The idiotic part of all of it was I probably should have been home anyway. But I knew the rules of being a working student.
The way things worked at Calm Waters High School was if I didn’t attend school that day, I wasn’t allowed to work either. I needed to work, so I had to go back to school…regardless of how dumb I knew it was.
Each class was more of a chore than usual. I found myself staring at the clock, watching the minute hand tick. Every minute here was a minute I wasn’t trying to find my dad.
In between classes I walked through the hallways of the school, from class to class, feeling like a bug under a microscope. At one point I stopped as a paper flyer scraped against the ground under my foot. I bent down, picking up an advertisement for the Homecoming dance this Saturday. I wouldn’t be going. I crushed the flyer in a ball and hurled it into a garbage can.
Homecoming? Not a chance. It was surprising how normal things no longer appealed to me.
Other students literally stopped walking to stare at me. Conversations turned into hushed whispers. Calm Waters High was originally built with a Junior College campus in mind, but the funding had been cut and the existing plan had been modified into a high school. The layout was made up of several uniform, red-brick buildings set in a large circle. The area in the middle of the classroom buildings was a field of grass dotted by trees we called the quad. It wasn’t uncommon to have to cross the quad between every class.
With everyone staring at me like a two-headed goat, those walks in between classes seemed even longer than normal.
My Calculus teacher decided the weekend had been a fantastic opportunity to study, and so gave us a pop-quiz. I blankly stared at the sheet of paper in front of me. It all seemed like gibberish now. The thing was, I actually did okay at Calculus. I should have been able to at least put down some good guesses, but this time I couldn’t even lift a pencil to put my name on the paper.
The teacher walked by collecting our papers, and stopped when he saw my blank sheet. He shook his head and patted me on the shoulder. The girl to my right saw it all and burst in to tears. You’d have thought father had been abducted in the middle of an insane corporate cover-up. It was all so fake. I was sure she would talk to her friends later, and they would all one-up each other over who felt worse about my situation.
The rest of the class passed in a blur as I zoned out. Suddenly people were sliding out of their desks and heading for the door. I waited until everyone had left, then got up. Only one class left. Drafting. Then I could go about trying to find some real information on my dad’s disappearance. All I had to do was keep my head down…
“Hey.”
Crap. Not what I needed. Some girl actually wanted to talk to me and tell me how sorry she felt for me. I looked up to tell her where she could shove her false sympathy, and found myself face-to-face with Alex Courtney.
“Uh, hey.” Not my smoothest response ever, but I was pretty sure this was only the second time she had spoken to me—the first being yesterday in the forest.
“Looks like you checked out okay after yesterday,” she said.
“Yeah. The doctor said something about being over-stressed.”
“I’m surprised you’re here.”
I’d already worked up an excuse for this observation, and it really wasn’t too far from the truth. “Needed to keep busy,” I replied. “Dwelling on it just makes it worse.” Alex didn’t appear convinced.
We walked towards the next classroom as slow as possible. I realized I didn’t want to sit through another class with people—the teacher included—giving me pitying looks.
“I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Thanks.” I glanced at her from the corner of my eye. She seemed dead serious, like she actually meant it. I stopped walking.
“What?” she asked.
“I think you’re the first person to say that and actually mean it,” I said. “Everyone else seems to be making it into a contest or something.”
“Who can be the most devastated and weepy?”
A short laugh escaped me. The first one since this whole mess started. “Yeah.” There was something about Alex that made me want to talk to her. Maybe because I thought she was hot, or maybe because she was the only person around here who even seemed to care. I decided to take a bit of a risk. “Did you see the news report last night? The one with Mel Smart?”
It was hard to keep a smile down as she rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I personally loved his whole ‘We are all a family at Helix’ garbage.”
“What was that crap about an explosion?” I watched carefully for any reaction from her. “We both know an explosion didn’t cause my dad to drive out into the woods, and then get taken by something.”
Alex took a step closer and lowered her voice. “What did you want them to say?” she asked. “I don’t even think they know what all happened. It has been complete chaos there.”
“I heard…” I trailed off. This was stupid. Why did I even trust her with this? Even as I doubted myself I already knew the answer. I needed someone to trust, someone to talk to. My dad was usually that person, but he was missing.
“What?” She took another step forward. I could smell the herbal scent of her shampoo. We were almost the same height—I had her by an inch if I was being generous, and I was actually kind of tall for my seventeen years of age—and I was gazing right into her eyes. She looked concerned.
“I heard my dad on the phone the night he disappeared. And what he said wasn’t even close to the stuff being put on the news.”
“What all did you hear?”
“He was talking about something being set free,” I responded. “Mentioned a rescue mission. I don’t know what any of it means, but I know he wasn’t talking about any explosion.”
“Did he say who he was talking to?”
I shook my head. “Nah. He was spooked though.”
“So what are you going to do?”
The bell for class rang. I glanced around my school’s campus and shook my head. “I can’t stay here right now. I just don’t think I can deal with another class. But I need to be able to go to work, and if I skip out on Drafting I won’t be allowed.”
Alex nodded thoughtfully. “You work at Helix right? Archiving files? You think you can find something there?”
“I don’t have any better ideas,” I said. “I figure if Helix has some secret stuff going on then it didn’t just start recently. There might be some old documents that will get me going.”
“How can I help?”
The question shocked me. I had hardly ever spoken with Alex before yesterday, and now suddenly she was offering her help? It seemed odd. A bit suspicious. “Why are you offering to help?” I asked. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but I don’t get why you want to help me.”
“I want to help because you’re right,” she said quietly. “There is something going on at Helix—not just this one, but at all the locations. I’ve heard things too. Things that might seem crazy to other people. To normal people.”
She stuffed her hands into her pockets and looked a bit embarrassed. Nervous. I got the feeling she wasn’t telling me everything…but whatever. Alex had her reasons for wanting to help, and I’d have been stupid to turn her down.
“Well,” I said, “I’m not exactly normal anymore am I?”
I tried to pass off my comment as a joke with a smile, but all Alex did was stare at me and reply, “No, I guess not.”
We stood there for a few minutes. It was finally quiet and calm. I took a deep breath in relief. The quiet was good. Refreshing. Soothing.
“I like the quiet too,” she said as if reading my mind. “Helps me think. You want to know what I’m thinking?”
“Sure.”
“What I think,” she said walking past me, “is that I can make sure your papers get all the right approvals on them so you can continue working even if you miss a little school…like today.”
She headed towar
ds the parking lot, and I had to jog a few steps to catch up. “What exactly do you do at Helix anyway?” I asked.
She gave me a sly smile. The kind that made all sorts promises. My heart beat a little faster, and I knew I wasn’t the type of guy that normally got to see it. I suddenly felt a little more hopeful.
“I do a bit of everything,” she said.
#
We talked about our game-plan on the way to Helix. We drove slow and stopped for a late lunch to kill some time. Talking with Alex and driving around with her was an odd experience. We instantly clicked, and our minds worked the same way. She knew right away the direction my mind was traveling, and seemed to go the same way effortlessly.
She didn’t dwell on my dad being missing, and didn’t shower me with pity. More importantly, Alex seemed genuinely certain my dad was alive. The glass half-full attitude was just what I needed.
“Helix has been here since the Cold War,” she said. School had officially ended a half-hour earlier, and we were only a mile from Helix. “If there is anything weird going on, you might be able to find the beginnings of it in the papers you are making digital back-ups of. This company doesn’t throw anything away.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “You can’t just walk around asking if there are any conspiracies going on that you should know about.”
“Sure I can.” She grinned. “You just have to ask the right questions, and know how to listen the right way.”
“You really aren’t like all the other people at school.”
Her face took on a more grim set. “No.” She shook her head. “I’m really not. You see, Jack, I’ve learned everyone is a liar. It makes a girl think about things a little differently.”
She pulled her car, a silver Honda Civic, into one of the staff parking spaces and turned the keys. I tried to lighten the mood. Things were too depressing lately, and the last thing I wanted was for her to feel as crappy as I did. “Not everyone is a liar,” I said. “I’m not.”
“You’re lying right now.”
“Nope. Not possible. I’d know.”
She did smile a little at that. Mission accomplished. Kinda. “I can tell when a person lies,” she said. “I swear people lie almost every time they open their mouths. Drives me crazy. I just want people to tell the truth.”
“You can’t handle the truth!” I said it in my best Jack Nicholson voice. It got a laugh out of her along with an eye-roll. At least she got the reference. My dad was missing, my life on the brink of shambles, and here I was trying to make Alex feel better. The thing was, by trying to make her feel less gloomy about people, it was making me feel better too.
“Ever since I woke up in the hospital yesterday,” I said more seriously, “it’s been weird. All I want to do is help. I want to find my dad and have things go back to normal. Maybe it’s stupid, but I’d almost rather people tell me what they really think about the situation rather than the canned ‘I’m sooo sorry.’ So maybe I think I know how you feel.” I looked at her and shrugged. “Am I telling the truth?”
Alex smiled back at me. “One-hundred percent.” She took a breath and let it back out slowly. “All right. Let’s do this.” She stuck out her hand. “Good luck, partner.”
I took her hand and tried hard not to wince at the strength of her grip.
“Right back at you.”
Chapter Six
No matter how much momentum I had going into the search for a conspiracy at Helix, it was long gone after only a few hours. My working space at Helix consisted of little more than a storage room with a computer and a scanner.
Metal shelving lined the walls of the small room, and on each shelf sat stacked boxes of old documents. The left hand wall held incoming boxes, and the right hand wall was where I put the documents after I scanned them into the huge database of information Helix maintained. I’d worked in this room for two years, and during that time I’d never seen the incoming boxes section empty.
I examined every paper as I fed it into the scanner. The majority of them were old expense reports, old weather data, and other useless crap. The task quickly became tedious.
I pulled out my cell phone and checked the time. 8:30pm. I usually only worked a couple of hours on Monday nights, but I couldn’t envision heading out now. Somewhere my dad was counting on me.
The next paper was a travel reimbursement for a trip to Los Angeles in 1976, same as the last five reports. I set it aside and pulled out the next hand full of papers. They all had the same date on them too.
I dropped them and rubbed my eyes. I saw double, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was time for a Dr. Pepper.
The door to the room locked behind me as I made my way to the main cafeteria. Helix boasted a full service cafeteria on the ground floor that served the employees. During the day a group of chefs worked constantly to provide the workers with breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner during the busy weeks. No one prepped food at night, but a refrigerator full of beverages remained available to those pulling late nights.
The delicious carbonation burned going down my throat. I knew I was stalling, but the answer to my questions wouldn’t be found searching through some old papers. I’d assumed I’d start looking through them and answers would miraculously appear for me. My audacity would have been comical if it hadn’t been so pathetic. Suddenly the flavor of the Dr. Pepper wasn’t quite as good, so I threw it away without finishing.
Alex said she would stay until 9pm and then give me a ride home, so I still had a few minutes to kill. She told me we had to keep our distance at Helix since she was going to fudge my work information. People are always watching here, she had said. If we are seen together too often here they might look too close at the signature approving your hours and your eligibility.
Her logic still didn’t make a ton of sense to me, but being cautious seemed like the way to go right now.
When I reached the door to the archiving room I noticed it stood open a crack.
Odd. I was nearly positive the door had closed behind me. I pushed the door open carefully, willing it not to make any noise. I was nervous, my heart hammering in my chest. All those crappy horror movies started replaying themselves in my head.
The room was almost exactly the way I’d left it.
Almost.
A new box sat on the desk near the computer. Its size and coloring were different from the uniform boxes I constantly went through. The normal boxes lining the walls were all white and identical in size. This box was blue and about half the size of the others. I glanced quickly from side to side to see if anyone lurked about. The door clicked shut behind me, the sound unnaturally loud.
I crossed the room quickly and yanked the lid off the box. The pessimist in me imagined it would be full of even more useless forms. Pulling out the first paper I muttered, “What the heck?”
Bizarre symbols covered the page. There were no margins, no spaces. Every inch of the paper was filled. Some were nothing more than swirls, others resembled the letters of the English alphabet stretched and skewed. After staring at them for a few moments my vision swam and my head started pounding. I put the paper aside, face-down on the computer desk, then pulled out another handful of the pages. Only a few more remained inside the box.
Every paper was the same. One side covered in the gibberish symbols, the other side blank. The ink used to write or print the symbols—I couldn’t tell which—was an odd shade of purple that seemed to change to black or silver depending on how I held it. Weird. I wanted to throw the papers back in the box, and yet…something in the symbols called to me. They seemed familiar somehow.
Maybe if I had time, I could make sense of them.
The thought came from nowhere, and I immediately recognized how stupid it was. Because you can just pick up a paper of odd symbols and decode them, I told myself. Right. Last time I checked, you weren’t some code-breaker-genius.
But the thought stayed. It felt more right with every passing moment. There was someth
ing here. Something important. Whoever put this box in here—probably Alex—thought it would help me. It was too much of a coincidence the box appearing during the ten minutes I was out of the room.
There were maybe a couple hundred sheets of the symbol-filled paper. I grabbed them and stuffed them in my backpack. If I left the papers, there was a chance they would vanish from the room. I just couldn’t risk it.
“You ready to head, Jack?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin and let out a strangled yelp. Not the coolest reaction for a seventeen year-old. I turned around to find Alex in the doorway struggling not to laugh. Her smile was contagious. Beautiful. Soon I was laughing along with her. She shook her head and beckoned me to follow. As soon as we were outside I edged closer to her.
“Thanks for that box of papers,” I said.
“Huh?”
I smiled at her. “You don’t have to act all evasive. We aren’t in the building anymore.” Right at that moment my phone rang. I let it buzz in my pocket. Barry was probably calling for the hundredth time. Sometimes friends need to know when to back off.
She stopped abruptly, forcing me to leave her behind as I kept walking. “Jack, what are you talking about?”
“The box of papers? In the archiving room?” All this back-and-forth crap had given me a headache. A bad headache. “I went and got a soda, came back and found a different box in the room? I assumed you left it there.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I was busy doing my own stuff. The first time I came down was on the way out. What papers are you talking about?” She hurried over to me and lowered her voice. “Did you find something?”
I opened my mouth to reply only to be interrupted again by my phone. “Seriously, Barry,” I said pulling it out of my pocket. “When are you gonna get that I need some friggin’ spa—”
My words died as I looked at the caller ID. It wasn’t Barry. It wasn’t anyone. There wasn’t an “Unknown” on the display or anything. Just the phone ringing. Huh. I flipped it open.
Residue Page 3