by J. A. Dauber
The push tripped me up and I stumbled into a locker the wrong way: face-first. I heard this crack as my nose moved about three inches to the right of its original location. Logan didn’t even notice; he and Rebecca had already headed down the hall. Rebecca did, and I think she looked at me with sympathy, but the truth is I’m not sure. My hands were covering my nose and it was a little hard to see.
I wasn’t going to make a thing about it. I really wasn’t. But it wouldn’t stop bleeding—gushing, really—so I had to go to the nurse. When she asked me what had happened, I lied and said I’d walked into a door when I wasn’t looking where I was going. The truth didn’t come out until Caroline—who was absolutely furious at Logan on my behalf when I told her what happened, and was not going to let him get away with it, and was definitely not going to accept any excuses or anything on his behalf, even from me—started spreading the actual story. And then it looked like I was too traumatized and scared to admit I’d been bullied. And by the school’s greatest hope for a state title….
Well.
Teachers got involved. Coaches got involved. The administration got involved. And thankfully for them, they managed to make sure the press did not get involved, which would have destroyed the season, and maybe Logan’s career. Which, I have to say—especially given what happened later—he 100 percent would not have deserved. Like I said, he hadn’t even noticed what he had done, and he certainly hadn’t intended any real harm. When he found out, he was miserable, and genuinely apologetic. That went a long way toward things blowing over. Even with Caroline.
The administration was happy to let things lie as low as possible. I think they wanted me and any possible nose-related scandal out of the school spotlight. And my mom wasn’t snooping too closely into any non-nose-related behavior. The upshot being that although I didn’t exactly have a free pass to skip school any time I wanted, for the next two weeks if I held my nose and said I had a throbbing headache, my mom let me stay home and the school didn’t have a problem with it. The freedom almost made the cotton balls I had to shove up my nostrils worthwhile.
And in the craziness, Caroline forgot about that first mysterious, unexplained absence of mine.
This was only the second-best thing about the incident—I’ve been calling it a fight, but who are we kidding. The best thing was that all of a sudden I was a big deal at school and Rebecca was drawn to attention and celebrity like a…well, I was going to say like a magnet, but maybe the fairer thing to say would be “like a journalist.”
I mean, obviously there were, how can I put it, conflicts of interest, given the circumstances, and so she never did or said anything, but—for the first time ever—I saw her looking at me sometimes, rather than the reverse. Nothing more than that, not then, but this was a change on the order of, I don’t know, the Revolutionary War or something.
I had no idea how to handle this. Any of this. Some days it seemed easiest to just stay home.
Well, about twenty feet underneath my home.
* * *
I had already started thinking about putting on the Mayhem suit, if I could figure out how to work it. I told myself it was how I could learn who Dad really was, maybe even discover what had happened to him. But now I think I know better. I think the decision to do it was just…aesthetic. Like it would have been weird not to. I know that sounds horrible, and I guess it is, but it’s probably the truth.
As to what came after…I’m still figuring that out, I guess. Anyway.
I knew—or thought I knew—what everyone knew about the Mayhem suit: it was made of tough metal, the kind bullets bounce off. But from that first close look, I could see it was actually some sort of soft material, almost cloth, that hung loosely off the hook….
Maybe there were some answers on the computer down there. I mean, there are always answers on the computer, right?
Dad was full of surprises. I assumed the computer would have some sort of insane encryption and that would be the end of my life as Mayhem. But the computer—which was an old MacBook, like, at least six years old by now—just asked for a password, the kind you need to get into the user settings and profiles. This one was a lot harder to guess than the door keypad one, though, since it had more possibilities, and I was worried that if I put in the wrong thing more than two or three times it would shut down completely or activate some knockout gas or who knows what.
Except there was one thing I knew about Dad: he had a terrible memory. Which made me bet he’d hidden the password somewhere in the lab. Or, when a careful search didn’t turn up anything passwordy there, some place in the house.
It took a while. I had to be supercareful about putting things back where they’d been—my mom had gotten more distracted since my dad disappeared, but she’d still notice if her shoes were put back in the wrong order. Eventually, tucked into a small space between the vanity and the wall in my mom’s—my parents’—bathroom, I found a scrap of a printout with three long combinations of letters and numbers.
I’d been wrong: you didn’t need a password to get into the computer. You needed three, one prompt popping up after another, after another. But once I painstakingly entered them—and you better believe I put that paper back exactly where I found it, after copying the sequences down for myself—there they were: a bunch of files arranged in neat folders on the desktop.
When you put them all together, the files added up to something like a car manual, but for a supersuit: To activate blowtorch, press your ring finger against the palm of your right hand twice. (That’s just an example. The Mayhem suit doesn’t have a blowtorch. It has something more like a microwave-based thermal amplifier…not the point.) There were notes about Dad’s training with the suit, like: Since you don’t want to repeat that incident with the cow in New Hampshire, always be sure to refill the gas cartridges before you go out.
Like I said, Dad had a terrible memory. I figured they were just notes to himself that also happened to make the perfect personalized instruction manual for his son.
In retrospect, it was pretty stupid to imagine he had done all this alone.
NOW. FRIDAY. 8:32 P.M.
I’m trying to keep this in some kind of order for whoever’s listening, but it’s hard. My cheek hurts and it’s getting cold and I really have to figure out what I’m going to do next.
The scanners aren’t picking up any more radio chatter. That means the military’s gone dark. They know I’m listening. And the thermal scans are useless: the fire is making the signal goofy. I’m blind here.
But they’ve got to be going building to building by now. And once they find me, they’ll let loose with everything they have. No mercy. No worries about civilians, either, since they’ve evacuated the area.
I can’t blame them. I mean, considering what they think I did.
And when I think about what I did do, I’m pretty sure I deserve whatever’s coming.
TWO AND A HALF MONTHS AGO
I didn’t meet Mr. Jones right away.
Well, meet isn’t the right word. I still don’t know his name, or anything about him. At least nothing certain. I haven’t even seen his face. And I’m pretty sure a lot of what he told me wasn’t true, or, at least, was designed to be misleading.
But whatever did happen with Mr. Jones, this is how it started.
I was going to fly.
Everyone had seen Mayhem do it in the old video clips. There were detailed instructions on the computer. I knew I had to try. But first things first: I had to get the suit on.
I practiced in the lab, two, three dozen times. Slipping the bottom half on, then the top, then the helmet, constantly checking the instructions. The reference to accidental decapitation encouraged attention to detail. Only once everything was on, floppy but firmly secured, did I activate the electric stimulus that armorized the whole thing.
Everyone knows what the suit looks like from the outside. Inside,
it looks…I don’t know, exactly. When it’s floppy, it looks like the inside of a sweat suit. When it’s not, you’re in it, and it’s a lot like trying to look down your shirtsleeve—not as easy as it sounds. It feels smooth and metallic, though. And it adjusts to your size somehow—I mean, I’m much bigger in the suit than I am in real life, but somehow you don’t feel like you’re rattling around in there. There’s some give—enough to keep a few things close to your body, like your phone—but not much. Inside the helmet looks like a giant wraparound computer screen, and it responds to voice controls and facial movement.
I have no idea how any of it works. The armorizing, the size adjustment, the screens…not a clue. But I don’t understand how my phone works, either. Something about radio waves full of data that fly through the air? I don’t know. It works just like the instructions say. That’s the main thing.
Once I’d mastered putting the suit on, I moved on to checking the weapons systems, making sure they were charged, all the indicators glowing green. I couldn’t do more than that without blowing the lab apart. But it looked like I had enough firepower to take on an army.
Well, maybe not, as has now become clear, but that’s what I thought then.
The door at the other end of the lab led to a tunnel, which ran for about a quarter of a mile underground and ended in a hatch that opened onto a ravine. The first time I peeked out, not wearing the suit, I got a face full of thorns. Smart way to keep anyone from snooping around—and, of course, with the suit you just brush them away without thinking twice. And then there was the second layer of security: those thorns—and the hatch—were thirty-five feet up from the bottom of the ravine. Straight up. If you were snooping around, you would have to be rappelling down the ravine wall.
Or flying.
So one night I waited for Mom to go to sleep. She had a routine that never changed. At 11 p.m. the TV in her room would go off; then, five minutes later, the light, and that was it until 6:30 a.m. I waited another half hour after the light went out, to be sure. Then down the ladder, into the lab, into the suit, through the tunnel, and toward the hatch. The files said the suit was capable of rapid ground transport as well as flight, but I didn’t want to risk it. Maybe I’d smash into a wall and cause a cave-in. There’d be a lot of fuss when someone found my Mayhem-wrapped skeleton.
The ravine was a good place to practice. Despite the temptation to rock out with the suit’s weapons, the more careful side of me knew explosions and rocket fire would bring attention. I mainly focused on working with the suit: running and jumping and even—at a very low altitude, still inside the ravine—flying.
I have to admit, I thought flying would be cooler. I guess it’s a lot like when you’re on a plane. You’re in the air, but you still feel like you’re inside. The suit’s the same way. Maybe if you could feel the wind on your face or something, but the suit filters all the air, and all you can see on the faceplate monitors are readouts displaying four or five different aerial views. It feels like you’re flying a drone or playing a video game, except that you happen to be a few hundred, or thousand, feet above the ground.
Still, I mean, it’s pretty awesome.
And after about five or six flights, every other night or so, I was beginning to get the hang of it. The suit was starting to feel like an outgrowth of my own body, just bigger, more powerful, more capable, more…adult, even, though that sounds silly. It made me start to think I could take on big things, like, maybe figuring out what had happened to my dad. I was smart enough to know that this was dangerous territory, but dumb enough to think I could handle it.
For a week and a half, anyway.
* * *
I don’t think I almost died the night I met him. Mr. Jones, I mean.
But I’m not 100 percent sure.
Nothing special was going on that night. I guess that was part of it. I mean, yes, I’d been having these incredible experiences with the suit, but the rest of my life was lonely dinners with my mom who hardly looked at me between drags on her cigarette and occasional days at school moping about Rebecca and dodging Logan and Caroline.
Not literally, in Caroline’s case. We were still hanging out whenever I went to school: walking to class, eating lunch, even comparing notes on the latest episode of The Great British Bake Off, which we were both inexplicably into. But…earlier that day…
Have you ever been talking to someone when you really had to go to the bathroom? I know, this is gross, but it’s the only example that works. You don’t want to tell them the reason you’re only half listening, both because it’s embarrassing and because you want to be nice. But since they don’t know, they think you’re mad at them or something.
This wasn’t quite that bad—I mean, there wasn’t that same urgency—but Caroline knew me pretty well. She knew there was something going on. And, being Caroline, she called me on it.
I told her I was having headaches from my nose, but when she wanted to take me straight to the school nurse and I said no, that led to more questions. Then I tried to say it was about things at home and could we leave it at that, but, of course, she wouldn’t. And why would she? We’d always talked about that kind of stuff before.
So I told her that it was something private, and that when I was ready to tell her I would, but that she had to stop crowding me.
Yup. Pretty much a direct quote, I’m ashamed to say.
She looked at me, and told me I was being a—well, it doesn’t matter what word it was. It was 100 percent accurate.
And then she said, “If you need some space, Bailey, trust me, I am happy to provide it for you,” and then she got up from the lunch table and walked off.
Leaving me to bus her tray, I couldn’t help noticing.
I felt terrible. We’d had fights before, but this was worse. It felt…deeper. And I didn’t quite know how to fix it. I knew I needed to apologize, which was fine, but I also knew I needed to explain.
And I wasn’t sure that I could, or should.
And although I knew getting into the Mayhem suit wouldn’t help me figure it out, I didn’t think it could hurt, either.
So that night, after making some random fragments of conversation with my mom, which ended with her mentioning my dad and trailing off into space, which tended to happen about three nights a week, I waited until I heard the television turning off, and then I went down, and out, and up.
Considering how specific the “manual” was about some stuff, it was surprisingly vague about how high you could go in the suit. But since it had some comments about how to avoid being spotted by aircraft, I figured the answer was: pretty high.
That night, I wanted to take it to the limit.
I finished my usual routine. And kept going. Higher and higher. Hit the clouds. Went through. Kept going.
And then I was flying faster. And faster. And higher and higher. I don’t know how high the atmosphere goes, so maybe I wasn’t that close to outer space. It sure felt like it, though. I knew—had absolute certainty—that if the suit somehow developed the tiniest crack, I would freeze and choke and gasp and burst all at the same time, and it would be over.
But it didn’t. I just kept gaining altitude. This was the Mayhem version of riding your bike down a big hill with your feet off the brakes. Right? Kids do this sort of thing all the time.
Except I hadn’t told the suit to keep going.
* * *
At first I thought I’d pushed one of the thrust buttons by mistake. Things are a little loose for me inside the fingertip control units and I was always worrying about hitting the wrong button. I hadn’t done it yet, but, of course, there was going to be a first time.
No biggie, though. I waggled my right index finger in the other direction to compensate.
Nothing happened.
I waggled harder. Still nothing. I was zooming up, up, up, with no way of stopping.
And
then the thrusters stopped, stopped dead, and I was falling out of the sky, and I realized that up was better.
Although that would imply that I was thinking clearly, which I was not. I was flailing, pressing buttons, trying to activate screen menus at random, hoping something—anything—would work. Nothing responded. The only thing I seemed capable of doing was going splat.
Well, that and screaming. Screaming I could do just fine.
After a million years of free fall that probably lasted around fifteen seconds, the thrusters cut in. I wasn’t falling anymore—just flying, straight and fast, in a random direction. I didn’t have any control over the suit, and whatever was running it had killed the monitors and maps. So I was helpless, blind, and in the dark—you can only see through the monitors, remember—and I had no idea how close I was to hitting the ground, a mountain, an airplane, anything.
I’m going to let you imagine how that felt.
After a long time—it was longer than ten minutes, and less than an hour, but I couldn’t have told you much more precisely than that—I felt something. Or the lack of something. The boot thrusters had cut off again. I only had time for about a millisecond of panic before I felt the gentle thump of my feet against a floor.
And then the monitors crackled back to life, and there was the bright light of big floodlights, blinding after being in pitch-dark for so long. I wanted to throw my hands up to cover my eyes, but I couldn’t. The suit was still frozen. So I shut them tight.
When I opened them again I could see that I was standing in an office.
Not a very big office. And not a very nice one, either. Like it had seen better days, or hadn’t been used in a while. I could see a beat-up wooden desk, and behind the desk was one of those ratty old swivel chairs, and sitting in that chair, looking at me, was a man with a plastic Mayhem Halloween mask covering his face.
