Today, there were closer to three hundred specimens filling the space, along with the school employees who were already jostling for prime viewing positions. Since the specimens generally tended to get along harmoniously, dodgeball matches were rare, perhaps only occurring once or twice per year and almost always involving older specimens who had learned to play by seeing the duels take place as they were growing up. Cooley, the veteran of an astounding five matches in which his team had never lost, had come to know and maybe even love the dynamics of the game: the raw energy that built on the court, the primal urge that was fulfilled both on the parts of the audience and the players, the comfortable, reassuring heft of the ball in his hand, and most of all, the knowledge that, win or lose, the conflict that brought everyone here in the first place would soon be over, most likely in his favor. Goldsmith, predictably, had never played the game before or even seen this illicit court in person. He had only heard the rumors.
The warehouse was chilly and smelled stale, a little like ammonia. Cooley stood on one side of the yellow line, joined by Bunson and his third teammate, an unbalanced specimen from the junior class named Mr. Jacob Scripps White. Goldsmith stood on the other side of the court. Misters Andrew Chang and Gregory Marcus Garvin, two straight-arrow, by-the-book seniors—both were part of the final ten top specimens who underwent the Selmer-Dubonnet exam along with him—stepped out from the crowd to join him.
“Someone’s got to keep the thugs in line,” said Chang. “Set an example for the younger specimens out there, let ’em know that they can’t just lie down for punks like Cooley.”
“It’s an honor, Mr. Goldsmith,” said Garvin.
Goldsmith nodded at them. After a series of shrill creaks, the scrap metal door slid closed and the audience started to hum with anticipation. He glanced around at the throngs of specimens surrounding the court. They were bouncing up and down already, nudging each other, pointing, making bets on how quickly Cooley was going to take them all out, whether he was going to abide by the headhunting ban or not. Cooley walked up to the line of red rubber balls and checked them all to make sure they were adequately filled with air. He squeezed them one by one, bouncing them against the floor. They were taut, hard, and packed plenty of spring. They left his hands and snapped against the concrete back into his grasp almost faster than the eye could see.
“Gentlemen,” called out a warehouse worker, “take your places.”
Cooley, Bunson, and White took ten paces back from the yellow line. Goldsmith, Chang, and Garvin followed suit. A nervous hush fell over the packed little arena. Goldsmith noticed the incessant scraping of leather shoe soles on the ground, the sound of jostling in the crowd, the frantic breathing of hundreds of kids jacked up on meth. Actually, that frantic breathing, he realized after a few moments, was his own. “Ready!” called out the warehouse guy. He held up three fingers high above his head and counted down. Three, two, one …
* * *
On Level 29, Professor Nelson watched the recorded broadcast of his earlier discussion with the senators. He knew President Lang saw the whole thing and figured she’d send it to the headmaster for his own personal review, but just in case she forgot during the course of her very busy day, Nelson attached a copy of the video file to an e-mail and sent it to the big man himself (the subject header read: “Monsieur Nelson Goes to Washington!☺”) There was a knock at his office door.
“Yes?”
The door slid open. Wordlessly, Sadie sauntered in. Nelson noticed the way her hair fell down her shoulders and that the shade of blue in her eyes matched the idyllic image of the Rocky Mountain skyline broadcast on the Nature & Co. window on his wall. She slid the door shut and leaned her shoulders against it, her hips and legs arching toward him. All of a sudden, his office smelled like a musky bouquet of roses and lush pomegranate. The professor paused the image of his Senate meeting, wondering if she recognized any of the distinguished old politicos and also if she’d ask him what occasion he had to hold forth with them in such a personal, clearly prestigious manner.
“Miss Chapman! Did you, uh … want to schedule a review session before the … exam?”
“Yes, I’d like that very much.” She walked toward him. Nelson leaned back in his desk chair and swallowed. Sadie held his face between her hands as she straddled him, feeling his palms slide against her thighs and up her skirt in that lewd, hungry way common to men of all ages. She noticed that he closed his eyes when she kissed him gently on the mouth, as if he was trying to make such a contrived encounter something even close to resembling romance. One of his hands remained up her skirt, pawing away, and the other moved clumsily to her chest, at first squeezing and then hurriedly unbuttoning her navy blue cardigan.
Her eyes quickly scanned the contents of his desk and just as he got to the final button, she saw it: a small, gleaming, black card with a silver cord strung through a hole near the top. It was the professor’s faculty-clearance key card: the cord was common to the many faculty members who wore them around their necks so the cards didn’t get lost. With one hand, she caressed the back of Nelson’s neck. The other moved toward that Holy Grail.
* * *
A loud whistle rang through the air. Both dodgeball teams sprinted forward to reach the three balls in the middle of the court before their opposition. The shouts and cheers of three-hundred-plus specimens reverberated against the walls into a bona fide roar. Garvin went for the same ball as White. He got there first. The moment the rubber touched his hands, Bunson hurled a kill shot—the red ball a blur cutting through air—nailing Garvin in the stomach, knocking him back three feet and out of the game. Garvin wheezed, trying to cry out in pain, but couldn’t because he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him and suffered three bruised ribs from the impact.
Cooley beat Goldsmith to the center ball. Relying solely on reflexes and adrenaline, Goldsmith leaped over Garvin’s writhing body and narrowly dodged Cooley’s first strike, the ball just missing his right shoulder. White grabbed the ball that fell out of Garvin’s hands and tossed it across the court to Bunson, who winged it at Chang in a single, fluid, blink-of-an-eye motion. It sizzled through the air. Chang ducked and it nailed some poor freshman kid flush in the face. He went down gushing blood from the nose and mouth. The audience noise just kept building. Two sophomore girls stepped over the freshman’s prone body and took his place. Some helpful warehouse guys dragged Garvin’s body off the court.
Goldsmith grabbed a rolling ball at the far end of his team’s side and hurled it as hard as he could at Cooley. Cooley dove to the ground, rolled, and grabbed it as it ricocheted against the back wall and moved along the floor. A pro-Goldsmith specimen in the crowd kicked a stray ball over to Chang. Chang passed it to Goldsmith. White flung a shot. Goldsmith deflected it high up in the air with his own ball, which he dropped, and then caught White’s ball before it could hit the ground. The crowd went nuts. White was out. He trudged off to join the audience, his head hung in shame. Goldsmith tossed White’s ball to Chang and picked up the one he was originally holding. Now they were both armed. They faced off against Bunson and Cooley. Cooley had a ball in his hands and looked focused, serene, in his element. Bunson bounced lightly on his feet from side to side, like a boxer. He had that playground bully’s smirk on. Goldsmith made eye contact with Chang and glanced in Bunson’s direction to signal that he would take him high, Chang should take him low. Chang nodded.
“One … two…,” Goldsmith counted under his breath, “three!” They let their shots fly. Goldsmith missed. Bunson dodged, leaping to his right and going horizontal in midair. Chang’s shot nailed him in the shins, moving so hard and fast that it knocked all 250 pounds of Bunson into a 360-degree spin before his head smacked against the ground, causing a sickening cracking noise.
“One hundred five miles per hour!” shouted a warehouse guy standing high up on a ladder and holding an old, antiquated radar gun. The crowd cheered wildly. Bunson rose slowly, rubbing his skull, and limped off the court in
to the crowd. Cooley’s eyes locked onto Goldsmith. He took aim.
“Watch out!” cried Chang.
Goldsmith watched Cooley’s line of vision and picked a side to leap toward, figuring he had a fifty-fifty chance of dodging the shot. Cooley, watching Goldsmith the whole time, hurled a no-look missile at Chang, who stood there completely exposed. Goldsmith hit the ground and rolled. He saw Cooley’s strike slam against Chang’s groin. Chang let out a high-pitched cry and went down screaming, crumpled up. Two warehouse guys dragged him away.
“A hundred eight miles per hour!” shouted the man with the radar gun. The crowd let loose with a barrage of “oohs,” “aahs,” and “holy fucking shits.”
Goldsmith picked himself up from the floor. It was down to just him and Cooley. The specimens that surrounded them started stomping a tribal beat against the ground. Boom boom boom boom … Goldsmith started to see things in slow motion. Cooley looked down. Goldsmith looked down. There was a single red ball rolling almost perfectly along the yellow line at the center of the court. At the same instant, they broke out into a sprint for it, two fierce gladiators speeding toward a head-on collision.
* * *
Sadie did her best to keep Professor Nelson’s pants on without throwing cold water on the whole routine. She had reached for the key card several times but stopped short because he had this annoying habit of grabbing whichever stray hand of hers was available and thrusting it onto his crotch. Sadie jotted down a mental note: All men are boys. She checked the digital clock glowing in the bottom right-hand corner of the plasma screen on his desk. Time was running out. It was too late to turn back or, for that matter, come up short on her end of the plan.
She gritted her teeth and unbuckled Nelson’s belt. He gasped as she grabbed him right about there with her left hand. Sadie yanked his pants and underwear down around his ankles and slid herself from his lap down to the ground. By the time the professor was mumbling some drivel about the color of her eyes (in French, no less), she had the key card in her right hand and was counting down the seconds until the next phase of Mr. Goldsmith’s despicable, brilliant, far-fetched ploy.
* * *
Goldsmith sprinted. Cooley sprinted, but hesitated for one barely perceptible moment too long. That red ball rolled at an excruciatingly slow pace. The crowd was roaring around them, all eyes on the distance between each young man and that final weapon on the concrete floor. Goldsmith grabbed it and felt the pattern of ridges on its surface. He put on the brakes, his polished dress shoes sliding a few inches. Cooley froze, planting his feet for an extra half-second before moving to spring away to the side. Goldsmith got a bead on him and fired.
The impact of the ball snapped Cooley’s head back and the hit echoed like a lone gunshot around the walls and high up to the warehouse’s ceilings. Blood started flooding from his nose and mouth as he teetered on weak legs for a moment, his eyes rolling back into his head before he collapsed to the ground with an awful thud. Goldsmith stood above him. The court went silent. He glanced around at the specimens and saw hundreds of mouths gaping wide open. Flat-chested Miss Caroline Melissa Keating let out a horrified gasp that cut through the stunned hush.
“Headhunter!” shouted Bunson. Several other specimens yelled profanities in support. He lunged out from the crowd toward Goldsmith. Garvin jumped in between them.
“No! It’s over! It’s fucking over!” Garvin shouted back as he struggled with Bunson. Goldsmith looked down at Cooley’s body. He heard Bunson scream something unintelligible before tossing Garvin to the side like a rag doll. Chang decked White, who fell into another specimen, whom White promptly punched out of his way in order to get back in Chang’s face. Then the crowd exploded like a swarm of angry insects feeding on itself, as pro-Cooley factions pounced on pro-Goldsmith factions, girls at first jumping out of the way and then leaping onto other girls and smaller male specimens, kicking shins and pulling hair.
Bunson threw his huge frame onto Goldsmith, tackling him to the ground. Goldsmith felt the big man’s hot, angry breath and lips pressed up against his ear.
“Now,” Bunson whispered. “Do it now, you’ve got the cover.”
Goldsmith reached into his blazer’s inside pocket and discreetly pulled out his Tabula.
“And if Cooley’s hurt bad,” Bunson hissed, “I’ll fucking eat you.”
Not if I eat you first, Goldsmith thought. He scrolled to his Tabula’s e-mail application and selected the draft he typed up not even twenty minutes ago. While the chaos of three-hundred-odd specimens brawling on methamphetamines erupted around them, he hit the Send button.
* * *
Captain Gibson sat in his office located up on the disciplinary level. His network console chimed and he glanced at a new e-mail from Mr. Goldsmith. The subject header read: Urgent. He double-clicked on it and read the message:
Dodgeball match in progress.
Warehouse level.
Send team ASAP!
“Shit,” muttered Gibson. He hit a red switch on the desk. A siren started ringing on the disciplinary level and began to spread through the rest of the tower. Footsteps rumbled toward his office. He jumped up to meet them, ready to start barking orders.
* * *
Sadie heard the alarm ring on Level 29 and felt relief flood through her body. Professor Nelson froze.
“Wait, wait…,” he said, easing her head away and rolling the chair toward his computer terminal. He read the bulletin: it was an illicit dodgeball game down on Level 3. So what? He had better things to worry about than …
Nelson looked back down at Sadie, but she was gone. The sliding door to his office was half-opened. He looked down at his desk and saw his key card missing. His face flushed with anger and he jumped up, ready to dash into the hallway and chase that bitch down before wringing her neck. Unfortunately for him, he tripped and fell gracelessly to the floor, twisting an ankle thanks to the tangle of underwear, trousers, and shoelaces that she’d bunched up and tied into knots around his feet.
* * *
Up in the Presidential Dining Suite on Level 121, Pete sat across a dark oak table from President Lang. He twirled up the last of his spaghetti (a sampling of Stansbury’s gourmet hand-and-mouth food; rare, notoriously unhealthy nonintravenous food, cooked exclusively for important guests and visiting dignitaries) and wiped the brown sauce from his lips with a crisp white napkin. President Lang unwrapped a sterilized Handi Wipe and cleaned her shiny Mont Blanc laser syringe. It was a custom-made gift from the headmaster upon her appointment to the tower’s executive office. She had not used a fork and knife for more than ten years now. The shiny black body sparkled. She placed it inside a sheath and slid the syringe into her blazer pocket.
“… and so you see,” she was saying to Pete, “despite all of this school’s formal traditions, cutting-edge technology, and top-level professors, we’re really just a tightly-knit community of friends and family like any other. I would hope that your article reflects this. Community and trust in one another are fundamental parts of what makes the Stansbury School so special.”
“I’ll be sure to mention that, ma’am.” Pete took a sip of water. “Would you mind if I asked you some questions about your career? I mean, I’d like to be thorough, seeing as how I’m the only journalist the school has permitted on campus in almost five years. Come to think of it, I practically had to threaten you guys with some serious scandal-mongering just to—”
“Ask away to your heart’s content. We’ve got nothing to hide.”
“This might be from my own curiosity more than anything else, but you’re a relatively young woman in a very powerful, time-consuming position. You work with all these great kids. Do you ever find yourself wanting a family, having children of your own?” Pete studied Lang’s face. Her eyes stayed calm. She smiled.
“Perhaps one day. But for now, I am more than content to devote all of my time to this school and these wonderful specimens.”
“So there’s nothing to the rumor t
hat you were in love with one of your Amherst professors many years ago but lost him due to a terminal illness?”
“No.”
“Or that you may have been pregnant with his child?”
“Come now, Pete.” She grinned gamely. “If you keep asking me such unfounded questions I might start firing some back at you.”
“Oh? Such as?”
“Such as who has been paying you under the table to investigate my school? In large, weekly envelopes of cash that you haven’t been reporting to the government as income.”
Pete smiled. “I didn’t come up with those questions on my own, Madam President. But I’ll say, specimens sure do have wild imaginations, don’t they?”
Before she could respond, the security detail’s alarm echoed in the hallway outside.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Just a routine drill, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” he grinned. “It’s probably nothing. Tight ship you run, Madam President. Tight ship.”
* * *
The dodgeball audience was so amped-up that they didn’t even hear the blaring alarms reverberate throughout the warehouse. Some overly hyperactive senior specimen grabbed Bunson and hauled him off Goldsmith. Bunson shoved the senior to the ground and pinned him, the guy’s arms and legs flailing around like an overturned turtle. Goldsmith got up and rushed over to Cooley as specimens freaked out around him, wrestling each other to the ground while the warehouse guys tried to break things up, hoping to save at least some face when the detail officers made their inevitable appearance.
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