by J. A. Dauber
So Mr. Jones was waiting to try to get it back some other way.
That was a narrow hope to hang my life on, but with each mile I didn’t die, it seemed more and more plausible.
And I needed to get back home fast. I needed to get out of the suit, to try to figure out if the hard drive worked, not to mention to find someone to decrypt it and tell me what was on it.
But I had other things to worry about. Downing two military fighter jets does not go unnoticed.
The sky started filling up. I don’t know how many planes are in a squadron. At least that many. Maybe it was two squadrons. Maybe six. It was a lot of planes.
By this time, I figured, someone in the government had talked to a bunch of someone elses in the government and they’d come to the conclusion that Mayhem had wiped a small American city off the map. Who could blame them? Maybe, given what had happened in Manhattan, they thought I had done it together with the Bloody Front. I’m sure that Mr. Jones is using his government contacts to push that story forward. And I know how rumors can spread and become the truth. I’m in high school.
Time for a change of plans.
I swerved and headed straight toward the largest tangle of buildings the suit could find for me within fifty miles. Medium-size city; population…maybe a hundred thousand or so. I didn’t have time to look at all the data I was getting.
Big enough to give me a place to hide. That was what I was going for.
I could hear the pilots’ response. It wasn’t very nice, but at least it confirmed that they weren’t authorized to attack near big civilian populations. I did hear them talking about calling in the National Guard. Going house to house, or something like that.
Well, I figured I could handle that. Bunch of weekend warriors.
I guess the National Guard had been trusted with some serious military gear when I wasn’t paying attention, though. And after the Bloody Front attacks, they were not afraid to use it. I had landed in an alley and was about to dearmorize my suit when I heard the word tanks.
Looking back, I probably could have pulled it off. Slipped out of the suit and gotten away, just another kid looking shifty and scared. I mean, with tanks in the streets, that wouldn’t have been such a stretch. But I wasn’t thinking straight, and besides, I was pretty sure I’d been spotted landing in the alley. Maybe staying suited was smarter.
Only it wasn’t. Because when I turned on the scanner to search local police and military bandwidths for broadcasts using the word Mayhem, all I heard was a loud staticky sound, then silence. And I had that image of Mr. Jones again. Like a cat batting around a ball of yarn. With its teeth showing.
I made a note to myself about yet another unpleasant thing I’d do to him when I saw him, and started running.
I headed south-southeast, in the direction of home, and then—all right!—a river. I was sure the armories of the local police departments and the National Guard here didn’t extend to submarines or battleships. Pretty sure, anyway. Just get to the water, and I would be on my way, if not quite home free.
And all of a sudden I was flying.
This was not by choice. An imaginary giant’s hand had lifted me by the scruff of my neck and was dangling me about twenty feet in the air, spinning me around right above a pocket park in the middle of the downtown business district. To the National Guard, I guess it looked like I was taunting them, telling them to come and get me. But the truth was that I was Mr. Jones’s puppet. And it looked like he wanted me to go out in a blaze of “glory.” I’m putting glory in quotation marks, since you can’t see me doing air quotes.
He hadn’t been worried about the hard drive, I guess. Maybe he knew about it, maybe he didn’t. He just wanted to have his revenge up close and personal.
And it started arriving, in the form of heavy gunfire.
* * *
It’s not like any of these attacks individually could have done much to the suit. Like I said before, the suit shrugs off small-arms fire. Even a tank shell or two wouldn’t do that much to it. But it had already taken a lot of damage from the missile, and to sit there and absorb more and more…I wasn’t sure how long it could hold out. Besides, if the military decided I was just going to be a sitting target for whatever reason—and, of course, that was what it looked like, and they weren’t going to spend a whole lot of time asking me about my motivations—then even though it was an occupied area they might try to evacuate it and bring in the big guns.
And that’s exactly what they did.
I could hear the megaphone blare of military instructions, and I saw people running through the street, some of them passing right underneath me, parents carrying kids wrapped up in blankets, everyone crying, probably as scared of the soldiers as they were of me. There were a few people holding precious things close, like stuffed animals and photo albums. I saw one small boy drop his album and a bunch of pictures spilled out. He stooped to pick them up, but his dad almost yanked his arm out of his socket to keep him moving.
I looked through my scopes at those pictures, lying there on the ground, and I had to do something. But I was paralyzed, hanging there, scaring the snot out of little kids and getting my butt blown off in the process. Suit integrity was holding, though based on the blinking, blinding damage alerts, who knew for how long.
Ironically, not being able to do anything gave me time to think.
I tried to go through the suit’s instruction manuals in my mind. Useless. Every conversation about the suit I’d had with Mr. Jones was even less helpful. There was only one glimmer of hope, one thing that might help: that Klingon message, Trap-door spider. I hadn’t been able to make any sense of those words, but they must have meant something—and right now they were my only lead.
Was Mr. Jones the trap-door spider? That fit, for sure: he was a secret, scuttling thing, hiding in his space until someone disturbed him, and now he was jumping in for the kill. But somehow I didn’t think that was what the note meant. But if it wasn’t, then who was the spider? Was it me? That made even less sense.
But then my brain, working at speeds previously unknown, came up with another possibility. Maybe it was the suit. Maybe the Mayhem suit itself had some mechanism to chomp down on things that were coming in and attacking it.
Like Mr. Jones’s control override.
Which, as I’d learned from Caroline—I couldn’t think about Caroline now…I’d go to pieces, metaphorically, then literally—had to result from some sort of transmission signal, for him to turn it on and off the way he did.
And transmissions could be blocked.
Of course, Mr. Jones would have programmed the suit to make it impossible to block any outside transmissions, or at least his. He’s careful.
But what if there was a way of blocking Mr. Jones’s power. But it was something physical—like a spider’s web, but a mechanical version? There’d be no way for Mr. Jones to override that. Like how you can’t hack a dead bolt with a virus program. It just doesn’t work that way.
Okay. But even if there was some kind of blocking switch, how was I going to find it? In all my time with the Mayhem suit, I hadn’t come across it yet. And it wasn’t like I could take the suit off to give it a thorough investigation. I couldn’t even lift my arms to activate the shutoff panel, since Mr. Jones had taken control of the limbs. I thought for a second about trying to wriggle my arm out of the suit’s sleeve, like a little kid getting out of a sweater, but the inside of the suit was too tight for that.
On the other hand, if my line of thinking was right, none of this mattered. Because it would have to be something—be somewhere—I could reach when my whole body was paralyzed. It wouldn’t make any sense to put it anywhere else.
Which left my head. It was frozen—I couldn’t turn, nod, shake the helmet, anything. But there was one moving part that Mr. Jones couldn’t lock into place….
I moved my head forward. Slowl
y. There was just enough give for me to touch my forehead against the monitor panels.
And then I stuck out my tongue and licked.
I felt ridiculous, and a little gross, but I stopped caring when my tongue swept across a strange, rough protrusion about an inch to the left of the center of my mouth. Strange because the rest of the suit—both inside and out, at least before the diamonds had scuffed it and the missiles had hit—was as smooth as the lines of a new Porsche.
But this was rough, and felt almost like…a tiny, tiny, lever.
Mentally crossing my fingers, which I couldn’t do since they were frozen in a splayed position, I jabbed at the lever with my tongue.
I knew I was getting traction the minute I fell out of the sky.
* * *
I landed hard, and badly. Thank God for whatever crazy material Mr. Jones had used to make the suit. It cushioned the blow enough that I didn’t break anything. Or break anything of mine, anyway, because something glitched inside the suit. The screens wavered for a minute and went black, and my heart climbed back down from near the top of my throat as they fuzzed on again.
Like I said before, I’ve never played football myself, but I know enough to describe what I did next as a kind of championship broken-field run: down the grand avenue leading away from the park, and out toward the highway. If the opposing team were actual, literal tanks. Like the ones ahead of me.
I considered trying to go full superpower and shove them into the buildings on either side, but the consequences to the buildings would have been…severe. Not to mention to anyone who hadn’t been evacuated.
I have to remember to think about that kind of thing. Always.
There was another factor, too. I didn’t want to waste the suit’s power. Considering what the autorepair functions had to handle. And who knew what I might still have to deal with? Mr. Jones must have realized—from remote video footage he was tapping into, soldiers’ chatter he was monitoring, whatever—that somehow I’d managed to shrug off his control. I shuddered to think of what he might come up with next.
But he wasn’t all-powerful. That much was clear. Dad had monkeyed with the suit, installed the tongue switch, gotten some independence. That meant he’d been questioning Mr. Jones, too, right? It must. Maybe Dad hadn’t been partners with the Front, after all. And that’s why he ended up getting kidnapped.
Did this mean I was following in my dad’s footsteps?
I was almost feeling cheerful when the tanks started shooting at me.
I guess they were less concerned about civilians than I was. Or maybe they were just confident in their evacuation protocols. I figured I could spin and weave around two or three of them, and was feeling good about my prospects of getting out of there when there was a sudden rumble and a crash and I realized they hadn’t been aiming for me.
Knocking a building down on me wasn’t the worst way to stop Mayhem, after all.
And that takes us full circle. To where I started from.
NOW. FRIDAY. 10:52 P.M.
It’s quiet here, and it’s dark, and I’m so very tired. I’ve got to get some sleep.
I can’t do anything until the sun comes out, anyway, when the suit will be able to recharge.
I think I’ll stop here. For now. Thanks for listening.
Good night. Whoever you are.
NOW. SATURDAY. 6:47 A.M.
It’s almost sunrise. I can’t believe the night is finally over.
I know it should be very symbolic—it’s dawn, I’m refreshed, ready to start anew—but I don’t feel any of that. I feel exhausted and drained and guilty and terrible. About Caroline. And Clapham Junction.
So to recap. I might as well do it out loud. I mean, I’ve recorded everything up till now, it would be a shame not to finish it. And I’ve kind of gotten into the habit, over the last half day or so…
Here’s where we are. The suit is wrecked. I’m here, in the desert, bruised and banged up, can’t hear out of my right ear, my only possession a battered and possibly useless, possibly priceless, hard drive.
Got to keep moving. I’m hoping that when I blocked Mr. Jones from controlling the suit I also blocked him from tracking it. But I’m not sure, and even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean he isn’t keeping tabs on me some other way. I’m sure he has access to satellite data. Or to who knows what else.
But the sun’s up. The suit can start repairing itself. It’ll be good as new in a couple of hours. I can get back home. Fence the diamonds somehow. Take the cash and restock the weapons—or steal some from an armory, that should be simple enough—and find a superhacker to unlock the hard drive. Hopefully there’ll be information about my dad on it.
And if not, or even if so, take the fight directly to Mr. Jones and make him pay.
For my dad. And for our family, and all these years together we’ve lost. For those people in Clapham Junction. And for their families, who didn’t know, and probably never will.
For Caroline….
Oh, God. There’s no body. There’s nothing left….
What am I going to tell Mom? What am I going to tell her mom?
I can’t think about this now. There’s work to be done.
Because I have to figure out what that plan of Mr. Jones’s was, the one the scientist was talking about. Because I’ve been wrong, and wrong, and wrong again. First I thought Mr. Jones had been hacking into the Bloody Front’s computers and not sharing the information with me. And then, at Clapham Junction, I thought he and the Front were partners.
But I think that was wrong, too. Or at least, not totally right. After what the scientist alluded to. I think they might be an actual, real-life bloody front: people doing horrible evil on the outside as a front, a cover-up, so that no one pays attention to the even worse action going on behind the scenes. Was that an intentional pun? It must have been, right?
But what’s going on, really? What is Mr. Jones’s plan?
And how could it be worse than everything the Bloody Front has done? How is that possible?
No idea. Not a clue. Maybe there’ll be some clues on the hard drive. For the moment I’m stuck out here. Suit’s almost entirely depowered.
Clouds of dust up ahead. Something’s coming over the horizon.
I’ll suck a little more out of these almost-dry power cells, set the viewfinders to maximum…
Jeeps. Three of them. And that’s the Bloody Front logo spray-painted on the sides.
I guess I was right about Mr. Jones still being able to find me after all.
I’m imagining him on the phone to whatever members of the Front happened to be outside Clapham Junction when the explosives dropped. Here’s this Mayhem, he says. He killed all your—our—comrades. Yes, he and I have worked together in the past, as I don’t need to tell you, but he’s gone rogue. You remember Manhattan. I gave him one last chance after that, and here we are. I’m cutting him loose, and I’m offering you the chance to be the tip of the spear. Here’s the latest GPS data, courtesy of my private weather satellite. He’s weak. On the ropes. Vulnerable. Take out the suit and whatever you find, hand it over to me, and not only will you get revenge for your buddies, but I promise I’ll toss some meaty chunks of Mayhem technology your way so the next time you blow up a Foot Locker or terrorize some little old ladies playing bingo, you can make sure you’ll be able to cause maximum damage without getting a teensy-tiny scratch.
He probably didn’t say that last part. But I bet I’m pretty close on the first half…
I’m really starting to think like him now. What does that say?
I guess I was right about one thing. He’s a good teacher.
I can see a few rocket launchers perched over the struts of one of the Jeeps. And I recognize one of them through the suit’s viewscreen. The leader. Assassin. He’s going to want to cause a lot of pain to get back at me for New York.
> I know, I sound totally calm. Right? I think I’m in shock.
What do I do? Head for the hills? With power levels where they are now, there’s no way I’ll outrun the Jeeps, much less fly out of here. And the directional microphones are picking up faint shouting, so I think they’ve spotted me, too. No escape, no surrender.
Stand and fight it is.
I’m checking the weaponry rosters one last time…yup, pretty much gone. Maybe a few bursts left in the flamethrower. The suit’s defensive mechanisms are almost drained, too. It could probably handle small-arms fire, but a direct hit from something more serious, like one of those rocket launchers, and I’ll be in real trouble.
Okay. Frontal assault is out, and so is evasive action. It’s just open space between me and them. There’s a hill behind me I can try to take cover behind, but they’ll just drive up it and cut me down from the high ground.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I just thought of something. I mean, there’s no way it’s going to work. But I am out of options….
Okay, here goes nothing.
NOW. SATURDAY. 7:36 A.M.
I can’t believe that worked. I mean, I really can’t believe it.
It almost didn’t…well, no need to dwell on that.
Here’s what happened, though. For the record.
I directed a large chunk of the suit’s remaining power to the flamethrowers and blazed off a warning shot in the direction of the Jeeps. Not to actually hurt them, although I didn’t mind if that’s what they thought. Just to blind them for a second.
I took advantage of that second to scoot around the hill.
I wasn’t looking to escape. They clearly knew where I’d gone, since other than the hill, it was open land and sky for miles around.
