Crisis Zero

by Chris Rylander

  “Hello?” I heard my mom say upstairs. “Helloo-ooo?”

  She had already answered the phone. Man, she’d gotten there quickly. Did the prospect of getting a call on the landline really excite her that much that she felt the need to run to answer it? Either way, it meant I had mere seconds before she’d be back down here and the whole thing would be a bust.

  “Hello? Anyone? Is anyone there? Is that you, Mom? Is your mute button on again?”

  I ran over to the fireplace and pulled open the glass doors slowly so they wouldn’t creak.

  “Who’s calling?” she said loudly. “This is your last chance before I hang up.”

  I climbed inside the fireplace. It was a lot tighter squeeze than I expected. But I fit, sort of, and that’s what mattered. I pushed at the outer folds of the glass doors until they would appear closed at a glance. Then I pressed my palms against the inside of the chimney. It felt grainy with soot. I could barely breathe and already I could feel sweat trickling down the back of my neck in spite of the drafts of cold winter air gusting down on me.

  I tried not to cough as I wedged my feet against the inside of the chimney and inched my way up. Loose soot and dirt fell around me, into my face and hair. Slowly but surely I worked my way up the narrow chimney.

  The irony, of course, was that had it been any wider it would have been a lot harder to climb. But it was so narrow that I would have had to try to actually fall back down it. So I could stop and rest as much as I needed, wedged in the narrow space, without having to worry about losing any progress. And I needed to rest a lot, because climbing up a chimney is as hard as it sounds times a hundred.

  But it was necessary.

  I had one last Agency mission to complete, after all.

  About halfway up, the coughing started. I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. My lungs burned from all of the ash in my mouth. My knees and hands ached from the constant pressure of pushing up my body weight inside the old brick chimney. But still I pushed on.

  The last part, pulling myself completely free from the small chimney opening, turned out to be the hardest part. My muscles were completely spent from the climb. I rolled off the chimney into the snow on the slanted roof. It was deep enough to keep me from sliding down the slope and onto the pavement below me. My arms and legs and face were covered in black ash. I looked like I’d been tarred and feathered except that the guys doing it had forgotten the feathers. But, oddly enough, the soot jacket seemed to be helping with the cold somewhat.

  After crawling my way toward the edge of the roof, I peered over the side. Our house was just two stories, but from the top it felt like it was ten. I worked my way over to the gutter drainpipe that ran down the side between the house and the garage. I had no idea if it could hold my weight, but the only alternative was to simply jump. And that certainly didn’t seem like something I could do without breaking several dozen bones. While still on my hands and knees, I grabbed the lip of the gutter and slowly swung one leg over the side of the house. I froze, not really sure if I actually wanted to put the other leg over the edge.

  Don’t look down.

  Don’t look down.

  Whatever you do, Carson, don’t look down.

  I looked down.

  The white snow spun below me. I felt like I was going to pass out. I managed to snap out of it before I did, but the damage was already done. My hand slipped on the slick, ice-coated roof and then I went sliding off the edge.

  CHAPTER 43

  PROFESSIONAL FALLER

  THE GOOD NEWS WAS THAT THIS WAS HARDLY THE FIRST TIME I’d found myself falling toward my death. In fact, by my count, this was at least the fourth or fifth time I was in the middle of falling several stories since becoming a secret agent. And so, my limbs instinctively moved on their own and my hands grabbed the lip of the gutter.

  I dangled there for several seconds. The cold was eating away at my grip, but it didn’t matter since the gutter wouldn’t be attached to the house for much longer, anyway.

  A loud creak was the first warning that the gutter could not actually hold the weight of a thirteen-year-old kid. The second wasn’t so much of a warning as it was me simply falling backward again, this time towing the torn metal gutter with me.

  I landed on my back with a solid thump. I struggled to breathe, the wind completely knocked out of me. Surely, though, that was the least of my problems. I’d just fallen nearly two stories onto my back; I had to have cracked a vertebrae or two. Maybe shattered my pelvis.

  But as my breath slowly returned, I realized that despite a sharp aching in my tailbone, I was mostly okay. I could move my arms and legs and didn’t feel any blood flowing from my skull.

  I rolled out of the mound of snow, shivering, in pain, but still somehow alive and functioning. Surviving the fall, however, still didn’t change the fact that I still had a lot to worry about:

  •I’d just been expelled from school completing a mission for the Agency.

  •Tomorrow morning I was headed off to some military academy in Nebraska where the hardened student populace probably ate puny punks like me for bedtime snacks.

  •Mule Medlock was still on the loose and was planning to blow up Agency headquarters.

  •My best friend in the whole world was allegedly helping Mule Medlock pull off his evil plans for some inexplicable reason.

  •I was currently on my way to go stab my friend in the back and help the Agency capture him. The fact that it was all in an effort to save the world didn’t really make it feel much better.

  I was starting to think I might have been better off landing on my head when I’d fallen, all things considered. But of course that was ridiculous. Because if that had happened, then I’d never get an answer to the most troubling question of all:

  Why did Dillon join Medlock?

  As I shook off the cold, I started jogging toward the rendezvous spot. One way or another, I was going to get an answer to the question. I just hoped it would be before the Agency made their move, or I might never see Dillon again.

  CHAPTER 44

  THE DIRT MALL

  THE SECRET LOCATION WASN’T REALLY THAT SECRET, WHICH WAS probably the point.

  Junior and Dillon had planned to meet in the middle of a nearby shopping mall. Although, calling the Arrowhead Shopping Center a “mall” was a stretch, even by Minnow, ND, standards.

  Minnow had a real retail mall, complete with a Gap and a sporting goods store and Barnes & Noble and all that stuff. This was North Dakota, so the mall wasn’t nearly as big as the huge multistory malls you see in movies and TV shows, but it was big enough to be called a mall nonetheless.

  The Arrowhead Shopping Center, on the other hand, used to be the “big mall” in Minnow until the late 1980s. Since then it had basically been turned into a big building housing a few creepy, weird businesses and a lot of empty space. Most kids called it the Dirt Mall.

  The grocery store at the far end kept the place well trafficked enough to still be considered a public place. And I noticed all of these people staring at me as I passed them. I glanced at my reflection in the window of a store. I looked like I’d survived a fire, then a World War II battle, a swim through tar pits, then trekked alone through the Rockies, and finally battled a dragon inside a volcano. My entire body was still covered in black soot. But the combination of sweat and snow had caused it to run somewhat, giving it a streaky look, like I’d coated my body in eyeliner and then cried through all my pores.

  Dillon stared at me with his mouth agape as I approached him near the benches and plants at the center of the mall.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “And what in the world happened to you?”

  Normally I’d have laughed or at least smiled at his shocked expression. But given the circumstances, I could barely even look at him.

  We just stood there, ten feet apart, and stared at each other. And in that moment, that long pause, I knew it had to be true. He was working for Medlock, and I was working for the
Agency. We both knew it. He knew who I really was and I knew who he really was. Nothing else needed to be said. But I said it anyway.

  “How could you?”

  “Me?” Dillon said, shocked, the real pain of discovering your best friend lied to you pouring out of his eyes like lasers. “What about you?”

  He took a step back. And that’s when I noticed a couple walking toward us from the grocery store carrying several large grocery bags. Except that it wasn’t just a random couple. It was Agent Smiley, flanked by another agent. This was it; the Agency was making their move.

  That’s when I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just stand there and watch them arrest my best friend. It didn’t matter who he was working for. I had been lying to him all year; if I’d told him who I was and what I was doing, none of this might have ever happened. It was my fault. And I wasn’t going to let him take the fall for it.

  I pulled the small tranquilizer gun the Agency had given me from my jeans pocket. Dillon’s eyes grew wide as he saw it. I ran toward him and he stood there, staring at me with a mixture of shock and heartbreak on his face. He still hadn’t spotted the two agents coming up from behind him with their own tranquilizer guns.

  Instead he was focused on me, clearly still thinking that I was there to capture him. Which, to his credit, I had been.

  But not anymore.

  Instead I dived at him, right as Agent Smiley fired. I slammed into Dillon as the dart sailed wide. It embedded itself in the bench behind us and we crashed to the floor behind a large, fake plant.

  “Dillon, run!” I said, rolling to a crouch.

  I pointed my own weapon at the approaching agents, closed one eye, and fired two shots. The first dart hit the male agent right in the chest. He dropped like dead weight before he’d taken two more steps. The second dart hit a bag of groceries Agent Smiley held up as a shield. Several bystanders nearby screamed and headed for the nearest exit.

  Dillon was on the ground next to me, staring up with a look of confusion.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Saving you,” I said. “You’re still my best friend, no matter what. Come on.”

  I grabbed his shirt and pulled him around to the other side of the fake plant, shielding us from Agent Smiley.

  “I’m going to fire some shots,” I said. “When she dives for cover, you make a break for that exit. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Dillon nodded, his eyes wide, finally seeming to snap out of his confused daze.

  Then his nod turned into a shaking head.

  “No,” he said. “We need to go this way.”

  He pointed at the other exit across the hall.

  “Fine, let’s go,” I said.

  I rolled out from behind the plant and then fired another dart toward Agent Smiley. Her reflexes were inhuman; she easily dived out of the way, then raised her own weapon toward me.

  It surprised me how fast my brain was operating in that moment. It was more than just simple reflexes. Somehow in that split second before she fired, my brain registered that she was too skilled for me to simply try to dive one way or another. She’d recognize my movements and lead me easily. So instead, my brain signaled to my legs to hip fake to the right ever so slightly, then quickly spring back the other way, toward the exit Dillon had already made it halfway to reaching.

  And, shockingly, the double move worked.

  That one extra motion caused Agent Smiley just enough of a hitch in her shot to fire wide left. Which gave me just enough time to raise my weapon again and let off a barrage of darts. She hit the ground hard behind the bench between us and didn’t get up.

  I turned and sprinted after Dillon, who was outside the mall now, but waiting for me with the door open. I grinned at him. He grinned back, but then it quickly faded. His eyes grew wide.

  I spun around, shocked to see Agent Smiley half standing, half leaning against the bench. A dart stuck out from her arm. She should be unconscious. Maybe she was a robot after all.

  But her eyes betrayed her; she was losing her battle with the potent tranquilizer that had dropped her partner in under two seconds.

  She used whatever energy she had left to raise her gun and let loose one final shot. The shock of seeing her fight off the dart’s toxin for so long slowed my reaction time just enough. Before I could even so much as attempt to dodge, I felt a soft thump on the right side of my chest.

  The shock and mild pain caused me to stumble, and I fell at Dillon’s feet half inside the mall and half out in the cold late-afternoon air. I stared up at Dillon’s shocked and panicked face in disbelief.

  “Carson, get up!” he yelled.

  But his voice was already fading. It sounded like I was under water and he was screaming at me from somewhere above the surface. I could barely hear his words. My eyelids felt as if they were being pushed closed by a pair of invisible fingers.

  The last thing I felt was Dillon dragging me the rest of the way outside.

  And then, it was all gone.

  CHAPTER 45

  HOP TO IT, BRUCE DERNS

  “SHOULD WE TAKE HIM TO THE HOSPITAL?” A VOICE ASKED somewhere in my dreams.

  It was a girl’s voice. Familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “You know we can’t do that,” a boy responded.

  “But I’m worried about him,” the girl said. “Besides, I don’t like it here. It’s making me uneasy. Why did you bring us here?”

  “Because I knew it was safe,” the boy said.

  I groaned.

  “See?” the boy said. “He’s waking up, he’s fine.”

  “Carson?” the girl asked. “Carson, come on, wake up!”

  A hand shook my shoulder and I groaned again.

  “Stop it,” I mumbled. “My head hurts.”

  “What did he say?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know,” the boy responded. “Something about bop-it Ned hurls?”

  “No,” the girl said. “That makes no sense. I think he said, ‘Hop to it, Bruce Derns.’”

  “Why would he say that?” the boy said.

  “I said, my head hurts,” I repeated slowly, struggling to enunciate every word.

  “Yeah, it probably does,” the boy said. “You smacked it on the cement pretty good when you went down. You’re lucky Danielle showed up. I never could have gotten you here alone.”

  Finally, my eyes fluttered open. It was just a dim haze at first, but then the faces above me came into focus. It was Danielle and Dillon, staring down at me. I was lying on something relatively soft. I tried to sit up, but a wave of fresh stabbing in my forehead forced me back down.

  “Just take it easy, Carson,” Danielle said.

  “Whaddaryoudoinghere?” I mumbled.

  “Saving you two idiots, apparently.”

  I tried to look around. We were somewhere dark. And quiet. I couldn’t hear anything but our own voices. No traffic, no birds, no nothing. My vision was still too blurry to make out much of anything that wasn’t right in front of me.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Bonanza,” Dillon said.

  “Bonanza?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, Bonanza. That’s one of those words, isn’t it? That’s kind of fun to say? Bonanza. Bo-nan-za. Bo-nan-za.”

  “This is hardly the time,” Danielle said.

  Bonanza was an old restaurant in Minnow that had been closed down for a few months. The old building had been sitting on Broadway, dark and vacant, ever since. It had been a family favorite—it was the type of place that was a steak house and buffet all in one. The sort of place my dad loved. If my dad had a sense of humor, he might have held a fake funeral on the day it closed down.

  But now that it was gone, the place was all but forgotten.

  I attempted to sit up again, more slowly this time. And the rush of pain that flooded my headed was duller, more bearable. I sat up and found myself in an empty red booth with no table.

  It was dark outside, and there we
re no lights on in the abandoned restaurant, but there were enough windows to allow me to see that the place had been half demoed. Most of the tables and chairs were gone. The giant buffet in the center of the room was just a barren framework of old wood. Most of the booths had been torn out, except for three or four.

  Dillon and Danielle stood next to the booth and watched me uneasily.

  “Are you okay?” Danielle asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “What happened? How did you get here? Did Dillon call you?”

  “It was the Agency . . .” She stopped, looking uncomfortable. Danielle rarely had a hard time speaking her mind. “They sort of tasked me with following you.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “They told me they were worried about you having a secret motive. I didn’t ask why . . . but I should have. I’m . . . I’m sorry, Carson.”

  And just like that, I felt like passing out again. The Agency actually suspected me of having turned? It just didn’t seem possible. But Director Isadoris had hired my own best friend to spy on me while I was spying on my other best friend who was the first best friend’s brother.

  It was like a classic Spy Triangle. A spyangle.

  And the worst part was, they’d been right. They were right to be concerned about my loyalties. What I’d done finally hit me. I was finished. I’d actually helped an enemy agent escape and had shot two of my fellow agents with tranquilizer darts. There’d be no coming back from that.

  I was Agent Zero no more.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE TRUTH BEHIND ALL CONSPIRACY THEORIES

  “SEE?” DILLON SAID. “THIS IS EXACTLY WHY MULE MEDLOCK wants to expose these guys. They’re hiring their own agents to spy on each other! What the Agency is doing is wrong.”

  “That’s exactly what a lying backstabber would say,” I said.

  “Takes one to know one.”

  A classic comeback, never more cutting than it felt right then. And accurate, I had to admit. I had lied to him for a long time. Maybe it was time for that to end.