Countdown Zero

by Chris Rylander

  After another moment fidgeting with the knob, Gomez was inside. His office was tiny, so I breathed as slowly and quietly as I could. But I didn’t need to worry about being quiet—as soon as Gomez saw the state of his office and the snowman version of himself behind the desk, he lost it. He puffed and sputtered, completely speechless.

  “Aaarrgh!” he finally shouted, all piratey.

  I stifled a laugh. Even in this dire situation, I couldn’t help but think of Gomez’s bulging eyes carefully examining his snowclone. But that didn’t mean I had stopped brainstorming ways to get out of the office without Gomez noticing.

  My coat pocket vibrated. Holding my breath, I slowly pulled out my phone. It was another text from Dillon:

  Did you make it out?

  I debated typing a reply but realized that I could no longer hear Gomez. Was he still there, not making noise? Or had he stepped out? Was it worth poking my head around the corner of the file cabinet to check? I put my phone back into my pocket and listened for breathing.

  There was nothing audible but my own shallow breath, which sounded to me like a chainsaw trying to cut through a slab of marble. I leaned to the side slightly until I could see through the door. Gomez wasn’t out in the main office where the school secretary sat. But I did see him in the reflection of the office door’s window.

  He was still inside his office, next to the desk, digging in his briefcase for something. If I could see him, that meant he’d be able to see me back in the reflection if he happened to look at the office door closely enough. I needed to act.

  I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a black stone I had brought for the Gomez snowman’s eyes. I checked the reflection in the door. Gomez still had his head down. I’d only have one chance at this and I’d have to move fast.

  My plan wasn’t a good one. Actually, it was pretty bad. In fact, it was more likely to result in a broken neck or severed artery than a safe exit. And in that regard, it was maybe the worst plan I’d ever come up with in my whole life. Perhaps even the worst plan that anyone had ever come up with in the history of plans. But then again, it was the only one I had. Besides, I had faced down a small army of trained terrorists with automatic weapons just a few months ago. If I could do that, then surely I could escape from a middle school principal’s office.

  I took a deep breath and leaned to the side again, so I could just see the open office door. The target was small, and I wasn’t exactly Aaron Rodgers, but it wasn’t very far away either.

  My windup was hindered by the small space, but I put as much power into the throw as possible. The small black stone fired from my hand with surprising speed and shot through the open door.

  It smashed into the secretary’s desk, knocking a cup full of pens and pencils off the edge with a crash. Gomez leaped up from his chair with a cry. I heard him slam into the snowman.

  He cursed. I did, too, silently. He’d just killed my poor snowman that had taken over an hour to construct.

  I stayed hidden as he ran from his office trailing chunks of snow into the main administration area. As soon as he was clear of the door, I sprang out from behind the file cabinet, pulling the second Gomez eye rock from my pocket and firing it at the window behind his desk.

  A small, jagged opening appeared in the glass, with cracks spreading around it like a spiderweb. I could only hope the small hole had greatly reduced the strength of the entire windowpane. But I didn’t have time to wonder about it any longer, because Gomez was likely already on his way back toward the office.

  I lunged forward in three long, quick steps and dived headfirst with my elbows out in front of me toward the center of the window. I half expected to bounce off it and end up on my butt back inside Gomez’s office, staring up at his blazing red eyes with my neck bent at an awkward angle. But the weakened glass gave way and I plowed right through the window and into a snow-covered bush just outside. The padding of my winter coat helped me avoid getting stabbed or cut by shards of glass or the bush’s branches.

  After I landed, I didn’t stop to see if I’d broken any limbs. I immediately rolled to my right and then took off sprinting along the side of the school building.

  As I reached the end of the building and turned the corner sharply, I heard Gomez shouting from the hole in the window.

  “I see you! I know who you are!”

  His words faded behind me as I ran.

  He likely did know it was me. But the cold fact was that he couldn’t prove it. Would he find a reason to give me a ton of detention, like usual? Yeah, definitely. Would he have enough evidence to actually expel or suspend me? Nope. He never did.

  I grinned as I ran toward our rendezvous spot. Prankpocalypse had gone off about as well as one could expect, all things considered. To be honest, though, I was a bit surprised at how little I was looking forward to the morning-after payoff. That used to be my favorite part. As I ran through the silent North Dakota snowfall, all I could think about was the thrill at almost getting caught and the rush of the escape.

  Of course, if I had known then what I was going to find in my lunch the following week, I might not have been craving so much excitement after all.

  MOST KIDS PROBABLY DON’T EXPECT TO FIND A SECRET MESSAGE hidden in their school lunch.

  If they did, they’d probably think someone was playing a joke on them or something. Or, if they were anything like my conspiracy-theorist best friend, Dillon, they’d probably assume that the secret message was from a member of the League of Reformed Pirates trying to rally support for their fight to get more realistic glass eyeballs so they don’t freak people out when they get tired of wearing their eye patches.

  But when I found a top secret message in my corned beef the Wednesday after the smashing success that was Prankpocalypse, I most certainly did not think it had come from the League of Reformed Pirates. In fact, I knew exactly who had sent me the secret message before I even read it.

  At the same time, I didn’t know what the slimy, gravy-covered slip of paper was going to say. But I certainly wasn’t expecting it to deliver a blow so devastating that I’d feel like I’d just gotten kicked in the jaw by a farm mule named Arnold who was juiced up on steroids and spent fourteen hours a day pulling heavy carts around his pen.

  Agent Nineteen has seventy-two hours to live. Meet on the school track in six minutes.

  I couldn’t keep my hand from shaking. I looked up and found Dillon staring at me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just have to go save the world again.”

  My name is Carson Fender, and just in case you’re confused by all this “secret agent” talk: A few months ago I saved the world. Well, sort of. The thing is, being a real secret agent isn’t always like it is in the movies. There wasn’t some maniacal evil genius who had a disintegration laser pointed at the earth’s core, or a secret satellite he’d rigged to blow up the moon. No, in real life, fighting villains and saving the world is more complicated than that.

  So, maybe I didn’t stop the earth’s core from being destroyed or prevent the moon’s destruction or anything. But I did help to take down an evil organization called the Pancake Haus (don’t ask) and stop them from freeing several dangerous terrorists from prison and just generally wreaking havoc across the globe.

  And, yeah, so maybe I didn’t exactly take them down completely. Their leader, Mule Medlock, got away and is still out there somewhere, likely concocting a new scheme of some sort. But I still helped to capture most of his henchmen and put a pretty big dent in his organization’s structure and plans. I’m not bragging. It was probably more luck than anything. Besides, it was kind of my own fault that Mule Medlock even got as close as he did to succeeding in the first place.

  But all of that is a long story and beside the point. That all happened months ago. And since then I’d been retired from the Agency. They didn’t need my help anymore, and I hadn’t received any official Agency messages since the night that stuff a
ll went down.

  And now, suddenly, this. A note in my corned-beef casserole telling me that the man who recruited and trained me, Agent Nineteen, was about to die, and that, for some reason, the Agency thought I could help save him.

  I excused myself from the table.

  “What do you mean ‘save the world’?” Dillon asked. “Where are you going?”

  “Look, I gotta go . . . uh, you know . . . go to the bathroom,” I said. “I just call it ‘saving the world’ sometimes.”

  Dillon grinned. “I like it! That sounds a lot better than what I usually say, which is, ‘I gotta go feed the fish.’ Or sometimes I say, ‘I have to go release the kraken’ or ‘drop anchor.’ Every once in a while I say, ‘I gotta go plan the dictator’s assassination.’” He paused. “‘I have to go save the world.’ Yeah, I like it!”

  “Great, you get him started and then take off and leave the rest of us with the results?” Danielle said. “Both of you are utterly twisted and disgusting.”

  “Sorry, duty calls,” I said, hurrying away before they could distract me any longer.

  Several kids tried to stop me to tell me their Prankpocalypse stories. That had been happening a lot since the night we’d pulled it off: Almost every kid had some funny story relating to one of our many pranks that night. Normally I’d have loved to just stand around talking about the hilarious success of one of the pranks, but instead I just brushed them off with a quick fist bump. Because right then I needed to get down to the school track. Agent Nineteen was in trouble; I didn’t have time to waste talking about secret bathroom codes or trivial pranks.

  There was something much more important in the works now.

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE PERSON WAITING FOR ME DOWN BY THE school track: Agent Blue.

  Agent Blue was Nineteen’s partner and my other mentor when I’d been an almost agent earlier that year. Agents Blue and Nineteen were also Mr. Jensen and Mr. Jensen, teachers at my school, and they did a pretty good job at playing the parts.

  “Carson,” he said stoically.

  “I got your message.”

  He nodded solemnly. Neither of us needed to say much more about it.

  “It’s imperative we don’t waste any time,” he said. “I’ve already arranged for you to miss your next class. We need you to come down to HQ right away.”

  I nodded, figuring there would be time for all the questions I had later. I followed him toward the old shed by the sledding hill, which housed the secret entrance to Agency Headquarters.

  I’d only ever been to the Agency HQ one other time. It was right after I’d saved my friend, the kid I’d been assigned to protect, Olek, from the Pancake Haus. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about it every day since then. I mean, there was a massive secret base miles underneath our school, where dozens of people did top secret things, and all while we lived our relatively boring lives up above them, completely unaware of how much was being done to keep our lives as boring as possible. After all, for many people, excitement isn’t always a good thing.

  But the point is, how could I not think about that stuff all time? It almost made me wish I didn’t even know about the Agency or their secret headquarters at all, because it basically drove me crazy to think about what they were doing while I was taking some meaningless social studies quiz or changing into my gym clothes or waiting for the school bus. And the worst part was that I couldn’t tell anyone about it. There was nobody I could talk to about the secrets I knew.

  For those first few weeks, I’d been so consumed by the knowledge of the Agency’s existence that Dillon and Danielle would catch me just standing there staring at the ground for minutes at a time. Dillon of course had merely assumed that I was only shocked to see what he himself had discovered during the past few weeks: that an army of mutated, hyperintelligent ants were plotting something massive at our school, something that involved kids being carried away into secret ant lairs to be turned into ant slaves or ant food or maybe just experimented on with a complex and varied array of ant tools by psychotic ant scientists.

  Danielle’s concern was a bit simpler. At first she’d just figured that I missed Olek. She had known Olek as nothing more than a foreign exchange student, and we’d all become pretty good friends in the short time I had been assigned to protect him. Her theory was partially true. I did really miss Olek since he’d returned to living with his family. But missing Olek didn’t cause me to stare at something for five minutes straight with a look on my face like I thought I’d just seen a wizard sword fighting an armadillo but wasn’t quite sure if I’d really seen it or was just losing my mind. And that’s why Danielle started to think something else was wrong.

  “What’s with you lately?” she’d say after noticing me gazing.

  “I’m telling you, he sees the Einstein ants, too!” Dillon would shout, crouching on the ground to get a closer look.

  Danielle would always ignore him while I tried to cover for myself, making up some lame lie or another.

  But the truth was, it was getting increasingly tougher not to just come clean entirely. To tell Dillon and Danielle the actual truth: that I had been a real secret agent for a few weeks earlier that year, and that pretty much half of Dillon’s insane theories about our hometown were actually true (you know, all the ones that didn’t involve superintelligent ants and the like). They were my best friends, after all. If I couldn’t trust them with my biggest secret, then who could I trust?

  But in the end, I always kept my mouth shut, because of something Agent Nineteen had said to me once: Forget all the rules of being a secret agent that movies might have told you. The first and only steadfast rule to being an agent is: Don’t ever blow your cover. Ever. That’s when people start dying.

  I stood outside the maintenance shed while Agent Blue input all the secret codes and had his retinas scanned by a security device. A moment later we were on the hidden elevator that doubled as the floor of the shed. We zoomed down into the earth, and just like last time it felt like it took my stomach an extra forty seconds to join us at the bottom.

  The scene before me when the elevator opened, though, was nothing like last time. Then, the office had been pristine and professional, with men and women in sharp suits efficiently monitoring hundreds of cameras and text feeds coming in from around the world, a well-oiled machine of modern surveillance and espionage.

  As soon as the doors parted this time, I found myself staring down the barrels of four huge machine guns.

  My first thought was that Blue and I had been ambushed. My next thought, a split second later, was that Agent Blue had just led me into a trap as part of some cruel training exercise. My third thought, fueled by the terror of having real guns pointed my way, was that I wished I’d brought a change of pants.

  “Security clearance?” said a voice.

  “Zulu-tango-nine-four-four-zulu-oscar-lima-seven,” Agent Blue said calmly, as if having four machine guns pointed at his face were as boring and routine as ordering an Egg McMuffin at the drive-thru on his way to work in the morning. “Guest access: alpha-juliette-six-six-zero, per directive one-four-seven-five-eight-eight.”

  Just like that, the guns were lowered and the four men in full body armor and riot masks stepped aside and let us pass.

  “What was that all about?” I said as we entered the lobby, the huge atrium that made up the heart of the Agency Headquarters. The last time I had been down here it had been packed with Agency employees and bustling with activity. Now it was oddly empty and quiet, virtually deserted.

  “Discovering there’s a rogue agent on the loose can cause a lot more havoc than you might think,” Agent Blue said.

  “You mean Medlock?” I said. The psychotic criminal mastermind I’d met earlier that year had once been an agent with this very organization. It’s one of the reasons he was able to wreak such chaos with his plan. He knew exactly who he was fighting, and what each of the Agency’s moves would be. Including hiring me.

  Agent Blue nodded. “
I guess it’s a good lesson in who you can really trust.” He paused as we ascended the glass steps leading up to the HQ offices, and then added while shaking his head, “You never really can know who your true friends are.”

  I swallowed, and thought again about Dillon and Danielle. About how Medlock and Nineteen and Blue had apparently all once been friends and partners who trusted one another completely. And about how close I’d come to telling my own friends my secret just four days ago when we’d all gone to see the newest James Bond movie together.

  The difference, of course, was that my friends were just harmless seventh graders, whereas Mule Medlock, aka Agent Neptune, had been a highly trained secret agent who was somehow still alive despite the fact that Agent Nineteen had seen him get shot in the head while out on a mission. Getting shot in the head had to mess a person up at least a little bit. It’s not like my friends would ever go crazy and cause some huge national security crisis like Medlock.

  Not even Dillon would do something like that.

  AGENT BLUE LED ME TO AN EMPTY CONFERENCE ROOM AND told me to have a seat at a large table.

  “Wait here,” Agent Blue said, and left the room before I could even say anything.

  I’d forgotten in the last few months just how frustrating it could be, working with the Agency. Everything was always on a “need to know” basis with them, which meant that I was often kept in the dark about things until someone decided to tell me, and what questions I could ask were often met with silence, or a question in return, or even worse, a short, cryptic answer that really only left you with even more questions than you had to start with. So I just sat there and tried not to think of more questions to add to my growing list.

  It seemed like it took hours for Agent Blue to come back. When he finally did, he took a seat across from me.

  “Is Medlock behind this?” I asked before he could say anything. “Did he capture Nineteen?”