Academic Assassins

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  Just how heartless can one headmistress be?

  Merridew stepped over several ants to reach me, while Babyface tagged along. “I want that book, Mr. Pendleton. Give it to me now or so help me…”

  “We can’t stop,” a Screaming Mimi said. “We’re just at the end!”

  More ants chimed in. “Yeah—what happens? Tell us what happens!”

  A chant slowly rose up—“What happens?”

  “What happens?”

  “What happens?”

  Merridew took in the mob. She spun around once, twice, glancing at the surrounding ants as they continued to chant—“What happens? What happens?”

  “What happens?”

  “What happens?”

  “Enough,” she ordered. “ENOUGH!”

  The chanting died out.

  Merridew teetered on her feet. She shook it off and regained her equipoise with a quick sniff, pulling out her C.R.U. “Mr. Grayson—use whatever force you deem necessary. I want that book.”

  I tightened my grip around the paperback as Grayson and his Men in White stormed down the aisles. “I won’t stop read—”

  Merridew pressed her thumb against her C.R.U.’s button and I feel the cold surge of electricity run through my neck and DON’T LET GO OF THE BOOK DON’T LET GO OF THE BOOK DON’T LET GO OF THE BOOK but the electricity is stronger so much stronger than me and it pries the paperback out from my fingers.

  Peter Pan dropped to the floor.

  “Pick it up,” Merridew ordered. “Pick it up!”

  Just as Grayson reached for it, Table Scrap scooped the book up and tossed it to a Screaming Mimi, who quickly tossed it to an Orphan, who threw it to a She-Wolf.

  Several Men in White surrounded the Wolf before she could lob the book. She pressed Peter Pan to her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around it, clutching the book’s tattered pages to herself like a favorite stuffed animal, refusing to let go.

  Grayson tried yanking it from her hands.

  “Let go let go let gooooo….”

  She pulled free from Grayson’s grip and shuttled the book through the air.

  It’s a pop fly, folks…

  Time seemed to slow down to a syrupy sludge. I watched as the book spiraled over every ant’s head, coming my way.

  Here it comes…

  I picked up my feet and started running, hands held out before me.

  Keep your eye on the ball…

  The book was only inches away from my clasping hands.

  Keep your eye…

  Babyface intercepted the book before I could catch it. “I got it!” He raised Peter Pan above his head and waved it back and forth.

  Et tu, Babyface?

  Babyface didn’t budge. His blank stare felt cold. Miles away. He handed the book to Merridew. “Listen to what Merridew says.” His voice even, no emotion whatsoever. “It is better this way.”

  “Thank you,” she said, smoothing out her crumpled skirt with her palms. “This room is closed until I can decide a better use for it. No more library privileges. Now. All of you—return to your pods or there will be severe consequences.”

  Nobody moved.

  Merridew’s eyes tightened as she lifted her activator. “Is that understood?”

  “You think a little shock is gonna stop us?” I asked. “We’ve been strapped to your electric chair for months. Years for some. We’re used to the pain by now.”

  “True.” She nodded. “Several of you are now inured to our responses. Your bodies are rather resilient. That is why I have granted orderlies permission to extend the allotted response time from three seconds—to five.”

  Grayson and the Men in White were already shocking ants into submission. A Mimi screamed as she was dragged out from the library by her legs.

  I was losing them. I needed to act.

  The book!

  Merridew still held the paperback. I’d have to wing it.

  I did a quick mental reread to determine what I remembered—Who wins the sword fight? Was it Peter Pan? Or Captain Hook?

  How did the story end again?

  No time to map it out. Just go!

  Go!

  Go!

  “There was a sword fight!” I shouted, holding up my hands as if the book were still there, open and ready to read. “One of the biggest ever!”

  Merridew looked down at her own hands, just to double check that I hadn’t snatched the book back when she hadn’t been looking.

  “That is quite enough, Mr. Pendleton—”

  “Peter gallantly battled Hook across the ship’s deck,” I continued. “The two lunged at one another….Like this! And this!”

  I did my best swashbuckle down the aisle, lunging my invisible sword through the air.

  I saw the spark return to the Mimi’s eyes as soon as she realized I was telling the story—with or without the book. “What happens next?” she asked.

  “What happens?” a Napoleon echoed as the chant picked up again—“What happens? What happens? What happens?”

  Merridew tried to interject. “That’s quite enough—”

  “Hook himself was a brilliant swordsman,” I continued. “Even with one hand he was able to parry Peter’s blade. He used his hook as a dagger. He swung his sword with one hand—like this! And swept the barb through the air—like this!”

  “Mr. Pendleton! I am warning you—”

  “Peter ducked—like this! The hook missed him by barely an inch.”

  “If you do not stop—”

  “With Captain Hook hovering above him, Peter went in for the kill and stabbed Hook in the ribs—Yaaaaaagh!”

  I staggered back several steps, clutching my own stomach with one hand.

  But I never let go of the book.

  The book inside me.

  “SPENCER!” Merridew shrieked. The public facade of her face, that impenetrable mask as fake as her perm, crumbled away like a shattered porcelain doll. What was left behind was a desperate expression. A look of powerlessness.

  You might be able to take away all of our books, Merridew, pecking our shelves clean—but you can’t take away the words inside us.

  Not from me.

  “What happens? What happens? What happens?”

  “The sword fell out of Hook’s grip,” I shouted. “He fell back, grabbing his innards and—”

  The first jolt of electricity knocked the words out of my mouth. I had to take a deep breath before finding my place and starting up again.

  “His back was up against…the ship’s railing—”

  The second third fourth fifth shock sent me to my knees.

  Table Scrap struggled to keep the chant going—“What happens? What happens? What happens?”

  “The sea. At his shoulders…And there—”

  The sixth seventh eight ninth tenth eleventh twelfth thirteenth fourteenth fifteenth sixteenth seventeenth shock forced me forward. I had to plant my hands on the floor before me, just to keep me from falling over.

  “What happens? What happens…? What…?” The chant lost momentum, voices fading away.

  “Waiting…in the ocean…was the croc—”

  My hands gave out with the twenty-fifth shock, sending me to the floor.

  I couldn’t breathe. Sweating all over. A pain deep in my stomach. I was going to be sick. My skull wouldn’t stop throbbing, pulsing with excess electricity.

  Something was burning.

  What is that? Burnt bacon?

  Then it dawned on me…

  That’s me.

  I was smelling my own singed skin.

  Forty two shocks later, darkness took over and Peter Pan was done.

  “They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers.”

  —Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

  “The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones….”

  —Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

  It took Grayson and three of his M
en in White to personally escort me to the Solitary Housing Units. Each grabbed an arm and leg and carried me through the bowels of the building, plowing into one set of control-locked doors after another.

  The air quickly grew damp. I could feel the temperature drop, as if we were descending into some subterranean bunker miles below the earth’s surface.

  I don’t remember seeing this part of the building on the grand tour….

  We stopped at a control station monitoring the corridor. A pale orderly slouched behind a Plexiglas window, dozing, reminding me of a teenage boy working a drive-thru window. Grayson rapped his knuckles against the frame, waking him.

  “I’d like a cheeseburger,” I mumbled. “Fries and a milkshake, please.”

  At the push of a button, a metallic school bell rat-tat-tatted in my ears as a set of heavy automatic doors opened before me.

  “I’ll take my order to go,” I called out as the Men in White carried me away.

  The hallway was dimly lit by a series of slender fluorescent tubes. Lining both sides of the corridor were thick metal doors. Each door had a pair of eyes staring out from a miniscule window—haunted eyes drifting lifelessly in their sockets. Looking deep into those peepers, I could’ve sworn there was no soul left within them.

  “Sully?!” I shouted. “Sully—are you down here? Where are you?!”

  As soon as those dead eyes locked onto mine, I heard the blunt pummeling of fists against the other side of each door, banging to get out.

  “Sully—it’s me! Spencer! I’m here to break you out….”

  I just didn’t know how quite yet.

  The Men in White halted before a door at the farthest end of the hallway.

  “Open twenty,” Grayson shouted. A metallic buzz vibrated through the door. I could hear a latch grind free from its bolted position within the lock. He tightened his grip on my arm as he used his free hand to open the door before shoving me in.

  The cell, six feet by eight feet, was vacant.

  No windows.

  A rusted cot was bolted into the wall, a thin mattress with faded stains on top. A dented sink and a steel toilet with no seat were tucked in the far corner.

  “Welcome to the Black Hole,” Grayson said.

  Nothing, not even light, was capable of escaping these rooms. Once the automatic steel door sealed me in, I might as well not exist anymore.

  I rushed for the door, but Grayson swung his arm out and hooked me under the jaw, flipping me onto the floor. I landed on my back with a thud.

  I closed my eyes, a dull pain throbbing through my body.

  “Sweet dreams, #347678….” Grayson muttered.

  I could hear the Men in White chuckle as they stepped over me and out of my cell. The door squealed shut behind them and the latch ground back into place.

  I rolled over the floor. The cool concrete soothed my temples.

  I heard a fly buzzing about the room.

  No, not a fly—it was the lights. The slightest hum from the bulbs droned over my head. It seemed to increase in volume. I couldn’t keep myself from hearing it now, this persistent zzzzzzzzz.

  Flipping onto my back, I saw a pair of slender fluorescent bulbs extended along the ceiling, encased behind a thick wire mesh.

  The cinder block walls had been painted in an elephant-skin gray. I traced my fingers through the groove between bricks, wondering if I might find a crack.

  A miniscule blotch of graffiti sprouted out from the far corner—

  Lost Boy

  It looked as if it had been painted in a flaking rusty brown. A tiny crescent-shaped sliver clung to the wall.

  Is that…?

  A fingernail. Somebody had inscribed the graffiti in blood.

  “Welcome home.”

  I spun around. My cell was empty.

  “Who said that?”

  “Just the voice inside your head.”

  The hazy intonations of a boy’s voice seeped through a rusted iron grate located behind my latrine. I knelt next to the toilet and peered through. The thinnest shaft connected the neighboring cell to my own, about two feet cut into the concrete.

  “Sully? Is that you?”

  “Do I sound like Sully?”

  “Guess not.” I tried to think of what to say. “How long have you been here?”

  “Who knows?” The boy’s voice let out a singsong sigh. “A week, a month. Six months. You’ll never know. Not in here. They keep the lights on, twenty-four-seven, so you’ll never know what time it is, whether it’s night or day, winter or spring or summer or fall….Life just becomes one long, never-ending stretch of silence.”

  Something about this voice sounded familiar. I couldn’t quite pin it—but the longer he talked, the more I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d heard it before.

  I could see a vague silhouette from the other side of the grate. I squinted in hopes of making out the face, but the rusted grille eclipsed his features.

  “My name’s Spencer.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “At least that makes one of us,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. You’ve got enough time on your hands now to do all the soul-searching you want.” After a deep breath, he recited—“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

  My pulse picked up. That was Thoreau. My neighbor knew Thoreau.

  I haven’t heard somebody quote Thoreau since…

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  The question hung in the air. “In another life, my name had been Jason.”

  “Jason…?” I asked. “Jason Bowden?”

  “Please. Call me Peashooter. It’s been so long since anybody’s called me by my real name down here.”

  Speechless. Completely, utterly thunderstruck.

  My mind instantly gridlocked with a dozen different questions, each struggling for my tongue’s attention, until I couldn’t manage to ask a single one.

  “Whaaa…?” It was the best my brain could do on such short notice.

  “What do you think?” Peashooter asked back. “Right after our parents picked us up from New Leaf, we were thrust back into society—but society didn’t want anything to do with us. There were consequences for what the Tribe did. Adults love consequences. It’s how they maintain social order. Fear of consequences.”

  “But your mother….” I started to say. “She was so happy to see you.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “Even if our families were willing to take us back with open arms, do you really think the rest of society would simply let us go back to our normal lives?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Nothing I could’ve said would change anything.

  Peashooter was right.

  “The world is full of consequences, Spencer,” he said. “Sounds like you’re learning that the hard way….”

  The temperature never fluctuated. The lights never dimmed.

  “The place where there is no darkness….”

  Just like Orwell had written.

  After a while—an hour, two hours, ten—I dragged myself off my cot and leaned against the wall next to the latrine.

  “You still there?” I asked the emptiness of my cell.

  Peashooter’s tinny voice responded—“Where else would I go?”

  My throat was so dry, it cracked when I asked, “How come nobody told me you were here? Surely somebody had to know….”

  “We’re Merridew’s secrets. She doesn’t want the other ants to know we’re locked up here. If we mixed in with the other inmates, we might incite a riot.”

  “But Sully….She’s intermingling with the general pop.”

  “Merridew thought she could control Sully,” Peashooter suggested. “Use her to control all the other tribes. Then you came along and had to stir things up again.”

  “Hold up. Who’s ‘we’?”

/>   “Who else? Compass. Yardstick. Sporkboy. We’re all down here, fading away into nothing in our own little Neverneverneverland.”

  “Compass is Merridew’s grandnephew. She wouldn’t lock up her own family.”

  “Of course she would,” Peashooter said. “Compass was her first guinea pig. She shocked him into catatonia with her dog collars. Now he’s a walking vegetable.”

  I had a flash of the plaque in Merridew’s office: Parens patriae—“The state as parent.”

  So much for this messed up family.

  “You’re one of Merridew’s little secrets now,” he said. “We’re the kids nobody wants to remember. The true Lost Boys. No one has to look at us or think about us down here. We don’t exist anymore.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while.

  “Peashooter…?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry. For what happened. For what I did.”

  “It wouldn’t have lasted,” he said. “The Tribe would never have lasted.”

  “But it has,” I insisted. “Sure, it’s evolved a little….” Mutated might’ve been a better choice of words. “But the Tribe is still alive and kicking ass. There are at least five or ten tribes here at Kesey. Maybe even more. The Tribe’s not only yours or mine anymore. It’s everybody’s. The tribe belongs to everybody.”

  “But it needs a leader. Someone strong to take control. To make the hard decisions. Someone who can rule with an iron grip when necessary. Like Peter Pan.”

  “Yeah, well.” I laughed to myself. “What happens when Peter Pan grows up to become Fidel Castro?”

  We were playing telephone with a couple of tin cans and a piece of string, only our phone was two rusted grates connected by a two-foot chasm of concrete.

  Talk about a long-distance phone call.

  “You’ve got to take this place over,” Peashooter eventually said. “Overthrow Kesey. Overthrow Merridew.”

  “You sure that’s good advice? Last time you tried to overthrow an institution you nearly burned down an entire summer camp.”

  “One spearhead to rule them all.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always considered myself more of an underminer than an overthrower….”

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” Peashooter suggested. “You can’t be a leader without breaking a few heads.”