The Handbook

by Jim Benton

  Maggie looked at him with disbelief.

  “Mike. An unlocked window is exactly how a burglar would enter your house in the first place,” she said.

  Mike stopped in his tracks and thought about it for a minute. “Yeah. Okay, I’m never going to leave this unlocked again.”

  He opened the window quietly and pulled himself in. “You’re smart, Maggie,” he added.

  Jack and Maggie climbed in after him and surveyed his room. The walls were covered with posters of video games and basketball. Candy wrappers and socks and empty fast food bags covered the floor.

  “My mom’s over at Jack’s house. C’mon. Get my mom’s car keys,” Mike told them. “We have to hurry before they get back. But first I have to pee.”

  “Car keys?” Maggie looked at Jack for some sort of reassurance.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

  Mike came out of the bathroom, and Maggie handed him the keys, her hand brushing against his.

  “Why aren’t your hands wet?” she asked.

  “Cause I didn’t pee on them,” he said.

  “But you washed them, right?”

  “Why would I wash them if I didn’t pee on them?” Mike said, and they hurried to the garage.

  “Look,” Maggie began, “I’m having a hard time believing that you didn’t pee on them, but even if you didn’t, people wash their hands when they use the bathroom, Mike.”

  Mike stopped and turned around to face Maggie. He grinned and put on an old hat that belonged to his grandpa.

  “People used to wash their hands, babe. Before we got the book. People used to wash a lot of things.”

  Mike peered out the tiny window of the garage.

  “I don’t see any of them out there,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”

  He got into the driver’s seat, put on his safety belt, pressed the garage door opener, started the car, and pulled slowly out into the street. Maggie and Jack were slumped down in their seats.

  “Nice look,” Jack said.

  In addition to his grandpa’s old hat, Mike was wearing sunglasses and had a cigar clenched between his teeth.

  “This is so I’ll look like an adult,” he said, and he drove carefully around the corner.

  Maggie, in the backseat, peeked over the top of the seat. She watched as her house disappeared from her view.

  “Stop. Stop the car,” she said, her voice panicky and urgent.

  Mike stopped. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “We can’t do this. Mike isn’t old enough to drive. We can’t run off like this without telling our parents where we are.”

  “She’s right,” Jack said. “We can’t do this. We’ll just tell our parents what happened. There’s an explanation. They’ll fix it.”

  Mike spit out the cigar.

  “Guys, I am so glad you said that. I was thinking the exact same thing, but I didn’t want to be the first one to wuss out. Thanks for wussing first, Maggie,” he said sincerely.

  Mike looked down at the car’s dashboard. He was puzzled.

  “Sorry, but I’ll have to drive all the way around the block. I don’t know how to go in reverse.”

  Mike turned the corner and was passed by one of the agent’s cars going the other way.

  “That was them. That was them. Do you think they recognized us?” Jack asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Mike laughed. “This is exactly why I put on this disguise. So we wouldn’t get recognized.”

  The agent’s car squealed around and jumped on the gas. It roared up behind them, and one of the agents hung out the passenger window.

  The immobilizer crackled and four blasts crashed into the trunk of the car. They felt the static in the air and smelled the car’s burnt paint.

  One charge shattered the side mirror and another cracked the back window.

  Mike stomped the accelerator and the car surged forward.

  “I think they recognized you!” Jack yelled, and Mike wrenched the steering wheel, forcing the car to whip around the corner and slam his passengers against the doors.

  “You’re going to get us killed!” Maggie screamed from the backseat as electrical blasts continued to hammer the car.

  “He won’t,” Jack said. “Mike rocks at driving games. If anything, the faster we go, the better he’ll do! It’s just like a video game!”

  The agents could hardly keep up. In Mike’s mind, this looked exactly like a video game, complete with a timer and a score. He was a fantastic high-speed driver, and he swerved masterfully in and around traffic and managed to keep the agents from getting a clear shot. With each maneuver, he increased the distance between them, and soon led them by several blocks.

  “I’m winning!” he shouted as he slammed on the brakes and crashed into a Federal Express truck.

  “Oh, man! The games never have a parked truck on the road!” he complained, trying to restart the car. He turned the key again and again but it wouldn’t start up.

  “Game over!” Mike yelled. “That’s it. We gotta run! Oh, man, I think I may have eaten some of that cigar.”

  Just then, a red minivan, going the opposite direction, stopped next to their car. The door slid open and a pretty girl with short, dark hair poking from under a baseball cap extended her hand.

  “Jack Hartfield?” she said with a smile. “I’m Resistance. We’re here to protect you. Climb in.”

  “We’re not going with you,” Maggie objected. “We don’t know you.”

  “Maggie!” Jack urged. “You’re right. We shouldn’t go with strangers. It’s wrong. But the other guys are shooting at us.”

  Maggie was terrified.

  “I don’t know, Jack. Mike, what do you think?”

  She looked at the driver’s seat and it was empty. Mike was already in the van.

  She reluctantly unclicked her seat belt and the two of them jumped into the minivan. It drove down the street, safely concealing them from the agents, who, running toward Mike’s crashed car, didn’t even glance their way.

  “You said your name is Resistance?” Jack said.

  “I’m with the resistance. My name is Marion,” she said.

  The driver looked back at them and nodded a hello.

  “That’s Mole. He’s an adult, but don’t worry. He’s not a parent,” she said.

  “How’d you know where we were?” Mike asked. “How did you know Jack’s name?”

  “We monitor the Parents Agency’s transmissions.”

  “Parents Agency?”

  “Yeah. That’s who was shooting at you. They’re well organized, but always a little behind us on technology. You know how parents are.”

  They all nodded.

  “The Parents Agency believes that you may have seen a copy of the Secret Parent’s Handbook. Some of them think you may even have a copy that was issued to …” She pulled out a small notebook and read from it, “… a Mr. and Mrs. Wallace. Your old next-door neighbors?”

  “Yeah. Those were my neighbors,” Jack said, uncomfortable that Marion seemed to know so much about him.

  “So, do you have it?” she said with a grin, and Jack felt there was something dangerous in her dark eyes that didn’t match the smile.

  Jack and Mike traded looks and Maggie picked up on it.

  “I only saw it for a minute,” Jack said. “They put it out in their garbage. I found it while I was trash picking. I flipped through it, but it didn’t really look like anything I wanted, so I left it there.”

  “But you should have seen this awesome drill he got. You plug it in, pull the trigger, and VOOSH, you get totally electrocuted,” Mike said, and Jack nodded enthusiastically.

  Maggie was impressed at how believably Jack lied and how automatically Mike supported it. She couldn’t help but smile to herself.

  “That’s too bad,” Marion said. “We really could have used it.”

  Mole pounded his fist on the steering wheel.

  “We’re going to take you back to headquarters,” Ma
rion continued, “and see what you can tell us. We’ve been piecing together bits and scraps of this thing for years, based on fleeting glimpses, memories, and so on. Whatever you can recall will help.”

  Marion looked at Maggie. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a copy, have you?”

  Maggie thought it sounded a little bit like an accusation.

  “Copy of what?” she asked, and pulled her backpack containing the Secret Parent’s Handbook closer to her side.

  The minivan pulled into a parking lot of an old school that looked as though it had been closed for a long time. They drove up to a large garage door and honked the horn. After a moment, the door opened and they drove in, the door closing behind them quickly.

  They followed Marion out of the garage and were watched closely by serious-looking kids of all ages in the hallways.

  As they passed the school’s old classrooms, they could see some were filled with boxes of supplies; others were outfitted like dormitories, with beds and dressers and TVs.

  “You live here?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t, but a few kids do,” Marion said. “For most of us, it’s just a base of operations.”

  They walked into the gym, which had been converted into a large technological center. Dozens of kids manned computer monitors flickering with data and surveillance feeds.

  “Looks like you guys operate a few websites,” Maggie said.

  Marion smiled. “Hundreds. It’s the main way we fund our operation.”

  “Yeah. Exactly what IS your operation anyway?” Jack asked.

  A very little boy with blond hair stood up from a chair and walked toward them. Marion saluted him and cast a critical eye at Jack, Mike, and Maggie.

  “Salute!” Marion barked. “Salute the General.”

  Maggie and Mike saluted.

  “The General?” Jack said with a cruel laugh. “What are you, like seven years old?”

  “I’m General Dobson,” he said. “I’m in charge of the Resistance here. And I’m NOT seven,” he added indignantly. “Try seven and three-quarters.”

  “Yeah, Marion told us this is the Resistance,” Mike said, putting himself in between Jack and the General. “What is it you’re resisting—potty training?”

  Mike laughed loudly, but only for a second. The General swiftly had Mike’s wrist in a crippling judo hold that drove Mike painfully to his knees and had him squealing for mercy.

  “We know you’ve seen the Handbook,” the General said, releasing Mike’s wrist.

  “You do, huh?” Jack said.

  “We do. We monitor the parents’ transmissions. We’d like to find out what you saw, and how we can fit it in with what we already know. We’re not the enemy here.”

  “Who, exactly, is the enemy?” Maggie asked.

  The General clenched his teeth and scowled. “You know who the enemy is. The parents are the enemy.”

  The General walked over to a keyboard and activated a large monitor hanging on the wall. As he spoke, he clicked through the images.

  “Parents,” he began, “have been in charge since the beginning.”

  A picture of Fred and Wilma Flintstone holding Pebbles came on the screen.

  He leaned over to one of the technicians and whispered, “Get a better picture of cavemen, will you?”

  He returned to his presentation.

  “What chance do kids have? What chance have we ever had? They have all the candy, all the money, all the power. And they make certain that we can’t get any of it.”

  Other kids in the control center nodded.

  “They deny us our simple pleasures and make us endure algebra, brussels sprouts, and room cleaning, even though they know that none of these things will ever make us happy. Ever.”

  Marion raised her hand.

  “Yes, Marion?” the General said.

  “Also don’t forget they make us, like, look both ways when we cross the street and not talk to strangers, like we’re idiots,” she said, trying to be helpful.

  The General smiled. He looked at Jack, a bit embarrassed for Marion.

  “Yes. Well. Thank you for that, Marion,” he said gently, as though he was speaking to a much younger child.

  An image of a plain-looking book came on the screen.

  “And they have a book,” the General said, which started a low round of booing among the Resistance members. He put up his hands to make them stop.

  “It’s a book of special information. We know it’s called the Secret Parent’s Handbook and we know that they take extraordinary measures to protect it.”

  The screen displayed a photo of one of the immobilizers used by the agents.

  “I took that immobilizer off an agent myself,” Marion said proudly. “It’s my immobilizer.”

  “We’re confident that this book is full of things they don’t want us to know. It’s full of things we could use to overthrow them and take our rightful place as the leaders of the world. They’re not the boss of us.”

  The entire group of Resistance members shouted back in unison, “THEY’RE NOT THE BOSS OF US.”

  The General looked up at them with his fierce blue eyes.

  “The Resistance has been around for decades, assembling a copy of the Secret Parent’s Handbook—just like the one you saw.”

  “How much of it do you have?” Jack asked.

  The General tapped the keyboard and brought up images of their cherished fragments.

  “Quite a lot,” he said. “Here’s an eighth of page eleven, found in the remains of a house fire. And here’s nearly half of page thirty-five, retrieved after it passed through a wiener dog. Here’s a picture of me retrieving it.”

  The screen showed a photograph of the General, dressed in black, suspended by ropes lowered through a hole in a roof. It was a selfie of him smiling at the camera, holding up the scrap of paper as a wiener dog slept peacefully in the background.

  Marion beamed. “The General is just the best at special retrievals.”

  Jack and Maggie and Mike nodded politely and tried to look impressed.

  The General continued his official briefing. “Other little shreds here and there have turned up and our best minds have been laboring to reconstruct a complete book.”

  He swelled up with pride.

  “Some of our scientists read at, like, a twelfth-grade level, you know.”

  “Yeah, this is great,” Mike said. “Looks like you’ll have this complete by the time you’re—what—a hundred years old?” Then he chortled and snorted loudly, right in the General’s face.

  Marion shoved Mike hard and knocked him to the ground. She would have jumped on top of him, but the General stopped her.

  “That’s not the way it will happen, Mike,” he said, offering him a hand up. “One day, a kid is going to find a complete copy or a nearly complete copy. Maybe it will be at a garage sale, or forgotten in an attic—something like that. You had a complete copy in your hand for a moment yourself, didn’t you, Jack?”

  Jack nodded weakly.

  “And when that kid finds it—and hangs on to it—we’ll be there. We’ll read it, study it, and use the secrets of the book to finally put the parents in their proper place. We’ll take over.”

  “You push like a girl,” Mike said to Marion, still a bit embarrassed that she had knocked him down.

  “I can do better,” she said with a cruel smile, and shook a fist at him. “Wanna see?”

  The General continued, “We’re working with the few scraps we have in the meantime, to at least begin to make some small progress against the enemy.”

  “Or,” Marion began. “Or if this plan doesn’t work, we’ll begin taking prisoners. We’ll kidnap some parents, toss them into cages, and we’ll question them until we get the answers we want.”

  Maggie winced.

  “You think you can capture adults so easy?” Mike scoffed.

  “We’ve already run a series of test captures, Tubby. It’s easy. When an adult hears a kid in trouble, they
run right into our ambushes. It’s a lot simpler than you think,” she said with a cruel little giggle. A few of the other Resistance members laughed along with her.

  “Kidnapping? Imprisonment?” Mike said. “Isn’t that, like, majorly illegal? Not to mention that if a person thinks they are being kidnapped, they might do anything to fight back—somebody could get killed.”

  The General frowned.

  “Marion knows that we are not kidnapping and questioning parents,” he said.

  “At the moment,” she added quietly.

  “Currently, we believe we can accomplish our goals without that level of violence. We WILL take over, friends, make no mistake. But for now, the position of the Resistance is that we will not take orders from parents without pouting, sulking, or throwing a fit. And when they want us to eat our vegetables, or wash our hair, or not put our feet up on the couch, we will demand an explanation!”

  The Resistance members applauded.

  Maggie clapped politely and said, “I know what you mean about parents, but actually, those three examples—vegetables, washing your hair, and keeping your feet off the couch—those things seem pretty easy to explain …”

  The room went silent. She felt their eyes glaring at her angrily, especially Marion’s. Mike nudged her. Jack shot her a look.

  She got the message.

  “It’s, uh, because they’re stupid,” she said. “Parents are stupid. And everything they say is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  The General eyed her critically for a moment. And then he smiled.

  A huge round of cheers and applause went up and the General beamed at her. “You’ll fit in here nicely. Let me show you your rooms.”

  Jack’s mom hung up the phone. She had been speaking with Mike’s dad.

  “They don’t know where the boys are either. Maggie’s mom called a while ago and she can’t find Maggie.”

  Jack’s dad looked out the window. He did his best to sound upbeat.

  “It’s really not even that late. Lots of times we don’t have dinner until seven, and Jack knows that. They’re just running around somewhere, I’ll bet. They’ll show up any minute. You’ll see.”

  Jack’s mom hugged him tight. “I know,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “But … I just worry. I worry all the time. About everything. Since the day he was born.”