Blue Moon

by James Ponti

  My pulse was racing, and it felt like my heart was beating all the way up in my throat. They wheeled the bed into the operating room, and the instant we heard the door slam shut behind them, Natalie bolted into action.

  “Let’s go now!” she said more as a command than a suggestion.

  “What about them?” Alex asked. “Orville? Edmund? The operating room? Shouldn’t we see what they’re doing?”

  She was determined. “No way! We’re getting out of here before anyone else arrives.”

  She poked her head out the doorway and made sure everything was clear, then she motioned for all of us to follow her. We moved as quickly and quietly as possible down the hall and through M42, toward the main door.

  “Can’t we just go take a peek?” Alex asked, not giving up.

  “The space is too confined,” she said. “We’ll get caught.”

  Alex shrugged. “So what? There are five of us and two of them. I like our odds.”

  “First of all, there are four of us,” she said. “We’ve already asked a lot of Liberty to help us this far. He’s a part of Dead City, and we can’t ask him to fight the Unlucky 13. And second, we don’t know how many more are on their way.”

  Alex was frustrated and went to say something, but she didn’t want to hear it. She just cut him off and said, “This is not a debate. I’m in charge, and we’re leaving. Now!”

  I’d never seen the two of them so much at odds with each other. And I’d have to say it wasn’t the ideal location for this to happen. Still, Natalie was not backing down, and after a few deep breaths, Alex relented. The mood stayed pretty tense as we snuck out of the shelter and then during the long climb back up the stairs. No one really talked until we reached Grand Central, where all the arms and legs we saw were actually attached to living, breathing people.

  “Can I talk now without you pulling rank on me?” Alex asked, more than a little peeved.

  “Sure,” Nat snapped back at him.

  “I don’t understand what happened down there,” he complained. “The Unlucky 13 is setting up a secret operating room a couple hundred feet underground. There are mysterious body parts in a freezer. There are new medical supplies being brought in. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that we should investigate.”

  Natalie thought for a moment before responding, and I couldn’t tell if she was regretting her decision or was just angry at Alex. Maybe it was both.

  “I didn’t think it was safe,” she said. “There was only one door in and out of there, and we had no idea how many people were coming behind them. There was too much of a chance that we’d get trapped.”

  “What happened to Danger Girl?” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Normally, I’m the one trying to get you to be more careful. Didn’t you risk getting arrested by marching in the Thanksgiving Day Parade just to sneak up to Ulysses Blackwell?”

  “I did,” she said, her voice rising. “And do you remember how that day turned out? I got slammed against a rock wall a couple times. Maybe it knocked some sense into me, because I will not let that happen to anyone else.”

  Suddenly, it made sense why she was being more cautious than usual.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I should have been more sensitive to that.”

  “It’s okay,” she replied, her mood calming down. “I just want us to be careful.”

  “I want that too,” he said softly. “You made the right call.”

  There was an awkward silence, and I decided to break the tension, or at least try to, with a little humor. Not always my strong suit, but I’m getting better.

  “Are we done fighting? Because I haven’t had anything to eat since that kettle corn, and it’s making me cranky. Oh, and so is the thought that the Unlucky 13 might be planning to unleash the zombie apocalypse on Manhattan.”

  “There’s that word again,” kidded Liberty. “Remember, I can say it and you can’t.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Do you guys see what the hunger is doing to me? It’s making me insensitive.”

  Luckily, there was a cinnamon pretzel stand nearby, and I was able to calm the rumbling in my stomach long enough for us to say our farewells. Mostly, I wanted to make sure that Alex and Natalie were all patched up and that Liberty knew how much we appreciated his help.

  “I promise we won’t keep popping up unannounced,” Natalie said to him.

  “Good,” he said. “But I’m more worried about Blue Moon. What are you all going to do about it? You’re on the Baker’s Dozen. You’ve got to take charge.”

  “The problem is that we don’t really know what it is,” Natalie responded. She turned to Grayson. “Any chance your big old computer can find a copy of that file without the final pages ripped out?”

  Grayson smiled. “If it’s out there, Zeus can find it.”

  “Zeus?” Liberty said, confused.

  “He thinks his computer’s a person,” Nat explained.

  Grayson went to deny this, but then stopped himself. “I kind of do.”

  We all laughed, and that helped improve the mood.

  “I’ll start him searching tonight,” he continued. “But CIA documents are usually encrypted, so it could take a while for him to find what we’re looking for.”

  “Don’t take too long,” Liberty said as we were about to leave. “I’ve been thinking about Marek missing his Verify. That’s going to be huge. And it’s going to happen at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when a million people come to Times Square.”

  “A million people,” I said, making the connection. “Sounds like the perfect time to try out Operation Blue Moon.”

  Time Management

  One of the real drawbacks of being an Omega is that in addition to finding random body parts and uncovering plots for the zombie apocalypse, you also have to make time for regular life stuff like doing chores and finishing your homework. I caught a break (literally) when I fractured my hand and got out of some chores for six weeks. But the day the doctor removed my cast (or as my sister liked to call it, “the neon purple excuse machine”), Beth greeted me at the front door with a sponge and a dish towel and simply said, “You’re it.” Apparently, I’m now on dish duty for the rest of my life.

  As far as homework goes, I returned from our terrifying adventure into M42 and was still coping with the above-mentioned “parts and plots” when I got another shocker. I glanced in my planner and realized that I had only one day to cram for a major math test, build a shoe-box diorama of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and write a three-page research paper about the War of 1812.

  The last thing I needed was a couple of bad grades just as winter break was about to begin. Nothing says “home for the holidays” quite like being grounded the week of Christmas and New Year’s. So I woke up Sunday morning determined to focus on nothing but schoolwork.

  I started off by creating special playlists designed to provide the perfect mood music as I worked on each one of my assignments. Sure, this took a little while, but I was certain it would come in handy down the line.

  Next, in order to relax both physically and mentally, I walked over to Astoria Park and shot baskets until I was able to make ten free throws in a row. This way I knew my mind and body were in perfect harmony with each other and therefore in the ideal state to do my best work.

  Finally, I headed over to Grayson’s to hang out . . . I mean, I headed over to Grayson’s to use his computer for help on my research paper. Zeus really is the most amazing computer I’ve ever seen, and the fact that Grayson pretty much built it from scratch gives you an idea of how talented he is. The fact that after an hour of using it, I’d only written a paragraph and a half of my term paper gives you an idea of how disinterested I was in doing homework.

  Everything made my mind wander. I was reading about the British Army invading Washington, DC, but I could only think about the undead invading New York. I was trying to compose the perfect topic sentence when I got distracted by an amazing aroma.


  “What is that?” I asked. “It smells delicious.”

  “Latkes.”

  I crinkled up my nose as I tried to figure out what a latke was. “What are they?”

  “Potato pancakes,” he said. “My mom makes them every year for the first day of Hanukkah. They’re delicious.”

  Grayson’s family is Jewish, it was the first day of Hanukkah, and I was in the way. How very Molly of me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Am I interrupting some special family time?”

  “That’s not until dinner,” Grayson said. “How’s your paper coming along?”

  I looked up at him and smiled sheepishly. “Can’t we just talk about the latkes and forget the paper?”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “I’m just having trouble building enthusiasm for the War of 1812,” I answered. “It seems kind of insignificant in light of the impending zombie apocalypse scheduled for New Year’s Eve. Speaking of which, has Zeus had any success in his search for the missing pages of Operation Blue Moon?”

  (See what I mean? Easily distracted.)

  “He had it narrowed down to two hundred million potential documents the last time I checked,” Grayson said with a shrug. “As soon as he finds the right one, he’ll e-mail it to me.”

  Something about the way he said it made me laugh. “You know, you really do treat Zeus like a person.”

  Grayson rolled his eyes.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “Why don’t you have him e-mail me, too? Or if he’d rather, he can just give me a call.” I held my fingers up next to my face like a phone.

  “You guys joke, but with his voice recognition software, he’s totally capable of doing that,” he boasted. “So don’t be surprised one day when the phone rings and it’s him. Let me show you.”

  Even though it meant postponing my homework, I slid over and let Grayson use the keyboard. He typed a quick command and started speaking to the computer.

  “Zeus, notify Molly when Blue Moon search results are complete.”

  The computer answered in a perfectly human-sounding voice, “By text or e-mail?”

  Grayson looked at me for the answer.

  “Text is fine,” I said with a laugh.

  “Confirmed,” said Zeus.

  “Doesn’t he need my number?” I joked.

  “He already has all your contact information,” Grayson said, pleased with himself and his computer.

  “Maybe we should just have him solve our New Year’s dilemma,” I added. I turned to the computer and said, “Zeus, what are the Unlucky 13 planning to do about Blue Moon on New Year’s Eve?”

  Okay, so I was kidding, but Zeus didn’t know that.

  “Initiating search,” he replied.

  “Yikes,” I said. “How do I tell him I was joking?”

  “You don’t,” he said. “Zeus does not have a sense of humor. If he doesn’t know the answer, he’ll search for anything that has all of those keywords in it.”

  Before I could say anything else, the computer made a beeping noise and spoke once again. “One result.”

  We looked up at the main monitor and saw a freeze frame from a podcast. The funny thing is that we both recognized the person in the picture.

  “Isn’t that . . . ?”

  “. . . Action News reporter Brock Hampton,” I said when Grayson couldn’t place the name.

  It was the same newscaster we’d eavesdropped on when he was reporting about the dead bodies discovered on Roosevelt Island and also the same one we’d seen on the Halloween broadcast talking about Jacob Blackwell’s death on the subway. He was cheesy and over-the-top, which made him infinitely more interesting than the War of 1812.

  “Click play,” I said.

  “Don’t you have a ton of homework to do?” Grayson asked.

  “I promise I’ll get back to it in one minute and fifty-eight seconds,” I said as I checked the time bar at the bottom of the video clip.

  “Okay,” he said.

  The report wasn’t really news. It was a list of special things Brock recommended to celebrate the holidays in New York. Most of it was obvious stuff like ice skating in Rockefeller Center or seeing the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. But the one that caught our attention, and the one that had made it turn up in Zeus’s search, was what he said about New Year’s Eve.

  “And what better way to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another than to spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square,” he said. “This year, I’ll be there with live updates all night long, and there will be a special treat as it will be a rare blue moon. Don’t be one of the unlucky ones to miss a blue moon in Times Square. It will be a night you’ll never forget.”

  It stopped and we looked at each other.

  “There’s a blue moon on New Year’s Eve?” I asked. “Is that weird?”

  Grayson made a funny face as he thought about it. “A blue moon is just the second full moon in a month,” he said. “It’s almost always going to be the last day or two of the month, so that makes sense. But his phrasing at the end was really weird. Even for Brock Hampton.”

  He dragged the cursor back, and we watched the end again.

  “Don’t be one of the unlucky ones to miss a blue moon in Times Square. It will be a night you’ll never forget.”

  “Didn’t he say something about being unlucky when Jacob Blackwell’s body was discovered?” Grayson asked.

  I thought back and realized that’s how I’d made the connection between Jacob and the Unlucky 13.

  “He did. We thought it was strange then, too.”

  Grayson smiled, and then he started to laugh.

  “What?”

  “Check this out,” he said. “Zeus, search Action News . . . Brock Hampton . . . unlucky.”

  A minute later, there were about a dozen podcast clips on the screen dating back to the beginning of the year.

  Grayson smiled, and I had no idea what he was so excited about.

  “This is how the undead find out,” he tried to explain. “This is how they learn when and where to show up for Verify or get any other news about the Unlucky 13. They watch Brock Hampton.”

  We played through all of the clips, and in each one Brock used the word “unlucky” and reported on a public event. Some we already knew for sure involved the Unlucky 13. In addition to the report on the bodies discovered on Roosevelt Island and Jacob Blackwell’s death on the subway, we found a story about Ulysses Blackwell’s float in the Thanksgiving Parade.

  “Brock’s probably undead too,” Grayson said. “What a perfect scam. We just think he’s inept, but he’s really sending secret messages to everyone in Dead City.”

  “Do you know what this means?” I asked.

  “That we can track the Unlucky 13?” he said with a goofy smile on his face.

  “Yes,” I answered. “But I think it also means the undead really are planning on launching Operation Blue Moon on New Year’s Eve.”

  Suddenly, his smile disappeared.

  “You know, I think you’re right.”

  Grayson dragged the cursor along the end of the time bar again, and we listened to Brock Hampton’s final sentence one more time.

  “It will be a night you’ll never forget.”

  All Hands on Deck

  We called Natalie and Alex and told them what we’d learned about Brock Hampton. Then it was time for Grayson to celebrate Hanukkah with his family and for me to stop talking about doing my homework and actually start doing it. I went home, shut myself in my room, and somehow managed to get it all done. It wasn’t exactly my best work, but at least it didn’t inflict any permanent damage to my grades. In fact, the only real harm done was to the night of sleep that got ruined by “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

  The story is about a murderer who hides his victim’s heart under the floorboards of his house. He then imagines that the heart comes back to life and beats so loudly that it drives him insane. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you want to read just
before you go to bed, right? So imagine reading it the day after you’ve looked into a deep freezer containing several random body parts. Needless to say, I wound up having various nightmares in which the hand, arm, leg, and finger we discovered all came back to life.

  But here’s the funny part: My sleeping brain was able to make a connection that my wide-awake brain totally missed. At some point during the night, it must have figured out where the body parts came from, because when I woke up, I just knew. I had suddenly put it together that Jacob Blackwell was missing an arm when his body was discovered on the subway, that Orville Blackwell lost the lower part of his leg because of the beat down Natalie gave him when we fought in the morgue, and that I chopped off Cornelius Blackwell’s hand during that same fight. (The finger had fallen off it earlier.)

  Theoretically, they could have been an entirely different arm, leg, hand, and finger, but I’m not a big fan of coincidence, and that seemed unlikely. The part that didn’t make any sense to me, though, was why they were being preserved in the freezer. Jacob and Cornelius were both dead and would no longer have any use for their missing pieces, and Orville seemed to have transitioned quite well onto his artificial leg.

  The lack of sleep caught up with me the next day, and by third period, I was dragging my way through school. I even nodded off during lunch. Lucky for me, Natalie snuck up from behind and poked me in the ribs, startling me so bad, I literally jumped out of my seat and screamed. Lucky because there might have still been a few kids left at school who weren’t totally convinced I was a freak show.

  “What’d you do that for?” I asked once I managed to catch my breath and regain my ability to form words.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It was just too perfect to pass up.”

  Alex and Grayson plopped down on the other side of the table and tried not to laugh too hard. Judging by the fact that everyone in the cafeteria was staring, it must have been pretty loud.

  “How bad was it?” I asked.

  “Not too bad,” Alex said.