Crisis Zero

by Chris Rylander

  CHAPTER 14

  THE ERIK HILL MIDDLE SCHOOL TRAILBLAZER

  AFTER TEMPTING FATE AND FOLLOWING GUS AND CADE TO their next class, I came to the conclusion that Gus was perhaps even more likely than Mr. Lepsing to be in cahoots with Medlock. The kid clearly wanted to cause as much destruction as possible, every moment of his life. He wouldn’t think twice about getting behind a plan that ruined Principal Gomez’s life or released a deadly virus out into the world or whatever other horrors Medlock was planning.

  During their short walk to class, Gus and Cade spent much of it laughing about what had happened to Gomez. Laughing the way that people did after witnessing the aftermath of a successful prank. Not only that, but he showed even further evidence of sadism by taking one kid’s math notebook, tearing the whole thing in half, and tossing it into the hallway garbage can just to show off to Cade how well his new weight-lifting regimen had been working.

  I knew I’d need to make Gus a priority for the time being. Of course, eventually breaking into Mr. Lepsing’s supply closet was still on my radar, but at the moment I had more suspicions surrounding Gus than Mr. Lepsing. Mr. Lepsing ultimately just seemed like he didn’t have it in him to work on a plan for mass chaos.

  During my fourth-period gym class, I tried to map out a strategy while avoiding a barrage of dodge balls. I devised a way to make sure I could follow Gus around between every single class, during lunch, and then also to basketball practice, keeping my eyes open the whole time for anything suspicious. And if all of that produced no evidence, then I’d even follow him home. Whatever it took.

  And so right after gym class, I tracked down Cade and Gus by heading in the direction of the classroom I’d seen them enter at the start of fourth period.

  I ended up walking right by them. Gus definitely saw me, but had been too busy telling a story about this third-grade girl he stole an iPad from that weekend at the mall to acknowledge me.

  As soon as they passed, I wheeled around and started to tail them. At a safe distance, of course. Eventually, they bumped knuckles and Cade split off down a different hallway, presumably to a different fifth-period class than Gus’s.

  Gus bobbed his head while he walked in time to some song apparently stuck in there. A few times he made a threatening gesture toward a passing kid. They all flinched, and Gus snickered each time as if the joke never got old.

  One poor kid even got tripped, not realizing it was Gus who did it as he face-planted into the hard tiled floor. I had to resist helping him to his feet. Gus stopped just long enough to admire the pain he’d inflicted on the poor kid, and he would have seen me had I not quickly ducked behind a trash can. When he was finally satisfied that the kid had not enjoyed being tripped, Gus resumed his path of terror down the hallway. I stepped out from behind the trash can and resumed my pursuit. Gus took his phone from his pocket a few moments later, glanced at it, and then veered off suddenly into a bathroom.

  Two kids hurried out a few seconds later, one of them still trying to hastily zip up his fly. As soon as Gus entered a bathroom, you got the heck out.

  I knew this was my chance.

  Judging by the way he’d changed his course upon checking his phone, Gus must have gotten a secret text message he wanted to read in private. And so I waited a few seconds and then entered the bathroom myself.

  I had just become the first kid in the history of the school insane enough to knowingly follow Gus Agriopoulas into a bathroom.

  CHAPTER 15

  LITTLE CHICAGO

  THE BATHROOM WAS EMPTY.

  All four urinals were unoccupied. I looked under the walls of the two stalls and saw no feet. Gus had come in here a second ago and now he was gone.

  There were rumors that many of the town’s oldest buildings had secret passageways that were used back in the days of Prohibition. They didn’t call Minnow “Little Chicago” back then because it looked like a miniature version of the huge city or anything like that. It was called Little Chicago because it was one of the most important hubs of alcohol smuggling outside of Chicago itself.

  Why would a kid be using a secret passageway in a school, if not to sneak around, committing acts of sabotage and framing principals as a part of some grand scheme to infiltrate and destroy the clandestine government agency located underneath the school itself?

  But that’s when one of the stall doors slowly creaked open.

  Gus was standing on top of the toilet seat, which is why I hadn’t seen his feet. He glared at me as he hopped down and took four impossibly quick strides, closing the distance between us in a fraction of a second.

  Gus grabbed my shirt and lifted me several feet off the ground as if I were filled with helium instead of bones and blood and organs. He slammed me against the wall and put his face very close to mine.

  “Listen,” he said, his minty-fresh breath smelling surprisingly pleasant, “I don’t know why you’re following me around, but I don’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped, the collar of my shirt starting to dig into my neck. “I just think . . . you’re cool.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “But you’re going to stop, got it? You’re creeping me out.”

  I nodded. Or tried to. I didn’t have much feeling left in my head or neck.

  “Now, just as a fee for wasting my precious time, I’m going to dunk your head into that toilet a few times. You’re lucky I like you, or else I would have taken a dump in it first.”

  He put me down, but only for a second. Before I could really react, he had lifted me up again. But this time he wrapped his arms around my waist and promptly tipped me upside down. He carried me over to the (thankfully) empty toilet and dunked my head into the water a few times. Then he set me down, not gently exactly, but he didn’t drop me onto my head at least.

  Gus crouched on one knee and looked down at my dripping face. I gagged. Just because the toilet had been empty didn’t erase the cold fact that it was still toilet water. And the bowl had contained contents at some point in time. Maybe even that same day.

  “Leave me alone,” he said. “Or next time I’ll tear your head off and use it to clog up the whole school’s plumbing. Later, bud.”

  He walked toward the door, but then stopped. He turned back toward me, smiling.

  “Again, though, dude,” he said, “the goats were hilarious.”

  With that, he left me there, gagging on the water running from my hair down into my eyes and mouth.

  That hadn’t necessarily gone well. Especially since I was still far from convinced that I could cross Gus’s name off my list.

  CHAPTER 16

  MISSION PHASE ONE—ELIMINATE ALL STEAK SAUCE

  “MAKE ANY PROGRESS?” DANIELLE ASKED ME AS WE STOOD in line for lunch.

  “Uh, sort of,” I said.

  I was reminded of Agent Chum Bucket’s arrest when we saw his replacement, an old woman with a pouf of curly gray hair under a plastic net. I wondered how the Agency would contact us now if they needed to during school.

  “What do you mean ‘sort of’?” Danielle asked.

  I explained my day as quickly and quietly as I could. She seemed pretty horrified when I got to the swirly part. Which was fitting since it was actually pretty horrifying. In fact, I still hadn’t recuperated enough to work up an appetite. I couldn’t get the taste of the toilet water out of my mouth.

  “So your top two names are ‘maybes’?” she said.

  I nodded as the old lady who’d replaced Chum Bucket scooped a blob of brown goo with chunks of some sort of “meat” in it onto my tray.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I think I can officially cross off Mrs. Food and Tyrell from my list,” Danielle said. “Tyrell definitely isn’t our guy. He has a solid alibi. Turns out he and his family were all away on vacation the past two weeks, visiting some spy museum in Washington, DC. I even saw the date-stamped pictures of them in front of the White House and Lincoln Memorial and at the museum.”

  “
What about Mrs. Food?” I said.

  “I asked her about some of her old CIA–KGB double agent missions at gym today.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said. “Kids do it all the time. She loves telling those stories. I’d never really paid attention to them, of course, since I never had a reason to and always figured they were totally made up. Anyway, she spun off a few, one that I’d heard before about fighting off a twenty-seven-foot anaconda while snooping around inside the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow looking for a secret borscht soup recipe that doubled as the blueprints for creating a fusion bomb.”

  “Uhghghg.” I shuddered. I hated snakes. Even more than swirlies.

  “Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” Danielle said. “She said this was back in nineteen fifty-eight, but the State Palace at Moscow’s Kremlin wasn’t even built until 1961.”

  “Please tell me you had to look that up?” I said.

  Danielle grinned at me and then shrugged.

  “Hey, I like Cold War history, so sue me,” she said. “But the point is none of the facts in her stories hold up. A bunch of other things she’s said in the past don’t add up either, like how Khrushchev was supposedly training a platoon of ferocious timber wolves to parachute into the US to wreak havoc.”

  “Hey, that could technically be true,” I said. “You can’t verify that it isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds.”

  “Maybe not, except that she said Khrushchev got the idea from the opening scene of an old movie called Red Dawn, but that movie didn’t even come out until nineteen eighty-four.”

  “So?”

  Danielle sighed as if she were talking to a wolf instead of a person.

  “So, Khrushchev died in seventy-one! She’s making it all up—she just likes to have fun with the kids, make them gasp and ooh and ah and all that.”

  “Okay,” I said, as we headed toward our usual table. “But that doesn’t prove much, does it?”

  “Well,” Danielle said, “it means she probably never was a spy, for one. And even more telling was when I snuck into her office during her off period. I saw her talking on the phone and she was talking to her granddaughter in, like, baby talk and telling her how she would make her cookies that weekend. Which proves she’s lying about her whole backstory—she always tells us she never had kids. But she does—I saw pictures on her desk of her with a big family. And old pictures of her wearing a college cheerleading outfit and wedding photos and pictures of her with all of her kids when they were babies. She’s just a strange old lady who likes to make kids do military drills in gym class while telling outlandish stories. Nothing more. At least, not as far as Medlock is concerned.”

  I nodded, impressed with her work so far. It made me feel sort of bad. I had two maybes and one complete unknown. She was definitely down to one name.

  “What are you guys whispering about?” Dillon asked as we sat down at the table. “You guys plotting against me? Are you going to try and steal my brain during the night and use it to power your new PlayStations?”

  Dillon was convinced that his brain generated its own powerful electricity and could be used as an everlasting battery should it ever be removed from his head. Well, that is, if you could keep it “entertained and hydrated,” or so he said.

  “Yeah, Dillon,” I said. “We were just discussing where to buy the saw. I heard Home Depot’s got a great deal on skull saws right now. Just forty-nine ninety-nine. Plus tax.”

  Danielle reached over and pretended to measure Dillon’s skull with her hands.

  “Come on, get off me.” Dillon laughed, swatting at her hands.

  Danielle and I laughed as well, almost like old times. I was again reminded that at some point we’d probably have to tell Dillon the truth. We both couldn’t hide being a secret agent from him for much longer. Especially with how bad things were getting between Medlock and the Agency. For all we knew, the whole town could find out about the Agency soon, if Medlock’s plan was carried out.

  “What’s up with you?” I asked him. “I haven’t seen you much lately. Danielle says you’re busy with researching some new theory.”

  “Oh, yeah!” he said getting that excited look on his face. “This is the Big One, man. In fact, I could really use your help with it. Want to help me collect samples Wednesday morning before school?”

  “Before school?” I said. “As in, like, five or six?”

  “Yeah, man,” Dillon said excitedly. “That’s the best time to catch the fungus unaware—that or late at night. But I need more morning samples. Come on, we haven’t hung out in a while. It will be like old times. . . . Remember that summer when we went out every morning at six to see if we could amass the world’s largest collection of living earthworms?”

  To tell the truth, I didn’t really want to get up that early to help Dillon with one of his ridiculous and pointless theories. But, honestly, I also felt really bad about how much I’d been blowing him off lately. Besides, it’s not like I was really going to do any spy work at five in the morning.

  “Okay, sure, let’s do that,” I said. “Tell me about the theory so I have some background.”

  “Awesome, you’re the best!” he said, his eyes practically sparkling. “Well, I made some great progress just last night. Get this: I collected fourteen samples of fungus from the snowy fields north of our house. My early testing shows that they’re just a few years from being able to pull themselves from the dirt on their own, having survived two winters now somehow. A few of them were even starting to form legs! I sent them off for more testing, lab testing, you see, but the preliminary results are good. Or, well, not so good when considering what the fungus is planning. Because I also uncovered evidence that their first-phase goals will be to eliminate all steak sauce—don’t ask me why. But after that it gets even worse. . . .”

  I was sort of listening to him ramble on about his new theory, but mostly I was trying to keep an eye on Gus. I’d spotted him in line shortly after sitting down. He sat at the same table he normally did with a few of his friends and hangers-on. He seemed to be acting relatively normal. He laughed and joked and made fun of several kids passing by. Typical Gus. Maybe he was just a sociopathic jerk and nothing more? Just because he was capable of supporting Medlock’s insane plans didn’t necessarily mean that he was actually the inside guy. That was pretty loose reasoning.

  As I sat there, thinking it all over, I suddenly realized that I had been staring at Gus the entire time. And now he was staring directly back at me. With a scowl on his face.

  A scowl that was now approaching me quickly from across the cafeteria.

  CHAPTER 17

  TRY MY RASPBERRY TOE JAM

  “OH, NO,” I SAID.

  “I know, right?” Dillon said excitedly. “If the strawberry jam didn’t make the fungi samples recoil in pain, then why would apricot? It makes no sense at all, and yet it makes perfect sense!”

  But Danielle noticed right away what I was talking about. Several of our other friends had, too. It was hard to miss a guy like Gus Agriopoulas charging across a school cafeteria with an expression like that on his face.

  His expression could best be described as Grim Reaper.

  I stood up quickly, accidentally knocking over my chair, drawing even more attention to the whole mess. For a moment, running seemed like the best option. But, then again, I was dealing with one of the fastest kids in the entire state. He’d probably be winning varsity high school track meets as an eighth grader later in the school year, breaking records set by kids four years older than him. I held up my hands.

  “What did I tell you?” Gus shouted, only a few feet away from me now.

  At this point, I had two options:

  Cower and get the snot literally beaten out of my nasal cavity.

  Try to figure out if Gus was working with Medlock, and then get the snot literally beaten out of my nasal cavity.

  The way I figured it, if I was going to get pummeled in front of the wh
ole school, I might as well accomplish something important while it happened.

  “Wait, wait,” I said, sounding desperate enough to make Gus pause right as he got to my table. I took a step back and spoke quickly, while I still had a fully operational mouth. “Did Medlock tell you to do this? Was it you who framed Gomez?”

  I tried to speak softly, so that only he would hear me, since basically the entire cafeteria was watching us now.

  My words stopped Gus dead in his tracks. His eyebrows furrowed up into a scrunchy mess on his forehead. Then he tilted his head like a dog seeing himself in the mirror for the first time.

  “What are you talking about, Fender?” he asked.

  He looked so utterly baffled that he might even have been reconsidering getting into a fight with me. What I had said must have sounded crazy, and crazy kids were unpredictable. Now that I was pretty sure Gus had no connection to Medlock (no one was that good an actor, not even Meryl Streep), I decided to play it up, try and use that angle to my advantage, now that I had it.

  “I’m talking about jam!” I shouted, trying to sound like a lunatic, channeling my inner Dillon. “Raspberry jam! Gus-Putin, you’ve got to try my raspberry toe jam!”

  I started flapping my arms like a bird. Gus took a step back. It was working! I was actually scaring him away from—

  And that’s when Gus’s fist connected with my sternum. I have no idea why he went for a torso punch instead of caving in my face, but I suppose either way it was definitely a sign that he had tired of my antics rather quickly.

  I flew back about five feet and landed hard. My chest felt like it had shattered into a million pieces. I gasped once and started climbing back to my feet. With a guy like Gus, you couldn’t ever let your defenses down, no matter how bad you were hurt. Gus didn’t feel remorse or empathy. He wouldn’t stop a beating out of pity or satisfaction. Once he decided to destroy you, he wouldn’t stop until someone made him stop.

  I figured I had at least a small chance; after all, I was a secret agent who had taken down fully grown men with huge machine guns before.