Rita Morse and the Sinister Shadow

by Holly Hook

  * * * * *

  Five seconds.

  That’s how long it took us to run to the other side of the cafeteria.

  Laughter broke out from a couple of nearby tables as I flattened myself against the wall. Hey, even I wasn’t going to stick around over there. Penny and Ryan joined me. Ryan turned the color of paste again while Penny clutched his arm.

  The window. The Shadow One. I turned my gaze towards it, expecting to see him smiling back.

  Guess what? Nobody was there now. Only a bird flew past the window. I let out a slow breath and begged my heart to slow down. The Shadow One must’ve run off before anyone else could see him. Figured. Now we could look like idiots for running across the room as if we had hornets in our pants.

  “If you want to practice for the marathon, the track is out by the football field!” A lunch lady wheeled a trash can down an aisle, scowling at us. More laughter broke out from a table of older girls nearby.

  “But—” I sputtered, pointing to the window.

  The lunch lady shook her head. “No running. Any more misbehavior and you get trash duty.”

  The lunch lady made her way down another row. The snickering died down and left a bunch of chatter in its place. Our sentence of shame had passed.

  “Oh…” Ryan moaned, leaning against the trophy case. “Oh…”

  Penny seized his arm. “Look!”

  Josh and Kristina sat way on the other side of the room, far away from the window. Kristina laughed so hard that tears rimmed her eyes. Josh pounded his fist on the table. Their cell phones bounced from the force of his pounding. They knew what happened. They knew the Shadow Regime guy had been the one standing outside the window, even though they were nowhere near it. The sight of them made me want to puke.

  I shook Ryan out of his daze. “Let’s get out of here. Don’t say anything until we’re out in the hall.”

  My legs felt like gelatin as we climbed the stairs to the quiet hall. I plopped down on some benches near the school seal. Probably the senior benches, but I didn’t care. Compared to Shadow Ones, territorial eighteen-year-olds weren’t that scary.

  Penny and Ryan sat down next to me and dropped their backpacks on the seal. The silence grew stronger and stronger until it became unbearable. Finally, Ryan choked out, “Was…was that real?”

  “No,” Penny said, her voice unnaturally shrill. “We just ran the fastest we’ve ever run in front of the entire cafeteria because we felt like it. That was—”

  “Shhh!” I peeked over my shoulder at the hall behind us. Only a janitor swept up some papers at the corner. “What if the traitors come out here and listen in?”

  “Good point.” Penny cringed. “Let’s get to the library. That’s one place you’ll never find Josh and Kristina. And besides, we need to check out that disc.”

  “Good idea.” Ryan stood. “But what if that freak gets into the school?”

  “I doubt he’ll try. He’d stick out in a uniform like that,” I said. “This is getting bad. They’re not bothering to look like shadows anymore. They don’t care if we know about them. And that means…” I’m almost finished. I’m facing Procedure Number Twenty-Eight. I struggled to form the words, but they wouldn’t come.

  Ryan looked over his shoulder. “M…maybe he was just trying to scare us. It worked, all right.”

  “Yeah right, Ryan.” My voice cracked for once. I was losing it. I couldn’t keep up my brave face much longer, but I knew I had to. Nobody else was going to help us or tell us what to do. Jerry couldn’t. My parents wouldn’t even believe me about all this.

  We had to find out what happened to Gabe Cruz more than ever. “They’re just getting warmed up.”

  I scanned as much of the library as possible before sliding through its double doors. One curly-haired librarian went through a stack of new books at the front desk. She didn’t have armor or blue hair, I’m happy to say. Nobody sat at any of the tables or worked at the computers in the middle of the room. I almost started digging in my backpack for the disc, but stopped myself. Sean didn’t want any strangers to see it.

  The librarian smiled at us. “Hello. I wasn’t expecting any students until next week.”

  “So no one’s in here?” Penny asked. Her words echoed with relief.

  “No one,” the woman told her. “I did have a young man come in here earlier, but that’s it.”

  I breathed a big sigh of relief. Maybe the Shadow Regime guy had gone back to his own world through a portal. The farther away, the better. Now we could focus on watching the last part of the Gabe Cruz saga. “Is it okay to use the computers?”

  “It is,” she said, “when they’re working. All of them went down this morning around third hour or so. They were all on and suddenly went to this blue error screen. I tried restarting them, but I got that error again and just shut them down.”

  I dropped my backpack. Yeah, I was really losing it now. “What? They all got the Blue Screen of Death?”

  The librarian shook her head. “It looks like the network got hit by a virus again. Every year someone thinks it’s funny to do this. I hope they’ll be back up by next week. I’ve got Mr. Harvey on it.”

  Without another word, I skulked over to a table and sat. No way I was going back to the cafeteria so that Shadow One could stare at me some more.

  Penny shot me a wide-eyed glance. “Someone crashed the computers on purpose. Josh and Kristina must have told the shadow people about the disc, so now they don’t want us to see that entry.”

  “That guy in the window probably did it,” Ryan strangled a paper clip. “Let’s sit somewhere else tomorrow. Away from a window.”

  “Oh, no!” Penny shot out of her chair.

  I gulped. “What now?”

  Penny’s eyes grew rounder than usual. She flattened her hands on the table and stared at us like we’d grown horns. “Josh and Kristina,” she said. “They’re going to tell the Shadow Regime you two have detention in Mr. Gorfel’s class tomorrow.”