Bridget Wilder #3

by Jonathan Bernstein

  As fast as Dale can take control of the building, the building regains control. All I can do is try to make my escape in the seconds between the continual shift in power.

  The left-hand wall rises; I crawl over to it.

  It falls to the ground before I’m able to slide under.

  The front wall rises. I crawl on my hands and knees to the center of the cube. I aim Red at the front wall. As it descends, Red fills the one-inch gap and prevents the wall from reaching the ground. The grinding sound gets louder as the plastic wall keeps pressing down on Red.

  Fear suddenly grips me. I drop down on my knees and, to my horror, see cracks start to appear in the little marble who has stayed by my side and seen me through so much.

  “Red, no!” I cry.

  I did this to him. I put him in this position.

  “Stop!” I bang my palms on the front wall. “Let him go. I’ll stay here. I won’t try to escape.”

  I feel plastic move under my palms. The front wall is rising. It keeps rising.

  There’s enough space for me to duck under. I swing down low and move out from under the gap. As I leave the cube, I grab the broken remains of Red. Two jagged pieces of glass and a few fragments.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  I try to attach the remains to the front of my ring. Some of them stick, others drop to the ground.

  I choke back a sob.

  The door of the room bursts open, and a group of Font Force volunteers come running in. Right at the front, with eyes unblinking, is Adam Pacific.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Boys Don’t Cry

  “It’s your phone!” I yell at Pacific as he comes thundering toward me, spinning a towel over his head. “That’s how Font controls you. Get rid of it!”

  Starey Hayley runs into the room just behind Pacific. “Get rid of her!” she commands him.

  I pull out my amnesia squirter—I remembered the word!—and aim it at Pacific. The towel wraps around my hand, whipping the weapon away.

  No squirter. No Red. I’m defenseless.

  I raise both fists and one knee. I can at least get in a couple of decent kicks and punches before I’m overpowered.

  Pacific suddenly slumps to the ground and lies there, motionless. Starey Hayley, who hasn’t removed her mad, vengeful eyes from me since she came stomping into the room, trips over Pacific’s body. The rest of the volunteers are suddenly a little less bloodthirsty, and a lot more scared. Two Font Force members lie on the ground, but I’m still standing. Plus, I see what they don’t. I see that the amnesia squirter went off before it was towel-fu’d from my hand.

  I swoop down to the ground and grab the atomizer. Atomizer! I remembered the word!

  “She killed them,” a Font Force member whimpers.

  “No, I . . .” I start to deny the accusation, then I decide this is a time for drama rather than honesty.

  “You want me, Font Force?” I cry out, waving the amnesia atomizer around. “Come and get me, but there’s going to be a lot less of you standing by the time you reach me. Because you’ll be lying on the ground.” I gesture with the atomizer at Pacific and Starey Hayley. “Like these two.”

  The Font Force members stop in their tracks.

  “She didn’t squirt me,” Starey Hayley points out. “I tripped.”

  “Let me rectify that right now,” I say. I aim the atomizer at her. The rest of the Font Force volunteers scamper for the door.

  “Call the FBI and the CIA!” I hear them scream. “Call the police, the fire department, and the sanitation people!”

  Hayley looks down at the still-motionless Pacific, then back up at me and my amnesia-squirting weapon.

  “Any last words?” I ask. “Any favorite quotes or lines of poetry?”

  Hayley’s face twitches. She starts to blink and then rubs at her eyes.

  “I didn’t want any of this,” she says. “I just wanted the city to keep the dog park open. I emailed Font, and I ended up here.”

  Huh? I look at Hayley’s miserable, confused face and I realize: extreme terror just overcame mind control. That’s useful, but I don’t have time to roam the nation, waving my atomizer in people’s faces to scare them into waking up.

  I motion to the open door. “Get out of here,” I command Hayley. “Run and don’t look back.”

  “What about the dog park?” she asks.

  “I’ll handle the dog park,” I lie.

  Hayley scampers out the door.

  Which leaves me alone in the room with the limp body of Adam Pacific. What do I do here? Should I just leave him? Do I try to revive him? I kneel down and reach out my index finger till it hovers a half-inch from his nose. I feel weird about touching him.

  “Dad?” he says, sitting up suddenly.

  I lose my balance and tumble backward, flailing on the floor before I pull it together and scramble to my feet.

  Pacific gazes around the room and then up at me. He looks lost.

  “The Font phones,” I tell him. “They control your mind. Not just you. Everyone. Well, except me.”

  Pacific looks at me like he has no idea what I’m talking about.

  “You were one of the Font Force,” I explain. “But I shot you with my amnesia atomizer.” I hold up the tube as proof. “You don’t remember the last half hour, but you towel-fu’d the Font Force, L4E, and some guy the size of a monster truck.” I get up and gesture to the open door. “Let’s go get Jamie. Font’s got a head start, but if we hurry . . .”

  Pacific remains on the ground.

  “My dad was going to show me a technique that makes it impossible to be mind-controlled,” he says quietly. “I remember him saying he had faith in me, that this was the thing I was going to excel at.” Pacific doesn’t look at me, but I can see his eyes start to mist over. “’Cause I wasn’t ever going to be great at any of the other skills he tried to teach me. No good at languages. Never learned to swim. Can’t shoot a gun. Scared of being locked in tight spaces.”

  The arrogant, obnoxious facade Adam Pacific shows the world has vanished. In its place is the sensitive, vulnerable guy beneath. But it’s totally the wrong time for that guy to make his appearance. Right now, I need the jerk.

  I squat down beside Pacific. “You’re being too hard on yourself,” I tell him. “What you did with those wet towels . . .”

  “That’s all I have,” he retorts. “I’m a one-towel pony. I got tossed in a Dumpster by a boy band.”

  “I got covered in shrimp by the same boy band,” I remind him (and oh, how the memory stings!). “And you stuck up for me. You won’t admit it, but you did. You saved me from the worst moment of my entire life. You’ve saved me a lot.”

  He turns his head away from me.

  “But I couldn’t save my dad,” says Pacific. “I couldn’t do what you did. You saved Strike. You figured out where he was, and you found him. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

  He wipes his eyes. I don’t know where to look or what to say. I feel horrible for him, and I understand his pain. But the time is now four forty-five, so the sharing will have to wait for another day.

  “Listen, Adam,” I say, touching his arm. “I don’t know you very well, and what I do know I don’t really like. But I’d be in trouble without you, which tells me we’re a good team. So why don’t you bottle up your emotions, put your game face on, and help me put together a plan to stop Font from using Jamie to end the president’s career?”

  “Right,” sniffs Pacific. He gets up off the floor, rubs the back of his hand across his eyes and nose, and picks up his towel. He gives me a nod, and we head out the door.

  “Sorry about your dad,” I say as we go.

  “Sorry about your face,” he retorts.

  There’s my guy!

  We make it two, maybe three, steps into the first floor corridor when a deep growling voice says, “FBI. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Mi
nd Games

  An actual-to-goodness, square-jawed, broad-shouldered, tough-as-a-tank FBI agent is waiting for Pacific and me midway down the corridor. She points her gun at us.

  “You’ve got a lot of people looking for you, Bridget Wilder,” she barks. Wow. I can hear that voice of hers in the soles of my feet. It’s probably the wrong time to ask her to record my voice mail message. “You and your friend are coming with me.”

  “I wouldn’t call us friends exactly,” I correct her. “We’re like reluctant partners who have to work together to bring down the bad guy. Wilder and Pacific.”

  “Pacific and Wilder,” says Pacific. He shoves his hands in his pockets and affects a cool-guy posture.

  “You see why we don’t get along?” I ask the FBI agent.

  “This is what’s going to happen,” she says. “You’re going to very slowly take all your weapons and your communication devices out of your pockets, and you’re going to kick them to me.”

  “You heard that part about us working together to bring down the bad guy?” I ask the FBI agent. “Indicating that we’re not the bad guy?”

  Ms. FBI is unmoved. “Kick them to me,” she repeats.

  Pacific kicks his towel toward the FBI agent. I slide my atomizer. Pacific shoves the phone he took from Starey Hayley to the agent. I go to slide her my phone, but not before I touch the screen and activate Pacific’s Font phone. The FBI agent kicks Pacific’s towel aside. She grabs my atomizer and phone, and finally, Pacific’s phone.

  “Hands in the air,” the agent instructs us. “Walk toward me and . . .”

  She stops talking. Her eyes go wide. An intense look falls over her face. She drops my gun and phone.

  I nudge Pacific. “Do what I do,” I whisper. I widen my eyes and adopt as intense an expression as I can manage. Pacific does the same.

  “Morgan Font is the future,” I intone.

  “Font is the future,” echoes the FBI agent, whose mind fell into Morgan Font’s trap the second she picked up Pacific’s phone—which I, of course, activated.

  Pacific and I continue to act like mind-controlled volunteers.

  “Font’s enemies are everywhere,” I tell the brainwashed agent. “You need to help us get out of here.”

  “I will help you,” says the agent robotically.

  She gestures for us to follow her. As we go, I pick up my stuff and text Joanna.

  Get Dale to find Font’s current location. Also, I got out alive.

  The FBI agent leads us to a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor. Oh look, there’s a man in a suit pointing a gun at us.

  “Secret Service,” shouts the guy. “Stand down.”

  The brainwashed FBI lady faces off against the Secret Service agent. “Morgan Font is the future,” says the FBI agent. “Are you an enemy of the future?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” demands the man.

  “It’s her phone,” I call out to the Secret Service agent. “It’s controlling her mind.”

  “Get it away from her!” yells Pacific. “Grab it now!”

  The Secret Service man registers the intense, unblinking stare of the FBI agent. He moves like lightning, kicking the phone out of the FBI agent’s hand, snatching her gun away, and catching the phone, all in one smooth motion. But I’m faster. I activate Hayley’s Font phone. The Secret Service guy’s face goes blank. These phones are the work of the devil, and they need to be destroyed, but, I have to admit, they’re fun toys to have. With a mere touch of a screen, I have transformed the Secret Service man and the FBI agent into obedient zombies. And I immediately realize that’s way too much power for me to have.

  I get a text from Joanna.

  Font’s on the E Street Expressway. Congrats on not being dead.

  I feel Pacific’s hand grip my shoulder. “Wake up, slacker,” he grunts. “I’ve got a plan.”

  “You?” I say.

  “FBI. Secret Service. Get us down to the garage. Disable anyone who gets in our way.”

  The two agents lead us down to the bottom of the first-floor steps.

  “Your plan is we steal a car?” I ask Pacific.

  “You’re not thinking big enough,” he says.

  “An elephant?”

  He spreads his arms. “Bigger.”

  The brainwashed agents push open a blue door, and we follow them down more steps that take us to the Font Foundation parking garage.

  What’s bigger than an elephant? I wonder, as I glance around at the vehicles in the dark garage.

  And then I see five faces that used to make my heart race but now make my stomach churn, larger-than-life, plastered across the side of a huge bus with a Stars and Stripes background. The neon words All Over America are printed under the familiar faces.

  “Is that L4E’s tour bus?” I ask.

  “Not anymore,” smirks Pacific, as he heads toward the massive vehicle. “Now it’s ours, and we’re going to drive it to the White House.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Get on the Bus

  There are other, smaller, vehicles in the garage that would have been easier to navigate through traffic. But I understand why Pacific headed straight for the L4E bus.

  “That band stole something from us,” I tell Pacific. “In my case, my heart, in yours, your dignity. Relieving them of this big, lumbering beast of a bus is the least we can do.”

  As the brainwashed FBI agent drives the L4E All Over America machine out of the garage and toward the E Street Expressway, Pacific guides me through the interior of the vehicle. The front of the coach has a seventy-inch TV screen and leather couches customized in Scottish tartan. The next section of the bus is occupied by the band’s sleeping quarters.

  In the far-off days of an hour ago, being near such hallowed ground would have made me stammer and tremble. Now, it means nothing to me (though I do reach out and touch what I imagine to be Cadzo’s pillow as I leave the sleeping section).

  Pacific walks me through a space with a full-size pool table and into the kitchen. Well, I say kitchen. The space is filled with a huge stainless steel fridge with two sliding glass doors that provide an unspoiled view of the mountains of frozen burgers, frozen pizzas, ice cream containers, sodas, meaty nuggets, and Scottish Mars Bars inside. Next to the mega-fridge is a rectangular chunk of metal.

  “It’s a deep-fat fryer,” Pacific informs me.

  “So they can fry their chocolate bars?”

  “So they can fry everything.”

  Pacific leads me to the last section of the bus. It’s a recording studio big enough for an actual grand piano.

  “In case they ever got inspired,” says Pacific. “But I never saw any of them come in here.”

  “You can’t fry a piano,” I point out.

  Pacific laughs. Not at me, but at something I said, which is a first.

  “Waste of an instrument,” he says.

  Pacific sits down at the piano stool and starts to play scales. His hands move up and down the keyboards, and then he begins to play a melody that’s sort of sad and wistful. After a few bars, he picks up the tempo, and the tune he’s playing becomes more rhythmic and hard-hitting.

  If only I’d practiced on my flute, I could have been this good, I think.

  Pacific changes to L4E’s latest hit, “No One Is More Perfect Than You (Girl),” but slows it way down and makes it seem a lot cooler. I can feel the bus judder and screech and I can hear the horn honk as the FBI guy at the wheel drives us to the White House, but right now I’m more interested in listening to Adam Pacific.

  “You’re not a one-towel pony,” I say. “You can do that.”

  Pacific stops playing. He gives me a surprised look, as if he’d forgotten I was there. I see his face revert to that half-sneer I’ve grown to know and dislike.

  “It’s nothing,” he mutters, getting up from the piano.

  I’m going to need the jerk side of Pacific in a few minutes, but I don’t need him right now.

  “It’s not nothing,” I
say. “Play something else.”

  He starts to walk out of the studio. I don’t know why I want this moment to last a little longer, but I do, so I start singing the first song that comes into my head.

  “Here come the spy twins on an another adventure, here come the spy twins coming to your town . . .”

  Pacific looks at me like I just lost my mind. Which I very well might have. Here’s a guy who does nothing but put me down, and I’m making myself into a target for him. But nevertheless, Joanna’s song is nothing if not appropriate to where I am right now, so I sing it again.

  “Here come the spy twins on another adventure . . .”

  Pacific goes back to the piano. He instantly finds the right chords to go with my reedy warble. And he harmonizes with me. “Here come the spy twins coming to your town, here come the spy twins on another adventure, nothing’s going to stop us now.” He added that last bit!

  “We’re already better than L4E.” Pacific laughs. He starts improvising a new verse.

  My phone vibrates. A text from Joanna. I feel myself go red. Why?

  R U watching TV? If not, watch NOW.

  I grab a remote and turn on the giant TV hanging down from the studio ceiling. I glance around and see a remote control on the mixing desk. Pacific stops playing.

  “What?” he says.

  I press power, and there it is. Shaky phone footage of L4E being whipped by towels. Also, of me with a shrimp bucket over my head. The footage freezes on Pacific mid towel-fu. I flip to more channels. This is everywhere.

  “Breaking news,” says the anchor onscreen. “The teenager accused of assaulting pop group Live 4 Eva has hijacked their tour bus . . .”

  The footage changes, and I see the L4E tour bus driving on the Whitehurst Freeway.

  Police sirens start to shriek behind us.

  On the TV screen, we see six police cars and two motorcycles chasing the bus.

  I turn to Pacific. He’s frozen to the spot, eyes fixed on the screen, a stricken look on his face.

  “If my dad sees this,” I hear him whisper.

  Oh no.

  I grab his arm. “He’ll think he’s got an awesome son,” I tell him as earnestly as I can manage. “And he’d be right.” Wait, do I think he’s awesome? Just because he played the piano? A cat can play piano.