by McLay, Craig
I looked at my watch again. I couldn’t just keep standing here. The washrooms were directly opposite Mr. Louvern’s Business Studies class. I had dropped Business Studies last semester, mostly because I thought Mr. Louvern was an ass. If he spotted me standing around out here, he surely wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask me what I was doing standing outside the girls’ bathroom, something he would do both for the amusement of his remaining students and as punishment on me for dropping his class. Mr. Louvern was always singling students out to make himself look better in front of the jock assholes who clustered in the back row. He had played hockey when he was younger and never failed to tell every successive class that he had been asked to try out for the Phoenix AAA team before a twisted knee diverted him into academics. The first time I heard that story, I felt kind of bad for him. By the sixth time I heard it, not so much.
I looked at the bathroom door. What the hell was she still doing in there? It had been at least five minutes. Maybe she had spotted me and ducked in there to shake me off. Well, I wasn’t going to make it that easy.
I pushed open the door of the boys’ washroom and stood just inside the entrance. It smelled, as always, like urine, vinegar and 400-year-old gym clothes. At least now I was out of the hall, so I wasn’t so conspicuous. Plus, when she finally came out of the girls’ bathroom, I’d be able to hear the door and could resume my pursuit.
I waited for ten minutes without a sound other than noises from the nearby classrooms. What the hell was she doing in there? Did she have some sort of bowel condition? A difficult period? I was definitely going to have to try and explain my absence from Ancient Civilizations now. I couldn’t just say I was held up in Biology. Ten minutes guaranteed that my lack of presence would be categorized as absent and not late. Shit.
I heard a footstep in the hall and stuck my head out the door for a look. It was just somebody from Louvern’s class jogging down the hall, probably to get something they left in their locker.
Screw this, I thought. I pushed open the door of the girls’ bathroom. I couldn’t hear any sounds from inside, so I snuck in. All of the stall doors were ajar. There was nobody there.
“Violet?” I said in a low voice. A loud, deep voice emanating from the girls’ bathroom is likely to be investigated as unusual, after all.
Nothing. Somehow she had managed to give me the slip. How did she know I was following her? And how in the hell did she manage to walk in here and disappear?
I heard more footsteps out in the hall. Oh well. There was no point in waiting around in here any longer. Since I was too late to evaluate Peter Fife’s Persian war-porn extravaganza, I went home. I had no sooner closed my bedroom door and turned on my computer than Violet Haze stepped out of my closet.
“Simms, what in the hell are you doing following me around the school?”
I let out a yelp and stumbled backwards, landing rather painfully on a partially deconstructed Rubik’s Cube on the desk. I had taken it apart after months of fruitless attempts to solve it, but one of the corner pieces had flown across the room and landed behind the dresser. The dresser was heavy and had an aquarium on top, so I wasn’t able to move it out to get the missing piece back. If anyone asked about it, I was calling the cube a piece of installation art.
“Jesus!” I shouted. “What are you doing here?”
“Good question,” she said. “Especially coming from a man who just spent twenty minutes hiding in the women’s bathroom.”
I rubbed my hip where it had made contact with my art installation. “Max thought it would be a good idea to try to find out more about you,” I said, not bothering to hide my embarrassment at being such a lousy investigator.
“I see,” she said. “And what have you found out?”
“You’re much better at spying on people than I am,” I admitted. “Other than that, not much.”
She looked around the room appraisingly. Other than the fact that the bed was not made, it was relatively neat, by my standards. My sister was the slob of the family. Anyone trying to cross from one side of her room to the other would have to wade through a waist-deep pile of clothes, makeup cases and electronic devices.
“You know,” she said. “If you wanted to know more about me, you could have just asked.”
“That had not occurred to us,” I said. “Our methods are more…uh…”
“Ineffective?”
“Some might use that word. We prefer to call ourselves covert.”
“I suppose that’s accurate in the sense that neither of you seem to know where you are or why most of the time.”
I was getting a little tired of being called an idiot, even if there was a foundation to some of her arguments. “All right then, Miss Smarty Pants, start talking then.”
So she did. She told me about coming here from Egypt (she was too young to remember many details, but she did remember the strange feeling she got when she looked out the window and realized that she was no longer connected to the ground). Her father’s illness. Their landlord, Mr. Stavros. The fact that she wasn’t sure, but she thought she might have killed Mr. Stavros with some kind of psychokinetic power. At that point, I had to interrupt.
“Wait a minute. Seriously?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Have you killed anybody else?”
“Not yet.”
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?”
“Not as long as you don’t keep following me around.”
“Can you make things move? Could you get that Rubik’s Cube to float up off the desk? Better yet, could you get the piece of that Rubik’s Cube that fell behind the dresser back out?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know you really have this power? Maybe the guy just had a massive stroke or something.”
“Maybe.”
I sat back against the wall and pondered this. It occurred to me that we had been here a while and I was thirsty. Maybe she was thirsty, too. “Do you want something to drink? Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“I’m just going to grab something, so it’s no problem. You’re not going to take off, are you?”
“No.”
I jogged down to the kitchen and grabbed a ginger ale out of the fridge. When I got back to my room, she was gone. I ran to the window, but there was no sign of her shimmying down the drainpipe or running across the lawn. I checked the closet to make sure she wasn’t just messing with me, but she wasn’t in there, either.
Who on earth was this girl? Was she even for real? What about her story? Had she made the whole thing up? Maybe I should go in for a CAT scan myself. I looked at my watch. Max would be home by now. I decided to call.
“I found out some more about this Violet chick.”
“Code names!” Max hissed. “Remember, they’re listening to everything.”
I sighed. “Okay. I found out more about Miss X.”
“Excellent!” Max said. “Where does she live?”
“Actually, I didn’t find out that part.”
“How could you not know that? It’s pretty much the most pertinent piece of required information. It’s the thing that you find out first.”
“You wanna know, then I suggest you spend an hour trying to tail her, Marlowe. She shook me off like a homeless flyer and then tailed me all the way home.”
“What?”
“I just got back to my room when she stepped out of the closet. Scared me so bad I sat on my Rubik’s Cube.”
“So you’ll be shitting red and green squares for the next couple weeks. What did you find out?”
I related a synopsized version of the story she had told me.
“Mind powers?” Max said when I was done. “You’re full of shit. Did she demonstrate anything?”
“No. I asked for a demonstration, but she declined.”
“I bet you did, you horny bastard. Neglected to levitate your todger, did she?”
I allowed myself a brief moment to think about suc
h possibilities. I had never before been alone in my room with a girl of roughly the same age who was not in some way, shape or form related to me. Maybe if I acted suspiciously, I could get her to come back. My knowledge of seduction techniques was limited. I did not know anyone who would be able to provide me with recreational drugs. There was a kid in my grade named Ernesto who claimed to smoke a lot of weed, but he had called me a narc the one and only time I had asked him about it, so that avenue was likely shut off. My parents had a few bottles of wine on the rack in the basement, but not so many that they wouldn’t notice if one of them just disappeared or was replaced with tap water. I did not look 19 or have access to a fake ID, or anyone who could provide me with one.
Based on what I had seen of her so far, I didn’t think Violet Haze was the type of girl who would respond to those sorts of overtures, anyway. She seemed more like the kind of woman who should be dating James Bond, except that Bond women almost always get bumped off.
“So what now?” I asked.
“We wait,” Max said. “Based on the way this woman operates, it sounds like she’ll be the one to come to us.”
I looked at the chair where she’d been sitting while she had relayed her extraordinary story. I hoped Max was right. This girl interested me.
-10-
Of course, our assault on the Weather Station was a disaster.
Quite literally.
Shortly after we cut the power and the station went offline, a tornado – or, rather, 15 separate tornadoes – rolled through the city within a ten-minute span. Some of them touched down, wrecked something, and then almost immediately disappeared, while others carved long and wide swathes of destruction across much larger areas.
Amazingly, nobody was hurt. The buildings that were destroyed during the destruction included a vegan restaurant, a safe injection site, two community drop-in centres, the headquarters of the local Green Party candidate, four legal medicinal marijuana grow op sites, and a Jesuit retreat that had been trying to block Walmart from building a new store next door to their meditative garden. All of them were empty at the time the funnel clouds touched down. In every case, the buildings on either side of them were left completely unharmed. Two tornadoes also struck just outside of town. One carved a perfectly straight seven-mile diagonal through a butterfly preserve that matched exactly the proposed route for a contentious natural gas pipeline. Another one wiped out a century-old farmhouse that was the sole obstacle to a planned suburban development in the south end.
Meteorologists and storm watchers were baffled. Although it wasn’t unusual to see two or three tornadoes touch down during a major storm, there had been no storm activity in the area at the time. Many were reluctant to confirm that tornadoes were the culprit. The damage was so extreme and also so contained that some even floated the theory that some of the damage must have been due to some other cause, although none of them could offer up any theory as to what that might be. Conspiracy theories quickly sprang up, giving rise to a whole “Tornado Truther” movement that believed all of the damage had been the result of some co-ordinated mass demolition operation. This was not a position that gained a lot of traction in the media.
Max, of course, believed that the wave of destruction only re-enforced his theory that the Weather Stations controlled the weather and that, by taking one offline even briefly, we had exposed this truth to the world. The fact that the world did not immediately recognize this was something he was confident would change over time.
“Look at the sites they hit!” he said afterward. “Those twisters weren’t the Finger of God, they were the Finger of The Man!”
I couldn’t argue against the fact that if there was such a thing as The Man, the affected sites would probably have been pretty high on His hit list, but there was one aspect of his logic that didn’t square.
“But if that was the case,” I said, “and you were correct in your assessment that the Weather Stations controlled the weather, then why did all of that happen during our assault?”
Max, as he did so many of my arguments against one of his deeply entrenched and beloved positions, waved this away. “They probably had them all programmed in and ready to go. I bet when we took the station down, it removed the control. As soon as they got it back up again, the twisters disappeared.”
This opinion was not widely circulated in the media. There the general consensus was that two idiotic juvenile delinquents (us) had, for reasons unknown, sabotaged the one piece of equipment that might have provided even a modicum of advance warning about the dangerous storm that materialized out of nowhere and did so much damage. The fact that nobody was killed was the only thing that kept them from demanding that we be transferred to adult court and sent to the worst maximum security facility possible to become the sexual slaves of the largest, ugliest and most densely tattooed individuals in the place.
The plan had been fairly straightforward. Violet had explained it to us one night at our headquarters.
“I think we’ve established that we can’t go after the Weather Station directly because the security’s too tight,” she said. We were hunkered down in a corner of the old warehouse as rain hammered the leaky metal roof overhead. There were so many holes in the roof that there were only a couple of places inside that you could sit without being subject to the whim of the elements. In some places, the holes were so big that water gushed down in torrents. It pooled in so many places that crossing the floor without soaking your sneakers was impossible.
“So you say,” Max said. He did not like being usurped as the chief tactician and was inclined to be surly during planning meetings.
“Hey, you want to go in the front door with guns blazing, be my guest,” Violet said.
“No one’s saying we want to do that,” I interjected.
“Don’t need guns for a job like this,” Max muttered under his breath. I was tempted to ask him exactly what kind of a job he thought we would need guns for, but decided against it because it might cause him to think of one.
Since we couldn’t go after the station, we’d go after the power source. Through her online research, Violet had been able to identify a nondescript transformer on a hill 300 yards from the station as its main power source. If we took that out, the station would go down.
“You don’t even have to blow it up,” Violet said. “All you need to do is trick it into thinking that the station isn’t there.”
“And how do we do that?” I asked.
Violet pulled what looked like a USB stick out of her bag. “Simple. Open the box and plug this connector into port B122A. It’s preloaded with code that will tell the transformer to shut itself off.”
I was impressed, but wary. “That’s awesome! Are you sure, though? How do you know it’ll work?”
“I’m sure,” she said with a smile that radiated absolute confidence.
“How do we get into the box?” Max asked.
“Well,” she said, “the door’s only held closed by a teeny-weeny little padlock. I’m sure two such highly trained commandoes as yourselves will have no problem with that. A simple bolt cutter should do the job.”
“And you’re sure there’s no security on the thing?” I asked, looking at the stick she handed me. It was slightly larger than a USB, matte black, and had a tiny row of lights that ran down one side. It didn’t look like anything an average teenager would be able to pick up at Radio Shack. Where on earth did she get this thing? I wanted to know, but wasn’t entirely sure I would like the answer.
“None,” she said. “Whole operation should take you less than five minutes. As long as you don’t leave any fingerprints behind, they’ll never even know you were there.”
I stopped turning the device around in my hands, rubbed it quickly on my shirt, and stuffed it in my pocket. I made a mental note to give it a more thorough cleaning later. Did I have a pair of gloves that I could use for tricky detail work? My winter ones would be too thick. What about dish gloves? No – they were yellow. That wo
uld look stupid.
“So we’re out on the box,” Max observed. “Where will you be?”
“I’ll be at home,” Violet said. “I’ll monitor the networks to make sure they’re not on to you. We’ll keep in touch by radio.”
We elected to go the following Friday at midnight. I borrowed a hand-held bolt cutter from my dad’s toolbox, but was unable to locate any decent gloves, so I had to go with the dish gloves. If I tucked them in under my sleeve, they didn’t look quite as bad, I thought. Max, however, disagreed.
“The fuck you wearing?” he hissed when he climbed out his bedroom window and met me in the backyard of his mother’s house. “This is war, not bath time for your goddamn hamster!”
“Give me a break,” I said. “I couldn’t find anything else. Besides, you’re not exactly Sergeant Rock.”
Max, I noticed, was wearing his mother’s gardening gloves. Even in the darkness, it wasn’t hard to see that they were emerald green and had an imprint of purple and pink geraniums.
“Never mind that,” he said. “At least they’re heavy duty. You remember the stick?”
“Fuck! I left it in my desk!”
“I don’t believe this! Of all the –”
“Relax! Of course I brought it,” I said, pulling it out of my pocket as proof. “Got the bolt cutters, too.”
“Okay.” He took the walkie-talkie off his belt. “This is BO-two-two-four to BO-Central. Come in, BO-Central.”
I heard Violet’s voice crackle through the cheap plastic receiver. “At no point did I agree to be called BO-Central.”
“Do you read?” Max said, not trying to hide the impatience in his voice. From experience, I knew that he tended to be the most snappish and stressed right at the start of an operation.