The game continued with a few turnovers with no one scoring. Brendan scanned the bleachers, looking for equipment or anyone using a remote. He was distracted by a black girl who was signing with another Cathedral Valley student. Both laughed. Her laughter stopped once she saw Brendan watching, but then she returned to her friend and they continued their silent conversation. Further up in the stands he saw fathers and mothers cheering their sons.
Abandoning the effort, he got his phone out and kept his eyes on the game, recording everything.
As he watched, a pass from the Temecula quarterback that should have dropped right on a receiver went strangely wide. Brendan bookmarked the spot and kept his camera on the action as the ball wobbled to a stop on the field. No call was made, and no one appeared to notice. Perhaps it had been his imagination. Then he heard someone in the stands hooting and laughing. Brendan turned the phone and scanned the audience. A boy with a crew cut and a green-and-yellow team jacket tried to high-five someone sitting next to him but was ignored. Then he leaned down to the black girl who had been signing and jostled her shoulder. She rolled her eyes and gave his hand a polite slap.
Cathedral Valley took possession after receiving a fourth down punt. Bull took to the field with the quarterback in spite of the coach’s protest. Bull limped his way to the line and positioned himself in the middle, nudging a few of his own players out of the way. He shouted back to the quarterback, loud enough for Brendan to hear: “Just do it.”
The ball was snapped to the quarterback. Three receivers went out, but the defense appeared to know what was coming. They were trying to block Bull. The quarterback pitched the ball forward and Bull tucked it in and pushed through the Temecula line. Players were draped all over him, and he was hit twice by incoming defenders who made it past Bull’s own screen of linemen. The crowd was going nuts. Just as Bull began to slow, slogging as if he were wading through deep mud, a defender hanging on to Bull’s legs dropped away. Then another Temecula player came loose. They were slapping at their uniforms. Before they could recover, Bull marched into the end zone.
Brendan looked back at the Cathedral Valley students. All were cheering. But the boy with the crew cut was grabbing the black girl’s shoulder now. She wore a restrained smile, like she had just won something but didn’t want anyone else to know.
Cathedral Valley High got their extra point and then made the kickoff to Temecula. The Cat Valley defense stopped the ball return. Temecula’s last-minute attempts to score failed. The clock ran out, and an air horn signaled the end of the game.
“So what did we learn?” Lucille asked as they walked towards the hyperloop.
“I have some footage to look at,” Brendan said. “Send me everything you have.”
“Did you see it?” Tyler asked. “That one pass?”
“I don’t know how anyone could have missed it.”
“It’s because they’re not looking,” Lucille said. “They’ll blame the wind or too much spin on the ball.”
Brendan checked to see that their chaperone wasn’t close enough to hear. He had fallen behind, busily texting while walking. “What happened with the defending players? It’s like they had fire ants on their legs for a moment.”
“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “That’s never happened before.”
“Is everyone ignoring the fact they have an ogre playing for them?” Poser asked. “There’s got to be something illegal about that.”
“Everybody have fun sizing up the opposition?” their chaperone asked as he caught up. They hiked the steps to the hyperloop platform and got in line. A group of riders ahead of them got into a pod and zipped away.
“Oodles of fun,” Poser said.
Brendan nodded. “When’s the next game?”
6. Analysis
Brendan had a lot of footage to go through, but their chaperone took them straight back to the dorms where their monitors were waiting for the handoff.
“It’s like the Marshals Service,” Poser said as they got in the elevator. “Tomorrow at lab?”
Brendan nodded.
“Tina’s going to be pissed you went to a football game with Lucille.”
“I went to a football game with you and Tyler too.”
“You think that’s how she’ll see it?”
The elevator opened to their floor and they went to their rooms. By the time Brendan had thought of a comeback, Poser’s door was closed and his screechy music had begun pulsing. He went inside his own dorm room and called his mom, but she was at work so he could only leave a voicemail.
“You up?” he texted Tina.
He saw the message was read, then nothing. Finally a reply came. “I’m up.”
It was his turn to hesitate. His fingers hovered over the screen.
“Sorry,” he finally texted.
“NP. Vlad and I talked.”
Brendan waited for more details but none came.
“Went to game with Tyler, Luc, Poser,” he texted. “Weird stuff going on there. Need your help.”
“Ok.”
“Lab tomorrow pm.”
“Ok.”
He considered saying more but decided it was enough. He turned off the lights and went to sleep.
***
His geometry teacher was sick. Thank god for small favors. The teacher’s assistant went ahead with the class, and soon the work groups separated to consider the daily proofs. A bright-eyed kid with freckles didn’t mind doing the work for their group. As the kid worked, Brendan pondered his smallest drone designs and wondered how to make them fly faster.
“Hey, Brendan, you’re into the supers stuff,” a boy named Theo said.
Brendan didn’t look up from his tablet until Theo pushed his own in front of him. On the screen, a superhero in armor was running through what looked to be a construction site, judging by the bare framing and hanging sheets of plastic. He kept looking at the camera or the cameraman, who hung back but kept the hero in focus. The camera had a spotlight on it that illuminated the otherwise dark place and prevented the hero from hiding.
The hero’s armor was shredded in several locations. His helmet was askew and his mask was split and hanging from a single hinge above a decorative eyebrow mounted on the helmet’s face. He was bleeding.
“Get away from me!” the man screamed at the camera.
The shot switched to a second perspective from the dark floor above. The armored hero was in view, appearing small and vulnerable. A large shadow was perched on top of a wooden stairway with no handrail. Whoever it was had frilly, curly hair and wore a small hat. The man in armor passed by the bottom of the stairway and the shadow followed, smoothly gliding down the steps. The second camera tracked along just behind him.
The hero paused, and the perspective shifted again. It was a close-up on the hero. He was sweating and panting, and he finally tore off the dangling faceplate and threw it aside. The first camera came in close, blinding him.
“I quit! Enough! Uncle! I’m not playing anymore. I’m a freaking geologist, and I don’t need this.”
He stumbled over a plastic bucket. Now he was peeling his armored boots off. He flung one at the camera but the camera didn’t waver.
“Worship,” came a deep, electronically altered voice. “Pray. Repent.”
The man in armor scrambled through a doorway. It was a dead end leading into a large unfinished bathroom. He slapped at some glass blocks but they were solid. He pulled the plastic off a small window and opened it. With the armor chest piece and leggings, he would never get through. He began to work at the straps.
“Argonaut, your sins are laid before me.” The huge shadow stood in the doorway. Both cameras had moved behind the hunter, and the armored man was eclipsed by the huge shape.
“The fight‘s over,” Argonaut said. “Over! I think I broke some ribs.”
Brendan tried to push the tablet away, but the other students in their group had crowded around.
One camera got a low shot of Argonaut as he tu
rned to face the shadow. Terror filled the man’s face. Tears streaked down his cheeks.
“Kneel,” the shadow said. “Repent.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, whatever I did, I’ll never do it again!”
The large figure stepped into the light. He wore a one-piece clown costume and red boots. His back remained to the camera as he lunged forward and grabbed the armored man and pulled him down to his knees.
“Not to me,” the clown said. “Repent to them.” He pointed over his shoulder at the camera.
“What?”
The second camera moved in to get a low front shot of the clown. Large round red buttons decorated the front of the clown outfit. The mangle of hair drooped around a white face with black slits painted over the eyes and mouth. The hat wasn’t a hat at all, but a small crown almost lost amidst the tangle. Something large hung around the clown’s neck. It was a crucifix with a clown nailed to it, the image’s face twisted in agony, a crown of thorns clamped down on its brow.
The clown raised something that shined silver in the light of the camera. It was a large butcher’s knife. He swung it down as Brendan watched, paralyzed.
The video stopped.
“It stops there?” one of the students asked. “What a rip-off.”
“Fake,” said another.
Theo put his tablet away. The teacher’s assistant was approaching. “I don’t know…the videos get pulled every time they‘re posted. You’ve got to dig to find them, but they keep showing up on new accounts.”
“He had two cameras with him,” Brendan said. “That’s not bystander video.” Brendan brought up his tablet with his geometry work in time for the teacher’s assistant to inspect the group. The man nodded approvingly and moved along. “What was the video called?”
“‘God of Clowns Strikes Again.’”
“Didn’t the whole clown thing die off with all the bad Joker knock-offs a few years ago?” someone asked.
Brendan found the video. It had been posted three hours ago and already had forty thousand likes. He turned off the screen.
“What do you think?” Theo asked.
“Viral marketing for a Christmas movie,” Brendan said. “They all hit this time of year. I’ve never heard of Argonaut.”
“Well I have. He actually has sponsorship with an aerospace start-up in Colorado. He went missing three days ago.”
***
Brendan tried not to think about killer clowns or football cheats for the rest of the school day but found it impossible. Even Lucille stayed intent on their English class poetry assignment and didn’t say anything to Brendan for the duration of the class. The normalcy of it was refreshing. But Brendan couldn’t help himself. He got online via his phone, bypassing the school’s network and its overprotective filters. It didn’t take him long to find more clown videos. His search found three in total, and each time a hero was ostensibly murdered at the end.
“Hero snuff,” detractor commenters said. “Probably fake,” said most. But the hits kept coming. Brendan found the word probably disturbing. He kept digging. Hundreds of supers blogs, vlogs, and news reports fueled the viral interest in the videos but could shed little light on their veracity. And although the videos were always taken down by any site with any kind of commercial responsibility to their ad providers, they were quickly posted to mirror sites that had no such compunctions.
God of Clowns was popular in a way Brendan’s father could only have dreamed. Yet there seemed to be no angle for cashing in. The notion of an imminent movie announcement butted heads with the fact that there were three missing persons who had last been seen as the clown’s victims. Brendan found the other two videos and watched them a few times over, a feeling of self-disgust growing inside of him.
It was the worst thing he had ever watched, revolting, reveling in murder, supers snuff porn even though it cut away at the last second, but he couldn’t take his eyes off it. He felt embarrassed anytime anyone was close enough to see what he was viewing. When he closed his phone he found himself in a strange place, finally feeling numb about the real horrors he had witnessed during his fights with the warlords.
A man burning on a stack of tires. Tyler’s leg breaking under Torben’s foot. His own role in beating down Torben and Simba. Seeing Nurse Dreyfus get stabbed. It was as if the volume had turned down on it all and now he could breathe.
***
By the time the electronics club met, Brendan had concluded that a faster drone would have to be larger. Larger meant more visible. But more force could easily be applied if more than one drone was doing the pushing. The downstream Earth drone program had shown him the way. Now he just had to write the code to sync the drones.
Tina was cool and distant, intent on her own homework. Brendan waited for her to speak, but when she didn’t he felt an odd rush of anger. He worked on code on his tablet. Poser settled in between them and made a show of watching one and then the other, as if an invisible tennis match was taking place.
“Don’t you have something to do?” Brendan asked.
“Nope,” Poser said.
“How about plotting the intercept trajectory for a football so we don’t have to manually fly the drones?”
“Ask Vlad. He’s the one with the maths.”
Vlad was with a group of seniors huddled around a workbench. The large boy was the center of attention and speaking loudly. He held up what looked like a gun. Brendan flinched. When the weapon didn’t fire, he moved closer.
The barrel of the weapon was oblong and made of molded black plastic. Judging by the structure of the exposed battery pack, Vlad had borrowed from Charlotte’s glove design. Even though they were disconnected from Not-Earth, the upstream world continued to infect his own.
Vlad pointed the gun at one of the seniors. “You’re sure about this?” Vlad asked.
“You said it wouldn’t hurt.”
“I never said that. I said it would cause no permanent damage. Recovery should be instant.”
Doubt crossed the senior’s face. The other boys and girls in the group cheered him on even as they stepped away from him.
“Okay,” the senior said. “Do it.”
Vlad pulled the trigger. The gun made the briefest hum that reminded Brendan of the last time he had x-rays taken of his teeth. Then the boy staggered and almost fell.
“Gonna hurl,” he said.
“Sink’s that way,” Vlad said, pointing.
The senior shook his head, took a few deep breaths, and nodded. “I’m okay. Wow. That was intense.”
“Vlad, what is that thing?” Brendan asked, pushing his way in past the other students.
Vlad flashed a grin and held the gun up. “My sonic gun. A magnetic acoustic device. Nonlethal, of course. It’s nothing new, but I just made it better.”
“That’s on Ms. Hayes’s extra credit project list?”
There were enough snickers to tell him the answer was no.
“Can I see it?” Brendan asked.
“Wait your turn,” the senior who had been zapped said. He held out his hands for the gun.
Vlad made an adjustment. “Quick trigger pull only. And only for consenting targets. Okay?”
A collection of muttered agreements followed and he surrendered the weapon.
“We’re writing the drone program to intercept a football,” Brendan said once they were away from the seniors.
“And why am I helping you with this?”
“Because you’re my best friend, and I’ll do your calculus homework for the rest of the month.”
“You don’t have friends, just people caught up in your gravity well of problems. And you’re failing geometry. This is for Lucille, isn’t it? Why does she care so much about who wins a football game? And don’t say because of Tyler. You said she ditched him on Torben’s world, so you can’t make the case she cares. Now she wants to help him cheat to win a game?”
“Yeah, basically. But she’s going to help me with the agent next time he comes he
re.”
“We were helping you with no strings attached. With her involved, we’re going to get in trouble. We’re lucky no one got expelled with everything we’ve been through. We shouldn’t be trusting her.”
Tina was close enough to hear. Without looking away from her work, she raised the stylus from her tablet and pointed it at Vlad emphatically.
“Do you actually have a plan with this agent?” Vlad asked.
“I’m working on it,” Brendan said. “So you’ll do it?”
“Let me see what you’ve got so far.”
Judging by Vlad’s exasperated sighs as he read over the code, Brendan didn’t have much. He had even less once Vlad began deleting much of what was there. “This is all wrong,” Vlad muttered, his fingers tapping away at Brendan’s tablet keyboard.
Tina looked up at Brendan. “When?” she asked. He found it difficult to meet her hard expression. “When will you take Lucille to the FBI office?”
“When the time is right. Assuming that’s the right move.”
“That’s no answer. Your father is in real danger, and you’re willing to wait weeks before doing anything.”
“I’m doing something, and it’s a long shot. The authorities are involved. What else are we supposed to do?”
“Nothing stopped us when it was the headmaster. But now you’re willing to let Lucille sideline you with this football business. Did she get her hands on you?”
“Are you jealous?”
Her lips tightened and she gave him the coldest smile. “No. There’s nothing to be jealous about, is there?”
Poser put up his hands at both of them as if refereeing a fight. “Hey, guys, it’s been a long grueling day of learning and expanding our young minds. Brendan and I are going to the cafeteria and will bring back some coffee and treats. Get everyone’s waning blood sugar back on track. Sound good? Of course it does.”
The Dark Academy Page 4
