Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  After you passed through some woods outside of Bedford Falls, the journey to Indianapolis was mostly farmland, just a panorama of cornfields bisected by the highway. Every once in a while a gap appeared in the rows of corn, and there would be lines of natural gas mining machinery, motionless and rusting in the snow. Even on cloudy nights like tonight, you could see Indianapolis miles before you actually reached it, the skyscrapers and lights of downtown flying high above the plains. During every minute of the fifteen-minute trip to the city, with a giddiness Benji couldn’t help but love, CR bounced in his seat and seemed to talk in one continuous, breathless sentence.

  “Holy crap, y’all, this is so exciting. Like, I can feel my butt tingling right now. Do your butts tingle when you get excited? Well, I can’t be the only one. I just want to click my heels right now, just click my heels like a damn leprechaun! Zeeko, pass me those paintballs. Thank you, Dad Clothes, you are my bae. These Newporte d-bags deserve it, am I right? These big-city guys are all the same. Their big-ass companies stomp on little towns and then they go back to their mansions and wipe their big asses with hundred-dollar bills.”

  “I think you’re confusing the Newporte football team with Scrooge McDuck.” Benji laughed.

  CR giggled. “‘Hey, Newporte, shut the duck up!’ I’m gonna say that! They’ll be all like, ‘Whaaaat?’”

  “You don’t want them to recognize your voice,” Benji said.

  “You’re right, not my best idea. But people mess with my Banjo at their own peril. Banjo, you are my bae. Zeek, you’re sure Icy Hot can’t kill someone, even if they get it on their balls? Sweet, sweet. Guys, I can’t believe this is happening. Can you believe we’re seniors and we’re doing this? This is exactly like I imagined being old would be. I love everything so much right now!”

  Everyone cracked up.

  From what Benji could tell, the north part of Indianapolis was the fancy-pantsiest part of town, with lots of McMansions and upscale restaurants and a pair of Apple Stores. They turned off the main road and drove past the huge main Newporte High School building, which looked so spotless that it almost gleamed in the night air. After making their way through the manicured campus, CR told Ellie to park the RustRocket on the far edge of their football stadium’s enormous parking lot, just past the reach of the field lights.

  Everyone followed CR’s lead and got out of the car, hearing the distant football practice sounds: shoulder pads colliding, whistles chirping. With a ten-thousand-seat capacity, Bedford Falls’s stadium was pretty big, but Newporte’s dwarfed it. It looked like it could seat fifteen thousand, and from the parking lot Benji could see their Jumbotron, which must have been twice as big as the one in Bedford Falls. The players’ cars, parked by the gates, were different than you’d find in Bedford Falls, too: brand-new SUVs, as well as some low-riding sports cars that seemed hilariously optimistic for an Indiana winter.

  CR grabbed a duffel bag from the trunk of the car, checked the time on his phone, and said, “Okay, here’s what’s up. It’s six fifty-two right now and their practice ends at seven, so we better hurry.

  “Step One: Eleanor, you’re gonna be the distraction. I got this idea from a book we had to read for class. It was about this guy at a boarding school and he was obsessed with dead people and this girl who was smart but moody but hot, so okay. Pretty good book! Sad, though. Shit, was it sad! Anyway, Eleanor, drive the Rocket over to the other parking lot, the one way on the other side of the field. At exactly six fifty-eight, cell phone time, light these babies up.” He dropped his duffel bag to the ground. As the canvas flap fell open, its cargo tumbled out: two dozen long, red, cylindrical sticks, topped with black fuses. He had tied all their fuses together, so that one spark could light the whole thing. “They’re bottle rockets. I got ’em on sale last year right after the Fourth of July. Told you I’d been planning this forever, Banjo!

  “Okay, Step Two: While everyone’s distracted by the fireworks, me and Zeek go in the locker room and rub Icy Hot in all the seniors’ underwear.”

  “Let it be noted,” Zeeko said, “I’m only participating because I feel it is my Christian duty to make sure CR doesn’t sterilize anyone.”

  “Good man,” CR said. “So once their balls are on icy fire, some of the guys will probably freak and come outside, which is when Banjo launches the paintballs out of the T-shirt cannons. Banjo, here’s a tip: Be sure you don’t aim where people are. If you want to hit them, aim just ahead. Aim where they’re going to be.

  “Eleanor, you have to be back here by the time the paintballs fly, ’cause we’re gonna have to haul ass out of here. Cool? Okay, now the disguises!”

  He grabbed the Walmart bag and handed them four ski masks. They were hot pink, with little poofy balls on top. They had obviously been designed for tween girls, and CR had obviously thought this was hilarious. He tugged his mask on. “So how hot do I look right now?” he asked, then headbanged as he played heavy metal on an air guitar, the poofy ball jigging.

  “It’s six fifty-six,” Ellie said impatiently.

  CR threw his air guitar over his shoulder. “All right, buddies, let’s go make history!” He and Zeeko jogged toward the field through the shadowy parking lot.

  “See ya real soon, Benji Lightman,” Ellie said as she drove off.

  Benji opened the plastic tub of assorted-color paintballs they’d gotten from Walmart. He divided them equally into the large barrels of the two T-shirt cannons, then checked that the CO2 tanks, which launched objects from the guns, were screwed in tightly. He adjusted some nozzles so the guns would shoot with the maximum amount of power.

  And then he waited. He put on his mask, which was too tight. Still, as the seconds ticked, he was surprised to feel a delighted, nervous thrill. This was actually pretty fun.

  Or at least it was, until 6:58 came and went without Ellie igniting the bottle rockets. The practice was ending, all the players heading back to the locker room. Benji’s phone buzzed with a group text from Ellie.

  Fireworks r duds! Won’t light! Get out of the locker room!

  “Oh, shit,” Benji said. Right then, from all the way across the parking lot, he heard several shouts of surprise from the Newporte field house.

  Doors burst open and CR and Zeeko dashed out. Inexplicably, CR kneeled between a couple of the Newporte players’ cars, like he was praying. As some of the Newporte guys followed them out, CR looked back and shouted in a high falsetto voice, “We just fed you a revenge sandwich with a side of justice!” He and Zeeko sprinted across the parking lot toward Benji, sprinted like men possessed, arms churning, poofy ski mask balls bopping happily back and forth.

  “Shoot!” CR screamed in that high voice. Benji realized he was trying to disguise his voice. “Shoot the d-bags now!”

  Benji picked up both T-shirt cannons and fired simultaneously. They kicked against his shoulders, two jets of gas ejected from the barrels, and there the paintballs went, a multicolored swarm rainbowing through the night.

  The amazing Technicolor onslaught peppered a few of the Newporte guys who had been chasing CR and Zeeko, but it wasn’t a direct hit; he’d forgotten CR’s advice about aiming for the future. Still, the shock of the assault made the players momentarily retreat behind their cars, which had just received rather psychedelic new paint jobs.

  The Rocket peeled to a stop a few feet away. CR scrambled into the passenger seat, Benji and Zeeko in the back, CR shouting and half laughing, “Go go go go!”

  “CR, I can’t believe you did that!” Zeeko said, ripping off his mask. “That was too far!” He was as angry as Benji had ever seen him.

  “What did you do?” Ellie said, speeding from the parking lot.

  “I slit a bunch of their car tires,” CR said.

  “Wait, wait, isn’t that an actual crime?” Ellie said.

  “I had to do it or else they’d be able to chase us!”

  And it seemed hard to argue with that logic, but unfortunately, as they turned onto the highway out of the
city, they realized that the Newporte guys were chasing them. A pair of new SUVs trailed them, gaining as they entered the panoramic cornfields.

  “Lose ’em, Eleanor! Take a shortcut!”

  “Point the way,” Ellie said sarcastically. It was all cornfields for miles, with just a single lane heading in either direction. “If we make it back to Bedford Falls, maybe they’ll stop chasing us. Buckle your asses up, boys.”

  She floored it. The Rocket might have been pretty much a piece of crap, but it was Ellie’s piece of crap, and she knew exactly how to take it to its outer limits. They accelerated, miraculously putting distance between themselves and their pursuers. By the time they reached the foggy, winding forest roads just outside of Bedford Falls, they were at least a mile ahead of the SUVs.

  Right then, there was a cry from the Rocket’s engine.

  They’d been racing at a good seventy miles per hour. Suddenly, the Rocket lurched, bucking so violently that Benji flew into the headrest in front of him. The engine emitted a sound like a pack of rabbits being tortured.

  “Ellie,” CR said, “tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

  “Don’t you do this,” Ellie said to the car. “Don’t you dare.” The Rocket answered by lurching again. It was dropping speed at a prodigious rate. You could have counted the pine needles on the roadside trees.

  “Go!” CR slammed his fist into the dashboard; the glove compartment sprang open like a jack-in-the-box, ejecting gum wrappers and DMV documents. “Come on, you piece of shit from hell, MOVE!”

  But the Rocket wasn’t in the listening mood. It staggered forward up a small rise in the road with all the power of a dying tortoise, finally just stopping dead, motionless and dead in the middle of the road.

  CR spoke with a small voice. “Are they still coming, Banjo?”

  Benji didn’t have to look back to know the answer. But he did. “Y-yeah.”

  CR opened his door. He stepped out, staring at the road behind the Rocket, his eyes wildly wide. The headlights of the casually opulent vehicles of the Pride of Newporte High approached through the fog like illuminative doom. Benji stepped onto the road, watching his friend growing white in the gathering light. CR looked nothing like an athlete with otherworldly talents and an infinite future. He looked like a little kid, and it was so sad, and somehow frightening, that Benji had to turn away.

  “Oh my God!” Benji exclaimed.

  CR looked at him.

  “There’s a road! We can hide the car over there!”

  Benji pointed at the miracle he’d just spotted: an opening in the dense forest, a hundred feet ahead of the Rocket on the other side of the small hill where the Rocket had died. It looked like an old access road, overgrown with weeds, the entry partially blocked by a small log. If you weren’t looking for it—say, if you were in pursuit of people who had icy-burnt your balls and launched a horde of paintballs at you—it would have been invisible. Where it went, who knew? But it was a chance.

  “Ohhh, thank God,” CR said.

  “I’ll push!” Benji said. “Ellie, put the car in neutral and steer toward that road!”

  “Wait, I’m way stronger, shouldn’t I push?” CR said.

  “No, go move the log off— Zeeko, get out and help me— We just need to push the car over the hill, then we can coast down to the road—GO, CR!”

  CR didn’t carry on the argument: A half mile back in the fog, the SUVs finally turned onto the straightaway, the yellow headlights now glaring directly at them like the lambent eyes of a dragon. CR sprinted to the road.

  Zeeko scrambled out and joined Benji behind the car. Together, they pushed against the RustRocket’s bumper with every bit of the slim measure of strength they possessed.

  “Neutral, Ellie!” Benji shouted.

  “It is in neutral!”

  Oh, Benji thought.

  The Rocket inched, inched . . . Finally it crested the small rise and, as the road sloped down, the car began to move without Benji and Zeeko’s efforts. They jogged to catch up and jumped into the backseat; with the log removed from the road, CR sprinted to the Rocket and leaped into the passenger seat.

  “Faster, Ellie, c’mon!” CR said. Benji looked back and could see the SUVs’ headlights gaining, just a few hundred feet back on the other side of the hill.

  “I can’t make it go any faster!” Ellie said.

  And Benji suddenly understood there would be no grand escape, no last-minute heroics. We’re going to get caught, he thought, closing his eyes. We’re going to get caught, and they’re going to take my pod away.

  “Help us,” he breathed, to God or nothing or everything. “Please help me.”

  Benji’s eyelids glowed.

  He opened his eyes. The trunk area was washed in subtle light. He looked in the direction of the SUVs, expecting to see them exploding through the final barrier of the fog.

  But no.

  This light wasn’t coming from the headlights. It originated from the bag wedged beside the steamer trunk. Benji’s backpack.

  The Question is in my backpack.

  The gaps between the pack’s metallic zipper glowed like the smile of a jack-o’-lantern that contained a neon-green flame.

  Open the bag, a voice deep inside him whispered. A high-definition image of him reaching into the bag filled his brain.

  CR and Zeeko opened their doors, trying to speed up the Rocket by pushing against the ground with one leg. Mesmerized, Benji crawled over the backseat and into the cramped trunk area, sitting between the trunk door and the steamer chest, staring at the backpack.

  The glow became brighter, painting the whole floor of the Rocket’s trunk with radiance.

  “Benji,” Zeeko said, peering over the backseat, “what are you doing?”

  Open the backpack, Benji.

  The backpack, untouched, slammed down on the floor of the Rocket’s trunk.

  The zipper screamed open.

  The Question launched out, slamming into Benji’s palm as if magically summoned. The tip of its straight end was green: terribly gorgeously atomically green.

  “What in the name of God . . .” whispered Zeeko.

  The Rocket’s trunk popped open of its own accord, exposing Benji to the open air.

  “Yes, Benji, push!” CR screamed. “Push, push, they’re almost here!”

  The headlights were just on the other side of the hill and final rim of fog.

  The Question vibrated in his grip, the green light on its tip blooming. Just beneath his index finger, a small curved piece of metal sprang out of the body of the Question.

  A trigger. It looks like a trigger on a gun.

  “Banjo, please, push!”

  But Benji aimed the Question out the back of Rocket, and pulled the trigger instead.

  Like an arrow ignited, like a missile of almighty light: That was how the power burst forth from the tip of the Question.

  The force of the blast blew Benji backward several inches, slamming him against the magic trunk, pinning him there.

  For the first time in history, the Rocket lived up to its name: Propelled by the continuous blast of the Question, which was acting as a handheld afterburner, the Rocket hyper-zoomed forward, quaking like it might burst into a thousand particles.

  “WHAT THE AAASSSS?!” Benji screamed.

  Everyone in the car shared roughly the same sentiment.

  “Ellie, look out, the trees!” CR screamed.

  Ellie heaved the wheel, aiming the Rocket toward the access road. The tires squalled and smoked, sending the Rocket into a wild fishtail. The Question’s blaze swiped across the trunks of trees on the opposite side of the road. Benji saw that the Question wasn’t emitting a steady stream of energy at all: It was firing a rapid sequence of compact green ovals, which flew like the tracer bullets of an atomic machine gun. The moment the ovals struck the tree trunks, the trunks vanished, vaporized from existence. The ruined trees roared and crashed to the road like cyclopses slain.

  Oh my God oh my G
od, Benji thought, this thing is a ray gu—

  “Benji,” Zeeko cried from the backseat, “whatever you’re doing, stop doing it!”

  “I don’t know how!” Benji said, but then he remembered his finger was on the trigger, and finally let go.

  The Question stopped blazing instantaneously.

  Still, momentum hurtled them forward on the unpaved downhill road. Ellie wove, working the brakes but skidding on frozen earth, navigating the RustRocket on a daredevil course of trees and turns, tossing Benji back and forth in the trunk. He grabbed the headrest on the backseat and white-knuckled it.

  An eternity later, the Rocket escaped the woods, shooting into some kind of open expanse. Ellie slammed the brakes; Benji pitched forward and felt something hard strike his leg. The Rocket skied over the snow for another fifteen feet. Then it came to a stop, its energy expelled, its passengers silent, its Prank Night escape complete, its tires smoking softly in the hissing snow.

  Benji’s whole body was electric with his heartbeat. He let go of the headrest. Swallowed several invisible cotton balls. Remembered that breathing was a thing.

  He gaped at the question mark–shaped object still in his hand. The trigger had receded back into the body of the Question. It looked like unextraordinary metal. There wasn’t so much as an afterglow on its tip.

  Benji dropped the Question, like something deadly, onto the floor.

  It’s not “the Question,” he thought, stumbling out of the trunk. Oh my God, that’s not what it is at all.

  The Rocket’s doors opened.

  Ellie stepped out first, shaking and pale, one hand on the Rocket to steady herself. Zeeko spilled out his own door beside her. For a moment Zeeko peered up at the sky full of stars, like a philosopher in contemplation. Then, bending at the waist like an English butler, he puked between his boots.

  Still in the passenger seat, CR slammed his shoulder again and again against his door. Benji saw the paneling had been dented during their impromptu rendition of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Finally, the door wrenched open with a rusty reeeeek.

  “Banjo, are you okay?” CR said as soon as he stepped out. He looked even more frightened than he had when the caravan of Newporte SUVs had been about to shatter his singular hope. He was staring at Benji’s forehead. Benji felt it and found a thin line of blood.