Countdown Zero

by Chris Rylander

  I swallowed as he stopped to chew on the Tootsie Roll in the center of his sucker. He attacked it with surprising ferocity given how calmly he’d worked down the candy part. When he finished, he glanced at Agent Blue, who continued.

  “Carson, I’ve already spoken to Mr. Gomez, and he will let you go on the trip on three conditions.”

  I nodded, even though I wanted to stop him right there.

  “First, you have to spend your lunch period tomorrow helping him continue to clean and repair his office. I’ve been told there was quite a bit of water damage, presumably from melted snow.”

  “Okay,” I said. That didn’t sound so bad. Not that the idea of spending an hour alone with Gomez sounded particularly fun, but it would be easy enough to get through. Like going to the dentist.

  “Second,” Agent Blue continued, “he insists that you understand that one more disciplinary incident of any kind between now and eighth-grade graduation will result in your immediate expulsion.”

  I nodded again. This condition was more serious, but if that’s what it would take to complete my mission, I could agree. It’s not as if I would be running another prank anytime soon. Besides, I’d kind of already reached the conclusion that pranks weren’t really worth it anymore. They’d started to feel a little childish, actually.

  “Finally,” Agent Blue said, “you must give up the identities of all your accomplices in your most recent prank.”

  That hit me hard, like a Bonecrusher piledriver. Ratting out my best friends was worse than losing a leg. They trusted me.

  “I can’t,” I said. “There has to be another way.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t,” Agent Blue said. “Mr. Gomez was quite clear.”

  “I know it’s a difficult pill to swallow,” Isadoris said, sounding like a normal guy for the first time that afternoon. “But you’re our last, best chance, Agent Zero. The only alternative would simply be to destroy the base. We can’t risk the release of the bio weapon. Agent Nineteen’s life, and the lives of all the agents and lab technicians at the base, depend on you. It’s time to decide what you’re willing to sacrifice to save them.”

  “But half the kids who helped me are going on the trip. If I rat them out, then they won’t get to go,” I said. “I mean, couldn’t that affect the mission?”

  “We’ve considered this possibility, yes,” Agent Blue said, likely knowing perfectly well that Dillon and Danielle usually helped me with my pranks.

  “Their inclusion on the trip isn’t important,” Director Isadoris said. “Yours is, Agent Zero. You’re the one student we need on that trip. You’re the one who can save Agent Nineteen, not your friends.”

  I WALKED ALONE BACK UP TOWARD THE SCHOOL FOR SIXTH period. And it was probably for the best. My mind was racing so much that I wouldn’t have been able to focus long enough to even hear anybody talking to me, let alone make any sort of comprehensible conversation.

  My new watch read: 69:54:13.

  Director Isadoris had given it to me before I’d left his office. It was a countdown clock set to the presumed time that the virus would kill everyone who had been exposed to it—including Agent Nineteen. They couldn’t be sure of the precise time when those inside were exposed, but the watches would help to keep us on task. Even if the whole thing was a bit morbid. And manipulative. Looking down at it now, it seemed like they just wanted me to have a constant reminder of what was at stake so I wouldn’t go back on ratting out my friends to Mr. Gomez.

  Would I be able to do it, though? Rat out my trusting friends to Principal Gomez? Keeping secrets from my best friends had been hard enough. I didn’t like secrets to begin with. But now I had to stab them in the back on top of adding even more layers of lies to the secrets I’d already been hiding from them.

  I kicked at what looked like a stone in the snow. But it wasn’t a stone. It was a small piece of a much larger chunk of dislodged pavement. My little toe exploded with pain as I stumbled and crashed face-first into a snow bank in the school parking lot.

  After getting back up and wiping the dirty snow off my face, I decided that I had to tell Dillon and Danielle the truth. Not about the Agency and being a spy; witnessing what Medlock’s breach had caused at Agency HQ had been enough of a warning about the perils of breaking your cover as an agent, even if it was to the two people you probably trusted more than anybody else in the world. But I had to tell them about Gomez, about giving up that they were my accomplices. The problem was, I had no idea how I was going to explain to them why I needed to do this.

  By the time I met up with them after school, I still didn’t have any answers.

  “So where did you really go at lunch?” Dillon asked as I joined them outside the door where their mom picked them up every day.

  “The bathroom,” I said, patting my stomach. “That corned beef must have really jammed up my internal gears.”

  Dillon shook his head. “You’re lying.”

  “No—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “Don’t even try to deny it, dude. I checked every single bathroom in the school. Even the teachers’ lounge bathroom. You weren’t in any of them.”

  “Gross!” Danielle said, smacking her twin brother’s arm. “You looked under the stalls in every bathroom?”

  “Hey, exposing conspiracies is dirty work sometimes,” he said with a shrug, never taking his accusing eyes off me. “Plus, Andrew, from Carson’s fifth period, said that he wasn’t in class today. So where were you, for real?”

  “Okay, okay, I didn’t have to go to the bathroom,” I admitted.

  “I knew it!” Dillon said.

  “But I can’t tell you where I really was,” I said. “At least, not here. Let’s wait until we get to your house.”

  Dillon’s face lit up like a psychedelic laser light show, complete with live heavy metal music. Nothing got him more excited than cryptic secrets that could only be talked about behind closed doors. Especially ones that revolved around him catching other people in lies.

  Danielle, though, was genuinely concerned. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

  “I’ll tell you soon,” I said, pointing to their mom’s car, which was just pulling up to the curb.

  The ride to their place was unusually quiet. And tense. For me, at least. Danielle looked mostly nervous, and Dillon was so excited he was bouncing around like a dog on the way to the park. I honestly think that had his mom rolled down the window, he’d have stuck his head outside and slobbered all over the side of the car.

  When we got to their house, we took off our winter coats and went downstairs to Dillon’s room. His walls were lined with tinfoil the way other kids’ walls were lined with movie, sports, and band posters. He claimed it helped scramble the Signal. Don’t even get me started on what the Signal is.

  “So what’s the big secret?” Dillon asked, his eyes practically spinning in his skull.

  Danielle closed the bedroom door and then joined us near Dillon’s desk.

  “Look, it’s bad news, so don’t get too excited,” I said, forgetting that, for Dillon, there was no such thing as a good or bad secret. The only type of secret that existed was an exciting one.

  “I knew it,” Danielle said.

  “It’s really bad,” I said. “I mean, like could-destroy-us-all bad.”

  “It’s the Chandlergast, isn’t it?” Dillon said, his smile finally fading.

  “Not now,” his sister groaned.

  The Chandlergast was this creature that Dillon swore lived in the various parks around the town of Minnow. The creature roamed from park to park to stay hidden, feasting on dead squirrels and poor hapless homeless guys. According to Dillon, the Chandlergast was half dragon, half ostrich, and half caterpillar, and would eventually emerge from a cocoon having grown so large and powerful that it could wipe out the entire city. I once tried to point out to him that the creature couldn’t have three halves, but he’d merely shrugged it off as a “technicality of phrasing an
d ultimately not that important given the potential devastation a full-grown Chandlergast would wreak.”

  “It’s not the Chandlergast!” I said. “In fact, you know as well as I do that there’s no such thing . . . Ah, never mind. Anyway, at lunch I was . . .”

  I didn’t get to finish my sentence because their doorbell interrupted me.

  “That must be Jake!” Dillon said. “I invited him over today.”

  “Why?” Danielle asked, rolling her eyes.

  “To strategize how we’re going to get a photograph of Smallfoot in the Black Hills on our trip,” Dillon said. “He agrees with me, unlike some of my friends, that we have at least a ten percent chance of a sighting.”

  “Don’t you mean Bigfoot?” I said.

  “Of course not, everybody knows Bigfoot isn’t real,” Dillon said with a dismissive scoff. “I mean, imagine an animal with feet that huge, it’d never be able to walk! Anyway, what’s the problem with me inviting Jake over, Danielle?”

  “There’s no problem,” she said. “I just . . . I thought he was only helping us out for Prankpocalypse.”

  “Well, he was, but he turned out to be a pretty cool guy. Carson, you don’t mind that he’s here, do you?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, glancing warily at Danielle. She was twirling a piece of her hair and not looking at either of us. “Actually, you might as well bring him downstairs. This involves him, too.”

  A minute later, we were all in the basement. Dillon told Jake that I was about to “reveal some crazy secret that would change the course of the world forever.”

  “Well, let’s not go that far,” I said. “Look, today at lunch I had to meet with Gomez in his office.”

  “What? Why?” Danielle asked, looking justifiably sick. “Prankpocalypse was a week ago, he never takes this long to punish you.”

  “Oh, man . . . ,” Jake said, looking like he already knew where this was headed.

  “Well, as per usual, he knows that I was behind Prankpocalypse,” I said. “Except this time he actually has enough proof to expel me.”

  I watched their faces fall, and I don’t think I’d ever felt so terrible in my life. Here I was, lying to my friends again.

  “Oh, no! Carson!” Danielle said.

  “I told you guys he had secret video cameras in his office,” Dillon said quietly. “I’ve been saying it all year.”

  “Gomez is full of crap,” Jake said confidently. “If he had anything on you, you’d already be gone.”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “He’s holding out because he wants me to give him the names of all my accomplices. If I give everyone up, then he promised that none of us would be expelled. But it would mean no Rushmore trip for the kids I turn in, and a ton of detention besides that.”

  Danielle looked as if she was about to cry. Dillon, for once, was also speechless. He just sat there and stared at me in shock. No crazy theories, no insane stories or hypotheticals over what could have caused our predicament. Jake looked completely zoned out, perhaps lost in thought. Or maybe he was legitimately in shock, like people sometimes are in movies after they barely escape a horrible accident.

  “I know,” I said after a few moments. “It’s bad. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Turn us in,” Danielle said softly. “You have to. You can’t let yourself be expelled. Besides, nobody forced us to help you. We all knew the risks.”

  “But the trip . . . I know how much you’ve been looking forward to it.”

  It was true. Danielle especially had been looking forward to her chance to get to go on the seventh-grade Mount Rushmore field trip since she was eight years old and first found out about it. She loved vacations, camping, history, science, and school. This trip was one of the few times in life that all five of those things got combined into one awesome weekend. And now it was about to get ruined. She looked as devastated as I felt for her. It was almost enough for me to just tell them the complete truth, so they’d know what was really at stake and why I wasn’t going to bite the bullet for them like I always promised I would if we ever got caught.

  “When do you need to tell him by?” Dillon asked.

  “Tomorrow at lunch.”

  “Ah, crud,” he said.

  And that pretty much summed up the whole situation. The four of us looked at our feet and the wall and one another with expressions of utter defeat on our faces. That’s when Jake’s face lit up.

  “Guys, this isn’t as bad as it seems,” he said. “Carson, just tell Gomez I was your only helper.”

  “What?” I said.

  “No way, man, you don’t have to take the fall for us,” Dillon added.

  “Trust me,” Jake said. “My mom is on the school board, remember? And she practically pays for the whole trip every year. Gomez might stick me with a bit of detention, but there’s no way he’ll kick me off the trip and risk upsetting my mom.”

  We all looked at one another for a few moments. I figured Dillon and Danielle were both debating the same thing that I was: Could that be true? Was Jake really above the law on this? And if so, what good reason would there be to not let him take the fall?

  “You’re sure?” I asked finally.

  Jake nodded. “I can handle some detention. I’ve never had it before, and I’ve always been curious what it’s like anyway.”

  None of us knew what to say. Even Danielle was looking at Jake with a newfound respect.

  “Don’t worry about it, guys,” Jake said, laughing. “It’s nice that having my mom on the school board will actually come in handy for once. Now, I think Dillon and I have some Smallfoot strategies to discuss, right?”

  Dillon grinned and Danielle groaned. She never bought in to Dillon’s theories, but as the two of them sat down to look at articles on Jake’s tablet, I thought I could see the smallest hint of jealousy on her face.

  SPENDING LUNCH PERIOD WITH PRINCIPAL GOMEZ ALONE IN his office the next day was about as fun as it sounded. Which is to say, I’d rather have spent the hour eating raw fish heads under the Seventh Street bridge. He spent the first ten minutes gloating about how I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was, and how he knew he’d get me eventually. At one point he even admitted that he was happy I was getting to go on the trip because then it’d be one less day I could cause trouble at his school. And all that is not even mentioning the actual work of cleaning up the mess.

  As I tried to help him copy the water-damaged documents from the bottom drawer of his desk, I couldn’t help but think that Prankpocalypse didn’t really seem all that funny anymore. I even almost started to feel a little bad about what we did to Gomez. But his sour mood that afternoon helped me get over the guilt pretty quickly.

  “I just don’t understand why Mr. Jensen consistently argues on your behalf,” he groused as he transcribed one of the documents onto a new sheet of paper. “All I see is an entitled, spoiled troublemaker who’s headed for a lifetime of disappointment when he realizes that there won’t always be someone around to bail him out for his myriad of mistakes.”

  I thought that was a little unfair, but I held my tongue, even resisting the urge to point out that if he would just enter all these documents into his computer as opposed to transcribing them by hand, he’d never run into this problem again. It seemed like he should have been smart enough to figure that out on his own, having risen to the position of school principal and all.

  “And for the life of me, I just can’t figure out why on earth they want you to come with them on the Mount Rushmore trip,” he continued ranting. “With you out there in the wild, they’ll be lucky to get even half of the kids back alive.”

  “Mr. Gomez, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, truly surprised that he would actually say these kinds of things to a student.

  “Don’t play dumb with me,” he said. “You’ve earned every bit of your reputation.”

  I didn’t say anything else, but instead kept digging through the mess of crusted file folders filled
with crinkled, ink-smeared papers.

  We worked in silence for the rest of the lunch period. At the end, Mr. Gomez made a big show of digging around for a few sheets of paper that were lying right on top in his briefcase. He plopped them down on his desk.

  “Are you ready to put an end to your foolishness?” he asked.

  “Um, sure,” I said.

  “This is what we call a Disciplinary Plan of Corrective Action Contract, or a DPCAC,” Mr. Gomez said, sliding the papers across the desk toward me.

  For some reason, this reminded me of my very first meeting in Agent Nineteen’s secret office, the one where they told me the truth about the Agency. Or as much of the truth as they were allowed to reveal, which likely hadn’t been much. That meeting had been filled with mysterious acronyms and documents as well.

  Gomez continued, “It states that in exchange for allowing you to go on the school’s field trip to Mount Rushmore, you agree to the following: One, you will provide the names of all accomplices or participants in your most recent act of vandalism against our school. Two, you hereby agree that one more disciplinary action against you for the remainder of your time here through the end of next school year may, and likely will, result in your immediate expulsion. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Even something as simple as chewing gum in class can get you expelled now, you understand?” Gomez seemed to relish driving the point home.

  “Yeah, I got it,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, not even trying to hide his grin now. “Then please write down the names of all your accomplices right here. And if I find out that you left off a single name, that’ll be it for you, Carson. Get me?”

  I nodded and grabbed the pen he was holding out toward me. I pulled the form closer and scribbled down Jake’s name, and then put down the pen.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “Yup, just the two of us,” I said, marveling at how much easier it was to lie to Gomez than it was to my friends.

  “That seems unlikely, given the extent of the damage,” he said.