The middle of the park is cut by a tiny trickle of water that has, over time, gouged a jagged ravine in the rocky soil. I would not describe the landscape as magnificent desolation, but the place did look about as lively as a lunar landing site. I should have felt right at home.
Standing on the rim, I saw no sign of Les. I started making my way down anyway.
The park is ringed with a running trail and bisected by a worn dirt path that dips sharply toward a small bridge linking the barren eastern half of the park with the equally barren western half. The builders had not wasted effort on making the bridge attractive. It was concrete, with a railing of steel pipe. A marginally functional bridge in a hideous spot that nobody could possibly have any use for. I empathized.
My windbreaker had seemed protection enough on this bright February day, but as I descended, I found myself zipping up and thrusting my hands into my pockets.
Once at the bridge, I paused to stare down at anemic Sand Creek, eight or so feet below. The water was not deep enough to cover more than a couple of minnows and a flattened Coors Light can. And the bridge was making an unusual knocking sound. Must have been the wind.
Wait—there was no wind.
I looked over the edge.
The knocking stopped.
I walked to where the bridge met the eastern embankment. The soil was eroded where the concrete pressed into the brown earth. Unless you observed closely, you couldn’t see the chunks of rock that someone had pressed into the gouge, forming a crude ladder. The rocks looked sturdy enough to support me. I hesitated a moment, then muttered, “Here goes nothing,” as I swung over the railing and stepped down.
The bridge, it turns out, did serve a purpose: it camouflaged the entrance to a huge concrete drainpipe. And Les was standing in its mouth, holding a large staff, which he had been using to tap the underside of the bridge to get my attention.
“Follow me,” he said.
He dropped the staff and disappeared into the dark.
Walking into dark pipes with people I hardly knew was not something I usually made a hobby of. Come to think of it, it sounded more like something a Fortitude red-shirt would do. But again—what did I have to lose? In I went.
The pipe was just about an inch shorter than me, so I had to crouch. Dust covered the floor. Within a few steps, the blackness was almost complete.
I looked over my shoulder to make sure I could see my way out. Just as I started to feel really nervous, Les turned on a flashlight.
“It takes a minute to get there,” he said as the light stabbed the blackness.
I thought of every dark cave in every movie scene that ends with a scream from someone just off camera, followed by shrieking violins and a quick cut to the body on the floor.
Then suddenly, things opened up.
My analysis suggested that the space had been built as some kind of juncture for a stormwater drainage system. It was a rectangular vault a bit smaller than the moving van that had hauled my commanders’ stuff. A narrow access tube shot straight up above us, and a couple of smaller pipes, too small for me to walk through upright, sloped into darkness ahead.
Les reached into his pocket. The flashlight flickered. For a moment, all I could see was tomorrow’s headline: “Missing Boy’s Mutilated Body Found; ‘What Was He Thinking?’ Mom Asks.”
But then Les struck a match and dropped it into a coffee can. Which was filled with wax from old crayons. And a wick. He did this three more times, with three other cans.
“Well,” he asked, “what do you think?”
He turned off the flashlight. The glow of the candles and the sweet smell of crayons made the room feel as cozy as . . . well, as cozy as a concrete shoebox several hundred feet inside a hill. Someone had dragged in a couple of fold-up camp chairs. And milk crates—almost a dozen of them—stacked neatly on the far side, filled with old comic books and paperback novels.
On the walls were clippings from computer and music magazines and some pictures of bands I did not recognize. The floor was littered with boxes of electronics gear—tubes from ancient computer monitors, speakers from discarded radios, clocks pulled from either garage sales or trash bins, smashed droids, a burned-out hyperdrive coil. Maybe. I didn’t recognize everything. But there was a lot of it.
I saw one battered cassette player and some well-used tapes, most from bands of one syllable: Rush. Yes. Queen. A few, with shiny gold-foil labels, had nothing but dates written on them. Those were in a crate next to a couple of lantern batteries (the kind with the springs on top), some jumper cables and a spool of telephone wire. I thought about what happens when water and electricity mix.
“What happens if it rains?” I asked. It was an odd first question to ask about such a marvelous place, I know, but I suppose all those dead red-shirt crewmembers were still on my mind.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Les said, cupping his hand over one of the candles to nurture the flickering light. “These pipes connect only to the storm drain on the curb in front of the school. Which is thoroughly plugged.”
“With what?”
“Beer bottles.”
I looked at him, baffled.
“From my stepdad. He fills these big, plastic trash bags with them and thinks I’m loading them in my backpack for recycling.” He paused. “Or maybe he just doesn’t pay attention.”
He reached down and picked up a length of thin blue wire, which he began winding around his finger. “I also threw in some baseball equipment that I removed from his truck.”
“Enough to dam up the drain?”
“Yeah.”
“That must have taken awhile.”
He stopped spooling the wire while he thought. “The bottles I packed in over a few weeks. The bases I took one night after a tournament. We lost. I was the final out. On the drive home, he said, ‘The only thing you’re not a total embarrassment at is stealing bases. That’s because you’re never on base. Because you can never hit the goddamn ball.’ ”
Les resumed twirling the wire.
“So after he fell asleep, I went out to his truck and stole his bases.” He did not smile. “I don’t think he appreciated the joke.”
Les’s head cast ominous shadows that danced on the wall in the candlelight.
“Anyhow, unless there’s a really big thunderstorm, we don’t need to worry about being washed out,” he continued. He reached into his pocket. I stepped back involuntarily before he offered, “Gum? I should warn you, it’s the kind that will stick to most dental work. I use it mostly for hanging things.”
I should have realized right then—Les was capable of some truly weird stuff.
But the more I absorbed it all, the more I saw the beauty in what he had built. It reminded me of Star Survivors Episode 36, the flaky one that originally aired on Halloween, where they are on the planet filled with Shakespearean characters and they have to make sure Juliet doesn’t kill herself when she wakes up in the tomb. All we needed were some torches on the walls. And a race of psychokinetic spider-people.
“So, what do you do here?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” he said, trying to sound casual but obviously proud. “Some reading. I moved my surplus electronics gear here after my stepdad complained about the clutter at home. And some of my dad’s old stuff that my mom was trying to throw out. I tried to wire the place up for electricity, but it turns out that car batteries are kind of heavy. And based on the experiments I ran on my stepdad’s truck, they don’t last as long as you would think. You can power a lamp for only a few hours before the charge gets so low that he can’t even start the engine in the morning.
“That’s only an average, based on several tests, of course.” He almost—almost—smiled at that.
“But really, more often than not, I’m just passing through when I’m leaving Festus by the back door.”
Back door? “What back door?”
Les pointed toward the ceiling. “See that shaft?” he said. I looked up into the narrow tube above us
. It reminded me of the chambers on the Fortitude where Steele is always cross-circuiting the power in an emergency.
“That leads straight to the basement at the school. The maintenance room. Where the grate happens to be loose.”
He looked at me with an excited glimmer in his eyes that had nothing to do with the candles. “Think ‘Andromeda’ again.”
I looked up as I sought to grok his meaning. And this time I realized . . .
Rungs! A ladder! A wormhole—straight into Festus!
Which meant—an escape hatch straight OUT of Festus!
“This is why I never see you after school! This is why you’re never getting beat up! This is why—”
“This is why I brought you here,” he said. “You looked like you needed a break.”
I was stunned. And elated. “What . . . when . . . how did you find this?”
“I found the pipe a couple of years ago while exploring the park. Actually, I was looking for shade while trying to avoid my stepdad during summer break. Anyhow, when I started at Festus, I had . . . incentive to avoid people after school. I was really desperate one day and ducked into the basement. I saw that big grate, did some quick reckoning and took a chance.
“I’m taking another chance by bringing you here,” he said solemnly. “And especially by showing you this.”
He handed me a piece of paper covered in lines and arrows and cross-hatching and strange symbols. At first I thought it was some kind of wiring schematic, until I recognized the shape: a giant H. With an extra line across the middle. With a boot-shaped box marked office on the lower right.
“I charted an entire wormhole network,” he said. “The closets, the basement, a couple of air ducts, which I would avoid if you have allergies, because they’ll really make the snot flow like a—”
He caught himself, and cleared his throat. “Anyhow, you can use it to go through the whole school without ever having to encounter another student. Which is how I usually prefer it.”
If someone had used an actual pocket laser on me, I could not have been more stunned.
“So there’s . . . like . . . even the gym?” I sputtered.
He smoothed out the paper against his chest, and then pointed to a set of neatly charted rectangles.
“Those are the bleachers,” he said. “If you can get to the higher levels after Chambers has called roll, you can lie flat and hide for the rest of the hour. Nobody can see you from ground level. Don’t think about what you’re lying in, and it’s kind of cozy.”
I suddenly understood the elation the rebel leaders must have felt when they got the plans for the Death Star and found that nobody had remembered to put screens on the exhaust port. I didn’t feel worthy.
“Why me, Les?” I spluttered.
He shrugged. “I figured we could, you know, watch out for each other. Sort of a Luke and Wedge thing. Wouldn’t have to be around each other all the time, but maybe if one of us is caught in a crossfire, the other could, maybe, help.”
I was speechless.
So I stole one of Captain Maxim’s speeches. It was something he said at the climax of the pilot episode, the one where their uniforms are all the wrong colors, but who cares.
“ ‘I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where we are headed. I don’t know what we will find when we get there. All I can promise is, we will live, or perish, as one.’ ”
Les responded to me with the Star Survivors salute: two fingers touched his heart, and then, with his thumb extended and his elbow bent as if making a solemn oath, he pointed toward the stars.
Actually, he was pointing to the concrete ceiling. Both seemed filled with limitless potential today. And maybe, maybe, at least some of my problems were about to be solved.
5.02.01
There is a problem.
Les is complicated.
I mean, even for a guy who maps underground storm drains and charts secret passages through the school, he’s complicated.
He’d already established why we couldn’t be seen together, at all. But he then decided that being not seen together would be just as bad. Because people would get suspicious.
It is weird logic. But I agreed to a schedule: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I could use the escape hatch. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I could use other parts of the network but needed to stay above ground.
“We simply can’t risk drawing attention,” he explained, emphatically, when he surprised me in a corner of the library again.
“Can we talk? Or text?”
“No texting,” he said. “I don’t have my own phone.”
“But you can call . . . ?”
“Only on the landline, when nobody is around. Cell phones leave easily accessible call records. And they can be hacked, if someone knows how to install the right software.”
I thought that Webster’s might want to add a photo of him under paranoia. But given how grateful I was, agreeing to his rules seemed the least I could do.
How to describe the exhilaration of my first test “flight”? It was magnificent. I dashed out of Athletics, crossed the hall between the library and the cafeteria, looked both ways and slipped into the door marked MAINTENANCE.
I ran down a dark flight of stairs and into a dimly lighted basement. There, in front of the furnace, was the promised grate. I lifted it and slid it out of the way, slipped down the shaft, found my footing on the metal rungs and pulled the grate in place behind me. After descending through the darkness for what seemed like forever, I remembered to turn on the flashlight Les had instructed me to pack.
The final drop to the pavement was just a bit scary, but I landed in the Sanctuary, among all those beautiful books.
I paused and flipped through a tattered copy of The Time Machine before I headed down the long pipe toward Sand Creek Park, and home, smug in the knowledge that the entire Earth’s crust was shielding me from my enemies.
True, I was still a frightened nerd walking through a sewer because he was afraid to be seen in the daylight. But I reasoned: a brave man dies a single death; a coward lives a lot longer.
And I have decided to accept my fate. Some things in the universe are constant: Newton’s laws, the speed of light in a vacuum, the level of miserable tedium and tedious misery in my life. These never change. And never will.
EXPEDITION LOG
ENTRY 6.01.01
The moment I walked into the ARC, I sensed something had changed.
Ms. Beacon was there as usual, doing paperwork behind the desk. The usual debris littered the tables—eraserless pencils, abandoned binders held together by decorative duct tape, math quizzes folded into triangle-shaped projectiles.
At the reference shelves in the middle of the room, the giant dictionary sat untouched on its rotating pedestal. On the walls, time-faded posters exhorted visitors to READ. As if you would do what in a library, EAT? Maybe JOG?
And at the table at the back of the room? A girl.
The black-haired girl.
The one who had been in the office.
And had disappeared from the cafeteria.
She looked at home. She had her own three-ring binder out—it was unbesmirched by tape or doodle—and she was engaged in a book. Maybe the posters worked?
I immediately shifted into stealth observation mode, cleverly cloaking myself by standing at a shelving cart at the front desk and pretending to survey the books there.
Her hair was long and straight, kept out of her eyes by bobby pins. She wore a dress that, once again, was slightly out of sync with basic Festus fashion trends. This one, like her previous outfits, had a lot of flowers. Little white ones. And what was she reading? I couldn’t quite tell. Maybe if I moved—
“Mr. Sherman?”
I leapt as if I were under attack.
“Yes, Ms. Beacon?”
“Don’t you have some reading to do?” She had not even looked up from her paperwork. Her powers were mighty.
“Yes, Ms. Beacon.”
“You have no do
ubt noticed that you have company.”
I looked at her. I looked at . . . her.
“I . . . no, I hadn’t . . . I mean . . .” I didn’t want to acknowledge how carefully I had been observing.
“Ms. Wah,” she called. “Will you come here, please?”
The newcomer stood up, straightened her outfit, strode over in a deliberate, poised way and stood next to me. She was taller than I was. Most eighth-grade girls were. She was also lean. Exceptionally. I briefly thought of an episode where the Fortitude is trapped in the Second Dimension, and to escape they have to—
“Ms. Wah, this is Mr. Sherman. Up until now, he has been the lone student in my Independent Study session. Mr. Sherman, this is Ms. Wah. She is now your classmate. I understand that there were some difficulties in your previous fourth-hour class, Ms. Wah?”
“None for me,” she said, brightly. “But my social studies teacher had some details wrong about contemporary European politics. I apparently was too direct in telling her. So it was decided that it would be better for both of us if I did independent study in the library. Thank you for having me.” I thought she might curtsy.
“Ms. Wah,” Ms. Beacon asked over the rim of her glasses, “am I recalling correctly that last semester, you had a similar incident with another teacher, shortly before you were assigned to work as an office aide?”
The girl didn’t flinch. “I don’t recall any actual problems, Ms. Beacon. Except that some French teachers, it turns out, are maybe not as fluent as they should be and are perhaps insecure when corrected.” Her brown eyes sparkled.
Ms. Beacon looked amused, in her own way.
“I doubt you and I will have similar problems, Ms. Wah. Now, for the next five minutes, I shall tolerate talking while Mr. Sherman explains the basic rules of our ARC. After that, I expect silence. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, Ms. Beacon.”
She returned to her desk.
I looked at Ms. Wah.
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