Here Comes Mr. Trouble

by Battles, Brett

  14

  Contrary to Uncle Carl’s wishes, Mr. Trouble had other ideas.

  “Get the detector,” he said. “The Makers are going to be agitated. This might be our best chance to find out where they’re hiding.”

  “One burger, that’s all I ask,” Uncle Carl said.

  “Later.” Mr. Trouble’s tone made it clear his mind was made up.

  With a sigh, Uncle Carl went through the whole process of getting into the trunk again. When he returned this time, he was holding a small case. From inside, he removed a cylinder the same size as a can of soda. It had a series of buttons ringing the bottom, a display screen in the middle, and four thin wires coming out of the top.

  At the end of each wire was a tiny suction cup. He stuck one to the window next to him then gave the rest of the wires to Keira and Fiona, who stuck them to the other windows. When they were through, wires were attached to all four sides of the car.

  He touched one of the buttons on the bottom of the cylinder and said, “Okay, it’s running. Now, does anyone have a candy bar, or maybe a piece of gum?”

  Maggie pulled a granola bar out of the side pocket of her backpack. “You can have this.”

  He took it from her and immediately started ripping open the package, but he hadn’t gotten the bar all the way out when Fiona reached over and tapped him on the back of the head.

  “What?” he said.

  She gave him a look and shifted her gaze to Maggie.

  “Oh, right.” He turned to Maggie. “Thank you. That was very…kind.”

  “Yeah, sure. No problem,” Maggie said, annoyance returning to her voice.

  When they reached Tobin, Mr. Trouble began driving up one street then down the next. Every ten seconds or so, he would glance at Eric, then back at the road, then back at Eric again.

  Finally, as they turned off Patrick Place onto Leann Lane, he said, “Here’s the deal. The trouble you’ve been having? It’s not the normal kind of trouble a kid your age would have.”

  “Yeah. That’s not exactly news,” Eric said.

  Fiona sat up. “Ronan, I don’t think we should—”

  “He deserves to know what’s going on,” Mr. Trouble said.

  “That’s not the way Dad would have done it,” she said.

  “Dad’s not in charge anymore. I am.”

  Silence.

  Eric frowned at Fiona. “This is my life we’re talking about. I have a right to know what’s going on.”

  “You do,” Mr. Trouble said.

  When Mr. Trouble didn’t go on, Eric said, “So, tell me.”

  “Right. Okay, uh, let’s see. What’s the best way to—”

  “Just tell me!”

  “Okay. In a nutshell, you’re being hunted.”

  “I’m being what?”

  “Hunted.”

  “You mean like ‘let’s go deer hunting’ hunted?”

  “Well, sort of. But without the gun part.”

  For some reason that didn’t make Eric feel all that much better. “Why me? What did I do?”

  Mr. Trouble was about to answer when the cylinder in Uncle Carl’s lap beeped twice.

  “Something?” Mr. Trouble asked, suddenly tense.

  Uncle Carl looked at the screen on the side of the cylinder and said, “Just a weak trace. They may have come through this way, but they’re not here now.”

  Mr. Trouble relaxed and glanced back at Eric. “Okay, where were we?”

  “You were going to tell me why I was being hunted,” Eric said.

  “Right. See, you’ve recently done something that brought attention to yourself.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “That wasn’t a question.” Mr. Trouble nodded once at Fiona. “Tell him.”

  She took a deep breath, not looking particularly happy, then said, “Okay. See, part of my job as your point of contact rep is to do some research on you and try to figure out your triggering incident.”

  “Triggering incident?”

  “The thing that made them take a closer look at you,” she said. “Last summer you went to camp for a week. One of the kids did a belly flop into the lake and knocked himself out. You swam him to shore and saved his life.”

  “I was right there when he hit,” Eric said, as if it wasn’t a big deal. “A few feet to the side and he would have landed on top of me. All I did was reach out and turn him over.”

  “And swam him to shore,” Mr. Trouble reminded him.

  “There was an article in your local paper,” Fiona went on, “with your picture.”

  “What was the quote from his mother?” Mr. Trouble asked.

  Fiona closed her eyes, thinking. “‘We’ve always told him to be aware of his surroundings and be a doer, not a watcher. We’re very proud of him.’”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Mr. Trouble said. “That’s your triggering event. A little life blip that made you stand out from the crowd. It doesn’t, however, guarantee you will become a target.”

  “What makes the difference?”

  “Your skin.”

  Eric’s face twisted in shock. “My skin?”

  “In the cells of your skin, actually.”

  “You mean DNA?”

  “Not DNA, but something like that. We call it the Maker Marker.”

  “Oh, that’s cute,” Maggie said sarcastically. “Who thought that up?”

  Eric’s eyes narrowed. “That scrape Uncle Colin took from my finger. He was testing me?”

  “We had to make sure you had the marker.”

  “And I do?”

  He nodded.

  “But how could the Makers test my skin?”

  “They don’t need a laboratory. They use this.” He touched his nose. “They just needed to get close to you and take a long whiff to know for sure. Once they did, and knew for sure you had the marker, that’s when your troubles began.”

  “Peter,” Eric said, making the connection. “The sniffing.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Trouble said, somewhat hesitantly.

  “But what happened last summer—what does that have to do with anything?”

  Mr. Trouble was silent for a moment. “All fruits are not apples, but all apples are fruits.”

  “Huh?”

  “All the people who would do something like you did at camp don’t have the marker, but all people who have the marker would do something like you did. Understand?”

  Eric thought for a moment then nodded. “So I’m one of the lucky ones the Makers want.”

  “Officially, we call them Trouble Makers. That’s with a capital T and a capital M.”

  “Trouble Makers,” Eric said to himself.

  “Can you think of a better way to describe them?”

  “No, I guess not,” Eric said. “So Peter Garr is one?”

  Mr. Trouble immediately shook his head. “No. Peter Garr isn’t a Maker. He’s being used as what we refer to as a Maker surrogate. He may be a bad guy, but he hasn’t been in control of the things he’s been doing to you lately. The other day in the library, at Maggie’s house last night, the attempted kidnapping today—he’ll have no memory of any of it.”

  “So the Makers have sniffed me out through him?”

  Mr. Trouble hesitated. “We think the smelling is less precise when they use a surrogate. Kind of like breathing through a heavy scarf. The surrogates use your smell to track you, but the initial whiff, the one that confirmed you were a target, a Maker did that himself.”

  Eric though for a moment, then said, “Peter isn’t the only one giving me a hard time.”

  “All the people who have been directly bothering you lately are surrogates. The Makers take temporary control of them, using them for whatever they need.” Mr. Trouble paused. “Some are easier to manipulate than others. Those are the ones they use for their hardest work. Peter, for instance. Some are less so. A Maker might only use them to plant a suggestion or idea in their mind. Like having someone believe his wife has gone on a business trip.”

>   “Dad.”

  Mr. Trouble nodded. “We believe he’s been touched.”

  “Will he be okay?”

  “There’s seldom any long-term damage so he should be fine.”

  That wasn’t as comforting as it could have been.

  “What about the Makers? Who are they?”

  “It’s not really who,” Keira said.

  “She’s right,” Mr. Trouble said, looking at Eric in the mirror. “The thing is, Trouble Makers aren’t—”

  Suddenly, the cylinder began to shriek.

  15

  “Level-seven hit,” Uncle Carl said, looking at the display. He glanced out the front window, then back at the cylinder. “Go left at the next street.”

  Mr. Trouble did as instructed, but immediately the shriek began to die down.

  “I don’t understand,” Uncle Carl said. “Go back, go back.”

  Mr. Trouble turned the car around and got back on Leann Lane.

  “Aren’t what?” Eric asked, still focused on the pre-shriek conversation. “What are they?”

  “They’re Makers,” Keira said, as if their name itself should be enough.

  Mr. Trouble pulled to a stop near the point where the cylinder had originally started shrieking, but it was silent now. He turned in his seat and looked at Uncle Carl. “False reading?”

  Uncle Carl looked concerned. “No. I’m sure it was real.”

  “Then why isn’t it going off again?” Fiona asked.

  “Because whatever it picked up isn’t there any more.” He paused for a moment. “Circle the block.”

  “Uncle Carl, we don’t have time for mistakes,” Mr. Trouble said.

  “It’s not a mistake. There was something. I guarantee it. Ronan, please, just go around again.”

  Mr. Trouble stared at his uncle for a moment then started driving again. “Two minutes,” he said. “If we don’t find something by then, we move on.”

  “Fine, fine,” his uncle replied.

  As they headed toward the end of the block, Eric said, “I still have no idea what the Makers are.”

  Mr. Trouble said nothing for a moment as he turned the corner, then he shrugged. “That’s the problem. No one really does.”

  “Have you ever seen one?” Maggie asked, sounding like she thought they were all crazy.

  Mr. Troubles hesitated. “We’ve all been in the presence of Makers. We’ve seen the forms they’ve taken. But what they actually look like?” He shook his head.

  “I don’t understand,” Eric said. “Forms? What they actually look like? If you see them, you see them.”

  “Why don’t you just capture one of these things?” Maggie asked.

  “There’s been only one time a Maker has even talked to one of us outside of a confrontation.”

  “Ronan. Are you sure they need to know that?” Fiona asked.

  He ignored her and said, “We call him Maker Larkin. He approached…a previous Mr. Trouble and gave him information about the Makers we couldn’t have gotten otherwise. We’re not sure why he talked to us, but what we do know is that so far most of what he told us has been true. He’s as close as we’ve ever gotten to knowing the real Makers.”

  Maggie snorted. “Oh, you guys are really good at this.”

  Fiona turned to face her, her face hard and serious. “Our first and most important job is to protect the client. It’s not to capture a Maker.” As she sat back, she added, “But my brother’s wrong. If we’re going to be completely open, someone has seen what a Maker actually looks like.”

  “Who?” Eric asked.

  She paused for a moment then said, “Our father.”

  There was an awkward moment of nothing.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Keira said, breaking the silence.

  “Of course we do,” Fiona argued. “Just before he…finished the job, he told the client to tell us Uncle Colin’s goggles had worked.” She turned to Eric. “Those goggles were designed to see Makers. Dad couldn’t have meant anything else.”

  “He didn’t tell you later what he saw?” Eric asked.

  More silence, then–

  “Stop!” Uncle Carl yelled.

  Mr. Trouble hit the brakes. Even before the car stopped rolling, Uncle Carl had detached the cylinder from the wires and jumped out.

  “Don’t go anywhere without me,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  With the increase in room, Eric scooted off Maggie and Fiona’s laps and into Uncle Carl’s empty spot.

  “What’s he doing?” Eric asked, looking out the window.

  “Makers leave traces of measureable energy wherever they spend a lot of time,” Mr. Trouble explained. “Usually you have to be very close to detect it, but when they get upset, that area expands and you can get a reading from two or three blocks away sometimes. What we’re looking for is their hideout. They usually rent a house in a nice neighborhood, someplace expensive.”

  Maggie forced out a deep, loud breath. “Are you really believing this? Makers? Mind-controlling people? Seriously. This is crazy. And tell me this—how could something that’s not human rent a house? Or do one of these surrogates do it for them?”

  “That’s not what they use surrogates for,” Mr. Trouble said, shaking his head.

  “She does have a point, though, doesn’t she?” Eric said. “How do they rent a house?”

  “I never said the form they take wasn’t human.”

  “Oh, wow. That’s easy, isn’t it?” Maggie said. “So basically I could be a Maker. Or Eric, or you, or any of us. But even if we were, and you were looking right at us, you wouldn’t know what a Maker really looks like? Makes complete sense to me.”

  For the first time, Mr. Trouble looked like he might lose his temper. “I understand that this might be difficult for you to believe. That’s fine. But this is our life, not some game of pretend. No, Maggie, I couldn’t be a Maker. Not you, either. Not Fiona or Keira or even Uncle Carl. Eric, on the other hand, is a perfect Maker candidate.”

  Outside, Uncle Carl walked around the corner of a house and out of sight.

  “Keira, go with him,” Mr. Trouble said.

  “Why me?” she said. “Why not Fiona?”

  “Because I told you to go.”

  “You sound like Mom,” she said, then opened the door and got out. “You’re not Mom. And you’re not Dad, either.”

  “Keira!” Fiona said. But it was too late. Her sister had already slammed the door shut. She looked over at her brother. “She didn’t mean it.”

  “Of course she did,” Ronan said. “And she’s right. I’m not Dad. But I am Mr. Trouble now. She needs to remember that.” He paused for a second. “And so do you.”

  Fiona looked away suddenly, part of her lower lip slipping into her mouth.

  “Are you trying to say I’m a Maker?” Eric asked.

  “Of course not,” Mr. Trouble replied. “And if I have anything to do with it, you never will be. The thing you need to remember, Eric—they can’t take you if you don’t let them.”

  “But I won’t let—”

  “This is ridiculous,” Maggie said. “Eric, let’s go home. It’s getting late.”

  “No one’s going anywhere until I’m sure it’s safe,” Mr. Trouble announced. “But I promise we’ll drop you all off at Maggie’s house in plenty of time for dinner.”

  “What do you mean ‘you all’?” Maggie asked suspiciously.

  “You and Eric and Fiona and Keira.”

  “Whoa. Why would you drop your sisters off at my house?”

  “Because they’re spending the night,” he said.

  “Ha. Ha. Very funny.”

  “He’s not joking,” Fiona said. “Your mom’s already expecting us.”

  “No way. You’re lying.”

  Fiona shrugged. “Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s true. Mom set it up while you were all in the lab letting the Makers know where we were. Eric’s staying overnight, too.”

  “Me?”

  “
But he’s…he’s a boy,” Maggie said.

  “Homework slumber party,” Fiona said. “For that big test we’re having next week.”