by J. A. Dauber
“Hi, Bailey,” he said. “A pleasure to meet you. You can call me Mr. Jones.”
* * *
I looked at him. Pretty much all I could do. The suit wasn’t moving an inch. I tried. Believe me, I tried. It was like being inside a steel statue.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “Every time you fly, anytime you’re out in the suit, I’m there. Watching.”
“Where are we?” I said. “Who are you?”
“There’s a tracker in the suit, you see,” he said, like I hadn’t said anything. “I put it in when I built it. It lets me know whenever it’s activated. When. For how long.”
“You built it?” I said. “Underneath my house?”
“And that’s not all I added,” he said. “After all, you didn’t get here voluntarily, did you?” He tapped a tablet on his desk. I couldn’t see the expression on his face through the mask, but I bet he was smiling.
“You’d better—” I started, but he cut me off.
“I’d better what?” he asked. “Tell you what you want to know, or you’ll blow my head off with your forearm rockets?”
I wasn’t going to say that. Or, at least, I would never have done it. Back then, I didn’t think using the suit had to involve hurting anyone.
Shows what I knew.
“Why don’t you try it?” he said, and did something on his tablet.
My hand swung up in the air by itself, as if I had the answer to a question in History class, and the monitors informed me that rocket A was armed, target was locked, and launch was imminent. “Hey,” I said, “Wait—”
And then it launched. The rocket. Tiny, yes, not much bigger than a pencil, but—at least according to the manual—powerful enough to punch through several feet of solid steel. It flew straight and true, right at him—and clunked to the ground a few feet from the desk. Deactivated. Harmless.
“Anytime I want, Bailey,” he said. “I want you to remember that. I can take over.”
I waited. There wasn’t anything else I could do. I was rooted to the ground in a big metal suit I couldn’t control.
“But I don’t want to,” he added. “I think it’s time to give you a choice.” He paused.
“You can walk away from the whole thing, if you want. That is an option. Say the word, and in less than forty-eight hours, a man in a ten-thousand-dollar suit will appear at your door with a gigantic check and a set of keys to a mansion in the next town over. You and your mom will live the rest of your days in prosperity, and Mayhem will be something to read about in the news.” He paused again. “Unless you ever say anything about any of this, of course. In which case it would all be taken away from you as easily as it was granted.”
And then he paused a third time.
“Or,” he said.
Now, you know which choice I made. I want to say that Mr. Jones knew it wasn’t really a choice…but that’s just me not taking responsibility. It was me. It’s on me.
But here’s the thing.
I didn’t make my decision because I wanted to pursue a life of crime, at least not consciously. I didn’t even do it because I thought the bad boys get the girl, although I have to admit that did cross my mind for a fleeting second.
No, I did it because of what Mr. Jones said next.
“Or,” he repeated. “If you listen to me—if you do exactly what I say, every time—then I will teach you how to use the suit. To its fullest capacity.”
And then he said three more sentences. Just three more. But they were enough.
Enough to hook me in. Enough to get me started. Enough to make me even more scared than when I was falling out of the sky.
Here’s what he said.
Sentence one: “Your dad is a prisoner of the Bloody Front.”
Sentence two: “I need you to help me get him back, and take them down.”
And sentence three: “Before it’s too late for him—and for us all.”
NOW. FRIDAY. 8:41 P.M.
Okay. Sort of a good-news-and-bad-news situation here.
Good news: I’ve changed location without anyone noticing. They may be getting closer, but they don’t have visual. Which matters because even the best cloaking devices don’t work against a set of eyes looking directly at you. I made it into a building a few blocks away from my last known coordinates. And the thermal scans I ran were right—the building is abandoned.
The bad news: When I landed, I must have hit a structural beam and right now there’s about three tons of rubble on my legs. I’m not hurt—the armor is pretty strong stuff—but at the suit’s current power levels I don’t have enough strength to get the rubble off me. So I’m pinned here like a bug.
None of my options are good. I could (a) let the military know I’m here and get life in prison, (b) sit here until they find me and get life in prison, or (c) starve to death…
Where was I? Might as well keep going, in case this turns out to be more of a last-will-and-testament thing. Sorry. Not funny, I know. But I’m afraid if I don’t laugh I’m going to scream. Or cry. Or both.
TWO AND A HALF MONTHS AGO
All those radio shock jocks and ultra-right-wing talking heads were so happy when the Bloody Front made its first appearance all those years ago. Finally, they’d been proven right: Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, ISIS-style, had made its way to America. The fact that the people responsible for those first Ohio mall shootings didn’t make any statements about Islam, and that there was no proof they were Muslim didn’t make much of a difference. One of them, at least in the fuzzy security footage, seemed to have a beard, and another one was waving a black flag with some scribbles on it. Which, the commentators helpfully explained, were not Arabic characters, but again, that didn’t seem to matter. Someone on the news called them the Bloody Front, and it stuck.
The name may have made the group sound like a bunch of old-time pirates, but they were genuinely scary. They would come out of nowhere, hit a civilian center somewhere in the United States—never a major city, always somewhere suburban or vaguely rural, and never less than a hundred miles away from a previous site—and then disappear, watching the whole place dissolve into terror and chaos. And they’d gotten a lot more active over the past year: attacking every month or so, rather than once every year or two. Which meant every town in the country was scared, not just the big cities. Maybe the FBI or the NSA or whoever had leads on who they were. If they did, they weren’t saying, which didn’t do much for public confidence.
The recent wave of attacks hadn’t affected us that much, not at school. I was still going around pining for Rebecca, nursing my nose, avoiding Logan, and mostly back to normal with Caroline.
I had figured out a way of being honest without telling her everything. I told her that I’d found some old stuff of my dad’s, hidden away, and that I’d found out some things about him that were really tough for me to process.
“Does it change TGT?” she asked.
I told her, truthfully, yeah, it did, maybe a lot. Our latest version of TGT had been that my dad was in a fire or accident that had not only killed him, but also burned him beyond recognition and destroyed his ID so no one could identify his body. He’d ended up a John Doe somewhere, buried in what, apparently, is called a potter’s field. Caroline had even done some computer searches of newspapers and police reports from the time of his disappearance to try to see if anything “popped,” as they say on those Law & Order reruns that Mom watches every night. We hadn’t found anything, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
“For better, or for worse?” Caroline asked.
And I said for worse. Which was half-true.
On the one hand: proof my Dad was alive.
On the other hand: he was the prisoner of a psychotic terrorist organization.
On some imaginary third hand: I was going to do something about it.
You
bet I was. When they’ve taken your dad prisoner, it gets a whole lot more personal. I know I sound like a tagline from some cheesy eighties movie starring, I don’t know, Bruce Willis, maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. I wanted to rip them to shreds. I wanted to beat them to a pulp. I wanted to—
I just wanted them to go away, and I wanted to have my dad back. That’s really what I wanted. To be playing Chutes and Ladders, or whatever the game-night equivalent has progressed to now that I’m not eight years old. I didn’t want to have to think about terrorists as anything but somebody else’s bad news.
I felt that—all of that—the second Mr. Jones told me that they had my dad as their prisoner. And then what I did was, I blinked.
Under other circumstances I might have reacted more dramatically, but I was essentially paralyzed from the neck down.
“Could you please unfreeze me?” I finally asked.
He thought about it for a second. “All right,” he said, doing something to a tablet on his desk. “I’m restoring limited mobility. The weapons won’t work, and if I see any sudden movements you’re a statue again. Got it?”
I got it. It was nice to move my arms again. But I didn’t move much more. I just stared at him. And he stared back, from behind that cheap Halloween mask.
I broke. “Are you going to tell me anything else? About my dad? And why the Bloody Front took him?”
“Maybe if you ask me nicely,” Mr. Jones replied.
Ripping a piece out of the wall seemed more attractive. “Please,” I said through gritted teeth. And then he started talking.
Looking back, I think his whole demeanor could have been an act. I’m not 100 percent sure of anything when it comes to Mr. Jones…. But if I tell it straight, the whole thing, maybe it’ll make more sense. I’m sure I won’t get it word for word, but I’ll try to get as close as possible. Maybe something about the way the conversation went—all our conversations—will be important. We’ll see.
“They made a mistake,” he began. “The Bloody Front. They’d figured out that it was Gerry flying around in the Mayhem suit, but they also assumed that he’d been the one to build it.” He looked down, and I could hear the sadness in his voice. “I always told him to take more precautions. Building his hideout beneath his own house?” He shook his head. “But he was willing to cut corners a little too often. He didn’t want to have to drive somewhere else to get into the suit, was what he said. That was what got him.”
Even though I could sense something not so nice, something patronizing in how he was saying it, I had to admit it did sound like my dad.
“I’ve been using every resource, tapping every network to get him back,” Mr. Jones said. “For years. Not just to return him to his family. But because the Bloody Front has something terrible in mind.”
He looked up at me. He was probably looking me right in the eye, but it was hard to tell, with the mask and all.
“We used the Mayhem armor for good,” he said. “Maybe our methods were illegal—robbing from the rich to give to the poor is still robbery—but with such injustice in the world, who cares if our financial institutions are forced to undergo some belt-tightening? But unlike us, the Bloody Front has no scruples.”
“What—” I said, but I couldn’t quite finish the sentence. I cleared my throat and tried again. “What are they trying to do? And why do they have my dad?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said, and again, his tone was odd—like he knew it wasn’t obvious and wanted me to admit I didn’t get it. Showing who was in charge again. I didn’t get that at the time, either, but I see it now.
I shook my head.
“They want your dad to build an army of Mayhems,” he said. “To blow up the world.”
* * *
“Cat and mouse, cat and mouse,” Mr. Jones continued.
I didn’t say anything. The suit wasn’t paralyzed now, but I was. This was…too big. Too much. Part of me was listening to what Mr. Jones had to say. Part of me was stuck on a loop repeating: blow up the world…blow up the world…blow up the world…
“They pressured your father to build them the suit. Gerry doesn’t know much more about how to build the suit than you do. But he’s a smart man, your father. And brave,” he said. “So he delays them. Sends them off on wild goose chases. Rare equipment from here; precious metals from there. The random-seeming attacks aren’t quite as random as the news believes. Each one lays tracks. Gives me clues to plan a rescue.”
“Then why haven’t you done anything?” I practically shouted.
“And how do you suggest I go about it?” he said. “Go to the police? The government? I’m the creator of Mayhem. They’d throw me in some deep dark hole—and believe me, they wouldn’t lift a finger to help your father. Let him rot, they would say. I’ve been doing it by myself, getting closer and closer, thanks to your dad, but even if I find him, how am I going to rescue him? Me and what army?”
“The Mayhem suit,” I said. “You could remote-control it, like you just did. Fly it out of our house—”
The Halloween mask was shaking violently from side to side. “Oh, no, no, no,” said Mr. Jones. “For an operation this sensitive, to save a cherished companion, you couldn’t possibly rely on”—he tried to find the right words—“a drone strike. No, you need a living, thinking human being. Who can make his own decisions on the spot. Who has proven, based on my extensive observations, to be a worthy candidate for the task.”
I caught my breath. I know he saw it.
“To save his father and destroy a threat to the world in one blow,” said Mr. Jones. “Not a bad arrangement.”
“But you—you said—” I stammered. “You said you haven’t found him.”
Not exactly, he admitted. But given the most recent clues Dad had left, for the first time he knew where to get that information. “I’ve narrowed his position down to fourteen locations within the continental United States. Employing a series of differential algorithms—well, never mind the details, you wouldn’t understand them,” he said, a little smugly. “I’ve found what must be a supply node, a central facility from which the Bloody Front sends material to its various splinter-operation sites. I’m sure your dad is being held at one of those. The computer data inside the main facility will tell us which one.”
All my anger and annoyance just…went away. “Let’s go!” I shouted, as I activated my boot thrusters.
And didn’t move.
Mr. Jones was tapping away on his tablet. “I warned you,” he said. “No sudden moves.” And he sighed. “I want to get your dad back, too. But we need to be careful. Anything less than mastery of the suit—absolute control, which requires total obedience to my training plan—and you’ll get everyone killed. It’s amazing you haven’t blown yourself up yet.”
Whoever Mr. Jones was—that wasn’t his real name, obviously—the one thing I could tell was that he was not a parent. He had no idea how to talk to teenagers.
I argued. I protested. I shouted. And eventually I gave in.
But at least I convinced him to start the training that night.
Which was horrible.
* * *
“We’ll practice here,” Mr. Jones declared, and I looked around, thinking, In this little office?
He tapped on that tablet of his, and the wall split into two sliding doors. And there, behind him, was a warehouse the size of a football field.
Actually, more like three football fields. With a roof at least two hundred feet high. And with all sorts of structures scattered around the edges. The first two floors of an apartment building—or of the outside of an apartment building, at least. It looked like one of those false fronts you see in movies about Hollywood back lots. Something that looked like a rock-climbing wall, only much higher, and with cannons sticking out here and there. And an actual stretch of highway running the length of the warehouse,
with cars, trucks, and even a tank parked along it.
It kind of looked like God’s toy train set.
“Welcome to our practice facility,” Mr. Jones said with pride. “It’s been a while since anyone’s used it. Good luck.”
“Um, wait, aren’t you going to—” I started, but he had already disappeared through a small side door. Before I could ask him where he was going, guns opened fire on me.
I shrieked and flailed and went fetal. And then I heard Mr. Jones in my ear, telling me to keep calm, stay in control, take a breath, and think. Nothing in the room could hurt me, he said—in fact, very little in the whole world could hurt me, except my own carelessness or foolishness. Easy for him to say, I remember thinking. He’s not the one in the suit.
As it turned out, although the bullets bounced off me, the hits weren’t completely painless—the spunging and zinging rattled my teeth and practically gave me a migraine.
But I mean, I was bulletproof.
The bigger headache, though, came from the constant voice talking away in my ear. Between Mr. Jones’s never-ending stream of instructions and the suit’s readouts and monitors, it felt like I was playing an online video game—one I sucked at. I’d thought I’d been impressive, flying around on my own and all. Once I began trying to dodge multiple streams of cannon fire while picking up a mailbox and throwing it through a second-floor window of that abandoned building, I started to see that what I’d taught myself was deeply inadequate. Much as I hate to say it, Mr. Jones had been right: if I’d charged ahead that night, I probably would have gotten someone killed.
I have to hand it to him. Maybe he wasn’t a parent. But he was a pretty decent teacher. Despite the fact that he was driving me crazy, he was good at watching. Diagnosing bad habits and mistakes. “I know you’re left-handed, Bailey; that means you’re overcompensating on the right-hand fingertip verniers. Ease back.” Leavening legitimate frustration at my suckage with rare but earned encouragement. “Well, you’re learning. Your father was a lot worse when he started out, I can tell you that.” It was kind of…well, not nice, exactly. But valuable. And even, I have to say, appreciated.
