Mayhem

by Jeffrey Salane

  They reached the school entrance and stopped while M made sure the coast was clear.

  “Back there, I don’t think I …” mumbled Evel.

  “Back there you left me alone in a room with a madman,” said M. “I would think that being a Zoso, you’d at least have the guts to handle the task yourself.”

  Before Evel could answer her, M jerked him outside into the afternoon. The day was warm for this time of year. Kids were playing football on the lawn. The line of parents in cars had emptied and the school buses had all left for their routes. M stormed directly down the street and into her house.

  “Mom! Dad! I’m home!” screamed M. “And I brought a new friend!”

  The house was perfectly still and quiet. M shushed Evel by putting her finger up to her lips and signaled for him to stay put. There was no one downstairs. M stealthily motioned for Evel to move upstairs with her. She went through the entire house and no one was there. They were alone.

  In her room, M dumped out the books from her backpack and started stuffing clothes in it.

  “I think we got off on the wrong foot back there,” Evel offered, trying to break the tension. He took a step into her room. “I’m here to —”

  “I know why you’re here,” interrupted M as she pulled more clothes from her closet. “And don’t come into my room. You are not invited inside this door. Stay where I can see you.”

  She rummaged through her top drawer and found her life’s savings in a jar. The change rattled inside as she flipped it into her backpack. There was probably only ninety dollars in there, all collected from her weekly allowance. M watched the jar sink into the mess of clothing and wondered where the money had really come from. Did it really belong to her fake parents? Or was someone else trying to make her think she had a normal life? She faced Evel again. “So, is there, like, a bounty on my head or something?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact,” admitted Evel. “But …”

  “But what? Oh, I know, I bet you’d be willing to look the other way and give me a five-minute head start since I handled your thug for you, is that it?” snarled M. She was ready for a battle, but Evel didn’t seem to want one. He had walked into her life like a hostage, unarmed and unassuming. She’d seen the look on his face when he saw Dartsey. He was legit freaked.

  “No, I …” Evel stood in the doorway, carefully considering what to say next. “I want to help.”

  M zipped up her overstuffed backpack. “You? Help? Me? Don’t make me laugh. Especially because there’s nothing funny about what’s going on here.”

  She slumped down to pull another pair of shoes out from underneath her bed. Sitting back on her knees, M noticed the photographs hung around her mirror. Were her friends in on this secret, too? She reached over and pulled them down like pulling petals from a flower. She knows me. She knows me not. She fooled me. She fooled me not. Polaroid versions of her friends stared back at her. They were all smiling like they were in on a private joke, but what if that private joke was her?

  “Maybe I’m just crazy,” M whispered to herself. Here, in her room where she had felt so safe and comfortable this morning, M wished just slightly that she was crazy. That her parents would show up and take her somewhere to seek medical help. But she knew better.

  “You’re not,” answered Evel. “Crazy, that is. You’re not crazy. But we can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”

  “Yeah, no duh, Evel,” said M. “Welcome to my life.”

  Below them on the first floor, a creak sounded out. They weren’t alone in the house anymore.

  Evel automatically backed into M’s room and actually moved behind her. M gave him a look and realized that he was cowering. “Really, dude? You’re going to use me as a human shield to whoever is downstairs?”

  “I’m not cut out for this,” he murmured nervously. “I shouldn’t have come here. This was a bad idea. This was the worst idea.”

  “Calm down, Chicken Little,” sighed M. Maybe he wasn’t Devon Zoso’s brother after all? “I want you to stay here,” she said slowly. “I am going to see what’s happening. If you hear anything violent erupting, for both of our safety, just stay here.”

  Evel nodded immediately with conviction. Then he squirreled away in the nook behind M’s bed. She could hear him hold his breath. She almost told him that holding your breath never works if you want to avoid someone. It’s almost impossible to avoid hearing people’s deep inhalations between holding breaths. Slow and steady breathing wins hide-and-seek every time.

  Slinging her backpack over one shoulder, with a second pair of shoes in her hands, M called out, “I’m coming downstairs.”

  As she rounded the corner prepared to face her mother and father impostors, M was met instead by her friends seated at the kitchen table. Chloe and Emma were on the sides and in the middle sat Jenny with a syringe as a centerpiece.

  “We need to talk, M,” said Jenny.

  “I don’t have anything to say,” M replied as she walked carefully toward them.

  “Things aren’t working out here so I’m glad you packed,” Jenny said, ignoring M’s comment. “We’re moving to the next safe house. You’ve been compromised.”

  M laughed. “Compromised? You mean I’m conscious. I’m aware. And I know what’s in that shot — another memory serum. So here’s how this is going to shake out. I’m leaving Harmon and you’re not going with me, whoever you are. Because if you try to stick me with that again, it will be over my dead body.”

  “Well, since Emma here is trained as an EMT, I think we’ll be able to keep you from death’s door,” said Jenny with a self-satisfied smile that gleamed with silver braces. “But we can’t protect you if you won’t let us.”

  “I don’t need protecting, in case you didn’t see the thug I dropped back in Art Appreciation,” bragged M.

  “Talented, yes,” admitted Jenny. “Lucky, too. The next Lawless brute won’t be caught off guard. And good luck if the Fulbrights learn you’re here.”

  Before M could reply, the side door opened and her fake parents walked into the kitchen from the garage carrying groceries.

  “Oh, hello, miette,” her fake mother said sweetly, nodding to her friends. “You know your friends are always welcome over for dinner, but please let me know ahead of time. I think we’ve got just enough kale and organic sausage to serve everyone …”

  She trailed off as she spotted the syringe on the table. The captive daughter was out of the bag.

  “What’s wrong, darlin’?” her fake father asked his fake wife.

  “She knows,” her fake mom exhaled.

  For a minute, the entire room seemed uncertain what would happen next. It was the moment after a bad accident, when no one is concerned about anyone else but themselves. Feeling for any scrapes, cuts, bruises, broken or missing limbs, the fake lives in the room took stock of their roles in this game. M’s fake family wasn’t in control. Her friends were. And now her friends weren’t in control, M was. And that’s not a factor they were prepared for.

  From the living room, there was suddenly a deep breath that caught everyone’s attention. A piece of metal clunked against the kitchen floor and rolled under the table. M watched as her fake parents dropped their groceries and ran for the door. Jenny, Chloe, and Emma pushed back on their chairs, but the table was big and the eat-in space in the kitchen was small. The chairs knocked ungracefully against the walls and trapped the girls when the gas canister erupted in a plume of white smoke. Evel ran in from the living room with a wet towel wrapped around his head and an extra one for M, too. The smoke flooded the entire house in seconds. Her eyes stung, even under the cold, wet towel.

  “This way!” he screamed, pulling her from the room.

  They darted out the front door and into a limo that was waiting across the street. Once inside, the limo peeled out and drove away faster than she thought possible for a limousine. Evel pulled off his towel first. His eyes were swollen. Against her better judgment, M left hers on and laid bac
k against the seat. She coughed and hacked up remnants of the viscous gas from her lungs. Her throat burned, but the feeling was familiar.

  “Where did you find that tear gas?” she cackled with a rough-edged voice.

  “Aarrggghhh!” strained Evel as he punched the empty seat next to him in pained frustration. “I found it in your house when you left me upstairs. Your parents had it in their room.” He coughed again. “What kind of parents have tear gas in their room?”

  “They’re not my parents,” said M. “And I thought I told you to stay put?”

  “You did, but it seemed like the right thing to do,” Evel argued. “Tear gas? That’s what that was?”

  “What did you think it was? A bomb?” asked M.

  “I don’t know, maybe?” Evel confessed. “I just thought it would cause a diversion long enough for us to escape.”

  “Escape to where, Evel?” M pushed as she jerked the towel from her face. Even in the tinted windows of the limo, the light felt like white-hot fire to her eyes. “And what kind of Fulbright doesn’t know a can of tear gas when he holds it in his hands?”

  “I’m not a Fulbright,” he said solemnly.

  “Well, you’re not from Lawless, either,” assured M. There was no way his cowardly antics were an act. “So what does that make you?”

  “I’m a Ronin,” he said in the quiet hush of the limo. “And we need your help.”

  Ronin. M had heard the term before. They were the leftover outcasts from the Lawless School and the Fulbright Academy. The failures. Underachievers. The poster children and storied examples of what students tried to avoid at all costs. To join their ranks meant that a student had been kicked out of one school or the other. And once cut, Ronin were kept under watch for the rest of their lives by the school that expelled them. But until this moment, the concept of Ronin had only been a threat to keep students in line. M stared blankly at Evel as if she were looking at Bigfoot.

  “We?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Evel gravely. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said M impatiently. “There’s no way you’re a Ronin if you’re Devon Zoso’s brother. She’s the golden child. You can’t come from the same family and not pick up at least a hint of those skills and smarts. How do I know you’re not hijacking me right now? That Dartsey wasn’t just a tactic to prove I’m really M Freeman?”

  She couldn’t tell if it was anger welling up in Evel’s face or if the tear gas had irritated his skin to a bright red color. But then Evel shot her a devastating look that froze her in place.

  “This may come as a surprise to someone like you, but people don’t always become Ronin because they flunk out of school. I saw how the Fulbrights were training recruits. They were building an army and I didn’t want any part of it. So I opted out.”

  “Well, good for you, I guess,” said M.

  “Hardly.” Evel slunk back in his seat. “The fallout from my decision was way bigger than I expected. I was only twelve years old — how was I supposed to know what would happen? My parents lost friends, family, and their jobs. All their financial accounts were frozen because of me.”

  Evel choked out the last words. He must be fifteen now, but he wore the weight of his decision like this all happened yesterday.

  “Well, this choice limo makes it look like you got over the money problems,” noted M.

  “At a price,” said Evel. “There were … concessions. My family had to ‘make things right’ after I dropped out. My parents kicked me out of the house. They tell people I’m dead now, if they mention me at all. And poor Devon, she became ‘spoken for’ — drafted by the Fulbrights way too young. My parents pushed her insanely hard to do whatever they asked of her.”

  “Well, they got their money’s worth with Devon,” said M. “How do I know you’re not trying to get her out of her indentured service by kidnapping me?”

  “I haven’t seen her since she was nine years old, M,” said Evel. “I am not working with her. I doubt she’d even speak to me now.”

  “And you get some sort of hush-money salary to stay out of the way,” said M. She picked at the leather seats and pulled her legs in close.

  “I’ve lost more than I will ever get back, if that’s what you’re trying to imply,” snapped Evel. “But this isn’t a trap. What you were in back there, before I showed up, that was a trap.”

  “You told me you were here to help me,” said M. “And now you’re asking me to help you. What’s going on?”

  Evel pulled off his jacket and revealed an arm covered with needle scars.

  “What are those?” asked M as she recoiled slightly.

  “As part of the Ronin rules, we are tagged on a monthly basis with a tracker, like endangered animals,” said Evel. “Then one month nobody showed up. Rumors started spreading. We heard that something bad had happened to the Lawless School. That the war was over.”

  She had been at the Lawless School’s deathblow. Truly speaking, M played a major role in its destruction. But so had Evel’s sister, Devon.

  At Evel’s pause, M asked, “You keep saying we. I thought Ronin weren’t allowed to interact with one another.”

  Evel wrung his hands together nervously. “We’re not. But that didn’t stop a group of us from finding one another. We’d meet online, through backdoor channels on social sites. Like I said, it’s not that we are bad at our jobs. A lot of us just didn’t want to work for the company, if you catch my drift.”

  The Fulbright life had given her pause from the very beginning, too. She wished that the Lawless School had raised the same flags or warning signs with her. It should have, from the very moment she crashed the plane. But back then she had thought that this was what her father had wanted for her. That wasn’t the case after all. He had wanted much more from her.

  Evel continued, “Another month passed and no one showed up to check on us. Without the trackers, we scrounged enough courage to meet one another in person for the first time. There were nine of us that had grown close over the years.”

  “Were?” asked M. Hearing the past tense verb triggered an awful feeling in her gut.

  “We met a few times before a new person showed up at our doorsteps,” Evel began. “The first wave of attacks captured three of my friends. It was the Lawless graduates. They wanted revenge and the Ronin were easy targets. At first, we thought they wanted to send a message to the Fulbrights that whatever truce had been in place to keep Ronin safe was over. The war had finally risen to the surface. Then we heard about you.”

  The sky went dark outside and the stars lit dimly along the highway. The car drove south. Abandoned businesses stretched along either side of the interstate, with empty parking lots. In the distance, shadowy mountains lifted into the sky. It was a side of America M had never seen before.

  “Where are we?” asked M.

  “Wow, do you remember anything?” asked Evel.

  “I remember a lot of things,” said M in a hush. “But there are admittedly some … gaps.”

  “Well, you’re in West Virginia now,” said Evel. “Coal country. And home to your oddball town of Harmon. We were lucky to find you.”

  “But how did you find me?” asked M.

  “A virus,” admitted Evel.

  “Excuse me?” said M.

  “A computer virus. Coded specifically to ping into the secure Ronin back channels we’d created that no one was supposed to know about,” explained Evel. “We were wrong. About our communications being untraceable, we were dead wrong. Someone had been watching us all along. But the virus didn’t attack. It was wrapped in a riddle of numbers, like a combination lock. A combination lock with a timer, and the only way to disarm the virus was to answer the riddle.”

  “You cracked it,” acknowledged M. “You’re a crimer, aren’t you?”

  “Crimer?” said Evel. “I’m a techie, if that’s what you mean. And yeah, I cracked it after weeks of studying the code.”

  “And what was the message?” as
ked M.

  “It’s better if I show you,” said Evel. The limo pulled off the highway and into a closed shipping facility.

  Oversize garage door ports were shuttered as far as the eye could see. There were no windows, either. Streetlights above them lit the shadows of the barren lot as the limo drove in and out of the darkness.

  “This place used to be a postal hub,” Evel told M. “Closed down a few years ago, a casualty of the digital age. People don’t write letters anymore. The building suited my needs, so I moved in last month.”

  The location wasn’t far from Harmon. They’d only been driving for forty minutes or so. Still, M felt hundreds of miles away from her fake life. The limo turned the corner to the far side of the building so that they were completely hidden from the view of interstate traffic. As they approached another loading dock, a ramp rose out of the ground and the large white garage door rolled open to allow the limo inside.

  M stepped out first. The room was smaller than she expected. Grease stains covered the concrete ground. There were tools on the wall kept in immaculate order. The screwdrivers, wrenches, and hammers were all positioned from smallest to largest. M looked down again and noticed that the limo was parked on a car lift with a mechanic’s bay underneath.

  Evel joined M and led her by the front seat of the limo. It was empty.

  “Evel, who was driving?” asked M.

  “Oh, it’s automated,” he said carelessly. Then he looked up to no one and said, “I’m back, Alfred. And please let the others know we have company.”

  “A success, then, sir,” echoed a disembodied voice from all around them.