Mayhem

by Jeffrey Salane

  “Automated?” puzzled M. “Alfred? Who are you? Batman?”

  “Nah.” Evel laughed. “I am a fan, though.”

  He opened the door and a set of lights illuminated, revealing a mile-long open-floor warehouse that expanded for over a city block. High-end computer equipment was set up from wall to wall. M felt like she’d entered a submarine, but then she saw beyond the computers to other unbelievable vehicles parked in the distance: a helicopter, a jet, a boat, and even a tank.

  “Do you really need a tank?” M said. “It seems a little much.”

  “Haven’t needed it yet,” said Evel. “But the day is young.”

  “How much money do your parents have?” she asked, suddenly frightened by the sticker shock of this outcast’s lair.

  “I don’t know how much they have, but I have a lot.” Evel reached a panel of computers and sat down in a chair. A hundred-inch screen flickered on in front of him with a series of numbers streaming across it. He diligently typed without looking at his keyboard once. When he was done several faces came on the screen.

  One was a redheaded girl with a mangled ear. Under her vid-feed was the name Kinja. Another was a blond-haired boy known as Scott. He seemed to have a winking problem, some sort of tic, but then M realized that it wasn’t a tic. His left eyelid was missing. A third girl joined the chat under the name Nell. But it was the fourth face to sign in that M recalled right away.

  “Derrick Hollows?” M blurted out. Derrick Hollows had been a first-year at Lawless with M. She remembered how he had fallen prey to an Idents grift where they stole his identity and shared it with everyone across campus. “You’re a Ronin?”

  “Wait. Is that M Freeman? What does she have to do with all this?” complained Derrick.

  “So you’re the one who blew up the Lawless School,” acknowledged Kinja. “Well done.”

  “Yeah, great job, Freeman,” Derrick said angrily. “I could have been there, you know. You could have killed me!”

  “Chill out, Hollows,” Evel intervened. “You were kicked out way before she brought the place down. And now she may be our only hope of surviving.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Scott as he leaned back to squirt drops into his left eye. When he looked at the camera again, the drops dripped down his cheek like tears. “How are we supposed to trust a Lawless brat? They’re the ones trying to kill us.”

  “Kill you?” asked M. “Wait, I need an update. I’ve only been myself for a few hours now and I don’t even know what day it is.”

  “It’s Tuesday,” Scott replied. “October ninth.”

  October? She couldn’t have been out for that long. Suddenly another memory returned: her fight with the Fulbright in her father’s secret room when she’d been stabbed with that serum. Oh no, thought M. Jones. M closed her eyes and remembered her friend lying on the ground, silent and not breathing. That was way back in February. Had she really been living her fictitious life in Harmon for almost eight months?

  “You need to tell me about this message.” M focused. She needed to push through the flashbacks and concentrate on her next move. The screen of mostly new faces watched her, waiting for someone to begin the conversation. “Because it could be a trap.”

  “We thought so, too,” said Evel, taking the lead. “When you are in our position, everything could be a trap. We cracked the code. Three vital pieces of information were hidden in the background noise of the virus. They were hard to decipher and extract. Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide this intel. But we don’t know why or who.”

  “We think you can shed some light on this for us,” Kinja spoke up.

  “Why me?” asked M. She glanced again from the faces on the screen to Evel and back. Derrick Hollows stared daggers into his camera. His lips pursed and his jaw clenched at M’s question.

  “Because the first concrete info we pulled was a GPS coordinate, or coordinates,” said Evel. “It was hard to figure out what they meant because they kept changing second by second. They moved, you see. Constantly, except for seven hours each night. That’s how we realized that we were after a living thing: It was sleeping at night.”

  M reached down and felt her wrist. The tracker from the Fulbrights was still stuck in her arm, a coarse bump bubbling up just beneath her skin. “You were following me.”

  “The second intel was this peculiar blueprint,” continued Evel as he motioned toward another screen. A diagram of a full-body suit was set against a graph background. Schematic formulas were written in the margins and pointed to the different sections of the suit. A suit M had seen before. One she had worn before, in fact.

  “This is a specialized uniform created by a kid named Keyshawn Noles,” said M. “He must have made this virus in case … in case he didn’t make it. When did you receive it?”

  “Last week,” confirmed Scott. “It slipped through a heavily guarded firewall and found its way to about sixty Ronins. Which is shocking, to say the least. Because this virus also coincided with the start of our friends’ abductions.”

  “You really are part of this, aren’t you, Freeman?” said Derrick with a hint of resentment in his voice.

  “I am now,” said M firmly. “You said there was a third message in the virus?”

  “The no-mind not-thinks no-thoughts about no-things,” quoted Evel. “Does that phrase mean anything to you?”

  “It’s a Buddhist saying, right?” M posed. She retreated to a time with her real father, M Freeman. He’d been teaching her to ride a bike. Don’t think of the street, don’t think of the bike — in fact, don’t think about anything. Let your body take over and the mind will follow. In times like these, your thoughts can be your worst enemy. The no-mind not-thinks no-thoughts about no-things!

  Suddenly M found herself at the core of the biggest mystery of her life and she knew exactly how to make sense of it all. “It’s me. I have something and Keyshawn is trying to remind me.”

  “Can we talk to this Keyshawn character?” interrupted Scott. “If he’s the one who sent this to us, then maybe …”

  “No, he’s gone,” said M suddenly. She had no idea how or why she knew this, but the high security and urgency of his virus spoke volumes.

  “Like your other turncoat friends?” Derrick accused with venom in his tone. “You, you disgust me, Freeman. You have the gall to walk in here and pretend like you’re so innocent. I think you’re the trap.”

  “Take it easy,” Scott tried to interject, but Derrick continued his rant.

  “We know you joined the Fulbrights and we know you escaped from them, too. So who’s been harboring you for all this time? Why did we have to pinpoint you and pull you away from your perfect little life?”

  “That’s enough!” Kinja yelled.

  “No,” said Derrick. “It’s not enough … but it will be.”

  Everyone looked puzzled as a sly smile crept across Derrick’s face.

  Suddenly, on Scott’s end of the line there was an explosion that blanked his screen for a moment. The blond boy looked left, stunned. Then he was shoved out of the frame noiselessly until M heard his body thump against something hard and far from his computer’s microphone.

  “Scott!” hollered Evel. “Scott, are you there — what’s happening?! Are you all seeing this?”

  Kinja’s feed was next. It blurred, bending her image into a warped picture and then straightening out with a dark shadow behind her. “Kinja!” screamed Evel, but he was too late. Her face was crashed into the computer’s camera with a jolt. Muffled movements meant a struggle was surfacing on her end, but M and Evel were powerless to help.

  “Look upon my face, M Freeman!” bellowed Derrick Hollows maniacally. “I want to be the last face you see before you’re taken away forever!”

  “You!” hissed Evel. “Hollows! What have you done?”

  “Nothing a good Lawless graduate wouldn’t have done in the first place,” he bragged. “You Fulbright suckers. I’ve been playing you from the get-go. You went to mak
e your move today, so I gave my Lawless connection an anonymous tip on where you losers were hiding out. I’m surprised you survived Dartsey, Evel, but then again, I hadn’t planned on you actually finding Freeman.”

  “But you’re a Ronin!” argued Evel.

  “Not in my heart,” Derrick said with a demented smile. The sound of struggles still echoed over Kinja’s and Scott’s feeds.

  “You don’t have a heart,” challenged Evel. “Because whether you realized it or not, we were the only friends you had left in the world.”

  “Well, then, friend to friend, I’d advise you to start running for your lives,” Derrick suggested snidely.

  Over Kinja’s and Scott’s cameras a heavy breathing came closer. Black smoke dissipated and a lone figure came into view in each feed. A masked figure with glowing green wires pulsating with life stared back at them. It turned its head slowly, looking confused, as if it had no idea how to use a computer camera. A gloved hand reached up and tapped the camera once, letting out an extremely loud whumph when it connected. The sound made M flinch and her stomach dropped into her feet.

  “Get out of there, Derrick,” M warned. “You can’t trust the Lawless School. It’s the Fulbrights! They’re coming for you!”

  Something moved in Derrick’s feed that grabbed his attention. M and Evel watched as the fear in Derrick’s face exploded like a rocket in the night. Sharp, intense, and shocking. “No, no, no, what are you?” he screamed as he cowered back from the screen. Then, without warning, he was lifted straight off the ground and thrown against the rear wall. To the untrained eye, an argument could be made that Hollows had been the victim of a ghostly attack by a poltergeist. But M knew better. Only a magblast could cause that kind of damage.

  “What’s going on?” hollered Evel nervously. He backed away from his large monitor, surveying the horror. His friends were gone. Replaced by a crew of masked Fulbright creeps.

  “We want what you’ve got, Zoso,” a voice echoed through the screen. “You have to the count of five to give Freeman over.”

  “Or else what?” interjected M.

  “One.”

  “They’re bluffing,” Evel explained to M, but it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself. “There’s no way they could find us.”

  “Two.”

  “I rerouted all the feeds; this place is untraceable,” stammered Evel.

  “Three.”

  “They found us already,” said M in a whisper.

  “Four.”

  “No!” Evel asserted to the Fulbrights before him. “So go on and count to five. I won’t be the one who gave you Freeman. That’s not going to happen.”

  Silence.

  Evel turned to M, exhaled, and smiled. “See. I told you. Nothing. They were bluffing.” He hit the escape button on the keyboard to close out of the conversation, but the masks on the screen did not go away. Three giant Fulbrights stared curiously straight ahead. Their eyes were blank and empty, void of any emotion or any signal as to what they were planning. “Alfred. Get these traitors out of my sight.”

  “I am afraid I cannot do that, sir,” the computer answered coldly.

  “Alfred? What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I have a message for you, sir,” the computer continued. “What is four plus one?”

  “Five?” Evel whispered and immediately all the computers in the room began to spark and short-circuit. Blasts of tiny pops erupted like the crackle effect from fireworks, as Evel’s own personal assistant, Alfred, reduced itself to a melted motherboard.

  But Evel’s broken tech wasn’t what caught M’s attention. That was only a sleight of hand compared to what the Fulbrights had in mind. It was the shaking dirt on the ground, the slight rattle of the tin roof overhead followed by the high-pitched whine that perked M’s attention. She shot up and grabbed Evel, pulling him with her as she darted across the room and back toward the garage where they had parked the limo.

  “What,” he asked as he ran beside her, “are we running from?”

  “Missiles,” M shouted, but her voice was blotted out by a crush of hot air that lifted them off the ground.

  It was not like a black hole. There was a brightness that lit up the room before there was any sound. A light shined from behind M as she ran, casting an angry glow across the computers that lined the room. It felt like a giant had turned on bright lights she had never known existed and its purpose was to scare the life out of anything in its path. M watched as the walls and ceiling around her loosened and rippled like they were made of water, bending in and threatening to lose their structure and support. The sight threw her off balance, like she was on a ride at an amusement park. But she had not been prepared for this ride.

  Then the light became brighter and the air around them hotter, stinging like an atmosphere of wild bees. Suddenly the air was pushing them forward, moving them faster toward the garage door at the end of the large open room. They were almost there when M finally heard the boom.

  And it wasn’t just one explosion — there were multiple explosions set off like a massive domino effect, with each domino blowing the other one up instead of knocking it down. Boom. The jet. Boom. The helicopter. Boom. The boat. Boom. The tank. Boom. The supercomputer. Boom. Them.

  Only M and Evel didn’t go boom. The last heated blast had tossed them into the garage and M was able to slide them both under the limo and into the mechanic’s bunker, about five feet beneath the concrete floor. They both watched a ripple of fiery air sweep above them as they cringed to the lowest point in the bunker. The metal tools around them shook and jangled menacingly, while the small room filled with the smell of melting tires from above.

  And then it was over. The furious dragon’s breath that had surrounded them and cleared its devastating path through Evel’s apparently not-so-secret, converted-post-office headquarters was gone. The room didn’t breathe anymore.

  “What in the world …” said Evel as he finally exhaled. He sucked in a huge gasp of air, like someone who had previously been drowning underwater.

  “More like where in the world can we go to escape the Fulbrights,” whispered M. Not because she thought someone might hear her, but because she thought any loud sound could potentially set off an avalanche of brick, mortar, and rubble. And she did not want to be buried alive.

  There was a steady thrum of ringing in her ears from the blast. It pulsed with her own pulse, so in a way she was thankful for the noise. The noise meant she was alive. That they were alive.

  “Evel, is there any other way out of here?” she said softly, but M’s new friend had checked out. His eyes were glassy; his neck barely held up his bobbling head. “Evel!” M insisted in a stern but hushed tone. She grasped him by the cheeks gently and held his head still, facing her. “Another … way … out?”

  Evel was covered in white dust, like a ghost trembling in her hands. M imagined that she must look the same way to him, so she spit in the palm of her hand and wiped the debris off her face. A lone bulb swung above them, flickering on and off with electric life. “Please, Evel, they’re coming back.”

  His eyes widened as he realized that she was right. Evel blurted out, “The rails. There’s an underground track that leads to the other side of the mountain. They … they used to deliver mail to the next town over. It was a different zip code, but they didn’t have their own post office. So their mail came here.”

  “Lead the way to that track, Evel, or we’re cooked,” said M as she pulled him up to his feet.

  “We’re …” He paused for a breath. “We’re in it now.”

  Evel leaned toward what looked like a dead end in the small mechanic’s chamber and pushed the wall open. A cold wind blew in from the darkness, seeming to pull both of their tired bodies inside. The tunnel was blindingly black and smelled like wet earth mixed with damp air. The cooling sensation felt amazing against her slightly burned skin.

  M continued walking in and kicked one of the rails with her foot. “We walk,” she
said.

  “No,” said Evel. “We ride. It’s faster.”

  M followed his voice and could barely make out the shadow of an old manual handcar with a seesaw-style bar attached at the middle. “How long has it been since this thing was used?”

  “Seventy years, maybe?” confessed Evel. “I didn’t think I’d ever need to make a getaway. It’s not like I planned to be firebombed.”

  “Then do you know if this track still leads somewhere?”

  “I know it leads away from here and that seems like the best plan right now,” said Evel.

  “It’s the only plan right now,” admitted M as flecks of dirt fell lightly from above them. The Fulbrights were making another move.

  M jumped on the handcar with Evel and they both tried to pump the bar, but the metal was rusted tight.

  “We should run!” cried Evel. “This thing isn’t going anywhere.”

  “No, we need wheels if we want to survive the next blast,” strained M as the bar inched under her. “We’ll never make it on foot. We’ll be buried alive.”

  Evel nodded and pulled up with all his might while M pushed her entire weight down on the other end. Then they reversed tactics in a coordinated effort until the bar slowly loosened and the handcar broke free of the dilapidated hold that the years had suspended it in.

  Once the bar gave way, they pumped it up and down frantically, creaking to higher speeds as the track dipped farther down into the dark earth. Wind picked up around them as the crackling sound of fire faded away and was replaced by the empty, cool hush of the tunnel.

  “It’s working!” Evel smiled. Or at least M imagined Evel was smiling as he said this. It was impossible to see anything down there.

  Turns in the track came quickly and without any more warning than a sharp jolt that swung their bodies in different directions. It was like riding a bull while wearing a blindfold. There was no way to anticipate which way the track would throw them next, so M and Evel held on to the bar and continued pumping for dear life.

  The next boom from above was muffled, like thunder clapping far off in the distance, but everything around them shook like they were clenched in an angry fist. The handcar bucked off the track, sending the kids flying forward. They landed hard on their shoulders and slid in the wet dirt, luckily landing outside of each metal rail. M looked over at Evel and was surprised that she could dimly see his face. There was light coming from somewhere.