“Well, we got here early and worked all night,” I said.
“Very well then,” Gomez said, nodding. “You can sign and date the last page.”
I did as I was instructed. Then I set down the pen again and slid the contract back across the desk. I waited while he flipped through it and scanned the pages. He said nothing.
“Uh, can I go now?” I said. “Fifth period starts soon and I need to go to my locker.”
He looked up at me, seeming surprised that I was still there.
“Yes, you may go,” he said. “I’ll let Mr. Jensen and Ms. Pearson know that you have my approval to go on the field trip tomorrow. One of them will call your parents this evening to discuss the details.”
“Okay, well, uh, thanks, Mr. Gomez,” I said.
He didn’t say anything, so I turned and headed for the exit.
“One last thing,” Gomez said as I got to the door. I looked back, being careful not to give him any reason to cancel the contract. “Let this be a valuable lesson to you, Carson. That all your actions eventually do have consequences.”
“HOW DID IT GO WITH GOMEZ?” DILLON ASKED WHEN I walked into sixth-period life sciences that day.
“Yeah, man, how did he take it?” Jake asked, his leg bouncing under his desk like he’d just spent the last three hours chugging a giant cooler of Gatorade.
The three of us sat right next to one another for sixth period. Which was normally pretty awesome. In school, each class is only as bearable as your proximity to friends.
“It went okay,” I said. “He bought it.”
Jake nodded.
“You’re still okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. “My mom’s always so busy drinking cocktails and gossiping with the other rich ladies at the country club that she probably won’t even notice whatever detention they give me anyway.”
I nodded. Man, if I were the one taking the fall for something like this, I’d never be this cool about it.
“So when do your detentions start then?” Dillon asked.
“Not sure,” I said. “Whenever I get back, I guess.”
“Get back from where?” Dillon asked.
I’d completely forgotten that he didn’t know about the me-getting-to-go-on-the-trip part of the deal. Obviously he was going to find out tomorrow either way, but I couldn’t think of a reason to explain that part away.
“Oh, we’re just going to my aunt and uncle’s house over in Willisville this weekend,” I said. Man, keeping secrets was complicated. It created a constantly growing web of interconnected lies that were almost impossible to keep intact. It was more stressful than anything else I’d ever had to do in my life, including guarding a ticking time bomb for two days earlier that year when I’d first gotten myself mixed up in this whole secret-agent thing.
“Please stop talking, boys, the bell rang thirty seconds ago,” said Ms. Greenwood from the front of the class.
“Sorry,” Jake said, waving at her.
Halfway through class, a note plopped onto my desk. I looked back at Dillon. He nodded for me to open it, frowning in that way that he did whenever he talked about this one theory he had about how the world was going to run out of oil by the year 2029, something he called Peak Oil, and how it would descend into a postapocalyptic wasteland like in Mad Max. Then I’d ask him who was Mad Max. And he’d always reply, You’ll find out in 2029.
I opened the note:
I’m so sorry. I can’t believe you got caught.
I wrote back:
It’s okay. At least you guys are still going to Rushmore!
I tossed the note back to him when the teacher wasn’t looking. Then I buried my head in my arms and tried not to think about Agent Nineteen’s impending death or how I was going to explain to my friends that I was going on the school trip the day after I got busted for the biggest prank in school history. Constantly lying to your best friends was something my agency training never covered.
JUST AFTER DINNER THAT NIGHT, THE PHONE RANG. ABOUT twenty minutes later, my mom came downstairs and knocked on my bedroom door. She came into my room with a huge grin on her face.
“Guess who just called?” she asked, and then kept talking before even letting me get a guess in. “Mr. Jensen from school. Turns out they had a student get sick and drop out of the Mount Rushmore field trip. And you’ll never guess whose name came up to replace him.”
“Uh, me?” I said. “Being that you’re in here asking me these questions?”
She laughed. “How exciting is that, Carson?”
I nodded and tried to pretend that I was excited to go on a simple, fun, carefree school field trip with my friends and that it wasn’t actually all just a setup for me to go on some insane mission that involved secret bases and deadly viruses.
“Come on, put on your shoes,” she said.
“Why?”
“The bus leaves tomorrow morning at seven! We have to go to Wal-Mart to get you some supplies! Then we have to get you packed!”
I hadn’t seen my mom this giddy in forever. She was always a happy-enough person, I guess, but this was on a whole other level. It was likely because she was used to having two sons who had turned getting detention into an Olympic event. Turns out, she preferred having kids who get to go on special field trips usually reserved for the “good kids.” Who knew?
At Wal-Mart, we were in the outdoors section picking out a flashlight when we ran into Jake.
“Hey, Carson, what are you doing here?” he asked.
“Shopping, of course.”
“Going camping?” he asked, looking at the cart full of camping gear.
I noticed that his mom was nowhere in sight. Did he just come here to hang out or something? It wouldn’t be unheard of. In a town this small, sometimes people go to Wal-Mart to bum around. Yes, seriously.
“Yeah, turns out I get to go on the Rushmore trip,” I said.
“What?” he practically shouted. “How did you pull that off?”
I stepped on his toes as subtly as I could to shut him up.
“My mom, dude,” I whispered, motioning toward my mom, who was just a few feet away, reading the back of a flashlight package.
“Oh, right, sorry!”
“Anyway,” I said, ready to try out the story I’d come up with, “Gomez apparently said something to Mr. Jensen about how our new agreement should mean a new start for me or something like that. So I guess he’s letting me go on this trip to test my commitment. I don’t know. I really think he was probably just looking for a way to get rid of me for an extra day.”
Jake nodded. “Cool. Man, Dillon and Danielle are going to be so excited.”
“I know, but I want to surprise them tomorrow morning on the bus so don’t text them tonight or anything, okay?”
He grinned and nodded.
“Sure thing. Do you think you’ll get to tent with Dillon and me?”
I shrugged. “I kind of just found out about this. Apparently some other kid dropped out.”
“Oh, weird,” Jake said. “Well, his loss is our gain!”
“Yeah,” I said, glancing back at my mom. She was looking at blowtorches now. What kind of trip did she think this was?
“Your mom seems pretty cool,” Jake said. He was watching her also.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, bringing you here all excited to buy you supplies and stuff. My mom just gave me her credit card and told me to come here and get whatever I wanted.”
“Yeah, she’s all right, I guess.” I can’t say I ever really thought about it. I figured moms generally lived for stuff like buying you supplies for school trips. “Well, I better get back to shopping, but I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, see you then,” Jake said as he turned and wandered off in the direction of the toy section.
MY MOM WAS STILL ACTING LIKE A GIDDY NUTCASE WHEN SHE dropped me off in the school parking lot the morning of the trip with a new duffel bag full of clothes, a new sleeping bag, and a ba
ckpack full of “supplies.”
“Have fun!” She gave me a hug.
“Okay, Mom,” I said.
“Don’t get into trouble. Take lots of pictures. Call me every day!”
“Okay, Mom,” I said again, trying not to sound annoyed.
“I’ll see you when you get home.”
My stomach started to hurt as I realized that I might not be coming home at all, depending on what I found inside the secret government base that I was going to infiltrate tomorrow afternoon. I hadn’t considered what my mom would do if something went wrong. I’d never seen her cry before. The thought alone almost made me start crying.
“Love you,” she said with a final squeeze.
“Yeah, love you, too,” I said, feeling even worse.
Mr. Jensen, aka Agent Blue, was waiting by the bus’s lower luggage compartment. He nodded at me as I approached.
“Good to see you, Carson,” he said.
I nodded back at him as he took my sleeping bag and duffel bag. He tossed them deep into the bus storage compartment.
“You’re the first one here, so you get your pick of seats,” he said, motioning toward the bus door.
The bus itself wasn’t a normal school bus. It wasn’t yellow and didn’t have seats that were basically rows of wooden benches covered with a thin layer of fake leather. This bus was huge, with tinted windows, and it had padded seats with headrests. There was also a small bathroom in the rear.
As I made my way toward the back, I noticed a small slip of paper in my coat pocket. I pulled it out. There was a message scrawled on it in the tiniest printed handwriting I’d ever seen.
Meet me behind the charter bus tonight at 11 p.m. for mission briefing. Ingest this message.
Agent Blue must have slipped it into my pocket when I was giving him my luggage. Once again, I thought about my mom driving to work, unaware of what I was about to do, and my body felt completely empty.
After eating the small piece of paper, I took a seat and checked my watch. Agent Nineteen had approximately thirty hours left to live. I sighed and watched out the window for my friends. Jake showed up first. He smiled and waved at me when he boarded the bus. I moved over so he could sit down.
“You ever been to Rushmore before?” he asked.
“No, have you?”
He shook his head. “My parents used to go all the time when they were younger, though. Before they got bogged down by cement shoes. That’s what my mom calls my brother and me: cement shoes. She always says she can’t wait for us to go to college so she and Dad can get their life back. Whatever that means.”
“Uh . . . okay,” I said, not sure if he was joking around with me or not. It sounded like he had a pretty weird family. I’d known Jake for a while, but we’d never been actual friends until his old best friend, Anders, moved away last month, and then he just kind of melted into our group. We were happy to welcome him. He always seemed like a strange kid, but that’s what I liked about him. North Dakota was too boring as it was to hang out with ordinary people on top of that.
“Anyway, they said I’ll love it, that it’s right up my alley.”
“Are you a presidents buff or something?” I asked.
“No, not really. I’ve just always loved faces. Like, replica faces. Paintings, drawings, masks, sculptures, you know.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t really know at all. Replica faces seemed like a strange thing to be into. But then again, my best friend thought that Pizza Hut had some secret operation in place to domesticate pelicans by the year 2035, so who was I to judge?
“There’s this guy, Chuck Close, who paints these amazing portraits,” Jake continued. “These massive paintings of faces. He’s my favorite artist in the world. I might pee my pants when I finally see Rushmore, I’ll be so excited. Have you ever done that? Peed your pants out of excitement?”
I thought back to a few months ago when I’d peed my pants in class on purpose to avoid getting caught with Betsy—the secret, self-destructing data device I’d accidentally activated. I figured that could kind of be attributed to excitement. Then again, I wasn’t sure if Jake was even being serious.
“Uh . . . maybe?” I said.
Jake laughed and nodded. Then he looked out the window and grinned. “Dillon and Danielle are here!” he said.
Their car was just pulling into the parking lot. Several moments later there was a gasp as Danielle spotted us from the front of the bus. She practically sprinted to the back.
“What the heck are you doing here?” she asked, sitting down in front of Jake and me.
Dillon sat next to her, grinning.
“I knew it!” he said.
“You did not,” Danielle said, but she was smiling, too.
“I did! I’ve been saying all week that something was up with this trip!”
“What you said all week,” Danielle replied, raising her fingers up like quotation marks, “is that this trip was really a secret mission to break into the hidden vault behind Lincoln’s nose, where thousands of gold bars are kept. Then you said that was the origin of the phrase ‘digging for gold,’ used with respect to nose picking. Then later this week you claimed that the trip was part of a secret experiment to see what happened when thirty middle school kids get trapped inside a bus with a family of hungry black bears—a theory that I personally didn’t find very funny. Then, after that . . .”
“Okay, okay!” Dillon finally stopped her. “Maybe I didn’t predict that Carson would be coming with. But my theory about the gold bars still stands.”
“Whatever,” Danielle said. “The real question is, Carson, how did you manage to get yourself on this trip?”
I proceeded to tell them the same story I’d told Jake the night before at Wal-Mart. They seemed to buy it.
Meanwhile, I was now lying to my best friends often enough to feel like a professional liar. A real snake. And the worst part was, the more I lied, the better I seemed to do it.
A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO AREN’T FROM NORTH DAKOTA NEVER seem to understand just how big the state is. They think that you can just drive from one end to the other in an hour. Well, they’re wrong. North and South Dakota are both huge. It takes over five hours just to drive across one of them. If you’re lucky. Because most of the time the interstates and highways are completely torn apart by road construction due to the harsh, karate-kick-to-your-face winters being so completely devastating to pavement.
Likewise, driving from Minnow, North Dakota, to Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota was no trip around the block. It was a ten-hour trek through the flat, boring wastelands of the upper prairie. In fact, we weren’t even going to make it there in time to see Mount Rushmore that same day. The plan was to get to the Black Hills area Friday evening and then camp out somewhere near the monument. Then we’d head up to see it on Saturday morning. Which was also when I’d have to embark on my dangerous solo mission. At which point Agent Nineteen would have just a few hours left to live.
At that moment, though, we were still on the road, and when you’re in a charter bus with your best friends, a long ride really doesn’t feel so long. Especially if you can get a poker game going in the back.
“You guys ever play Texas Hold ’Em?” Jake asked once we all realized our smart phone and handheld gaming system batteries would never last the entire drive.
We played poker using our snack and souvenir money, keeping the antes pretty low so nobody had to go without snacks for the rest of the trip. But with seven of us in, there was still a chance to win a decent amount of extra cash.
After an hour or so, I was down almost five bucks. I’m usually not such a bad poker player, but the fact that the mission was drawing closer with every mile had me more than a little distracted. And people were starting to notice. I needed to get my head back in the game, if only to keep from blowing my cover.
That’s when Danielle dealt me the hand. A pair of aces. The best hand you can get in Texas Hold ’Em. This was my chance.
Dillon folded, like he did almost every hand. He was terrible at poker, since, you know, he always assumed that every other player was trying to cheat in some outrageously complicated manner. But when you fold every time and the ante is only a nickel, you won’t end up losing much money.
Anyway, there were four of us in for the flop, which included two low clubs and the ace of spades. That meant I now had three aces. Poker pros call it a set. Don’t ask me why.
I tried not to let how excited I was show. It was a virtual lock that I’d win the hand. I just had to keep everyone else from folding too soon.
“Ace of spades?” Dillon said. “Oh, man, it’s a Dark Grave Digger. You all know what that means . . .”
The group groaned. There were certain card combinations that Dillon was apparently convinced spelled out certain cosmic paths for those playing the game. It had been funny for the first hour, but now it was starting to bum us all out, since almost all of Dillon’s combinations led to some sort of gory and inescapable death.
“This bus is going to drive off a cliff and burst into flames when the full moon draws to its highest point,” Dillon said.
“This is South Dakota—there aren’t many cliffs around here,” Danielle said.
“Actually, the Black Hills has several cliffs,” Carl said. “However, the current phase of the moon is three-fourths waning, so we’ll be fine either way.”
Dillon breathed a sigh of relief, and we all burst out laughing. I looked at my cards again. That had actually just been the perfect distraction to make everyone forget the pure glee that had probably flashed in my eyes when I saw that ace flop.
I checked, which means I didn’t bet anything this time around. I was waiting for some poor fish to make the first move.
Countdown Zero Page 5
