Countdown Zero

by Chris Rylander

  Everyone else checked as well, and I hid my disappointment. The turn card was a jack of hearts. Checks all around again. Now I was sure nobody had anything good, which meant I needed to hope someone got a decent-enough hand to make a bet.

  The river card was the eight of spades. I checked again, hoping someone would bet to try to buy the pot.

  Danielle also checked.

  So did Carl.

  Jake took the bait and bet seventy-five cents. A pretty bold bet considering the biggest pot so far had been about two dollars. He thought nobody had a good hand, and so we’d all fold to his big bet and he’d take the antes. That was precisely what I wanted him to think.

  “Raise two fifty,” I said, throwing down the money.

  Jake raised an eyebrow, but I knew he was more surprised than he let on. That was the payoff for the old check-raise maneuver. My hand twitched, waiting for him to fold, waiting to reach out and pull all that delicious cash back toward me.

  But he didn’t fold.

  “Five dollars,” Jake said calmly.

  Gasps followed his reraise. Then everyone’s eyes turned toward me as the bus jumbled across a rough patch of the highway. I looked down at my two aces and then back at the table where the other five cards sat, faceup.

  I examined Jake’s face. He stared back at me without blinking. It was almost like he was inviting me to try to read him, to figure out what he had. Like he had nothing at all to hide.

  “What are you gonna do now, Carson?” he taunted in a friendly way.

  I looked at the cards again. What did he have? Best I could guess, he had two pair. Perhaps he was holding the last ace in the deck, and was convinced his pair of aces and another pair would be enough to win the pot. But he was wrong.

  “Call,” I said.

  “Let’s see them,” Danielle said.

  I flipped over my aces. “Sorry, man.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Jake said, flipping over two spades. “A flush. Or a troupe of Dark Grave Diggers, as Dillon might say.”

  “A flush?” I said. “But that’s only four spades.”

  Danielle spoke up, too. “Carson’s right. The ace, the eight on the river, and the two in your hand make four, dude,” she said.

  Jake blinked. “Look again.”

  We all looked down at the cards. The first one that Danielle dealt was a spade. I could have sworn it had been a club. How distracted was I?

  “That’s not right!” Danielle insisted. “I dealt a club. I know it.” She looked around the table, as if the first club had gotten up and ran away or something.

  “I don’t know what to tell you guys,” Jake said, gathering the money. “Except it looks like I’m going to be swimming in snacks tomorrow.”

  I sat there dumbfounded. The flush was the only possible hand that could have beaten mine. He’d sharked me, plain and simple. In that moment I knew that he’d known since that last card turned over that he had me beat. He let me think he was playing into my hand, when in reality I was only playing right into his. And here I thought I was a good liar.

  Dillon gave Jake a high five while Danielle stared at Jake suspiciously. I appreciated her being on my side, but it didn’t really matter. It was my own stupid fault for being too distracted to see the card right when it was dealt. I checked my watch. We’d been on the road for six hours, a little more than halfway to where we’d camp that night.

  “Whose deal is it?” I asked, but my voice was hollow. Not because I had just lost the hand, but because I was back to thinking about the mission, now less than twenty-four hours away. Which meant Agent Nineteen potentially could be dead in less than a day. I could die, too, and my parents wouldn’t even know why. People’s lives were resting on my shoulders, their combined weight so heavy it felt like my back was going to crack in half. And there I was playing poker for quarters on a bus.

  And right then, more than ever before, despite being crammed on a bus with thirty kids, three teachers, and a bus driver, I had never felt more alone in my whole life.

  WE GOT TO THE CAMPGROUND AROUND SIX THAT EVENING. The three school chaperones—Ms. Pearson, science teacher; Mr. Gist, history teacher; and Mr. Jensen, social studies teacher and secret agent—helped us unpack our supplies from the bus and carry them to our campsite. Then Mr. Gist started cooking us dinner over a fire pit in the center of our rented camping space while the other two helped us set up our tents.

  At least, that’s what we were supposed to have been doing. In reality, it was like a tornado of cheap canvas and plastic poles. Most of the eleven tents were lopsided and looked like some sort of spiny techno-monster from a bizarre anime film.

  One poor group of kids managed to mess up so badly that their longest tent pole launched a backpack up into a nearby tree like a catapult. While Mr. Jensen climbed the tree to retrieve it, the other chaperone, Ms. Pearson, was busy helping two other groups try to find out why their tent door was facing the ground.

  The chaos left Dillon, Jake, and me alone to set up our tent by ourselves. But really, how hard could it be? Just a few months ago I’d helped to save the world, and in about eighteen hours I’d be infiltrating a secret government base to save a bunch of real-life spies. But it turns out that foiling the complicated plans of a demented evil genius was a whole lot easier than building a tent that came with instructions. After just five minutes, we had a complete disaster on our hands. Our tent looked like it was more likely to randomly burst into flames during the night than it was to keep out bugs or rain.

  “What did we do wrong?” Jake asked.

  “It must be in the air here,” Dillon said. “Can’t you smell that?”

  “Don’t even say it,” I warned him, but he was already off on another one of his theories.

  “There’s, like, some toxic vapor in the air. I can feel it penetrating my brain and making me stupider by the second. Quick, ask me a simple math problem.”

  This is about where I would usually stop indulging him, but Jake wasn’t as used to Dillon yet.

  “What’s ten plus fourteen times seven, divided by six?” Jake asked.

  “I said simple!” Dillon shouted, clutching at his brain like it was about to explode.

  I rolled my eyes and focused on freeing the poles from their incorrect places in the tent holes.

  “What’s seven plus nineteen?” Jake tried again.

  “Oh, no!” Dillon yelled in a panic. “I don’t know the answer! I’m getting dumber and dumber by the second. My brains are going to be pudding within minutes. Ahhh! Oh . . . wait, it’s twenty-six. Never mind.”

  Jake laughed, but only because he thought Dillon was joking around. As for me, I was suddenly aware that Dillon might’ve actually been right about this one. We were just a few miles away from Mount Rushmore now, where a deadly airborne virus had been released. Maybe it had gotten out into the open through Teddy Roosevelt’s nostrils? The most deadly presidential sneeze in history?

  “Carson? Hello?” Jake was waving his hand in front of my face. “Dillon thinks he figured out what we did wrong with the tent.”

  I looked up and saw Dillon rolling around inside our mess of deflated tent and plastic poles. And right then, even with the threat of a deadly virus hanging over our heads, I couldn’t help but laugh so hard that my side started aching.

  AN HOUR AFTER ARRIVING AT THE CAMPGROUND, AFTER finally managing to get the tents constructed, we were all sitting around the campfire in a circle. We ate a dinner that consisted of baked beans heated right in the can over the fire, corn on the cob, and ham sandwiches. It was pretty delicious, much better than I expected, especially since I didn’t even think I was that hungry.

  During dinner, the chaperones told us about what our expectations were over the next two days. We’d be learning all kinds of stuff: geology and history, mostly. But there was a writing component, too. We had to keep journals of everything we saw and learned over the course of the trip.

  Ms. Pearson talked about what we were supposed to write
each day, but I wasn’t really listening to her. I was thinking about Agent Nineteen. About what he might be doing or thinking at that very moment. Did he think he was going to die? Or did he assume that the Agency had some covert mission planned to save him and the rest of the lab workers? What would he think if he knew that mission was basically to just send in a seventh-grade goof-off? Would he go back to thinking he was doomed? This was all assuming he was even still alive. I suddenly felt like my baked beans were going to make a return trip up my esophagus.

  But I also wondered if he felt lonely, trapped inside the base with the other dying agents. Because that’s how I felt. I glanced over at Dillon and Danielle, taking notes on what Ms. Pearson was saying. I was hiding almost everything important happening to me from my friends, which made it feel like there was a steel air lock between us all the time.

  After dinner, we helped the three teachers clean up and put away the dishes. Then they herded us back to our seats around the campfire. We sat in a huge semicircle, leaving open the part of it where all the smoke was blowing.

  “One of Mr. Jensen’s favorite traditions on this trip is to tell campfire stories,” Mr. Gist said. “We’ve done it every year since he and I started chaperoning this trip, and every year at least one student passes out from sheer terror.”

  Everyone laughed nervously, trying to figure out if he was kidding.

  “And so I’ll let Mr. Jensen start us off,” he said.

  Our eyes turned toward Mr. Jensen, who already had a flashlight shining under his chin, casting his face with creepy shadows. His grin was as cheesy as it was wicked. We all laughed. Mr. Jensen did, too. But then his face turned serious again.

  “My tale takes place in a forest not unlike the one we’re camping in now,” he said, switching off the flashlight so we could actually focus on the story. “It involves a troop of scouts out on their annual canoe trip to the Minnesota Boundary Waters, where there are almost no roads and very few signs of civilization. They were in their third night of the trip, and so far everything was going as planned. There had been no canoe capsizes, no major injuries, they’d even managed to catch their own dinner in the river that day.

  “That night, the two scoutmasters and twelve scouts made a campfire and sat around it roasting marshmallows and telling scary stories just like we are at this very moment. At midnight, just as the full moon reached its brightest and highest point, the scouts retreated to their tents while the scoutmasters cleaned up and put out the fire.

  “An hour later, four scouts awoke to a rustling noise just outside their tent. They heard raspy, heavy breathing followed by the sound of something scraping across the ground. They suspected the other scouts were pulling a prank. And so they slowly unzipped their tent. The bravest of the four scouts poked his head outside. Suddenly his body convulsed as the other three heard a primal growl. The bravest kid fell back inside the tent. But it didn’t take long for the other scouts to notice that his head was gone.

  “They screamed in terror just as a large set of claws tore through the side of their tent. The three of them scrambled out into the night. The bright moon lit up the campsite just enough for them to see a large hulking beast rush past them and tear into another nearby tent.

  “The beast had gray, matted fur and easily stood six feet tall, even hunched over slightly. It had long, curved, dark claws that looked as if they could slice a small car in half. Its jaws were packed with twisted, jagged teeth. It lunged inside the tent headfirst and pulled back a short time later with a poor scout clamped inside its mouth.

  “One of the counselors stepped in between the three scouts and the beast. ‘What are you still doing here? Run!’ he screamed.

  “The three scouts didn’t wait for him to say it a second time as they turned and sprinted into the dark forest. They stayed together as they ran, eventually finding a massive tree to stop and rest behind. They panted, looking at one another’s terrified expressions and finding little comfort in them.

  “‘Should we go back?’ one of them eventually asked. The others seemed unsure of what to do. After a short debate, they all decided to slowly work their way back toward the camp to see if anyone else had survived. They weren’t entirely sure if they were headed in the right direction, but before long they found themselves in a clearing. One of their scoutmasters was also there with his back to them, hunched over and shaking.

  “‘Mr. G?’ one of the kids said cautiously as they approached. ‘Are you okay?’

  “He didn’t reply. Instead he merely kept shaking. And so the three scouts walked around to face him. Mr. G’s eyes were wide and his lips quivered. They waited for him to say something. Anything. After a moment longer it seemed like he finally realized they were there. He reached out for them, and that’s when he vomited. As the scouts watched, terrified, blood and guts poured out of his mouth, and, among them, the tattered remains of a scout merit badge. Then, he opened his mouth again and . . .”

  “AAAAAIIIEEEEEEEEEE!” Mr. Gist let out a shrill, blood-curdling cry that startled us so badly that at least fifteen kids screamed and one fell backward off the log he’d been perched on.

  Mr. Gist and Mr. Jensen laughed as we tried to recover. I had to admit, even my heart was racing. Once we’d all calmed down enough, we applauded. Well, those of us who weren’t mad or embarrassed for being scared so badly.

  Then Mr. Gist took the flashlight and told a story about how hard it would be for us all to find jobs after college in the future. I got the joke about how that was a “scary” story, but still didn’t find it all that funny or scary. Danielle, however, looked truly horrified.

  Next, Ms. Pearson told a supposedly true story about aliens abducting three fishermen from this very area twenty years ago. The three men were missing for two days and then suddenly turned up near their campsite one morning without any memory of what had happened during the time they went missing. Supposedly, they all eventually recalled the same horrific alien abduction story while under psychiatric hypnosis. It was pretty freaky.

  Then the teachers asked if any of the students had a horror story to share. A few kids told some lame ghost stories. Jake retold the plot of this zombie book he read called The Infects. It was a little scary since it took place out in the woods with a bunch of kids. But he lost some points, in my opinion, since it wasn’t really his own story.

  Dillon told a story about how we all had implants in our brains that the governor-general of Australia was using to control our thought patterns. Which is why nobody ever says anything bad about Australia. Most of the other kids laughed at his story, but I knew he’d really meant it to be scary and probably actually believed it was true.

  “Well, on that note,” Mr. Gist said after Dillon finished, “we should get to bed.”

  “Lights out in fifteen minutes,” Ms. Pearson said. “And remember, if you need to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, you must bring one of your tent partners with you.”

  The kids groaned.

  “It’s for your own safety,” she said. “That’s also why I recommend you all use the bathroom before you go to bed.”

  As we dispersed and Ms. Pearson and Mr. Gist put out the fire, I was already trying to figure out how to deal with this new challenge. I had to get out of my tent at eleven o’clock to meet Agent Blue for the mission briefing. How would I explain to Jake and Dillon where I was going, and keep them from following me? Could I sneak out once they’d fallen asleep? It seemed unlikely. No kid passes out before midnight on a Friday night camping trip with his best friends.

  For the fortieth time this week, I had to remind myself that telling my friends about my double life as a secret agent was not an option. No matter how much easier it would be.

  THAT NIGHT, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN WHAT FELT LIKE FOREVER, luck seemed to be on my side.

  When we went back to our tents, I made a big deal about how late it was and pretended to fall asleep. My plan was to act really tired in the hopes that everyone else would want to
go to sleep early, too. And the crazy thing was, it seemed to be working.

  At 10:45, just as I was considering making my move to sneak out of the tent, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Carson.” It was Jake, whispering.

  “What? Huh?” I mumbled, pretending to wake up.

  “I’m sorry, but I gotta go,” he said. “I hope it’s all right I woke you. You’re closest to the tent door.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” I said, and started pulling on my shoes. I ran through the situation in my mind as I put on my coat. On one hand, this was pretty lucky, as I now had a believable reason to leave the tent right on time. On the other, I’d be escorting Jake to the bathroom and might not be able to shake him so I could go meet up with Agent Blue. But the solution became obvious as we walked toward the campground bathrooms that were about a hundred yards away from our group of tents.

  “So . . . I might be a while,” Jake said uncomfortably. “I have to, uh, go save the world.”

  “No problem,” I said, trying to keep my nerves from making my voice shake. “It happens.”

  “Thanks for being so cool about it,” he said. “You don’t have to, like, stand in the bathroom with me. That’d be gross. I won’t tell anyone if you want to hang outside the bathroom until I’m done.”

  I nodded. This couldn’t have worked out any better.

  As soon as he went inside the well-lit campground bathroom, I snuck away from the building and headed back toward where the charter bus was parked. The faint light from the tall lamps near the bathrooms lit up the path just enough for me to see where I was going without a flashlight, but that didn’t keep it from being spooky. There were shadows everywhere, and noises in the forest, and all I could think about as I crept along was that stupid werewolf story. I picked up my pace and tried instead to think about how unrealistic it had been. Then again, four months ago I would have said the idea that secret agents were working in my school was just as farfetched.