the National Security Agency to puzzle over. Maybe they’ll rethink their assumption that I’m a terrorist.
Probably not, though.
So here I am. Walking through the desert in a gigantic robotic outfit.
Which is not recommended, by the way. The remaining power, which isn’t much, is being channeled directly into the servomotors, so it’s like driving a very slow car. With no extra juice for air-conditioning. I’m sweating like a mother in here. Leaving me alone with my thoughts, and with this recording for you, whoever you turn out to be.
But hey, at least the homicidal criminal genius who knows I’m gunning for him will take his defeat out on my dad. When he’s not sending my name and address to a crew of homicidal maniacs, putting my mom in terrible danger. Or maybe he’ll just give that same information to law enforcement and leave me facing God knows how many criminal charges, including but not limited to the destruction of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in government and commercial property. And murder. And murder, too…
And oh, by the way, although this is totally trivial, I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to go to summer school.
Social death. To be followed by very real death.
So that’s something to look forward to.
Yes, I know I’m giggling. It’s hysterical. I’m in hysterics.
I’m going to shut up now for a while.
NOW. SATURDAY. 10:43 A.M.
Okay, I’m back.
In both senses. I’m almost home, too. After a few hours of sucking up some desert sun, the suit recharged enough for me to fly the rest of the way. And I made it to the ravine without running into any fighter jets, terrorist rockets, world-ending bioweapons, or even selfie takers who’d do their civic duty by calling the police.
Man, I can’t wait to get out of this thing. Take a shower. Put it behind me. At least for a few hours. I’ll do the postflight checks later.
Okay. Through the hatch and heading down the passageway.
Wait a minute. The lights are on in the lab. I can see it coming out from under the door.
I always turn them off. Always. Someone’s been here.
Maybe it’s Mr. Jones. Maybe this was his plan—to make me think it was over for a while, and then kill me right when I think I c
an finally relax. That would be his kind of thing, the psycho. He probably has a death ray or something that’ll eat right through the suit.
I think I’ll put up a fight. Better to die with your boots on.
Opening the door.
Okay, in the lab now. Don’t see anyone here, and the thermal gauges aren’t registering any bodies. Just one heat source, a small pinpoint, on the counter next to the computer.
It’s a cigarette. Still burning.
But Mr. Jones hates smokers, I remember. And Dad wouldn’t allow smoking in the house.
…Mom?
Bailey.
Mom.
Bailey, I think you should come upstairs now. I think we’re long overdue for a talk.
Oh, man.
Mom.
NOW. SATURDAY. 11:15 A.M.
Okay. Wow. I’m back again.
In my room. Mom down the hall.
Mayhem down the hall, I guess I should say. Because it was her, all along. Not my dad. I had the story backward from the beginning.
I mean, not that it was entirely my fault. Dad disappears, Mayhem disappears, and then Mr. Jones tells me this whole story…
Which, it turns out, was a pack of lies. And which, like all the best lies, worked by appealing to my biased assumptions about how the world works. I figured the man would be in the robot suit. That’s how Mom put it, anyway, and I can’t argue with that.
The conversation went something like this. This isn’t exact, but it’s as close as I can remember…
Why am I telling you? Well, I’ve got to tell somebody. And it occurs to me, that in the whole world, I have absolutely no one else to talk to.
So here goes. While it’s still fresh.
SATURDAY. 10:47 A.M.
TWENTY-EIGHT MINUTES AGO
First she hugged me. “Thank God you’re safe,” she said. “Thank God you’re safe.” Over and over again.
But I couldn’t deal with it for long. Not the smushed uncomfortable feeling of being up against her chest, but the…emotion, so much of it pouring out of her after so long. So I pushed her away.
I tried to cover it, a little, with a stupid joke. “I guess I’m not out of danger yet, I mean, I don’t want to get suffocated in my own home…”
I hated it as soon as I said it. It was stupid and—and then she burst into tears, and as bad as I’d felt before, now I felt a whole lot worse.
I’m not sure I’d ever seen my mom cry before. Not once. Not during the dadiversaries, not when we talked about him…sometimes she’d be warm and glowing remembering their history, sometimes she’d be withdrawn, detached, like she was somewhere else. But she hadn’t cried. Until now.
I stood there, awkwardly, wondering if I should get her a tissue or something. But then I realized we were out of them in the kitchen, and I didn’t know if we had any more. So I said, “Uh, Mom? Where are the tissues again?”
And she looked up, her eyes red, her nose snuffly, and she said, “You don’t know where the tissues are? You just battled tanks and you can’t find the tissues?” And then she was laughing and crying at the same time, and then she kissed the top of my head, which even in the midst of all this I found a little annoying, quite frankly, since she hadn’t blown her nose.
And then she found a tissue, and wiped her nose, and said, “I’m not sure I can tell you what you need to know.”
And that’s when I said that I was pretty sure I already knew most of the backstory. From Mr. Jones. That he and Dad were roommates in college, that they’d worked together to build the suit…
But she was laughing out loud again. This was the most laughter I’d heard from her in years. “Leonard told you that?” she said. She was almost wheezing.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait a minute. Mr. Jones’s real name is Leonard?”
She couldn’t answer—laughing too hard—but she managed to nod her head. Confirmed. Mr. Jones’s real name was Leonard.
This made me feel very slightly better, as you can imagine.
Mom finally managed to stop laughing, and looked at me. “The roommates. The college roommates. Who grow up to be hero and villain. Doesn’t this remind you of anything?”
“Maybe?” I said.
“Think about those old Fantastic Fours we used to read together when you were small,” she said. “Don’t you remember them?”
Kind of yes, kind of no. But when she pointed out the story he’d told me was this close to the story of Doctor Doom, I almost literally slapped my forehead.
I should have figured an adult with a genius-level intellect who decided to make money by building a robot suit probably liked comic books.
“I don’t know how I believed that,” I said.
“Well,” my mom said, “the truth isn’t entirely different. Just with some changes.”
And I just sat there, openmouthed, as I discovered that it was my mom who was the scientific genius.
“But—” I said. “But—Mr. Jones said he’d built the suit.”
She looked at me.
“Oh,” I said.
“Trust a man to take credit for a woman’s work,” she said.
Truth was, she’d been the prime designer and architect, although he’d helped, and when they’d finished, the two of them were the ones who’d started using it.
“It wasn’t to help people, though,” she said. And I noticed that she wasn’t looking me right in the eye. “Just to have fun. Make some money. After all—”
And she blushed. Then looked me straight in the eye.
“I was young,” she said. “And in love.”
I felt a little like a website that was trying to play one of those annoying video ads. I kept trying to process, but it didn’t start. And then, finally, it did, all at once, at maximum volume. “You were in love with Mr. Jones?” I screeched.
“Or I thought I was,” she said. “I know, you wouldn’t understand that.”
Which wasn’t true. I mean, I understood loving—or at least being totally obsessed with—a person who you really didn’t know. I didn’t go into that, though.
So then there was the rest.
“I met your dad exactly the way I told you,” she said. “And we fell in love exactly the way you’ve always heard. I was just…seeing someone else at the time.”
“Leonard,” I said. (Ugh!)
“Yes,” she said. “Leonard. I told him that I wanted to see someone else, but I hoped we could still…work together. He was a perfect gentleman about it. On the surface, at least.” She looked at me as she continued. “He’s a planner. He takes his time.” And then her mouth twisted, like someone had given one side of it a sharp pull. But her tone didn’t change. “He agreed to try, and we kept…working. My guess is he was hoping I would break up with your father and run back to him. It had happened before—although not with anyone I was nearly as serious about as your father. Obviously.”
This was more information about my mom’s romantic life than I’d ever, ever wanted to know. But if hearing it was how I could find out the truth…. Still, I wanted to fast-forward past anything more intimate. So I interrupted. “Then you and Dad got married and had me,” I said, and thankfully she took the hint.
“Yes, Bailey, we had you,” she said. “After I gave birth, I wasn’t supposed to”—she looked for the right words—“engage in any rigorous exercise for a few months. And then I…well, I just got out of the habit. So there was no Mayhem for a while. For years.”
“Mr. Jones—uh—Leonard said he never got in the suit,” I said. “That’s why he made me do it.”
“That much is true,” my mom said. “I was always the one out there. Leonard was back at base, providing strategy and support. I’m afraid he used the time I was out of commission to plan…other things.”
“But you went back,” I said. “To it. To him.”
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br /> “I didn’t know what he was up to,” she said carefully. “By this time, you were in school full-time, and my job wasn’t satisfying. And the suit…I missed it,” she added. “It gets addictive. You can understand that.”
And I guess I could.
But by the time she finally came back from—uh—Mayhem maternity leave, Mr. Jones had changed. He was pushing her to do bigger jobs. Grab more cash. And he was being skeevy about where the money was going.
“I was beginning to get the sense there was stuff going on I wasn’t aware of,” she said. “But I was willing to trust him. For longer than I should have. We had a history, after all—”
And I was like, Mom, warning, don’t go there.
“The point is,” she said, “it took years of these obfuscations for me to follow him one day, from the air. To Clapham Junction.”
He spotted her, of course—he could track the suit even then, as part of his support role—and, when she confronted him, he showed her around. At least, he started to.
“I don’t know what he had going on there, exactly,” she said. “But it was big—probably not as big as it was when you saw it, it’s been years, but big enough—and it was trouble, and, as far as I was concerned, it needed to be shut down. And that is what I told him.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
Mom was making a face again, but I could see it wasn’t a smile. It was more like someone was stretching the skin back so you could see all her teeth.
“What happened was, the next day your dad disappeared,” she said.
* * *
Obviously, she suspected Mr. Jones immediately. She wasn’t an idiot—after all, she’d designed the Mayhem suit. But he had disappeared as thoroughly as my dad…none of her usual ways of contacting him worked.
And then after about forty-eight hours—right before she was going to take “decisive action”—he got back in touch.
With a picture of my dad. Alive. Unharmed. But clearly his prisoner.