“Sometimes I say I was meeting with my math teacher,” she said. “But that doesn’t cover me for long. I’m at least a half-hour’s walk from home already. I think.” She looked around. “I actually have no idea where I am.”
“Where do you live?” he asked.
She hesitated, then said, “Pine Terrace condo village. Next to the college campus.”
“That’s like two miles away! You walk that every day?” he said.
“My mother says it builds character.”
“I think it would build blisters,” he said.
“It’s also a break from her nagging,” she added.
Les nodded approvingly and studied her in the dim light. “You have access to the attendance computer?”
“I have my ways.”
“OK, here’s the deal. I can get you home in eleven minutes if you do exactly what I say.”
“How?” she asked.
“First, you have to swear that you will not tell anybody about this place. Or come here without permission.”
“Agreed,” she said.
Les pressed his watch. Its glowing face illuminated his in a ghostly way.
“Do you have any money?”
She shook her head. “I left my purse in my locker.”
Les reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of wadded-up dollar bills. “Here. You’ll need this for fare.”
“Fare?” she asked. She looked down the tunnel. “Is this a subway?”
“No. But Clark is going to escort you out of here, into Sand Creek Park. You’ll walk quickly to the bus stop on Highland Boulevard, just south of here. A bus is due there in four minutes. If you walk fast, you can just make it. Ride it to Old Ranch Road. There’s a stop in front of Pine Terrace.”
She checked her own watch. “Let’s go.”
“OK,” I said, and shined my light down the tunnel.
“Ricki!” he called, as we made our way toward the park.
She looked back.
He put two fingers to his heart, and then, thumb extended, pointed them skyward.
She rolled her eyes, but she also showed him just a hint of a smile. “You too?”
I led the way out with my flashlight. At the mouth of the tunnel, I showed her the steps, but I hung back; the world did not need to see us emerging together. We had enough to explain.
I thought there should be some kind of farewell scene, but Ricki had a bus to catch.
“See you in the library?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said. She stepped away from the pipe and out of my line of vision.
And that was that.
Except when she stepped back in long enough to say, “I still don’t think you’re that bright, and I was crazy to follow you, but I thank you for your support.”
“Say hi to your folks for me.”
She rolled her eyes once more and was gone.
7.03.06
How serious were things?
So serious that Les declared that he would call me at home later to come up with a plan.
“About 1900 hours. I can call from my basement; nobody will hear me.” He was pacing. I thought about how much our hideout resembled a jail cell.
“I’ll try to be free,” I said, examining the greasy tear and other problematic stains on my shirt. “I’ve got a lot to explain to my mom.”
“Take the north trail to the park rim,” he said. “It’s steep. You might fall and mess up your shirt. Get it all covered with dirt and who knows what else.”
“Why would I want to . . . ?”
He waited for me to catch up.
“Oh. Yeah. Great idea, Les. Thanks.”
Sure enough, the command unit was waiting for me as soon as I walked in.
“There you are!” she said. “What on earth happened to you? I was starting to worry.”
“Took a shortcut,” I mumbled. “Slipped on a trail in the park.”
“Oh no!” she cried. “Are you OK? Let me take a look.”
As she examined my attire, the look on her face went from concerned to quizzical. “You’re a mess!” she said. “This was all from falling in the park?”
“The trail is really steep,” I said. I hoped that admitting to a fake, minor transgression might stave off a board of inquiry about my behavior. So I told her I had been exploring in the park instead of coming straight home, then had gotten turned around and been too embarrassed to call her and admit it.
It worked—I got off with a short lecture about not taking shortcuts and a reminder that I had been given a cell phone precisely so I could call when I needed her.
I promised I would and made a note to myself to be extra careful. The commanders were maybe paying a little more attention than I had realized. As if I needed one more thing to worry about.
7.03.07
Les called that night, right on time.
“Are you safe?” I asked.
“For a few minutes. They’re watching basketball.” His voice was low. “I need the whole story on what happened.”
So I gave him a full report, starting with the baseball bats.
When I finished, he let out a long breath. “Ty does have a gift for that kind of thing. I think he worked with Hitler in his past life.”
I nodded. “He must be . . . rough to live with.”
Les’s reply came haltingly.
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s like his dad . . . and he gets in my head. I get so I . . . I just . . . I will do anything to keep him out of my life. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.”
I nodded. “I get it.”
“Every time I’ve made friends with someone, he’s gone after them. And the people he goes after—weird things happen, Clark.”
“Weird—like torture?” At this point, I wouldn’t put anything past Ty.
“Not necessarily. What I mean is—” Les sighed. “Never mind. Right now we have to figure out what we’re going to do about Denton.”
“Why Denton?” I asked, still wanting to know the fate of those earlier friends.
“Because he called my stepdad this afternoon.”
That focused my attention quickly. “About us?”
“I don’t know. He’s called here before, and even come by a couple of times . . . but, I don’t know. Look, I’m used to just running and hiding and sorting things out on my own when things get complicated. And things are getting complicated. There’s a lot of people to think about now. I mean, it’s even getting crowded in the Sanctuary.”
“I think we can trust Ricki, Les.”
“It’s not a matter of trust. Mistakes happen. Like, how do you know she closed the grate properly at the drain entrance? That she didn’t drop a book with her name in it along the way? What if you left—”
An ancient projector running in the hallway? Near the door to our secret exit? On a day when I might have been seen running through the halls?
My masterful escape was looking a lot less brilliant.
“OK, I agree,” I said. “We need to avoid the back door. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be an idiot.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to do any better. And I could tell you’d had a bad day.”
My stomach burbled at the memory. I was silent long enough for him to ask, “Clark? Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I was just thinking . . . earlier, in the Sanctuary . . . did you call me an alien mutant?”
“Something like that.”
“You know, I kind of like that,” he said. “Because aliens and mutants, by thinking differently—they can have great power, can’t they?”
“Yes,” I decided. “Yes, they can.”
“Of course, with great power comes great responsibility.”
“So I’ve read.”
“We should be careful. We might really turn life as we know it upside-down.”
EXPEDITION LOG
ENTRY 8.01.01
I went to school the next day expecting the worst, certain that Chambe
rs would be all over me for spewing my lunch all over him. I also was certain that somebody would connect me with the wandering projector. And that Ty, Bubba and Jerry would be telling the whole school about how they’d made me cower until I barfed.
But when I showed up at first-hour PE class, all Chambers said was, “Feeling better today?”
Odder than that was how he almost seemed to be avoiding me. Not ignoring me—actively avoiding me. Maybe he was afraid that I’d unleash another puke-on torpedo at him? Funny. I’d never thought of my weak stomach as an asset before.
Oddest of all was that the Ty Hunter trio found me in a hallway and walked right on past without even saying a dirty word. They glanced at one another but didn’t knock a book out of my hands, didn’t make fun of my shoes, nothing.
I was puzzling over this behavior in English class when Denton summoned me to his office.
Well, I thought, this is it. Maybe I was about to find out what his call to Ty’s stepdad was all about . . . but I probably wouldn’t live to tell Les about it. I hoped that my execution would be merciful and quick.
I walked straight in. Denton closed the door behind him, then sat behind his desk. His Marine portrait and case of medals had been reunited on their shelf and gleamed even brighter than before.
“How are you today, Sherman?”
“Just fine, sir,” I said, swallowing hard.
“Good, good.” He picked up a pencil and started absentmindedly drumming his desk with the eraser end. “Nothing to report, then, I guess?” He sounded almost . . . worried.
“Uh, no, sir,” I said. Was this some sort of mind game? A way to get me to confess to stealing school AV property before handing me the bill for Coach Chambers’s shoes?
“Good, good,” he said. “Well, if you think of anything, you’ll be sure to come to me first, right?”
OK. It was clear that he knew something had happened. And there was a chance—just a chance—that he had meant what he said about us being a team. And there was a chance—just a chance—that if I let him know what was going on, he could put an end to it.
I stared over at the portrait of Marine Denton, standing tall in front of the American flag.
I decided I would try to trust him.
“Well, now that you mention it, I did have sort of an . . . incident yesterday.”
His face looked stern.
“You did?”
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s these three guys? And, well, they had baseball bats. And they backed me up against the wall, and they . . .”
He held up his hand.
“Just a moment, Sherman,” he said. “Did this incident involve any sort of physical harm to you?”
I thought for a moment: No, they never got around to actually hurting me, this time. They left no marks. They just came a couple of millimeters from knocking off my head, that’s all.
“I guess not,” I said.
He exhaled. “That’s a relief. For you, I mean. Because if you had been hurt on school grounds, clearly, action would have to be taken. But you seem to have come out of it OK, yes?”
I nodded slowly.
“Glad to see that, Sherman. Remember, if you have any other problems, I’ve got your back. Think of me here, readying my sniper’s gun, standing guard. You’ll keep me posted on everything, right?”
I gave the slightest of nods.
“These are difficult times, Sherman. But sometimes you have to tough it out. Not complain to anyone. Why, I remember going through boot camp, and we were ordered to drop and freeze in the middle of a desert hike. Soldier next to me found himself on an anthill. He jumped up, and the drill sergeant had to throw him in the brig for disobeying a direct order. The Marine on his other side kept still, and today he commands his own brigade. So you see what I mean about the importance of keeping still and quiet?”
I told him I did.
“Good, I’m glad we got things cleared up.”
Things were cleared up, all right.
I felt a little better when I arrived in the ARC and saw that Ricki had returned. She was in her usual spot, reading a book. She actually looked up when I walked in. I nodded at her. She nodded back.
I wanted to ask her how things had gone at home. But I decided not to press my luck; I surely had already used up a year’s supply today.
I went to my own spot and discovered a carefully folded note on my chair.
Saturday, 12:15 P.M., at the rec center? it read. There was no signature, but a glance over at Ricki told me what I needed to know.
I pulled out my binder, ripped out a sheet of loose-leaf paper and drew a simple pattern on it: two circles, one stacked on top of the other, each surrounded by dashes, as if they were glowing lights. I slipped the paper in the front pocket of my binder and, without looking across the room, let the binder flip open and hang off the edge of the table.
Anyone walking by would have seen only a piece of paper with a meaningless doodle. But to a Star Survivors fan looking for an answer to a yes/no question, it could mean only one thing: “affirmative,” transmitted in the style of former First Officer Elohim Prime, who had been paralyzed in a tragic incident involving a hyperbaric chamber and some genetically modified Betelgeusian jellyfish, and could communicate only by flashing a light attached to the respirator vest he wore—one flash for “no,” two flashes for “yes.”
I pulled out my social studies textbook, and over the pages, glanced across the room. Ricki nodded.
I tried to read, but my eyes kept rereading the same paragraphs. That Weird Al parody of the Star Survivors theme kept running through my head: “What a Difference a Stardate Makes!”
Yesterday, I was the fugitive king of barf. Today, I was master of my fate, a genius of stealth, a successful escape artist and . . . I had a date! Or at least a meeting with a fellow alien who happened to be female.
When the bell rang, Ricki disappeared into the halls just as Ms. Beacon asked me to step into her office.
“Mr. Sherman, do you happen to go past the seventh-grade English classrooms on the way to your next class?” she asked.
I told her I did.
“Good,” she said. “Would you mind making a delivery for me?”
I told her I would not mind at all.
“Good,” she said. “It’s there in the corner.”
I looked, and I froze as solid as someone dipped in carbonite.
In the corner sat a projector cart. With a suitcase-sized VCR that, I am guessing, held a tape of Jason and the Argonauts. “They’ll be needing this for their discussion of Greek mythology in Ms. Weintraum’s room later,” Ms. Beacon said. “It’s the strangest thing—the custodians told me they found this running in the hallway yesterday, abandoned. I do wish people would treat the audiovisual equipment with more respect. Some of it is quite old.”
I nodded.
“I’m glad you concur. Now, you’re sure you don’t mind pushing it? I’m just assuming that you have some experience with this sort of thing.”
I told her I thought I could manage.
“Good,” she said, as she adjusted her glasses for a full-power scowl. “I am certain that the careless person who left it out in the open had a very good reason for doing so. But I am sure you would agree that person should have been more careful. If he had been caught on school grounds after hours without permission, possibly vandalizing school property, he would be beyond my help.”
I blinked twice.
“I understand, Ms. Beacon.”
I didn’t, fully. But her warning tone could not have been clearer if it had been accompanied by a couple of klaxons and a robot shouting, “DANGER! DANGER!”
EXPEDITION LOG
ENTRY 9.01.01
For the rest of the week, Ty, Jerry and Bubba kept their distance from me.
I wasn’t sure why. But I didn’t ask. I needed the mental space to prepare for my Saturday meeting with Ricki.
Nothing in my training manuals covered such a moment—an actual, plann
ed social encounter with a female human of my age. Granted, I had no idea whether our relationship was destined to be more Leia–Luke or Leia–Han. But even if we ended up being Jedi siblings separated at birth or something, I obviously had to show respect. And that meant proper protocol.
Full dress uniform was not in order, but I would need to look my best. Was there a guide on how to dress rec-center semiformal?
After a great deal of analysis, I decided that I would clad myself in my newest pair of red-tab jeans, my favorite shirt (a picture of Saturn with the words I Need My Space, which I’d found at a planetarium gift shop during a sixth-grade field trip) and a leather necklace with a pendant made of an actual bit of meteorite that my aunt from Arizona had sent to celebrate a solstice. It looked a little like a shark’s tooth, and my aunt said it radiated positive energy. This seemed like a good opportunity to try it out.
This also seemed like a good opportunity to break in another Christmas gift I had hardly used: my new Trek bicycle, which had been intended as some kind of reward for enduring the move. With Les’s map committed to memory, I had a safe route to the rec center all charted.
I decided I would also take the special provision of applying a small amount of scented fluid to my cheeks before I left the house. I had seen this act performed many times on television by men who had finished shaving and were about to encounter women.
So I found the small bottle from the Timber Peak gift set that I had been saving since my birthday. Timber Peak ads showed men in flannel shirts being smiled at by women in bearskin robes. I did not care for flannel, or for bear-women, but it would do.
9.02.01
Saturday arrived, sunny and clear and full of positive ions. The command units gave one another a look when I said I had decided to take my bike up to the rec center. They asked whether I was meeting anyone. I said no, I had just heard that they sold those red, white and blue Rocket Pops at the snack bar, and I was in the mood for one.
“But you just finished breakfast,” the female commander said, puzzled.
I shrugged.
They looked at one another again. The female commander started to ask something, but the male commander gave her a look that probably said, “Hey, he needs the exercise.” Then he wished me well, and I ducked out before they could think of more questions.
Revenge of the Star Survivors Page 12