He fell backward into the guard who had already drawn his pistol. They both fell to the ground as he fired several wild shots. I heard pings of ricocheted bullets in the confined space.
I rolled off Medlock. I could no longer see due to the smoke, but my hands found the guard’s face and I jabbed both my thumbs into his eye sockets. I pushed so hard I thought I might kill him. He screamed and flung me off him. I hit the floor pretty hard, but I knew I’d done some damage. The fog was thick, but through the haze I could see the guard flailing blindly on the ground.
Where was Mule Medlock? I spun around and saw him lying on the ground with a pool of blood blooming under him. He must have gotten hit by a ricocheting bullet. I crawled through the smoke, no longer able to put any weight on my ankles, in the direction of Olek and Packard.
Packard found me first. He came rushing out of the smoke with a giant saw in his hand. He swung it at me and I managed to just duck the blow without even thinking. I was on my knees, which put me at about an even height with him. I grabbed his whole torso in a massive bear hug, pinning his arms at his sides. Then I pushed all my weight toward him and we slammed to the hard tile floor.
Packard wheezed, the wind knocked out of him. I rolled left and then got back to my knees. He tried to get up but stumbled. I grabbed his hair and yanked back as hard as I could. He screamed and I ended up with a handful of black hair.
Hey, I know it’s cheap, but right then I just wanted to win the fight. By any means necessary. Who cared if it was by cheap means? I was fighting for our lives, after all.
Packard swung his fists at me wildly, but I was able to duck away from his pretty short reach. Then I grabbed wildly at the cart of tools. My hand closed around a massive syringe. Through the smoky haze, our eyes locked.
He held up a huge white knife made from what looked like a sharpened tusk. He swung it at me so quickly that I was barely able to fall back and out of the way. I actually felt a whoosh of air hit my face as the blade sliced just past my nose.
As I fell backward, I threw the syringe. I heard a soft thump and screaming. I climbed back to my knees and saw Packard running around wildly in the fog, the giant syringe lodged in his forehead. He was so out of control in the smoky haze that he ended up running right into the concrete wall with a thud. He slumped to the ground, blood dripping from a clearly broken nose.
This was turning into a bloodbath.
“Olek, are you okay?” I called out.
“Not really,” he replied calmly.
I guess it was a silly question being that he had two broken thumbs and a nasty bite mark on his arm. Although his reply meant he was alive, which was good enough for me.
“I’ll cut you free soon,” I said.
“No rush,” he said.
“My eyes, I can’t see,” I heard the guard moaning from somewhere behind me. “Kid, what did you do to my eyes?”
I crawled over to Olek and cut him free. His hands and arms were swollen and looked really painful. But he seemed to be in high spirits anyway.
“I knew you rescue me,” he said. “You’re best agent I ever meet.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, remembering that I was the one who had gotten us into this in the first place. “I can’t walk, Olek.”
“Here,” he said. The smoke was lifting now and I saw him swipe his arm across the metal cart, shoving all the tools onto the floor. “Get on.”
I climbed onto the cart. “Can you push it? With your thumbs and everything?”
“No worry, I got it,” he said.
He grabbed the cart with his fingers only. His crooked thumbs dangled below his palms.
“Take us over to Packard,” I said.
Olek wheeled us over to him. He was still breathing but completely knocked out. I reached into his jacket pocket and found a set of car keys with a security keycard attached to it. Just in case we encountered any locked doors while making our getaway.
“Okay, ready,” I said.
Olek pushed us toward the door, past the guard who had passed out with his hands covering his eyes. I knew he wasn’t dead because his chest heaved.
I used Packard’s keycard and shoved the door open. Olek pushed the cart forward and suddenly we were jammed in the door frame. I gave the door another push and looked back at Olek. He grinned as he struggled to get the cart through.
Behind him I saw a pool of blood on the cement where Mule Medlock had been lying. But Medlock himself was no longer there.
CHAPTER 41
“OH, CRAP, OLEK, WE HAVE TO GO, NOW!”
Then I saw Medlock. He stumbled toward us, one hand over his stomach where he’d been shot, the other holding a gun. He fired just as Olek gave a final push and freed us from the door frame.
“Are you hit?” I asked.
“Like Beatles song?” he asked.
“Not now,” I shouted, even though I knew his answer was as good as a no. “Let’s go!”
The cart moved pretty quickly down the hallway with Olek running while pushing it. Mule Medlock was running behind us, or more stumbling than running. But he was firing. Bullets whizzed past us, sometimes slamming into the wall just ahead of me. Had he not had a bullet wound in his stomach, I was pretty sure his aim would have been more deadly.
When we were finally at the outside door, Olek stopped the cart and ran around to open it. He grabbed the underside of the cart and pulled us both outside. The cart hit the doorframe and tipped, and we both spilled onto the pavement as the door swung closed. I sat up and Olek struggled to get to his feet with his injured hands.
Men with machine guns ran toward us from across the huge lot. Medlock must have hit some kind of alert. Then I saw the Mini Cooper. Its custom license plate read: PACKARD.
I locked eyes with Olek; he must have been thinking the same thing. We both nodded as I started crawling toward the car. The approaching men began firing. A few bullets hit the side of the car, and I heard them shouting.
“Don’t hit the dark-haired one. We need him alive!”
The shooting stopped, but they were getting close now. I used the keys I had taken from Packard to unlock the car. We climbed inside. I sat in the driver’s seat. I’d never driven before but figured it couldn’t be too hard. I’d seen my mom do it thousands of times. I started the ignition and put my foot on the brake, then yelled out in pain.
“Olek, you have to drive. I can’t use the pedals!” I yelled.
“I can’t steer,” he said, holding up his mangled thumbs.
“Uh, okay, you work the pedals, I can handle steering,” I said. “Press the brake.”
He crouched on the floor and then reached over and pushed on the brake pedal with his knuckles, wincing as he did so. I shifted the gear stick to R, which I assumed meant reverse.
“Okay, gas!” I yelled.
He slammed his hand onto the gas pedal and the car’s tires screeched and then suddenly we were zooming backward, way faster than I expected. Through the rearview mirror, I saw the men with guns diving out of the way.
I turned the wheel. “Brake!”
Olek hit the brake, and the car started spinning as it slowed. We must have spun at least 720 degrees before finally stopping. I smelled burned rubber. I quickly surveyed the road ahead. We were now facing the fence that separated the gray building from the main carnival area. I looked behind me. There were seven men with machine guns climbing to their feet.
“Gas, punch it hard!” I shouted.
Olek did, and after spinning for a second, the tires got their grip and we fired forward like a rocket. I screamed and held the wheel as steady as I could as we slammed into the fence. The car crashed right through it. We raced straight toward a ticket booth.
“Less gas!” I shouted.
Olek let up, and I spun the wheel. I turned it way too far, having no idea what I was doing. The car spun again, and I felt the right wheels lift up as we almost tipped over. Then we skidded to a stop, just missing the ticket booth.
&
nbsp; “Gas!” I said as I saw the men chasing us on foot through the rearview mirror.
The fairgrounds looked empty. They must have closed it after the animal debacle. It was dark outside now. I looked down and found a switch with a drawing of a light on it. I pulled it out and the headlights switched on.
“Okay, easy gas,” I said.
And then we were driving. It was a jerky, bumpy, swerving ride. But we managed to find the park entrance. The gate was closed. It was one of those dual metal triangle poles, but it looked a lot sturdier than the fence had been. I wasn’t sure if this small car could break through it. I looked back and saw several dark sedans zooming toward us.
I heard more shots and then suddenly our car spun out of control and crashed into the main ticket booth, rear end first. Airbags exploded everywhere around us even though we hadn’t hit it that hard.
“They must have shot our tire out,” I said.
Olek climbed back up into the passenger seat. He had been thrown into the back of the car by the collision. He sat down and nodded, looking dazed. Several sedans approached quickly.
“It’s over,” I said. “I’m sorry. I tried.”
“Is okay,” he said, and sighed.
Then a car pulled up on the other side of the front gate. The door opened, and Agent Blue got out of the driver side. He jumped the front gate and ran over to our smashed car, pulling out a pistol.
He pointed the gun at the approaching black sedans and fired four shots. All three cars spun out of control as their tires were hit. One of them actually flipped and started rolling, before coming to a stop upside down.
Agent Blue opened the door to the Mini Cooper.
“What are you waiting for? Let’s go,” he said.
“I can’t walk,” I said.
He reached in and lifted me out of the car easily, flung me over his shoulder, and we all ran back toward his car. Meanwhile, another car pulled up and Agent Nineteen and two other guys I didn’t recognize got out.
“I’ll get them back. You go take care of the enemy operatives,” Agent Blue said.
“Gray building behind the fun house!” I shouted as they hopped the gate and ran toward the crashed black sedans.
Agent Nineteen threw back a thumbs-up to let me know he’d heard me.
Then the three of us were in Agent Blue’s car, heading toward the school. I wanted to talk on the way back, but I was too exhausted to do much of anything but sit there and wonder what in the heck had taken them so long.
CHAPTER 42
I THOUGHT WE WERE DRIVING TO THE SCHOOL, BUT THAT WASN’T entirely correct. We did go to the school parking lot, but when we got out of the car, Agent Blue led us away from the school. Toward the sledding hill. It was pretty embarrassing, but he had to carry me, piggyback style, since I couldn’t walk on my ankles.
As we walked, he handed me a cell phone.
“Call your mom. Let her know you’re at a friend’s house and will be home later tonight,” Agent Blue said.
I called home and told my mom I was at Olek’s house, that they were finally getting to move back in. She sounded happy for him, but I thought I detected a trace of sadness in her voice.
“Can I also call my friends?” I asked Agent Blue after I’d disconnected. “To let them know I’m okay?”
“Sure,” Agent Blue said as we descended the sledding hill.
So I called Danielle and before letting her ask too many questions I simply told her I was okay and home safely and would explain more the next day. Then I hung up before she could say much more than “okay.”
We went all the way down the sledding hill and around the base of it, right up to the exposed dirt hillside filled with tiny swallow nests. A small shed sat in a nearby grove of trees. A small building that I’d seen a thousand times before but never paid much attention to. I mean, it was a maintenance shed. What was there to notice about it, really?
Agent Blue opened the shed’s door with an electronic keycard.
“You mean all those winter days that we’ve been sledding down this hill, we’ve been sledding right near a top secret government agency entrance all along?” I asked.
“Yes,” Agent Blue said.
“But isn’t that kind of crazy? To put a secret entrance just a few hundred feet from where dozens of kids go sledding?”
“You all stay away from this shed, don’t you?” Agent Blue asked.
It was true. We all did. There was just something about it that made us stay away.
“We do,” I admitted.
“That’s not a coincidence,” he said. “You ever heard of an EMF?”
I shook my head.
“It means electromagnetic field. It’s a magnetic field that sometimes occurs naturally or around large metallic objects. Anyway, the theory is that really strong EMFs make people feel uneasy. So we’ve generated a very strong EMF within a hundred-foot radius of this shed.”
“Won’t our brains be fried?” I asked.
He shook his head as we stepped inside the shed.
“No, EMFs have no detectable permanent physical effects on humans.”
I nodded and glanced back outside at swallow nest hill and noticed that many of the nests faced the front of the shed.
“There are cameras in those holes, aren’t there?” I asked, remembering Dillon’s claim.
“They’re extremely tiny and partially buried. How could you know that?” Agent Blue asked.
I debated telling him about my crazy (or not so crazy, apparently) friend Dillon’s theories but thought better of it.
“Lucky guess,” I said.
The inside of the shed wasn’t empty like I’d expected. It wasn’t very large, but it still contained everything you’d have expected it to if you didn’t know it was really a secret entrance to a government facility. There was a lawnmower, some gardening tools, a fuse box, a generator, stuff like that.
Agent Blue used a key to unlock and lift up the face of an old first-aid box on the wall. Underneath it was what looked like the normal contents of a first-aid box. But then he felt around inside and pulled open a false front to reveal a small digital pad. He placed his index finger on it and then leaned his face close to the box.
A red line of light passed over his eye, and the pad under his finger blinked green. An elevator-size square panel in the floor slid open. The platform beneath it was about a foot below the floor of the shed.
Agent Blue and Olek stepped onto the platform, with me still on Agent Blue’s back.
“Keep your arms at your sides unless you want to lose them,” Agent Blue said to us.
Then suddenly we were moving down, the panel above us closed, and everything went black. We were in a more normal-looking elevator now. The keypad inside had only three buttons, all of them unmarked. But they were all a different color. Red, blue, yellow. Agent Blue put his finger over the yellow button. It lit up and blinked a few times.
“You might feel your ears pop a little bit,” he said.
Before I could even respond, the floor just dropped out on us. At least that’s what it felt like. The elevator zoomed downward so quickly that it felt like my stomach and face were still located miles above the rest of me. As he’d warned, I felt my ears popping, just like they did when I dived to the bottom of a ten-foot-deep swimming pool.
We must have zoomed down at an incredible rate for close to twenty or thirty seconds. I couldn’t believe that we were actually that far underground. We must have been close to a mile beneath the surface. Then, mercifully, the elevator finally slowed to a stop.
“How far down are we?” I asked.
“As far as is absolutely possible without putting the structure in danger,” Agent Blue said.
The elevator doors opened, and I was looking at a small entryway of sorts. It was basically a little room with marble floors and several other sets of elevator doors. But straight ahead of me, through a set of glass doors, there was a huge room, bustling with people. We exited the elevator. Agent B
lue used a keycard to open the glass doors and we entered the massive atrium.
“Welcome to Agency headquarters,” he said.
CHAPTER 43
THE HUGE ROOM WAS PROBABLY THE SIZE OF SEVERAL LARGE gymnasiums with high ceilings, making it feel like a cavern. It was exactly what I would have expected the main room of some top secret government agency to look like.
It had marble floors, flags, plaques all over. On the left wall there was a huge projection TV screen that took up pretty much the whole space. On the right wall there were hundreds of framed portraits of men and women. Directly ahead of me were dual glass staircases leading up to some offices with glass walls. In between the staircases was a huge American eagle sculpture flanked by an American flag and another flag I couldn’t identify. Everything looked new, clean, modern, high-tech, and expensive. People crossed the room and ascended and descended the staircases in a chaos of activity.
Agent Blue saw my face and said, “We call this room the Lobby. It’s the heart of the Agency. There will be time to look around later. Right now, though, we need to get you guys to the medical wing.”
I was still hanging on to his shoulders as we headed left, along the wall, toward a set of metal doors in the corner of the Lobby and adjacent to several rows of glass cubicles housing metal desks and expensive-looking glass computer monitors. Most of the people working didn’t even look up once as we passed.
The medical wing of the Agency HQ looked like pretty much every hospital I’d been in before. Except there were no windows and everything looked slightly more high-tech. I ended up getting a walking boot cast on one ankle, and a bandage on the other. Olek had two casts put on his hands, and his arms were secured in double slings. He looked pretty funny.
When we got back to the Lobby of the Agency HQ, Olek and I were led up the huge glass staircase overlooking everything in the atrium. Agent Blue ushered us into a conference room and before leaving told us to wait there.
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