by John Conroe
The hall opened up into the classroom area: two floors of lockers and mostly locked doors. There were also multiple fire exits, but as we drew close to the first of those, I could see flashlight beams playing across the windows in the doors.
Caeco stopped to try a classroom door, but it was locked. They all would be. But I knew a couple of things—like the three-digit combination to the teachers’ lounge. They never changed it and I had been dragged in there dozens of times to fix laptops, tablets, and cell phones.
I punched in the numbers and yanked the door open. Caeco darted in after me, moving so fast that she was fully in the room before I was. The door locked itself as I closed it, and I moved deeper into the dark room. In the back corner, chest height on the wall, was a locked metal box about the size of a box of Munchkins from Dunkin Donuts. I pointed it out to Caeco.
“If we can open that, there is a master key to all the doors in this section of the school.”
She glanced at me, slid over to the box, and examined it. Then she cocked her head and listened. “They’re outside the building, and two search teams are coming in behind us,” she said, tapping the side of her head rather than her ears. I got it. She was listening to their communications with her nannites.
She gripped the box with both hands and ripped it off the wall. It was still shut, but before I could point that out, she worked the fingers of her right hand under the edge of the lid and pressed the box down on a table with her left. Then she pulled. The metal squeaked and squealed in protest, but it gave up the fight after a few seconds, the lid snapping open with a loud bang. Triumphantly, she held up the key. Blood dripped down her hand. I ignored the key and grabbed her right hand; the sharp lid had cut her fingers. Looking around, I spotted the school-mandated first aid kit on the wall and plucked it off. At least it wasn’t locked.
The kit yielded gauze wrap, which went around each torn finger and tied off at the back. She flexed her bandaged hand and gave me an odd smile.
I picked up the key. “This will let us in everywhere. The floor above doesn’t cover the full footprint of the building. It’s slightly smaller. There is an emergency door next to the Chem Lab. It leads outside to a fire escape. We can get down from there, and we end up across from the parking lot.”
“They have people on the ground,” she replied.
“We need to call Agent West and have him send his people here. The Chem lab could buy us some time.”
“I’ve already texted his cell. He’s on his way, but I doubt his men will be a match for Juiced soldiers.”
“They’re stronger, faster, and better equipped. We need to put them off balance,” I replied. We looked at each other, both of us starting to grin. “The Chem lab!” she said as I nodded.
Slipping back into the hall, I noticed a red light on the wall-mounted camera system. I held out a hand and concentrated. The light died. We moved.
Chapter 26 – Miseri
The crowded gym chocked full of noisy, bleating adolescents had been worse than walking into an urban firefight. It was a measure of Miseri’s devotion to duty that she didn’t turn around and escape the mass of sheep she was technically supposed to protect.
The American civilian had fallen far from the solid, independent colonists that Agentes in Rebus had been created to serve. These mewling, self-absorbed parasites were weak in body and mind, and to Miseri, it seemed, unworthy of her organizations’ efforts. But that was not her call.
Finding AIR’s wayward 112-million-dollar teenage weapons system was her task. Luck was with her as the door to the boys’ locker room opened and the well-constructed young quarterback appeared, his bored eyes looking about for someone. When he spotted her and Clay standing fifteen feet away, his expression changed to delighted interest.
Another self-absorbed adolescent, but at least one who was an appropriate physical specimen, Miseri thought.
“Mr. Johnson is it?” she asked quickly, hoping she remembered the name the announcer had been braying throughout the game.
A pleased smile formed on the handsome young athlete’s face. It was a mixture of pretend delight and self-satisfaction, which became completely fake as he mastered his features.
“A moment for the camera?” she asked.
“Certainly,” he replied, moving forward to close the distance.
“You are obviously playing well tonight, but so is your opposite number on the Middleton team. Any comments?”
He grimaced. “If I was lucky enough to face a defense as poorly prepared as Castlebury’s, this game would already be in the bag.”
She asked him a few more game-related questions, all guaranteed to feed his overinflated ego as he laid the blame for everything on virtually everyone else, then moved to her real question.
“Trey, you seem to be dialed into this school. Your insight is the best I’ve seen tonight. One of my sideline stories is about the attempt by federal authorities to arrest one of your fellow students. Do you know anything about that?”
He frowned, not liking that the topic had moved from him, but preening slightly at her description of his perception. “You mean the new girl? Williams, right?”
“Yes. What can you tell me?”
“I think the Feds should have taken her the first time, if you ask me. The girl’s obviously got issues. She’s violent and almost certainly a criminal.”
Wow, Caeco must have shut this one down hard to earn that much dislike! Miseri reflected.
“Tell me. I’ve obtained a copy of the photo the agent was working from. Does this look like the Williams girl?” she asked, showing him her photo of Caeco.
He frowned, shaking his head. “Not now. Maybe before, when she first arrived, but now that she’s had some kind of makeover, she doesn’t match.”
Miseri’s heart beat faster at his words. Not now? But earlier? Gotcha!
“Have you seen her tonight?” she asked.
He was losing interest in the interview, now that he was no longer its focal point. “No, but all you have to do is find that freak, O’Carroll, and you should find her,” he said, scanning the gym.
“There, the tall kid in the dark green hoodie. He’s a criminal, too, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, pointing across the gym at a slim young man who looked familiar. Then the boy moved slightly and a pretty girl became visible behind him. She didn’t look like Caeco, but her movements were familiar, smooth and controlled. The girl looked her way and spotted Miseri, eyes widening in alarm. She was gone in a blur that was almost too fast to process. Got her!
“Gladius One, this is Miseri. Target spotted, in pursuit. Cover all exits on the west side and send two men inside.”
“Confirmed, Miseri.”
She was moving as she spoke, but the hordes of kids blocked her path. She started throwing them out of her way but finally waved Clay forward, his massive bulk clearing a path like a bulldozer.
“Do you see her?” she asked her companion, trusting his height to provide him a view.
“Already gone. The boy cleared a path,” he rumbled.
That was the equivalent of the Gettysburg speech for Clay. To say he didn’t speak much was a gross understatement. He’d gone entire weekends without uttering a syllable and in those moments when he did speak, it was almost always just to her.
She had found him by accident, a chance visit to the AIR training facility where all new recruits were indoctrinated, retrained, and hooked on Juice. The instructors were at a loss as to what to do with him, a silent giant who had decimated their combat course but wouldn’t respond to direct commands to speak.
Miseri had rarely been back to the facility since her own introduction to AIR but had been saddled on her way back from a foreign mission with delivering a set of new recruits. After dropping off the two newbies with Administration, she had been headed back to her vehicle when she heard a hell of a commotion at the Close Quarters Combat field. Curiosity getting the better of her, she’d strolled over to find the then-unnamed Clay
standing silently amid a mess of broken and bloodied instructors and training drones. The Head Instructor was demanding answers to questions that Miseri could see the giant didn’t know. Finally losing his patience, the instructor drew his sidearm and pointed at the silent hulk’s head.
Something snapped inside Miseri; some unknown mental link had slipped into place, and she found herself snatching the gun out of the instructor’s hand. Turning to the giant, she had given him one simple command. “Follow me!” He had, and had belonged to her ever since. Utterly loyal, surprisingly capable, and absolutely terrifying in combat, he was her perfect assistant, one who didn’t natter on and on like almost every other human on the planet.
“She’s moving deeper into the school. The team will block the exits, but you and I had best track her. She’ll roll right through the others.”
“The boy?” he asked, concerned.
“What about him? Isn’t he just a kid?” she asked, curious.
He shook his massive head. “Not.”
Her taciturn Claymore was a veritable chatterbox today, and while his intelligence was average or slightly below, his perceptions of all things combat related were razor sharp. Interesting. He felt there was something different about the boy, and with Clay, different meant dangerous.
“Aren’t you just a chatty Cathy tonight. C’mon, let’s hunt ourselves a CAECO. And her new found boy toy.”
She pushed open the door to the girls’ locker room, the hyper-excited conversations all stopping instantly as the cheerleaders inside watched her and her giant walk through.
Chapter 27- Declan
We slipped up the side staircase to the second floor. Castlebury had chosen to create subject-specific wings in the high school, and so Math and Science took up most of the second floor. Mr. Porter’s Physics lab and Miss McCarthy’s Chem lab were two of the biggest rooms—and the only two that were linked by an internal door. I knew for a fact that the connecting door was rarely locked, as Mr. Porter had a hell of a crush on his much-younger coworker. Along with almost every boy in the school and most of their fathers. Miss McCarthy was the subject of many a locker room conversation and way more daydreams. A green-eyed, brown-haired young beauty, it was a wonder that any of the straight male students managed to pass her Chem classes.
Physics had been a particularly good class for me, and Mr. Porter was one of my favorite teachers. As a result, his classroom technology was always in tip-top shape (and I’m not ashamed at all to say, so was Miss McCarthy’s). So I happened to know the lock combination to his lab door. We slipped into the lab and I showed Caeco the connecting door to the Chem area, leaving her to go through on her own while I did a little scavenging in Mr. Porter’s tools. Once I had found what I needed for my little surprise, I popped into the Chem lab to find Caeco smearing a greasy-looking mess onto a square of aluminum foil. Behind her, I could see the open door of the Chemicals closet, its lock shattered and bent. New college funding idea: enter Caeco in arm wrestling contests.
I poked my head into the closet and grabbed four magnesium bars. Miss McCarthy, like every other teacher in our school and likely Vermont, was faced with teaching her classes on ever-smaller budgets. She had resorted to bargain hunting for some of her supplies. Rather than order expensive magnesium ribbon and powder from a chemical supply company, she’d purchased a small number of magnesium fire starters, the kind you find in the camping and survival section of most sporting goods stores. Four dollars each, they have a ferrocerium bar for sparking glued to the side of a rectangle of magnesium. The idea is to scrape off a small amount of magnesium and light it with the sparking rod.
“What are you doing?” Caeco asked, eyeing the little hacksaw I’d borrowed from the physics lab. Mr. Porter kept tools for last-minute adjustments to the pumpkin catapults that his Junior class made every year.
“Cutting these in half. Why?”
She reached over and grabbed one of the bars and snapped it almost exactly in half with her hands. Four seconds later, she’d broken the other three, then went back to wrapping her greasy aluminum foil around a couple of small bottles.
“What did you make for show and tell?” I asked.
“Potassium chlorate mixed with a plasticizer, in this case, Vaseline I found in the teacher’s desk. Primitive plastic explosive. The detonator is a piece of sodium inside a glass test tube of oil inside a bigger tube of water. When I throw it hard, the bottles will both break, the water will mix with the sodium. Boom and then double boom,” she said.
“Wow, you had a different chemistry class than I did. Miss McCarthy just burned the potassium chlorate with sugar and it made a cool purple flame.”
“Yeah, my teacher blew up a car,” she said with a little grin. “Ready? Let’s get onto the roof.”
The door had an alarmed emergency bar, but I had a little mental chat with the alarm and it agreed to stay silent while we exited to the roof. Outside, the rain was coming down in sheets, soaking us both almost instantly. I had trouble seeing Caeco’s outline ten feet in front of me, so I stayed close as she moved unerringly to the fire escape. She squatted down and took a quick peek over the edge before waving me closer. Lightning flashed across the sky, the almost-instant rumble of thunder telling me the storm was right on top of us. I actually didn’t need the pause between strike and rumble to know how close it was. My connection to the storm went much deeper.
“There are two by the door twenty feet to our left. I’ll occupy them while you come down the ladder. Make sure to hustle. The rain helps us stay hidden, but if they have thermal imaging scopes, they may still spot us,” she said, her lips almost touching my ear. I shivered, not just from the cold rain on my neck, and nodded, slightly preoccupied with the look of her lips and the feeling of power that permeated the night. Catching my gaze, she double-checked my readiness, then moved back to the roof edge. After one last look my way, she simply hopped sideways and dropped fifteen feet to the ground. I grabbed the metal ladder and slid down as fast as I could without breaking my neck. The metal was water-slick and I was down in no time. There were two soldiers down, lying in the water and mud, the result of the thuds and grunts I heard during my descent.
Caeco was relieving them of their sidearms when I got there, her pupils enormously dilated in the gleam of the outside lights. I was panting, adrenaline and ozone equally to blame. We raced for the parking lot, but a shout and several high-intensity lights speared us before we’d gotten ten feet. Heart pounding in my throat, I nonetheless raised both hands and released the will I had been gathering. It was odd to finally be free to do what I could. Keeping my abilities on lockdown my whole life had left me with a burden I hadn’t realized was there until I let it go. Four of my eight magnesium chunks lit in a burst of welding torch bright and zipped in separate directions, like my own personal shooting stars. It felt euphoric to let them fly.
Magnesium burns at over 5000 degrees Fahrenheit and laughs at rain. My personal comets hit the light bearers and left them preoccupied with blisters and pain. I laughed, which earned me a concerned look from my partner, who headed for my car.
Before we could reach the Beast, two sets of headlights lit up the wet asphalt and slick metal of the cars around us.
“Freeze,” a megaphone-enhanced voice yelled, but Caeco just ducked behind a car, pulling me down beside her. She threw one of her aluminum-foil bundles with a hard, sharp snap of her arm. One of the sets of headlights disappeared in a blossom of light and a shockwave of sound that picked me up and slammed me to the hard pavement. Debris rained down around us. A side mirror bounced once next to me, then fell on my head. My ears were ringing, everything sounding muffled like I had earplugs in. A snap, snap, snap sounded, the car I leaned against vibrating in time to the snaps. They’re shooting at us! I’m being shot at!
It was all surreal, the storm, the explosions, and now the gunfire, even as rain streamed down around us. Caeco was watching me between studying her surroundings, and she looked concerned. Maybe I’m
in shock? I wondered.
“Goddammit, cease fire!” a female voice screamed. The snapping stopped.
The giant from the gym stepped around the car behind us and grabbed Caeco around the neck. Lightning flashed: three spears of separate light. At the first flash, the monster was grabbing the tiny girl. With the next almost-instant flare of light, she was behind him, kicking out his leg, and the last strobe illuminated her compact form wrapped around his head and neck, her body spinning, hands hooked onto, or maybe into, his face. A sodden snap hit my ears just before the thunderclap from heaven followed the lightning. The giant timbered to the ground, his body spinning around as Caeco jumped lightly away. Blood streamed black from the clawmarks in his face. She landed crouched, one hand touching the glistening pavement, the other drawing one of her borrowed handguns from her waistband. She stood up and turned, pointing the gun at the giant’s body although he was still moving.
