by Travis McBee
“What do you mean jacked up?” Corey asked
“Well whoever it was, was darn sneaky. They snuck into each pod and shorted out the fuel cells so thoroughly they can’t be recharged and for good measure they stole the nav systems from every last pod. I swear if I find out who did this I’m going to...” He trailed off in a gulp of anger and ran hand through his blonde hair in frustration.
“Who could have done that? I mean wouldn’t someone catch them?” Abby asked alarmed.
“The friggen security cameras are probably out along with the rest of our technology.” Adrian snorted cynically, “Whoever did this probably jacked up the rest of the stuff that’s going haywire,” he added with a disgusted shake of his head.
“Dude come on,” Corey rolled his eyes, “Some whack job has nothing to do with the glitches with all the systems.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Will uttered softly
The eyes of Corey, Adrian, and Abby all fell upon Will with interest as they sensed some hidden knowledge preparing to reveal itself from him.
“Well…” Adrian prompted with a stir of his hand.
“I heard Coach and Mr. Sweetman talking today,” Will said quietly after looking around to check for eavesdroppers, “And Mr. Sweetman told Coach that someone is in the school and hacking into all the systems.”
“Seriously?” Corey asked, “Who is it?”
“How would he know?” Adrian interjected before Will could answer.
“Actually I think I might,” Will whispered softly, “There was this guys at breakfast today that I’d never seen before. He looked like a senior because he had a beard. Well he was sitting with Brandon Crosby, that kid I knocked out, and that seemed pretty weird to me. I mean why would a senior sit with that kid. After I got to thinking about it I think I know who he was though.”
“Who?” Abby asked quietly.
“Remember how I told you about that guy that threatened me after the Starview game?”
Corey and Abby nodded and Will ignored the confused look on Adrian’s face.
“Well I think it was him. I think he grew his hair and beard out and that’s why I didn’t recognize him straight away.”
“Did you tell anyone about him?” Abby asked shocked
“No, I wanted to make sure first before I told anyone,” Will said, “And I didn’t want to get into trouble for eavesdropping if I was wrong.” he added dolefully.
“Oh don’t be a baby,” Adrian snorted at Will’s confession.
“Will, you need to tell someone about this,” Abby told him
“Yeah man you do,” Corey agreed, “Come on I’ll go with you up to the dean’s office and we can tell her together.”
Will sighed and nodded his head in consent and rose from his chair with a scrape of metal.
“We’ll meet you in the lounge,” He told Abby, “And you should probably come with us,” he said addressing Adrian, “To tell them about the pods.”
“They already know,” Adrian replied, “I’m going to the senior lounge to see if I can find this kid you’re talking about. If he’s posing as a senior that’s where he’ll be.”
* * *
Will walked with the two brothers until Adrian parted ways with them on the fourth floor so that he might search out the Starview intruder. He and Corey continued upward to the sixth floor in relative silence considering the amount of information that sat so newly in their minds.
They walked past the wall of windows which showed a red sun setting behind Broglio and made their way towards the office. When they reached the large door Corey waved the door open with his palm and walked through into the little room Will felt like he had visited in a past life.
“Oh, hello boys!” The secretary greeted them with a warm smile when she saw them enter the room, “What can I do for you?”
“We need to speak to the dean,” Corey boldly pronounced
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” She flashed her smile in regret, “I think she left the school.”
“What do you mean you think she left the school?” Will questioned
“Well her office is locked and I heard the school shuttle is missing. So I guess she went somewhere.”
“Wouldn’t she tell you if she was going somewhere,” Corey asked with a frown.
“Oh no, she rarely does. She just leaves when she wants to,” The secretary’s smile never faltered, “Can I help you with something though?”
“Yeah, we think we know who’s behind all the weird stuff going on,” Will blurted out.
The secretaries smile faltered for the first time as she stared at first Will and then Corey in a look of growing confusion. Then without warning the smile returned and along with what appeared to be a twinkle of understanding.
“We already know,” she said simply.
“You already know?” Will asked in amazement
“Yes, we hired him ourselves he should fix it all in no time.” She said
“Wait…what?” Will squinted and eye and turned his head in confusion.
He looked sideways at Corey who was staring at the secretary as if he had just seen a cat get stuck in a milk carton.
“Well thanks anyways,” Corey told her and grabbed Will’s arm, “Come on, let’s go,” he whispered in his ear.
“But...” Will didn’t understand what was taking place
“Come on!” Corey whispered forcefully and drug Will into the hall.
“What’s going on Corey?” Will nearly screamed as the door hissed closed behind him
“Dude, she doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.” He jerked his thumb towards the closed door, “Either that or she’s in on it. We’ll come back tomorrow and talk to the dean there is no point in talking to that nitwit.”
Will glanced back at the door and realized that Corey was right. The lady didn’t even know if the Dean had gone or not she clearly wasn’t in a position of authority. They would come back tomorrow and sort it out with the Dean or someone else if they had to.
* * *
“Well did you tell her?” Abby asked as they entered the lounge
“She wasn’t there,” Will answered and plopped into a chair next to her.
“Wasn’t there? Well where was she?”
“Don’t know,” Corey said morosely, “The secretary didn’t seem to know much of anything. We’ll go back tomorrow.”
Abby frowned at the news but didn’t pursue it. “Have you seen Jon?” she asked.
Will shook his head, “Not since phys ed. Why?”
“I looked for him here when I got back I wanted to tell him everything that happened but I couldn’t find him.”
“He probably just went to bed early,” Will suggested.
“Yeah probably,” Abby agreed with a shrug, “I haven’t seen Brandon either though,” she added.
“You don’t hear me complaining about that?” Corey laughed although he searched the room with his eyes for the boy.
Will shrugged his shoulders, “I don’t know Abbz, maybe he went to sleep too.”
“Yeah maybe,” she said with disbelief.
* * *
Jon wasn’t sleeping, at least in the dormitory, as Will walked towards his own bed in the far corner he passed by the empty pallet of his friends bed. Strangely enough Brandon’s was equally vacant and Will found his mind grow weary as another mystery thrust itself upon it.
He crawled into his bed that night knowing that sleep would not come quickly or easily. As he laid in bed listening to the deepening breathing of his peers drifting off to sleep he considered the problems at hand. What was the Starview player up to and where did Jon and Brandon go? Those thoughts were still on his mind when the room flashed red and the alarms screamed their long silent voices to the room.
Chapter Twenty-One
An Unpleasant Viewing
Will sat bolt upright as heavy bangs reverberated around the dormitory punctuating the loud blares of the newly revived alarm with a terrible percussion. Will looked for the sour
ce of the sound and through the flashing crimson of the lights he saw heavy plates of metal slam smoothly over the doors that led into the lounge sealing them into the room.
All around him boys sat stock still in their beds or standing in confusion by them as they surveyed the scene of chaos. The wails of distressed girls drifted through the thick walls that separated them from the girl’s dormitory and they knew the bedlam wasn’t isolated to their dormitory alone.
Will walked slowly towards the massive sheets of metal that clung to the space where doors had been moments before. Around him his bleary eyed peers followed him and stood staring at the massive construct.
“What is it?” a drowsy voice called from somewhere.
“Looks like one of the blast doors.” Another voice offered.
“But why did it deploy? Did we spring a leak?” one of Will’s teammates asked.
“Somehow I doubt that,” Will said quietly.
As if to confirm his suspicions the sudden static of an open microphone filled the room through the speakers set into the ceiling.
“Well good evening Bridgers this is your Starview captain speaking,” A mocking voice laughed, “I suppose even you idiots must have noticed by now that something isn’t quite right? Well let me be the first to inform you that all of you are about to undertake a voyage from the comfort of your own dormitories! As we speak my colleagues and I are setting the thrusters to send this little school of yours into deep space where no one will ever be bothered by you again. Maybe if you’re lucky someone will stumble upon you in a few centuries but since we’ve taken the liberty to remove all navigation and tracking systems from your precious school I seriously doubt it. Good luck and good riddance.”
The speaker cut off with a sharp click and silence swelled like a whale into the room. No one wanted to be the first one to speak but the silence could not last forever and it was the usually quiet Sean Hester who broke it.
“Wa-was that a joke?” he muttered feebly.
“I don’t think so man,” Corey replied simply.
Sean’s words created a fissure in the silence but Corey’s shattered it. Yells of terror began emanating from the boys surrounding Will and through the thick wall he could hear the girls showing the boys how screaming was done. Will didn’t consciously decide not to panic like the majority of the room but none the less he remained calm and walked through the chaotic room to find Corey sitting on a bed and looking at the floor in apparent interest.
“Corey wake up,” Will snapped his fingers, “We’ve got to get out of this room and get up to the dean’s office.”
“Dude,” Corey pointed towards the sealed doors, “Don’t know if you noticed but…big. Freakin. Hunk. Of. Metal.” He said each word with an emphasis of intense sarcasm.
“Well we have to find another way out!” Will pleaded, “We can’t just give up!”
“Dude there is no other way out.” Corey replied morosely.
Will looked about the room and felt the hopelessness that had already settled on Corey. He kept looking as he flicked a strand of hair away from his neck where a slight breeze caused it to tickle his neck. The room only had two exits,one of them led to the bathroom from which there was no exit and the other was sealed by a massive piece of metal they had no hope of moving. The wisp of hair tickled his neck again as the breeze once again caught it and Will realized his solution in a gut turning wave of excitement.
“The vents!,” He yelled, “Corey come help me get the cover off of the air duct!”
Will ran over to a vacant bed that hovered beneath the shining silver of the central vent that had provided oxygen through dozens of nights sleep. He jumped on the bed in an agile leap and reached for the grill of the vent that sat mockingly nearly twenty feet above his head.
“You aren’t going to reach that,” Corey said as dejected as ever as he sauntered over.
Will glared at his friend who was being anything but helpful. Other boys were starting to drift over to join his friend at the foot of the bed but they all wore the same defeated look that scarred Corey’s features.
“What’s wrong with yall!” Will shouted so forcefully he could hear his southern accent break through the lingus in his ear, “Do yall want to float around in space for the rest of your lives?”
“Dude we can’t get out!” Corey motioned towards the vent that seemed unreachable, “There’s no way we can get up there.”
“Besides even if we do it’ll be closed off since the blast doors deployed.” Seam Hester added.
“Maybe if they were deployed normally but that Starview punk hacked our system and did all sorts of stuff. Can’t you feel the breeze coming through?”
As Will finished talking he reached his hand up to feel the moving air that tickled against his finger tips and to his immense pleasure he saw many in the group doing the same.
“You’re right,” Sean replied excitedly.
“But we still can’t get up there!” Corey interjected before the excitement could spread.
It wasn’t a point that failed to ring home with Will and he frowned as he burrowed into his mind for ideas. He stared around the room for anything that would help but all that met his eyes were frantic boys and a neat line of beds and metal cabinets.
“We could stack the beds on top of each other,” Proposed a nervous looking boy with a fuzz of red hair that Will had never talked to.
“Don’t be stupid Josh,” David Kim, Will’s teammate, belittled the nervous Josh who turned red and tried to sink into his shoes, “We can’t stack them more than two high.”
Will hung his head with Josh and knew that David was right. It would be impossible to hoist a bed above their head to a height they couldn’t reach. The bravado that had filled him into action began to seep away like morning dew on grass and his heart dropped.
“I think there might be a way.” A voice spoke out.
Will looked up to see the sandy haired Sean deep in thought with darting eyes that were surveying the room at a stunning pace.
“How?” Corey asked sardonically.
“We build steps out of the beds,” Sean replied as if it should have been obvious to all of them, “That way we can stand on the lower beds to stack them.”
“And how many beds would that take?” Corey asked surprising himself with the tone of hope that wormed its way out, “We only have fifty.” He added waving around the room.
Sean looked from the floor to the ceiling and then at the beds that line the walls before thinking aloud, “Well the ceiling is about twenty feet up and each bed is about three feet high so we need to get about six high. I’d say twenty one.” He said the number with finality and smiled around the group.
Will tried briefly to mull the numbers over in his head but all that happened was a sharp sting of pain resonating behind his eye. He sighed feeling no choice in the matter and realizing calculations mattered very little.
“Okay,” Will said taking authority once more, “Everyone start dragging beds over.”
The group dissolved and started to pull beds away from the walls with teeth grinding scrapes. None of them had bothered to question Sean’s suggestion openly because the boy was already recognized by his peers as the smartest person out of all of the freshmen, if not the school. If Sean said it would work, It’d work.
“How many beds on the first level Sean?” Will panted as he dragged a bed under the vent.
“Six,” Sean replied without hesitation as he helped another boy drag a bed.
The boys who hadn’t been in the group as they had discussed the plans noticed the action and before long there were forty-eight bodies listening to instructions as Sean told them where to put each bed.
It only took them five minutes to complete the most dangerous stair case Will had ever laid eyes on. It rose in dangerous gaps, three feet at a time, to the ceiling above. Will was the first to ascend and as he climbed he felt the tower of beds rock as the metal legs dug into the mattress that had seemed rock solid when
he had slept on it but now appeared to entirely too giving. When he got to the top he had to duck down since the ceiling was only two feet above his head.
“We could have left the last bed off,” Will told Sean who had climbed after him.
“Well the shorter boys wouldn’t have been able to pull themselves up five feet.” Sean replied informatively, “Besides you don’t know what’s on the other side of that vent.”
Will grunted his agreement and peered at the metal grate that separated him from the inside of the vent. A fresh draft of air wafted out of it cooling the sweat on his brow. There didn’t appear to be any screws holding it up and Will thought dreadfully that it might be welded into place and their dreams of escape would die on top of their bed made stairway.
“Any ideas on how to get this thing off?” Will asked Sean.
“Give it a tug?”Sean suggested with a shrug of his shoulders.
Will laughed morosely and reached for the grate. He wrapped his fingers around the cool metal and yanked hard though he didn’t expect it to give. However, the second the force was exerted on the grate it sprung from the ceiling and struck Will on the top of the head with a resonating clang.
“Good job!” Sean congratulated him through the dots that now flashed in Will vision.
Will shook his head clean of the dots, although a dull throb continued to dance on his skull. He stood on the bed and poked his head into the vent which was about as wide as his dad’s favorite chair which sat an impossible distance away.
“What do you see?” Sean’s voice echoed upwards toward him.
“Our escape,” Will called back smiling in the dusty air of the vent as he stared down a shaft that lead toward the lounge
Will pulled himself into the shaft and wormed his way a few feet before turning around and calling for the others to join him. They climbed into the shaft one by one and as they did Will began to crawl down the shaft. Behind him the dust muffled thumps of hands and knees told him that his friends were following him.
He arrived at the first shaft of light after only a brief stint of cramped crawling. He peered down and saw the familiar shapes of the chairs and tables that littered the lounge He was raising a fist to knock out the grate when a small hand gripped his shoulder.
