by Rob Vlock
Fortunately, within minutes, sleep pulled my eyelids closed, and all the disturbing thoughts bouncing around my brain were crowded out by a dream in which I lived in a house made out of cheese.
CHAPTER 12.0:
< value= [We Have Lunch . . . with a Side Order of Pain] >
THE NEXT MORNING I WAS woken up extra early. By something stinky. Which, I realized a few seconds later, was me. I sat up in bed and looked at myself. Rancid garbage juice from the Dumpster covered my entire body. And my bed. My parents would kill me if they caught me like this. Luckily, judging by the loud snores that reverberated through the house, they were still asleep.
I got to my feet, stripped the bed down to the bare mattress, and threw the bedding, along with my dirty clothes, into the washing machine. After a quick shower, I hoped my parents would be none the wiser. Although finding that I had willingly washed my own sheets might make my mom suspicious. I’d have to take that chance.
By the time my parents woke up, I had already dressed, eaten breakfast, and gotten ready for school. I tucked Will’s phone safely into my pocket and headed out early, eager to see if I could catch Will before homeroom and try to get it working.
Will wasn’t there, though. He didn’t show up at school until halfway through social studies. He muttered something about a doctor’s appointment to the teacher and sat down at the desk next to mine.
I was dying to talk to him about the phone, but our social studies teacher, Ms. Mahana, ruled with an iron fist. One word out of turn spelled detention. So I sat there, counting the seconds until the bell rang for lunch, feeling like I was going to explode with impatience.
When it finally did, Will and I loaded our trays up with food, made our way outside to the courtyard, and sat at our usual table away from everyone else. We liked to pretend we did this by choice, but the reality was, nobody wanted us sitting at their table.
As soon as we sat down, I started whispering. “Dude, where were you last night? I tried calling your house like a million times.”
He shrugged. “Umm . . . my parents took me to have dinner at my aunt’s. We got back late.”
“Well, I need to talk to you about what happened Monday.”
“Monday?” Will asked, shoveling a forkful of mac and cheese into his mouth.
“You know. My arm,” I reminded him.
He shook his head and shrugged again.
I was getting annoyed. “Seriously, Will. I’m talking about my arm. It came off in your hand after I wiped out! Ring any bells? Something weird is going down!”
I stopped, suddenly aware that I was yelling. The last thing I needed was the whole school finding out that I thought my arm fell off. Even worse, Dr. Shallix made it painfully clear that I wasn’t supposed to mention it to anyone. I took a deep breath and calmed myself down.
“All right,” I continued, “then look at this.” I slipped his broken cell phone out of my pocket and held it up.
“Yeah, so?” Will said flatly.
I looked around to make sure we were alone, then whispered, “It’s your phone. It’s proof that my arm fell off. You recorded the whole thing, remember?”
Will cocked his head. “Let me see that.”
I handed him the phone. He pushed the power button.
Nothing happened.
He dropped it on the table. “Looks broken to me. Doesn’t prove anything.”
“Why are you being such a jerkwad?” I hissed. “You know what happened. You were there. I’m just trying to prove I’m not crazy, okay? And you’re not helping. If we could just somehow watch the video on this phone, you’d see.”
He stared at me for a moment, then went back to shoveling his food into his mouth.
I was just about to tell Will to stop being such a pain in the butt when I noticed something.
His lunch tray was empty.
It usually took Will every one of the twenty-five minutes we had for lunch period to finish his food. That’s because he had to inspect every bite to make sure there weren’t any earwigs in it. He never once actually found an earwig in his food. But his cousin had a friend who said he found an earwig in his food at a school just two towns over. For Will, that was close enough.
But there he sat with an empty tray. He’d simply chowed down on it without checking for a single earwig. And eating lunch like a normal kid was definitely abnormal for Will. I was just about to question him about that when I realized we were no longer alone.
“Hey,” a voice said behind me.
Alicia Toth was standing next to the table.
Okay, a pretty girl talking to me two days in a row without using the words “trash” or “mouth”? Definitely weird. I mean, she had never said a single thing to me before yesterday in science.
“Hey,” I echoed, trying to sound casual.
Will just looked at her.
She slid the backpack that she always carried off her shoulder and sat down next to me. “Mind if I sit?”
“No,” I replied.
“Yes,” Will said coldly.
“So I wanted to ask you about that thing with the electromagnet yesterday,” she began. Then she noticed the smashed phone on the table. “Having phone trouble?”
“No,” Will answered flatly.
“It’s fine,” I responded, picking up the phone and trying to put it back in my pocket.
She caught my wrist and deftly pried the device from my fingers. “I don’t think this is fine. Looks all busted up to me.”
While she spoke, Will just sat there glaring at her furiously. Like she was saying something nasty about him. Or had just kicked his puppy. It wasn’t really like him.
“Can I have it back, please?” I asked, holding out my hand.
“Just a sec. I heard you say something about wanting to watch a video. Why don’t you just take the memory card out and play it in something else?” She opened the back of the phone. “See? It’s a micro SD card. You can use it with a ton of cell phones and computers.”
She reached out to give me the memory card. But she never had the chance.
Because at that moment, Will sprang across the table and tackled Alicia to the ground. I looked down in horror at the tangle of flailing limbs that was Will and Alicia. Will actually looked like he was seriously trying to land some punches.
“Will!” I cried. “What are you doing? Get off her!”
Alicia yelped with surprise, then started fighting back. She had some serious moves. Like she was part ninja or something. She blocked a dozen of Will’s punches, then clocked him with an elbow to the jaw. It sounded like someone smacking a side of beef with a baseball bat.
But if it hurt, Will didn’t show it. He just kept punching.
I looked around the school yard to see if I could find a teacher or some students who could help me stop Will. The grounds were empty. It was a cool, gray day, and everyone else had decided to eat inside.
In the meantime, Will stopped punching Alicia and wrapped his giant hands around her throat to strangle her instead.
Will was trying to kill her! Like, really kill her!
“Stop!” I screamed. “Will, stop!”
Alicia fought back ferociously. She punched Will, scratched his face, gouged at his eyes. When those things didn’t work, she clawed around in the dirt until she found a rock about the size of an orange. She grabbed it and started smashing it into Will’s face. But no matter how many times she hit him with it, Will wouldn’t let go.
Alicia tried to suck air into her lungs, but with Will’s hands around her throat, her effort was pointless.
If I didn’t break this up, one of them—maybe both of them—would end up dead.
I sprinted toward them. I couldn’t just stand there watching Will kill Alicia.
I took half a dozen steps.
Then I tripped over my own shoelaces.
After flying through the air, pinwheeling my arms and legs in a futile attempt to regain my balance, I slammed into Will just hard enough to break
his hold on Alicia.
As I got unsteadily to my feet, I heard Alicia coughing and struggling to catch her breath. Good. She was alive.
I turned back toward Will just in time to see him scowl as he slammed me against the brick wall of the school. I felt like I had just been dropped from the top of a five-story building. It knocked the wind right out of me. Man, when did he get so strong?
“What are you doing? We’re friends, dude!”
If he cared about the fact that we’d been best friends for almost our entire lives, it definitely didn’t show on his face.
Wait! His face! It should look like raw hamburger meat. I saw Alicia totally mess him up with that rock. But I didn’t see any kind of injury on his face. All I saw was rage. How could that be?
Will balled up his fist and brought it back over his shoulder, while holding the front of my shirt with his other hand. What the heck was going on?
“Will!” I cried as his fist started traveling toward my face. “What’s hap—”
That’s when Will’s head exploded.
CHAPTER 13.0:
< value= [I See What’s on Will’s Mind (Literally)] >
THE SIGHT OF MY BEST friend’s head basically disappearing in a red mist was the most horrible thing I could ever imagine. Only I hadn’t imagined it. It was real. As real as the solid ground that I hit with a thump when my legs gave way.
For a while, all I could hear was a ringing in my ears. The sort of thing you’d hear on Kill Squad III on Xbox if you set off a flash-bang too close to your character.
I saw Alicia walking over to me, with some kind of metal object in her hand, blood running freely from her nose and dripping from the tip of her chin.
She said something to me. At least, I saw her lips move, but I still only heard ringing.
She tried again.
“Get up!”
The ringing faded and the sounds of the school yard started coming back to me. The birds chirping. The wind rustling through the leaves. All as if nothing were different. As if my best friend weren’t lying there motionless in the dirt.
“Did he hurt you?” Alicia said, extending her hand to me.
I took her hand, and she helped hoist me to my feet.
I shook my head. “Wh-wh-what . . . what happened? What’s going on?”
I looked at the thing in her hand. A sort of hollow metal tube that she held by a handle. Her finger rested on a little lever that stuck out from the bottom. A trigger.
Rage boiled in my veins as I started to put the pieces together. “You killed Will!”
“Your friend wasn’t a friend. He was a Tick.” She didn’t bother trying to hide the disgust in her voice.
“A Tick? What do you mean?” I questioned angrily. “You killed him!”
“Not him. It,” she replied through clenched teeth. “And it got what it deserved.”
Hot tears ran down my face. “He was my best friend. I’ve known him since first grade. And you . . . Why did you do this?”
She shook her head. “Because it needed to be done.”
“Don’t give me that!” I screamed. “You just blew up Will’s head. Don’t tell me you did it ‘because it needed to be done’! What does that even mean?”
“Look at it,” she said calmly. “Go ahead.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head.
Her voice rose to a yell. “Do it!”
She put her hands on either side of my head and twisted until I faced what was left of Will.
“Open your eyes!” she snapped.
I swallowed hard and raised my eyes to where Will’s head should have been. There, glinting in the watery light, was something square and metallic. A thick silver cable connected it to the rest of Will’s body. I squinted at it. It looked like a . . .
“Central processor,” Alicia informed me. “I told you, your friend was a Tick. If I hadn’t done that, it would have killed both of us. And probably the rest of the school too.”
My stomach flipped as I looked at the metallic device. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. “Wh-what’s happening?” I croaked.
Alicia let go of my head and turned to walk away.
“What did you do to him?” I asked her. “What is that thing?”
She held up her weapon to show me. “This? It’s an electromagnetic pulse gun. A kleshch vzryvatel. At least that’s what we call it in Russian. I guess in English it’d be a . . . ‘Tick popper.’ It fires a small projectile that creates a really short, really intense electromagnetic pulse. Ticks hate it. You can probably tell why.”
“Russian? Are you from—”
“Nowhere!” she barked suddenly, her voice so forceful I took a step back.
I stared at the gun. Was she going to kill me next? I lifted my eyes to meet hers. “Are you going to shoot me?”
Her face softened and she laughed humorlessly. “Not unless you’re one of them. Don’t worry. It wouldn’t do much to a human anyway.”
“Human? I don’t understand. You’re saying Will wasn’t human? How can that be?”
She moved closer to me. “Look,” she whispered. “You need to just put all this out of your head. Pretend you didn’t see anything. Believe me, you don’t want to know any of this stuff. Just go back to class and forget about it.”
“But won’t somebody find him? This?” I pointed to Will’s motionless form.
“They’ll make sure it’s not discovered. The Ticks wouldn’t want humans to know they’re here. We need to leave. Now. Or we’re dead. Come on.”
She put her weapon away and turned to leave.
“Wait!” I pleaded. “What’s going on? None of this is real, is it? I’m crazy, right?” Despite my best efforts to choke it off, a pathetic sob forced its way out of my throat. I wiped my teary cheeks with the back of my hand.
Alicia stopped and faced me. She let out a long sigh. “Fine. I guess I owe you an explanation. Just don’t blame me if it gives you nightmares so bad you wet your bed every night.”
CHAPTER 14.0:
< value= [For the Record, I Don’t Wet My Bed over This] >
ALICIA LEANED IN CLOSE AND said in a tense whisper, “Sven, we’re in trouble.”
“Yeah, well, I guess going around blowing up people’s heads would tend to get you in trouble,” I replied angrily. “I can’t believe you killed Will!”
She sighed. “Forget about Will. This is bigger than that. We’re at war, Sven.”
“What are you talking about? Who’s at war?”
“We are. Humans. All of us. And the fight is going to decide the fate of the entire planet Earth. It’s not like a regular war between countries. It’s a war between species. One of those species is human. The other, a synthetic life-form. Technological beings that have been manufactured, but are alive. These beings have the ability to think, to reproduce, to live just like any other life-form. Do you understand?”
And here I was worrying I was crazy.
What she said sounded laughable, but my gaze drifted back to that strange silver box protruding from the ruined flesh of the thing I’d always thought of as my best friend. “Are you talking about robots? Robots are trying to take over the world?”
“Not robots. The descendants of robots, I guess. They’re cyborgs; part mechanical, part organic. They refer to themselves as Synthetics and formed an army to destroy humanity and create a new world that they control.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying there’s some kind of huge robot war going on?” I paused to let the chirping birds make my point. “That’s impossible. How come I’ve never heard anything about it? If it were true, it would be all over the news. . . .”
“Until now, the battle has been limited to a remote area in eastern Europe. Very few humans were even aware the Synthetic race existed. Just a few hundred humans in a secluded settlement. We call them ‘Ticks.’ ”
Part of me wanted to run screaming from the insane girl with the deadly weapon. But part of me wanted to hear her out.
“Hold on, if there were really some robots that wanted to take over the world, wouldn’t pretty much every country get together and defeat them?”
“It’s not that easy, Sven. But I should probably start from the beginning.” Alicia tucked the Tick popper into her backpack and rubbed her eyes. “The former Soviet Ukrainian city of Chernobyl. You’ve heard of it?”
I nodded silently. We’d learned about Chernobyl in social studies. It was the site of a huge nuclear reactor meltdown. “So you’re saying these . . . whatever you called them are some kind of radioactive mutants or something?”
Alicia laughed coldly. “Mutants? You’ve been watching too many movies. The nuclear power plant that melted down was part of a huge top secret Soviet laboratory complex that was built in 1962. It had advanced weapons labs, genetic modification facilities—and Laboratoriya 54u, an underground annex so secret that only a handful of the most senior Soviet officials even knew it existed. That’s where scientists were working on robotics and artificial intelligence. And they were doing some really scary stuff. At least, that’s what my parents told me. ”
She paused, cocking her head to the side, and stared at me. Like she was trying to see into my brain and figure out if I believed her.
But with Will lying dead in front on me, I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a history lesson. “So how does this make it okay for you to kill my best friend?” I demanded angrily.
After a few seconds, she continued. “I’m getting to that. So by 1986, the scientists had created these thinking machines that were even smarter than humans. When the reactor exploded that year, the government evacuated the scientists, along with the entire population of the area, and created a thirty-kilometer exclusion zone. There, the experiments they had been working on—the Synthetics—were left alone. Completely isolated. With no one to keep them from . . . evolving, creating more and more advanced versions of themselves until they were almost indistinguishable from organic beings. At first, we pretty much left each other alone. But a few years ago, they came to the conclusion that they, not humans, were adequately equipped to protect and manage Earth’s environment and limited resources. That was when they started getting aggressive. Just a few attacks here and there at first. But eventually, it got worse.”