by Sam Cameron
He’d let the King escape. This was his fault.
Ford had his cell phone out. Casual observers might think he was taking pictures of the wreck, but he was instead scanning for zoron particles.
“No sign of it,” Ford announced. “Let’s find our guy.”
Their “guy” was a middle-aged Free Mechanic named Wallace, who was standing in a parking lot nearby. He said, “I was working late, rebuilding a transmission. Heard the kid speeding down the road, heard the train gate coming down. Never something you want to listen to, you know? I rolled out and saw the whole thing.”
Mrs. Morris said, rather gently, “It must have been horrible.”
Wallace’s gaze darted toward the flashing lights of a fire engine. “Not as bad for me as for them.”
Gear tipped his head toward the office. “Can you show us what your sensors picked up?”
The garage bays smelled like grease and rubber and oil, all things Kevin found comforting. The office was a tiny, crowded alcove with one desk and a filing cabinet. The computer keyboard was dirty, but the computer itself was fairly new, thanks to the federal government. Wallace hit a few keys and they all crowded around to watch.
“This is the camera view,” Wallace said. “It’s mounted up on the northeast corner of the roof.”
On the screen, they watched a Honda Passport SUV speed along the road toward the lowering gates of the railroad crossing. The SUV smashed through the gates, and a split second later, was broadsided by the engine of a CSX freight train. Both vehicle and train spun away from the camera’s range. Kevin turned away, the back of his throat tightening up.
“The brake lights are on,” Mrs. Morris observed. “The driver was trying to stop.”
Ford said, “We’re lucky that train was carrying produce and not chemicals. A few car derailments and this whole place would be under toxic clouds. Gear, bring up the enhanced scan.”
Gear took over the keyboard and typed a few commands to activate the special software all Free Mechanics were equipped with. When the video replayed, it was with less detail but more color. The SUV showed up as bright red. A signature popped up beside it: 5699D.
Ruin King #5.
Which just confirmed what everyone had already guessed. Kevin felt sick.
“It’s my fault,” he said, “If I’d fried it—”
“Not your fault,” Gear said. “We all know that Kings jump. They’re smarter, stronger, and better at everything than other Ruins.”
Mrs. Morris touched Kevin’s back. “He’s right.”
But Ford said nothing, and he wasn’t looking at Kevin.
Wallace asked, “The cops are going to want a copy of that footage, right?”
“They can have it,” Gear said. He pulled out his key ring, popped off a portable storage drive, and slid it into Wallace’s computer. “I’m downloading what we need. They won’t even see the other data.”
After they were done with Wallace’s computer, the team returned to the wreckage outside. The firemen were still trying to get to the bodies. A news van had arrived, and a reporter was speaking live in front of her camera. Around her, spectators were filming the scene on their phones, probably uploading them already.
Mrs. Morris said, “There’s nothing more we can do here.”
“She’s right,” Gear said.
Ford shook his head. “We can bear witness. We can promise these victims that they didn’t die in vain.”
They waited and watched in the bitter night air, each of them silent.
I won’t screw up next time, Kevin told himself, and hoped it was true.
Chapter Thirteen
A knock on the door woke Danny early the next morning. He had been dreaming that he and Laura were trapped in MUZKBUX as it roared down a highway, and that wasn’t fun at all, but then Laura became a boy in a motorcycle helmet, tall and lean and mysterious, and they were almost kissing despite the helmet, and then—
More knocking. His mother’s voice asked, “Danny? Are you awake?”
He rolled over and blinked against the harsh light of morning. “Not yet!” he said and wished she’d go away for just another hour or two.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Now.”
Comet, asleep at the end of the bed, sat up and barked.
Groaning, Danny pulled himself upright. He reached for his hooded sweatshirt and shrugged into it, mindful of the soreness in his left wrist. When he opened his door, Mom was fully dressed and had a serious expression on her face.
“The police called,” she said. “Roger’s truck was found near downtown with four flat tires. It was stolen out of the garage last night.”
He didn’t have to fake sounding groggy. “Oh.”
She scrutinized him carefully. “Rachel said she and Junior left you alone last night, and the garage was closed when she got home. The keys are still in our kitchen. Anything you want to tell me?”
“Mom,” he said, yawning. Behind him, his clock radio clicked on. “I just got up.”
“I need you to be honest with me.”
“Honest as can be.” Danny held up his right hand. “I solemnly swear I did not steal your husband’s truck. I’m sorry if it got trashed. It’s a good-looking truck.”
And that was the truth, more or less.
She stared at him for a moment longer, then sighed. “Well, Roger’s very unhappy. And so am I. And I nearly tripped falling over your toy this morning. Where did you get it?”
For the first time, he noticed the cardboard box she’d brought with her. Before he could stop her, she lifted 2KEWLE from inside the box. The beach buggy looked innocent and harmless in the bright morning light.
Danny thought up a quick lie. “Eric. For my birthday.”
“Don’t leave it lying around,” Mom said. On her way out of his room she said, “And don’t be late for work.”
Work. As if he was in any mood to deal with customers and condiments today. Danny took a long, hot shower while being careful of his wrist. He didn’t think it was broken, but it was certainly swollen and probably sprained. He pulled on a long sleeved jersey to cover the damage and tried to decide what to do about 2KEWLE.
“What’s your story, hmm?” he asked.
2KEWLE stayed perfectly silent.
Danny shoved it into his backpack. Downstairs, he ate a quick bowl of cereal and was almost away scot-free out through the garage before Roger called to him from his office.
“Hey, Dan,” he said. “Come here for a minute.”
Reluctantly, Danny obeyed. “I’m late for work.”
“I only want to talk for a second,” Roger said. He was sitting behind his desk, typing something on his laptop. The morning news played on the wall TV. Roger was dressed in crisp jeans and a cowboy shirt and wore a “Country Harvest” VIP badge around his neck.
“I heard about your truck,” Danny said. “That’s pretty rotten.”
Roger raised his eyebrows. “Yes. Pretty rotten is one way of saying it.”
Danny’s sleeve had ridden up on his left wrist. He tugged it down again and shifted his backpack from one shoulder to the other. “Maybe the cops can dust it for prints. Do all that crime stuff like they do on TV.”
“I’m sure they will. You were the last one in the garage. Did you hear anything? See anything?”
“No. It was pretty quiet.”
“Strange how they got it out of the garage while you were asleep and before Rachel came home.”
Annoyance sparked through Danny. “Is she saying I did something wrong?”
Roger’s cell phone rang. He answered immediately. “Don’t tell me the equipment isn’t ready.”
Danny shuffled impatiently. “I have to go or I’ll be late.”
Roger covered the phone with one hand. “This is the thing, Dan,” he said. He was the only person who ever called him that, and Danny never corrected him. “A truck is just a thing, right? A collection of metal and parts. That truck, however, was given to me by my bosses fo
r a job well done. For being cream of the crop. People get jealous of that. Sometimes they do crazy things.”
Danny couldn’t help himself. “You think people are jealous of you?”
Roger smiled. “Some people, yes.”
“I really have to go,” Danny said. “Bye.”
He was relieved Roger didn’t follow him. Danny grabbed his bike from the garage, hauled it out the side door through fallen leaves, and started bicycling his way downtown. He deliberately bypassed the construction lot, even though MUZKBUX had probably already been towed away.
As he pedaled, he thought about San Francisco, and how things had been so much better for him and his mom before Roger came along, how his real dad wouldn’t have sat there like some condescending teacher and lectured Danny on jealousy. Jealous. Of Roger? There was nothing to be jealous about. The guy had a great house and was rich, sure, but he had lousy taste in music. He wouldn’t know a good song if it kicked him in the butt.
Danny’s wrist still hurt, but the farther he bicycled away from home, the more it seemed like something was wrong with his eyes, too. Or with the cars passing him in the street. Their colors were off. A silver Toyota Camry looked silver-purple with sparkles in it. A dark blue Chevy Impala looked greenish on all its edges. Danny rubbed his eyes but the weird effects didn’t go away.
He was halfway to the sandwich shop when his cell phone rang.
“Did you hear?” Eric asked. “Can you believe it?”
“Hear what?” Danny asked. Surely, nothing was as exciting as what had happened to him.
Eric said, “There was a big car accident last night. Ryan Woods and his girlfriend got hit by a train. How’s that for bad luck?”
Chapter Fourteen
Kevin was not having a good day.
He’d barely slept at all. All he’d wanted to do was go out and find that King and fry it. Now it was morning, but he and the rest of the team were stuck listening to a teleconference briefing from the Department of Transportation. Every team deployed in the field—in Washington, Miami, and a dozen other locations—had linked in to give status reports. It was Ford’s duty to report on the death of local teenagers Ryan Woods and Jackie Dixon.
No one was happy that a King had claimed more victims. Wilfred Yeomans, their boss, was especially displeased.
“What’s your plan of attack, then?” he asked. The footage of the crash repeated itself in the corner of the screen, a grim and tragic loop.
Gear, hunched over the computer console with the reports he’d printed out, said, “All the data we’ve collected indicates this town has a high infection rate. With that many zorons to draw on, it’s not likely to skip town yet.”
Yeomans asked, “Are we on the verge of an Ignition?”
Zeus and Apollo stopped chewing on bones and perked up their ears.
“We don’t know that yet, sir,” Ford said.
An Ignition was serious business. The King would suck in the zorons from surrounding cars and become strong enough to infect a jet airplane or military drone or other deadly device. The only logical response from headquarters was a Lightning Storm. But aerial support strikes like that required bad weather as a cover, and could only be authorized by the president of the United States.
If the president had to call a Lightning Strike on Piedmont, a lot of people were going to be very, very unhappy.
Mrs. Morris spoke up. “I think we’ll know more today, sir. That King had a fresh taste of blood. If it’s still around, it’s likely to go after more.”
“Which is precisely why you have to stop it,” Yeomans said. “I expect a full report in twelve hours. And I expect good news.”
The call ended.
Kevin asked, “What are we going to do, Dad?”
“We’re going to mount more sensors,” Ford said. “On every major intersection, real-time relay to this console. We’re going to mobilize more of the Free Mechanics and get them out there doing drive-bys on their bikes and in their cars. Call them in from every county in the state if we have to. And we’re going to sit on those emergency scanners. I want to know about every accident for twenty miles around, even if it’s a nice old lady banging into her garbage can.”
“I’ll put up the sensors,” Gear said.
“I’ll talk to the mechanics,” Mrs. Morris said.
Kevin quickly said, “I’ll talk to the mechanics, too.”
Ford said, “No. I want you to find out more about Daniel Kelly, that kid you saved. I want a background check on him and the truck he was driving. And you can listen to the scanners while you do the sensor calibrations.”
Kevin scowled. “Why am I stuck with the calibrations?”
“Because you’re the most junior, Junior,” Gear said.
“And in the unlikely case you get bored, you can study for your SATs,” Ford added.
They left him alone. Kevin wasn’t dumb. He knew his father was punishing him for letting the King escape from Danny Kelly’s truck. Ford didn’t trust him anymore. Maybe none of them did.
Kevin was going to have to prove himself.
It didn’t take long to run a check on Danny Kelly’s truck. It had been sitting on a dealer’s lot for the last three weeks, so it couldn’t have brought the Ruin from Dallas. Danny himself took a little longer to investigate. Soon Kevin had copies of his birth certificate, his school records, and his PSAT scores. His picture popped up on the screen. Even cuter by day than at night. Kevin knew what music and books he liked to buy online—a lot of the same ones he liked, in fact—and it turned out that he had a part-time job here in town. Even now, he was probably making someone a turkey on rye, or maybe a whole wheat veggie with hummus.
But there was a glitch in his history. It took Kevin several minutes to find the juvenile criminal record. When he cracked it open, he found that Danny had been arrested for car theft and joyriding when he was fourteen years old. As part of the plea agreement, he couldn’t get his driver’s license until he was twenty-one. That probably wasn’t so bad in San Francisco, where public transportation was plentiful. But then his mother had remarried and moved him to Tennessee with her and her new husband.
Kevin sat back, thinking hard.
On a hunch, he ran a check on Danny’s mother and father. The mother had no history of note. The father and a younger brother, however, had been killed in a T-bone car accident that was red flagged by the Department of Transportation.
Red flag meant Ruin.
How much of a coincidence was that?
Kevin checked his watch. Lunchtime, he decided. He was in the mood for a sandwich, and Danny Kelly worked in a shop just down the street.
Chapter Fifteen
Danny pulled large covered trays of lettuce, tomato, and onions out of the refrigerator and dropped them into the sandwich prep area. He checked the oven, where long loaves of bread were steadily turning gold. The shop smelled like the chocolate chip cookies that Zinc had been baking since sun up. Zinc was on the phone, and had been for twenty minutes
“No, no,” she was saying. “I heard he was a good kid. Would never go around a gate crossing.”
Danny wasn’t surprised that everyone in town was talking about the death of Ryan Woods and Jackie Dixon. All morning long, customers coming in for coffee, pastries, and the morning paper, had been gossiping and speculating.
“His parents are really broken up about it,” Zinc said when she was done with her phone call. She was older than Danny’s mom, with a streak of pink in her otherwise yellow hair. She pulled fresh hot loaves out of the oven. “You’d never try to beat a train, would you?”
“Can’t drive, remember?” he said.
“Terrible thing.” Zinc sighed.
Danny was trying not to think about Ryan. Maybe if he’d gotten him the Country Harvest tickets, he would have been over at one of the concerts and not out driving around on a Friday night. He reached for a tray of croissants, winced as his wrist began to throb harder, and waited until Zinc was in the back before h
e popped some more aspirin.
Aspirin didn’t help his vision, though. Inside, everything looked fine. But whenever he looked out the window at cars, either parked or passing by, he noticed strange colors again. Not in all of them, but in enough to worry him. He wondered how he was going to explain to his mom that he needed an emergency appointment with the eye doctor.
Every now and then, he checked on his backpack, but 2KEWLE was silent and still and no trouble at all.
Business picked up steadily through the morning, and they ran out of both the cream cheese Danish and the cherry turnovers. The first lunch order of the day was from a construction worker who came in for two turkey sandwiches and a meatball sub. Danny was finishing the sandwiches when Laura came in with her friend Alice.
“Hi,” Laura said, pressing up against the counter for a kiss. She was wearing a bright white sweater and her cheeks were pink from the crisp air outside. “How’re things going?”
“Okay,” Danny said. He pretended to like kissing her back, although the taste of lip gloss was kind of gross. “Hey, Alice.”
Alice slid into one of the corner tables with an offhand wave and started messaging on her cell phone.
“Did you hear about Ryan Woods?” Laura asked. “I can’t believe he got hit by a train like that. It’s crazy. He always followed the rules, you know?”
Zinc came over. “Danny, are you done with these orders?”
Danny rang up the order for the construction worker. Then he and Zinc had to tend to a sudden rush of students and parents from the karate dojo that was just a few doors away in the strip mall. Laura retreated to the booth with Alice. As he worked, he was aware of Laura watching him and occasionally giggling.
“Young love,” Zinc said. “I had me a bad case of that once.”
Danny stayed quiet.
At noon, just as Danny was beginning to lose track of orders, Zinc’s twenty-year-old nephew Gary showed up to help out. Gary was six-foot-three, had long hair to his waist, and spent most of his days playing video games. “Dude, you’re working slow today,” he said as Danny made a sandwich. “What’s wrong with your wrist?”