by Sonja Bair
“By the time this is over, someone will have gotten hurt, Freya,” David replied, looking at me apologetically. “Most likely, someone will die. I would like to claim elsewise, but I sincerely doubt it. Werewolves are not known to be compromisers. There is a strict hierarchy of power. When the power structure is in flux, blood will be spilt until the new order is established. Robert and Maria have laid relatively low recently. It surprises me. I’m guessing things aren’t going well in Santa Fe, so they are needing to control things both at home and here in San Luis. My contacts haven’t been answering me recently, so I don’t have answers.”
“Freya is now part of the hierarchy of werewolves, yes?” my mom asked.
David nodded.
“So she will need to be eliminated before the werewolf tribe settles down?”
He leaned forward and a light blazed in his eyes. I could feel power flow out and around him. His words were spoken softly, but with great intensity. “If you assume that I will be the one killed, then I suppose Freya is at risk as well,” David said. “But I will not be killed. Especially now that Freya is involved. I assure you that Robert and Maria will not hurt her.”
My mom sat back in her chair and regarded him closely. I wondered if David could tell if she was looking past his features, and looking deeper. She, too, had been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with more than the standard skills of an Alva. I wondered what colors she saw in his aura. It was a useless question to ask, because I knew she would never tell me. She claimed her ability was a mixed blessing at best. Sometimes, it was a good predictor of the future; sometimes, it predicts nothing. The human spirit is a complicated matter.
My mother abruptly broke her examination and smiled tight-lipped at David. Whatever my mother saw, she wasn’t pulling out her bottle of mace, but her shoulders were still tense. I’d guess my mother was still deciding what she thought of David. That was okay with me; so was I.
Our food appeared almost magically at our table, brought by a silent waiter who must have recognized the tension at the table. Food helped turn the mood lighter and my mother played nice for the rest of the dinner. We continued to discuss the werewolf situation, but more along the lines of tactics and background information and less about personal concerns. David walked both of us back to my house after dessert. He gave me a chaste kiss on the check and then turned to my mother. She hugged him loosely. Her head reached mid-chest.
“Be careful,” were my mother’s only words. She turned and strode purposefully toward her car with her normal, straightforward sensibility. I smiled softly at David, told him good night and walked inside. Be careful, I thought. Good advice for everyone.
Chapter 23
For the second time in two days, I jerked awake in the very early morning hours. Sitting up abruptly, I straightjacketed myself with the sheets. I clawed at them, trying to disentangle myself and get out of bed at the same time. Eventually, I ripped them off, leaving a waterfall of sheets down the bed and onto the floor. My brain was flying at one hundred miles a second, but one thing was mysteriously clear: I knew where Jia was going to attack again. Somehow, deep in my brain while I slept, the pieces fell together.
“Alrik! Alrik! Get up now.” I grabbed some sweats and pulled them on over my pajama shorts. “Get up, get up. We need to go to my school; she’s attacking the school today.” I grabbed a hoodie and my shoes and ran into the living room. Much to Alrik’s credit, he had instantly woken up to my yelling and was already going at full speed. He was dressed and pulling on his second shoe. If I weren’t consumed by the need to be gone ten minutes ago, I would have been impressed. “You drive. I have to get my shoes on.”
I grabbed my set of school keys and raced out the door. Alrik still hadn’t said anything, but I guess he had trusted my intuition and decided to ask questions later. I grabbed the handle to his car door, but it was still locked. I glanced at my watch. It was 4:30 a.m. We had time, but not much. Come on. Come. On.
The instant the car beeped, I jerked the door open. I had my seat belt on and feet stuffed in shoes by the time Alrik had backed out of the driveway. I sat back in the seat, heart still racing. Alrik spared me a quick look before he shifted the car into drive. “Tell me.”
“Jia has decided that my school is a place of fraud. I don’t know why. Maybe she thinks that we are teaching lies to the students. Maybe she thinks that we are bending students’ wills to match our own. I don’t know. But the why doesn’t matter right now. She is going to gas the school.”
Alrik shifted into third gear and was already exceeding the speed limit. “How do you know?” “Yesterday, I noticed that the chemical storage room was unlocked. I thought that between Philip and I, one of us had forgotten to lock it after cleaning up. There was an empty bleach bottle sitting on the counter, but I didn’t think anything of it. Later on, I noticed that we were all out of the strongest concentration of hydrochloric acid. Before the start of the year, I went through all the chemicals and made a list. We had plenty hydrochloric acid.” My heart was racing and my breaths were coming too fast. I put my head between my knees and tried to slow my breathing. I couldn’t flip out now; I had to lock the panic down until after this was taken care of.
“Bleach and hydrochloric acid. Doesn’t that make chlorine gas?” asked Alrik.
“Yes. The same gas that they used in World War I, but then the world banned it because it was too nasty even for warfare,” I said with my head still between my knees.
“How will she deploy it?”
I eased myself up straight, the feeling of panic carefully squished down into a box, at least for the moment. “I’m guessing the chemicals will still be liquid and then they’ll mix right before exposure, creating a gas. The gas would be tricky to store and would dissipate if she created it too soon.”
“Some sort of booby trap, then?” Alrik asked.
“Yes. Maybe connected to the action of opening a door? That would be the easiest and most effective way. We should call the police.”
“Not yet,” Alrik said. “If we can find the location of the chemicals, we can remove them—no harm, no foul, no messy explanations.”
“And if we don’t?”
Alrik glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “We give ourselves until five-thirty. If we don’t find it by then, we call in cops.”
The school grounds never looked so ominous. Many early mornings in San Luis Obispo start foggy, with a thick marine layer coating the city. I normally think of the fog as a reminder to not take the beautiful blue, sunny skies for granted, but today, the layer felt oppressive and heavy. The distant trees surrounding the baseball field were cloaked in grey, covering whatever or whoever may have been using them as cover. The school itself was completely darkened except for one bulb casting light down on the main entrance. It looked as if the school was waiting for us, taunting us, with a malevolent invitation to enter.
I got out of the car and cautiously approached. Because of the overwhelming sense of urgency, all my senses were overloaded. I smelled the wind. I felt the moisture in the air pressing down on me. My ears hurt from trying to pick up any out-of-place noise. But there was nothing out of place. My first try at unlocking the school was a big fumble. My hands were damp, and the keys slipped. On my second try, I heard the click of the tumbler falling back into the door. Alrik leaned past me and reached down to the door handle.
“You watch the bottom half of the doorframe, I’ll watch the top. If we see anything, I’ll slam the door and we reevaluate,” he said. I nodded.
He adjusted his grip, tensed his fist around the lever, then exhaled loudly. The handle creaked down. Blood pulsed loudly through my ears. The handle creaked further down. A faint click sounded deep within the door. I jumped and Alrik snatched his hand away. We looked at each other, eyes wide. Did the click come from the lock mechanism or the crack of glass? No gas poured out the door, but would it be that obvious? Alrik ran his hand along the door frame all the way to the threshhold. He stood up and shook his h
ead at me. I cautiously leaned forward and sniffed—no smell of chlorine. I rubbed my damp hands on my pants, grabbed the handle, and steadily pushed down and pulled open. No more clicks sounded. There was no noise of breaking glass or dripping liquid. We were good for now. I pulled the door all the way open. Alrik walked in, me close on his heels.
We stood in the hallway, staring. Classroom upon classroom lined the hall. Now what?
“Let’s start with my room,” I said.
We did the same song and dance before opening my door. Nothing. My stomach fell. I knew Jia had planted poison gas around the school. Somehow I just knew. But with the elimination of obvious locations, we were now left trying to find a needle in a haystack. I looked around the room. Where would she put two containers of liquids to break and cause the most damage? I carefully opened the chemical storage room. Nothing. But while I was there, I grabbed the now-empty bottle of acid. If we did find the planted bombs, we could empty the acid back into the bottle to determine if we found all the booby traps.
Alrik was gently opening cupboards in my classroom, but with no luck, either. I stood with my hands on my hips, turning in a circle that was ten times slower than my thoughts. My mind raced to the chemical properties of chlorine gas. It has a yellowish-green tint and is heavier than air. During World War I, they would release canisters of it upwind. If the opposing side was lucky, soldiers would see the cloud blowing their way in time and could slap a gas mask onto their face. If they weren’t lucky, the gas would roll over the edge of the trenches and fall onto the soldiers, unaware. Perhaps the smell of pepper would first alert the solider of the gas’s presence, but more likely, it would be the burning of the tissue in their nasal cavities or eyes. When chlorine gas hits a moist surface, the highly reactive chlorine atoms combine with water to become hydrochloric acid. The acid immediately starts to eat away at this highly sensitive tissue, potentially burning away the whole cornea of the eye, leaving the person blind. If the gas is inhaled, it will invade the lungs, reacting with the moist pulmonary tissues, burning away the thin delicate lining the inside of the airways. The fluid that constantly surrounds the tissue then leaks into the lung cavity, causing the person to drown on their own body fluids. How could Jia do this, especially to innocent students?
Then it hit me. In the Inferno, those being punished in the eighth circle of Hell weren’t those who fell for the fraud. The second to last circle of Hell was reserved for those who committed the act of fraudulence. Jia would target the teachers themselves. And where do teachers hang out without kids around? Oh, no. I tried to speak, but the words got caught in my dry throat. I cleared my throat, swallowed, and tried it again.
“Alrik, she hid it in the faculty lounge. That’s where she could to the most damage to fraudsters.” The small part of my brain that wasn’t overridden by the horror of the situation giggled that I had called a bunch of high school teachers fraudsters. If we survived all this chaos and for some reason got to tell the world about it, I was going to order up black leather jackets for the teachers with Fraudsters scrawled in gothic letters across the back. And we’d walk around with scary tattoos like pictures of Number 2 pencils and calculators marking up our skin.
The faculty lounge was at the far end of the hall from my classroom, but running full tilt, we got there almost instantly. We stopped at the propped-opened door and peered in. Two microwaves, a fridge, a sink, two long tables, and a bunch of chairs. Nothing looked out of place. We split up and started investigating any hidden space—inside the fridge, under the table, the drawers in the counter. Still no chemicals. I paused for a moment, closed my eyes, and focused inward. Where would she put it to do the most damage? Chlorine is heavier than air. The trenches in World War I were the worst place to be in a chemical attack. The unfortunate gassed soldiers would have to scramble out of the trenches to escape the chemical burns, only to be picked off by the opposing snipers. Jia would put the chemicals above the teachers so the gas would sink down on us—she would put it above the ceiling.
I grabbed a chair and placed it on top of the table. Although I hadn’t said anything, Alrik must have figured out my idea because he also grabbed a chair and set it on the other table. We climbed up on our chairs and reached up for the suspended ceiling tiles. We both paused for a second, and our eyes met. My instinct told me that we were on the right track. This is where the booby trap was going to be. I nodded at him and whispered caution to us both. Inch by inch, we each lifted the two-foot-by-three-foot off-white gypsum tile up off its bracket.
Silence. Standing on my tiptoes, I peeked over the bracket into the dusty space above the ceiling. My eyes took a second to adjust to the dark, but then I saw my guess was correct. Gallon-sized brown glass jars rested on a steel beam in the ceiling. Hoses draped down. Suspended from the beam was some sort of power tool. I studied the setup for a moment, trying to figure the mechanisms. The power tool was a pressure washer. The trigger was taped down and the fan-shaped tip nudged through a ceiling tile and was camouflaged by a nearby sprinkler head. Another hose connected the pressure washer to the two jugs of what I could only assume was the missing bleach and hydrochloric acid. The pressure washer’s power cord snaked up and around the steel beams and eventually plugged into what looked like a timer connected to an outlet. Simple, but effective. Jia was planning on spraying down an atomized mixture of the acid and bleach from above. Not only would teachers get the poison from above, but as the gas settled and built up from the floor, nowhere in the room would be safe. But there was something else plugged into the same timer. My heart sank even further. What else had she planned? I visually traced the other cord and found it was attached to a standard box fan, which was hidden in the shadows. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out its purpose. I took one last look around, memorizing the setup, and ducked my head out of the suspended ceiling. Alrik did the same.
“It looks fairly straightforward. I think we can disarm it without too much trouble or danger,” I said.
“Agreed. First step is to unplug the system, which should depower the whole thing. Then we need to be careful not to spill the chemicals, and the trap will be harmless. Did you see the fan?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t tell what why it was there,” I said.
“Neither could I. But I don’t think it is dangerous in itself,” he replied.
“Famous last words,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Let’s get this thing disassembled and out of here as quick as we can.”
We moved as a team. I unplugged the timer, which was set to ten minutes after lunch started—the time when the most teachers would be in the lounge. I shook my head at the horrible thoroughness of her plan. Alrik carefully removed the hoses from the glass jugs and the power washer. We each lowered an armful of disassembled pieces of the booby trap onto the tables below. The only thing left was the fan. Alrik and I approached it cautiously, even though we had unplugged it with the pressure washer. At first, it seemed to just be a fan, nothing more. Then I noticed a small piece of string coming out of the casing. I traced the string into the fan. It was wrapped around the center axis. I traced it the other way, but it disappeared into the lounge through a hole the size of a quarter. I cut the string off the fan, grabbed the setup, and exited the suspended ceiling. From inside the teachers’ lounge, Alrik and I followed the string. It was attached to a doorstop holding open the teachers’ lounge. I stared at the doorstop for a second, confused. Alrik bent down to grab the string and the door started to swing shut.
In an instant, Jia’s plan became clear. The handle had been removed from the inside of the door. She was planning on trapping the teachers in the room without a way to get out. I grabbed the door about a second before it shut, crushing my fingers between the door and the frame in the process. A string of unteacherlike words came out of my mouth. Alrik lunged for the gap created by my crushed fingers and pulled open the door. I flexed my fingers to make sure they still worked, then grabbed a chair to prop the door. Alrik let it go and
we both breathed a massive sigh of relief. I turned back to the glass jugs. Judging by my careful whiff, the smaller container was bleach. I emptied the larger container back into the original hydrochloric acid bottle. The liquid filled the original bottle all the way to the top and I sighed again. This must have been the only booby trap Jia had set. We did it. Although we hadn’t found Jia yet, we had prevented her from causing massive pain and suffering. I would call it a successful day and the sun hadn’t even risen yet.
***
It was 5:45 a.m. I had enough time to go home, shower, dress, come right back, and pretend nothing had happened. C’est la vie. Dealing with kids sounded downright tame right now.
I was back to school by seven. On Friday, I had assigned homework to create a piece of art which represented the six most important elements to life and a paragraph explaining the meaning. Kids showed up early to my classroom to drop the projects off; there were collages, sculptures, paintings, and even a macramé necklace. I wasn’t sure how the macramé necklace would illustrate carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus, but as long as the paragraph explained it, I was happy. I didn’t have time to do my normal morning routine or check my email before the bell starting the day rang. But the students already knew my expectations for the first five minutes of class and pulled out the paper with the day’s warm-up question on it. I looked around the room and smiled at the sight of students concentrating on their assignment. No one would have guessed the craziness earlier this morning.
My schedule for the beginning of class included such procedural tasks as doing attendance. When I grew up, absent student names were written on a pink slip of paper and hung up on the outside of the classroom door. Now, like almost everything, attendance was recorded electronically.
I sat down at my desk, pushed in the release, and flipped up the top of my laptop.
