Mayhem and Madness

by J. A. Dauber

  I had to keep it simple, since I couldn’t look like I knew what the suit was going to do. But I figured even that would be enough to make Rebecca look at me differently.

  Or keep looking at me differently. If I understood what had happened at my locker correctly. Which I was pretty sure that I did not, despite the number of hours I had devoted to thinking about it.

  But what happened instead was that the whole thing went to hell.

  One minute I was standing there, trying to look like nothing particularly interesting was about to happen while also trying to avoid looking around too obviously for Rebecca. And then there she was, walking through the passageway, talking to one of her friends. It might have been my imagination, but I thought she looked a little desperate. A little trapped. Or maybe she was just thinking about a test she had in fifth period.

  But then she—and everybody else—hears it, and everything else goes away. I’m used to it by now, and most of the time I’m inside the suit so I don’t hear it, but Mayhem is loud. Not quite commercial-jet loud, but when it’s landing ten feet from you, it’s hard to hear anything else. Even your own voice, shouting. Or screaming.

  I thought I’d calculated the drop precisely—until Mayhem crashed right through the memorial fountain established for students who had fought and died in Vietnam. On the cell phone videos it looks like he did it on purpose, which didn’t hurt the theories saying Mayhem was in league with the Bloody Front…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Mayhem landed in a crouch and stood up, rock and rubble sliding off the suit in a cloud of dust. Everyone was either running or frozen stiff in panic. Rebecca was somewhere in between.

  Within a matter of seconds, it became clear that she was the target, as Mayhem turned and looked at her. Programming that had been easy enough—facial recognition and tracking, essentially, using a picture I’d sneaked a few weeks before. He took three steps toward her, looking for all intents and purposes like Frankenstein’s monster as the suit’s black, featureless helmet swiveled slowly in her direction. Rebecca dropped any remaining pretense of togetherness and started screaming her head off.

  And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, someone jumped between Mayhem and Rebecca, shouting something inaudible at the suit and brandishing a medium-size rock.

  No, not me. Jimmy Anderson.

  I had been so myopically obsessed with my own feelings for Rebecca I hadn’t even considered the possibility that some other person in the school might be crushing on her, too. And I had just handed him the possibility of her favor by taking a stance against a supervillain—making the same noble gesture I was planning to fake.

  The problem was that Jimmy Anderson’s facial features and body type had not been entered into the suit’s databanks as a non-threat. And Mayhem, acting without human reflexes or responses, dealt with Jimmy the way it would have dealt with anything else.

  I knew enough to have set the suit’s controls to avoid fatal harm. But non-fatal harm can be bad enough.

  Mayhem reached out a hand and batted Jimmy Anderson away like he was a stray napkin left on the cafeteria table. Just a flick, and poor Jimmy went flying across the quad.

  I don’t need to watch the videos for this part. This part I see again and again. The bones breaking, his arm bending in a way no arm should. The scream—which gets cut off, almost in a cough, when his head bounced off the ground, a second later, like a basketball. His eyes closing.

  When I dream about it, Jimmy’s eyes snap open and look straight at me. One time they were crying tears of blood.

  In real life, Mayhem stood there, silently, over his victim. He was waiting for his cue, which was me saying, Go on. Get the hell out of here, you punk! But those words never came, because I was staring, shocked and horrified, at the body of Jimmy Anderson. After a minute that lasted forever, the other fail-safes kicked in and Mayhem flew off long before the FBI and Homeland Security finally came crashing in.

  Jimmy was in a coma for three days and that whole time I walked around thinking I was going to throw up any minute. This is the worst thing, I thought. The worst thing possible.

  But he woke up. At least he woke up.

  * * *

  If the school had been overrun by outsiders before, now it was mobbed. Reporters, government officials, paparazzi, everyone looking for answers. One kid got himself famous for forty-eight hours by claiming to be Mayhem’s best friend. He managed to get a sit-down interview on CNN before the whole thing unraveled.

  But that wasn’t what I was worried about, even as Mayhem, or the substitute Mayhem, or whatever I was. I was out of my mind with guilt, yes. And, if I’m being totally, entirely, down-to-the-bottom honest, I was upset that my plan hadn’t worked out. It’s true, Rebecca wasn’t actively turning away when I passed her in the halls—I even thought, once or twice, there was a look that kind of maybe possibly lingered—but she hadn’t said one word to me, and I definitely wasn’t ready to try something else.

  Her not talking to me wasn’t the worst part. Even the gaping hole in my existence of the missing conversations I would normally have been having with Caroline—Mayhem had just attacked our school, you’d better believe we’d’ve been talking about that, though I have no idea how the conversation would have gone, given my, um, special circumstances—even that wasn’t the worst.

  The worst was the single text from Mr. Jones—DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’VE DONE?—and then total silence. Nothing.

  The clock was ticking on my dad’s safety.

  I had ruined everything, and for what?

  * * *

  You’d think my mom would have noticed some of the behavioral changes in her son. But something had happened in the weeks since the Bloody Front had crippled Logan. She’d been spending more time at school, volunteering with the parents’ organization, and had admitted, finally, that she’d started seeing someone. Someone she’d met at one of the fund-raisers for Logan, funnily enough. He was the dad of a kid who’d graduated a few years ago, and the dad had come back to help support the school. My mom kept telling me not to prejudge and that when the time was right she hoped I would meet him and try to accept that my dad had moved on or whatever. Which, of course, made me more upset and difficult and, I’m sure to Mom’s mind, obnoxious.

  Because Dad hadn’t just left us and moved on. He’d been kidnapped.

  And Mom’s timing didn’t help, either. Sure, she didn’t know what else was going on, but you know when she chose to tell me? This news? On the day before our dadiversary.

  That’s what I called it: the day that Dad—well, I can’t call it what I used to—but the day Dad didn’t come home. We had a ritual. It started that first year, when we were still raw and torn open. That night, after dinner, Mom sat me down and reminded me of the date. And I cried, and then we had Dad’s favorite dessert—which was pistachio ice cream, which both of us hated, but whatever—and Mom popped the tape in.

  I know, nobody has a VCR anymore. Some of my friends may never even have seen a videotape. But it was an old home movie, and I guess Dad had never gotten around to converting it to digital, and so they kept the VCR around just to play that one video. I’m glad they did.

  Some kids love looking at their mom and dad’s wedding album or video, but I never did, because I had this tape. At their wedding, they were formal, dressed up and clearly doing whatever the photographer was telling them to do. But in this video…well, it was really them.

  The video was taken by one of their friends, and it showed them in their theater group in college. Where they met. It was this play about people putting on a play. A comedy with people running all over the place, tripping over things and slamming doors, with terrible British accents. I guess people online say it’s funny, but I don’t know. That’s not why I watch it—why we watch it. We watch it because we can see, whenever Mom’s weird half-blind actress and Dad’s sort-of-stupid actor look
at each other, the two of them falling in love.

  There’s this one moment when Dad drops a line and he looks horrified, and Mom looks over and gives him this special little smile, a smile just for him, saying: It’s okay, I love you, everything’s going to be all right. I used to rewind and watch the scene, rewind and watch, again and again, for years, when Mom wasn’t around.

  But now she says she’s moved on. So it’s up to me to make everything right. Get it back to the way it should be.

  Well, me and the one man who was going to help. Who was currently giving me the silent treatment.

  Okay, yes, I screwed up. Big time. I’d made it more difficult to take down the Bloody Front and save his friend—my dad. But he clearly had information that he wasn’t sharing. And he shouldn’t have been punishing me when we could be out there putting the suit to work.

  I was just so terribly alone.

  And then I got the text. Well, a series of texts:

  I know that we are currently in a terrible argument, Caroline wrote. And that we have said some hurtful things to each other. And I know that we will forgive each other, in time. But I also know it is your dadiversary. And I know that this is always a tough day for you, and this year, much more so. (Even if you will not tell me why.) So I have a modest proposal.

  And then there were those three blinking dots, the ones that said a text was coming. They lasted for a long time, much longer than they should have—Caroline typed really fast thanks to all that piano practice. I could see her, finished with the text but refusing to send, smiling—I’m gonna forgive him, but let’s let him squirm—and that made me smile, too, and even laugh out loud.

  There was a sound outside my door. My mom. I guess she’d been waiting outside, wondering whether she should come in. “Bailey? Everything…is everything all right in there?” Clearly the sound of laughter was not what she was expecting.

  I told her it was.

  “So…can I come in? Can we talk?”

  I looked at Caroline’s new message, which had finally come in: Shall we just skip to where we forgive each other now? it said. Like I knew it would.

  “Not now,” I told Mom. “I have to talk to someone else.” Which was kind of cruel, but fine. She was dating someone who wasn’t my dad. Let her feel sorry for herself.

  I was going to tell my friend what was happening.

  * * *

  Well, not everything. Not yet.

  But Caroline was really smart—and if she could get past the whole my-best-friend-is-a-supervillain thing and, oh, the my-best-friend-somehow-put-a-freshman-in-a-coma-because-he-wanted-to-impress-his-crush thing, maybe she could help me with these two very big problems I was having. Well, two other very big problems, I guess.

  First I needed to be able to get into the files of, if not the smartest, most dangerous man in the world, at least the most paranoid. Someone who spent what seemed like a lot of his time and energy making sure no one could track him down. Because, like it or not, Mr. Jones was the only link to my dad. And if he wasn’t going to help me, then I was going to help myself.

  And second, I needed to figure out how to reverse whatever allowed Mr. Jones to take over the suit. Even if I managed to find out whatever leads he had on the Bloody Front, the minute he discovered me—I can’t believe I’m using this expression, but I am operating a giant flying robot suit, so some drama is probably unavoidable—going rogue, his first move would be to shut the suit down. I don’t want to imagine the second move.

  In the comics, this is where Caroline turns out to be a computer genius. But this isn’t a comic. Even on her best day, Caroline wasn’t close to the level of ability you’d need to get past the defenses built into the Mayhem system, much less hack into the files of a supergenius. And as for me, I knew almost nothing about computers except how to download movies and follow Rebecca on all her social media accounts.

  But superhackers don’t grow on trees, and they don’t show up in Google searches. I didn’t even know where to start looking. And assuming I could even find one, what I was asking was clearly going to be expensive, and I understood that the $350 in my savings account was not going to cut it.

  Caroline would know what to do.

  And I was going to tell her then, I swear. I was about to call her. And I was going to tell her everything. But then my phone buzzed again.

  A message telling me to fly to a particular latitude and longitude. Within the hour.

  I texted Caroline: Can’t talk now something up will explain tomorrow really all of it I promise really really and thanks (for everything!!!!). Then I took a deep breath, and waited and waited and waited and waited for my mom to fall asleep.

  I made it to Mr. Jones’s rendezvous point with a few minutes to spare.

  It turned out to be the top of a mountain in the middle of a forest and, I have to say, I have no idea how he got there. The woods were thick and dark and if there was an ATV parked a few hundred feet away, my sensors weren’t picking up on it. It was like he’d wafted out of the ground, like a ghost. Maybe he has some way of messing with the data that comes into the suit. Who knows.

  He began by yelling at me about Jimmy Anderson—which I deserved. But I got the funny feeling that the anger was like the expressions on his Halloween masks: fake emotion, trying to cover up whatever was underneath. I didn’t know what that was; I’m still not sure. But I think at least part of it might have been to throw me off my guard for what came next.

  He sat there, on a large flat rock, wearing a mask of either Mick Jagger or that woman British prime minister, I don’t remember her name, and told me that thanks to my continued carelessness—those were his exact words, I’ll never forget them—I’d blown contacts, ruined plans, wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars. The resources he’d dedicated to finding my dad were all up in smoke, he said, wiggling his gloves. So it was clear what we had to do.

  It wasn’t clear to me, I told him.

  He looked me in the eye—well, in the helmet visor. “Mayhem needs to rob another bank,” he said.

  * * *

  Right away, I didn’t like it.

  You know those scam e-mails old people in Florida get? Or the fake Facebook messages? The ones that pretend to come from a friend who’s been traveling in some other country and they lost their passport or got pickpocketed and they just need you to send them, like, fifty bucks on PayPal or something so they can get home?

  This reminded me a little too much of that.

  I mean, I know my dad was in the bank-robbing business. I got that. A Robin Hood bank robber, hero to some, villain to others, but he had gone into banks and taken the money just the same. Now that people knew Mayhem was back, they might even expect it.

  But he’d always taken from the rich and given to the poor—not taken from the rich and given to Mr. Jones.

  “Um, what do you need the money for?” I asked him.

  And he told me.

  Well, he sort of told me. He said words, and they added up to sentences, and the sentences became paragraphs, but they never became an explanation. There was something about routing numbers and dead drops and mentions of signal intelligence and underwater trawling…

  The thing was, it seemed like he was trying to explain. To let me in, introduce me to the business, so to speak. And I wasn’t getting it. I was failing my dad. I was failing him. I was failing them both.

  Maybe that’s why I agreed to do it. But it wasn’t the only reason.

  It was also a way for me to get some money of my own. Because if he wasn’t being honest with me, then maybe hiring computer hackers was still the way to go. I needed to find out more about this Mr. Jones. That much was clear.

  My plan—to the extent you could call what I had a plan—was simple. Mr. Jones was going to set up robberies for Mayhem to commit. I would commit the robberies. Give most of the money to Mr. Jones. Use the rest
to hire hackers. Makes sense, right?

  Again, I had no idea how to find these hackers. But I was on a pretty steep learning curve when it came to breaking the law.

  And I was about to get a first-class seminar in the subject. From the master.

  * * *

  Mr. Jones said that my recent activity had led to significant suspicion that Mayhem was based in my area, so I should try to pick my first job somewhere farther afield. I confessed to him that I hadn’t realized I would get to pick, to which he responded that pretty much anyone can commit a crime…the trick was getting away with it. And that always, always depended on appropriate planning. If I wanted to learn how to stay out of jail, even with a supersuit, I had to learn how to plan.

  The planning sessions took place over the next few days. In the sky.

  I would practice maneuvering while Mr. Jones chatted away in my ear. Once or twice I could hear a helicopter hovering somewhere out of sight. I knew it was him, because it didn’t show up on my instruments. One time a drone matched me mile for mile. It was wearing a Mayhem mask on its front, one of the few times I saw any evidence that Mr. Jones had a sense of humor.

  But I learned a lot. Mr. Jones reminded me about digital footprints and search history, to make sure I wouldn’t type things like how to rob a bank into Google. He shared operational details from some of his and my dad’s greatest hits. And after a few days of extensive discussion and training, I was flying reconnaissance around the banks we’d targeted. And that was when I had my idea.

  Yes, I could smash and grab my way into a bank, like my dad had. But there were easier ways to get the money. Like when it came out of the bank.