Teen, Inc.

by Stefan Petrucha

  “Here’s the part where you get down on your knees, on your knees, Jaiden, and thank the stars for Caitlin, because you know what my laptop has that Bungrin’s machine and my PDA do not?”

  “What?”

  He tapped a little black slot on the side of his machine. “DVD burner. I connect the computers, make a copy of his files, and Bungrin won’t even realize what we’ve got until it’s too late.”

  We looked over at his still form, lying on the carpet.

  With a grin, Nate added, “Maybe he’ll even think he just fell or something.”

  “Fine. Do it.”

  “Thank Caitlin.”

  “Thank you, Caitlin.”

  “Who’s Caitlin, anyway?” Jenny asked. “Caitlin Fermelli?”

  I shook my head. “Tell you later.”

  Burning a whole DVD takes a while, and looking back, I wish Nate had just picked a few files to copy. I kept thinking someone would come through those two big black doors to arrest us.

  After waiting forever, I asked, “How much longer?”

  He waved me off. “Almost there.”

  Getting antsy, I looked in the spot where Bungrin’s body was supposed to be. Only, it wasn’t.

  “Nate! Nate!” I said.

  “Almost…”

  Just as he whipped a silver DVD out of his laptop’s slot, I yanked his shoulder. He turned to me with this look of total triumph. “It’s totally burned, baby! We’re out of here!”

  I almost didn’t have the heart to tell him. “Bungrin’s gone.”

  I felt Jenny tapping on my shoulder.

  “No, he’s not, Jaiden,” she said.

  I turned and saw she was right. There was Bungrin, standing in the opposite corner of the office, looking fit as a fiddle.

  And he was holding a gun.

  16

  YOURS FOR THE MULTITASKING

  Any illusions we might have had that Bungrin probably wouldn’t actually use a gun against a trio of wacky and lovable kids went right out the window when he fired at us.

  I knew from TV that a real gun didn’t sound or work like one from a video game, but that didn’t really prepare me for this. There was a sharp crack like a splintering piece of wood and Nate’s Taser, which sat on the desk just a few inches from the edge of his laptop, exploded. I mean, it utterly dusted. One second, slick black Taser, the next, plastic shards flying in the air.

  There was also this weird little time lag that’s hard to describe; you’re watching the gun fire, hearing the sound, seeing the Taser disintegrate all in slow motion. For a flash, you’re removed from it, thinking, huh, that’s not so bad, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with me, but then out of nowhere, the rest of your body catches up with what you’re seeing and your glands start pouring tons of adrenaline into your body and you realize you might die at any second.

  I ran, away from Bungrin. Jenny gasped and did the same. Neither of us made a sound, but Nate screamed in a weird way that sounded like a cross between a little girl and a wounded puppy. The DVD still in his hand, he dove behind the desk. I don’t think Nate was bravely trying to protect the DVD because it had the information we’d risked it all for, I think he’d just forgotten he was holding it.

  I still couldn’t believe what was going on. I started thinking maybe Bungrin was this incredible marksman and he was just trying to eliminate a threat and scare us by hitting the Taser, but then he said, “Crap! I missed,” real loudly, fired again, and hit the corner of the desk.

  “Are you crazy?” I screamed.

  Bungrin turned my way and said, “You tell me.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Time’s up!”

  I jumped as he fired again. I don’t know where that bullet went, I was too busy eating carpet, but near as I could tell, it didn’t hit me. I rolled over on my back and saw him coming toward me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jenny grab a laptop from the desk and race out the door.

  Good, I thought. She made it. Not so good that Bungrin was walking up to me with a gun in his hand. As he came forward, I kind of skittered backward like a spider, hand-walking on the wet floor until my head bumped the bottom of the fountain. Water sloshed onto my hair and forehead from the overflow.

  I heard this weird slurping sound and all of a sudden the overflow stopped, but I was too worried about the crazy man with the gun to wonder what it was. I wiped the water from my eyes to see him towering over me, aiming the gun at my head.

  “Some of the protestors threatened violence, so Security suggested I start carrying a weapon. I was knocked out. When I came to, I thought it was a kidnapping, I thought my life was in danger, so I fired to defend myself. By the time I realized it was you, it was too late,” he said. He said it like he was practicing his story for the press, but really I think he just wanted me to know he’d be fine even if he did kill me.

  I was going to ask how he planned to explain the fact that he didn’t recognize me even though he’d shot me point-blank in the face, then I realized he could just say it was dark, or he was confused. But really I couldn’t get past the whole I-was-about-to-die thing enough to speak.

  Then out of nowhere, this big black blob fell on top of his head and shoulders. Bungrin stumbled back, gurgled and tried to rip it off, but it was very heavy and, judging from the drops of water that flew from it, very wet.

  “Jaiden, come on!” Jenny screamed.

  As she helped me get to my feet, I realized what had happened. She hadn’t just run off. She’d grabbed the soaked coats from the stream and tossed them on Bungrin’s head. I was going to say thanks, but with Bungrin almost free of the coats, it seemed more important to run.

  As we headed for the door, I screamed at Nate. He did this funky running crawl out from behind the desk. I had no idea anyone could crawl that fast, but by the time he was at the door, he’d used his arms to push himself to his feet. The disk was still clenched in his hand.

  We nearly tripped over our soggy feet as we hit the hall and booked. Nate, who was drier, actually got ahead of me and Jenny. As soon he reached the elevators, he started jamming the Down button like crazy with his index finger.

  As if that would help.

  As I passed, I grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him along. The staircase was a few yards away. All three of us pushed through the door at once, which set off the alarm. Instead of the wild screech I was hoping for, there was this really low beeping sound. I figured, hoped really, it was connected to the rest of the NECorp security system, which would mean it was only a question of time before someone came up and saved us from getting killed. I mean, unless they were all part of Bungrin’s secret zombie army now, which, if you stop to think about it, isn’t nearly as strange as the fact that the CEO of a major corporation was trying to kill three teenagers with a handgun.

  With the down staircase right in front of us, for some sick reason my best buddy Nate turned and headed for the stairs that led to the roof.

  “Down!” I screamed. Then I pointed at the freaking stairs, like he couldn’t see them.

  “Up!” he screamed back. And he pointed, too.

  “Down! It’s the only way out!” I said, like it wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Up! He’ll never think to look for us that way!”

  I really didn’t want to get into a major, no-holds-barred argument with Nate, and it didn’t look like Jenny was going to break the deadlock anytime soon. She just stood there with the laptop in her hand, staring at us as we yelled at each other, like we were nuttier than Bungrin. Realizing that in a few seconds the rootin’ tootin’ exec would be upon us and it wouldn’t matter which direction we went if we didn’t go somewhere, I caved and we headed up.

  After two flights of steel and concrete steps, we slammed into another emergency door, heard another alarm beeping, and spilled out into the eerie stillness of the night.

  Once we were all through the door, standing on this red gravel that covered everything, Nate p
ushed it shut. Surprisingly the beeping stopped. Or, maybe we couldn’t hear it anymore with the door closed.

  Nate was panting. Little bursts of water vapor shot out of his mouth as he talked. “Okay, okay. Now we just wait here. No way is he going to find us. No way.”

  I looked around. I’d lived at the NECorp headquarters my entire life, but you know, I’d never been up on the roof. I felt like someone who lived in Manhattan, but never bothered to see the Statue of Liberty. The first thing I noticed, what with me being wet from the floor and not having a coat on, was that it was freaking freezing.

  The second thing I noticed was that the view was nice. There was a dull haze from the lights in the parking lot, but if you looked straight up you could see tons of stars. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could make out the houses in the development where my fake house was and the football field outside of Deever High. In the other direction I saw the strip mall, the woods, and what I thought was the top of the LiteSpring factory.

  It wasn’t the whole world exactly, but, in a nutshell, it was mine.

  Jenny, meanwhile, had the laptop open and was typing furiously, which seemed odd under the circumstances, until she explained.

  “I left my cell in my coat,” she said. “So I’m emailing my dad and everyone I know. I can even send them the data straight from Bungrin’s laptop.”

  “Only one problem with that,” Nate said.

  “What?”

  “That’s not Bungrin’s laptop. That one’s mine.”

  Jenny looked at the rig, confused, then said, “Oh yeah.”

  “Don’t sweat it, we’ve still got this,” Nate said, his breathing slowing down. He held his hand up and showed the DVD.

  I took it from him, looked at the rainbow shine on the data side, and actually thought for a minute there that we’d won.

  I started walking over to Jenny with it, so she could send the data, when I noticed she was shivering. So, I put my soggy arm around her.

  “See that? You are cool,” I said.

  “No, I’m not,” she answered. “I’m f-f-freezing.”

  Nate saw us and rolled his eyes again, then he started looking around, like he was trying to find another way down or out, but really, I think, he was just trying to avoid looking at us. Then he got this weird expression and started walking toward us.

  “Jaiden, there’s something I really gotta tell you. There was a lot of stuff on that laptop that I copied over to the DVD. Bungrin’s not just…”

  Before Nate could finish, the door to the roof swung open and I realized how stupid I was for expecting Security to show up and save us because of the lame beeping alarm.

  It wasn’t Security, of course, it was Bungrin.

  “No!” Nate screamed. Not like he was terrified or anything, just like he was really, really annoyed. “No, no, no! Why’d you come up here? What made you think we were here?”

  Bungrin raised an eyebrow. “It was easy. There’s all this water and white crap on your feet. As soon as I retraced my steps and looked down, I just followed the footprints.”

  Nate lifted his sneaker, like Bungrin had some reason to lie about it, then tossed his head up and rolled his eyes. “Damn!”

  All this time, Jenny was inching farther away, toward some kind of air-conditioning unit. I thought for a second she might make a run for it, but Bungrin just pointed his gun at her. “No, no, back here now.”

  Jenny, looking like a deer caught in the headlights, obediently walked over next to me and Nate.

  Bungrin looked at his fancy-ass wristwatch, typically impatient. “Okay, hand over that DVD and the laptop.”

  Jenny looked at him, real defiant. “Because you know that plant is poisoning the water, right? Because you know you’ve been lying about the mercury levels? And then you’re going to just … kill us?”

  Bungrin looked surprised for a moment, not so much at what she was saying, but at the fact that she was talking at all. Once he got over that, which took maybe a half second, he nodded vigorously and said, “Uh … yeah! That’s pretty much it,” like she’d said two and two was four.

  He came closer. It was one of those lose-lose situations, you know? Maybe if we’d trained for weeks and had some sort of tight attack plan, we could take him off balance, maybe even get the gun. He was big, not as big as Tony, but our one real weapon, the Taser, was gone, so there was nothing we could do.

  There I was, standing there with the DVD, the proof we needed right in my hand. Bungrin had already proven he was willing to shoot us, and it looked like whatever patience he’d had, which was never much to speak of, was gone.

  But then I realized, what the hell? If you’re on a roller coaster to hell, you might as well put your hands up and scream. Maybe I couldn’t do anything with the DVD, but maybe someone else could.

  While Bungrin glared at me, I flung the silver disc out into the night sky, like a Frisbee. It headed out like a flying saucer, over the parking lot.

  Nate and Jenny grinned. Bungrin looked shocked a moment, but then, in a flash, he raised the gun, aimed, and fired.

  And the son of a bitch hit it.

  Scores of little silver pieces danced in the air, turning end over end like some polyethylene plastic rain.

  “Oh, man!” screamed Nate. “Oh, man! That really, really sucks!”

  Jenny’s face just dropped.

  As for Bungrin, well, he looked about as surprised as we did.

  “That’s it then, eh?” He took a few steps closer to me. “Turn around, Jaiden, it makes for a better story if I can’t see you from the front.”

  “You’re going to shoot us anyway?” I said.

  “Yeah, now you really do know too much, yada yada yada. Turn around.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “I’ll shoot your girlfriend first.”

  I thought about that scene with Clint Eastwood, the bad guy, and Clint’s daughter. This was kind of like that, only I didn’t have a gun, like Clint did, so there wasn’t much I could do. I looked at Jenny a second, thinking I’d never see her or anything else again, then I did like he asked and turned my back to him.

  I could see the stars mixing with bits of DVD dust. I had no idea where the gun was, if it was by his side, pointed at my back, or right up against the hair on my head. I felt him get closer, though, I felt him lean in nice and close so he could whisper.

  “Just to make things absolutely clear to you, even without me in the mix, it never would have worked your way. NECorp could never have come clean and shut down the LiteSpring plant. It’d be suicide.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. Sure he was smart about business, but what was he, Nostradamus or something?

  “Because,” he said. “We tried it, and I saw what happened.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “We tried it. With SafeWarm. One bad valve, one stinking bad valve nearly brought all of NECorp down. It took ages to recover from that. Ages. Ages for NECorp, ages for me. And what did we get for all our troubles? You.”

  I turned around and looked at him. The gun was out, held level at about his waist. He had that smile as usual, but his eyes were wavering in their sockets, like there was some kind of pressure building behind them and steam was about to come whistling out of his ears.

  “What did you have to do with it? Dan Blake was the plant manager, and he got fired.”

  Nate called out, his voice all shaky. “He is that Dan Blake guy, Jaiden. He just changed his name. Some of his stock holdings are still in his old name.”

  Bungrin whirled toward Nate. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you? Yeah, that’s it. Hide in plain sight. I’m Dan Blake. That one stupid valve set back my career ten years. I had to change my name and start over.”

  He turned back to me, really angry, like it was my fault my parents died. “You know how much time that cost me? I should’ve been retired by now, sitting on my yacht with my trophy wife and all the toys in the world. Instead, here we are. For the want of a nail,
the war was lost. Almost.”

  Well, you can probably guess that I was pretty surprised. I didn’t have any real-life experiences to measure the feeling against, but there were lots of examples from comic books. It was like when Batman found out the Joker killed his parents, or Spider-Man found out that the crook he failed to stop went on to shoot his uncle Ben. I was so full of fear and rage, I really felt entitled to turn into some kind of superhero.

  How great would it have been if I could’ve reached out, lifted Bungrin up, and thrown him halfway across the city, where he could crash through the wall of his polluted factory and land in a pile of radioactive poisonous gunk, and all the mercury could pour out of the river, right into his mouth?

  Remember what I said about the roller coaster to hell? I couldn’t actually hurl him or anything, but I figured I’d give it a shot.

  I pulled back and punched him in the stomach. It felt like I was hitting a thick, firm mattress. No give at all. He just laughed.

  “Really, Beale. That the best you got?”

  I hauled off and clocked him in the jaw. That gave a little. His whole head turned to the left.

  “Remember what Nancy said!” Nate screamed.

  So I kneed him in the crotch.

  That hurt. I could tell, because his mouth turned into a little circle and he bent forward. With his head all of a sudden close to me, I punched him in the jaw again.

  “Yeah, Jaiden!” Nate said.

  On the one hand, it felt pretty good. On the other, I didn’t really feel like I was accomplishing much of anything. It wouldn’t bring back my parents, and he was still holding the gun.

  When I grabbed for that, he just threw me. I went up in the air, landed hard, and skidded across the gravel.

  I looked up and he leveled the gun at me. He hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  “Sideways is just as good,” he said. Then he glanced at his watch one last time. “Now, time is really up,” he said as he aimed.

  The door to the roof burst open, filling the night air with that lame beeping sound. It was Tony, with a bunch of NECorp security running up behind him, come to rescue us.