Countdown Zero

by Chris Rylander

  Agent Blue sat down on the pavement and tore open his pants leg at the seam. I cringed. His leg was red and so completely swollen that it looked like a giant blob of dough. It actually would have looked pretty funny in almost any other situation. And gross, of course.

  “Ugh, what happened?” Danielle asked.

  “He was bitten by a snake,” I said.

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to drive,” said Agent Blue. “And he’ll be no help.” He pointed back at Agent Nineteen, who was slumped against the door, passed out. He was definitely still alive, because his shallow breath was creating little clouds on the inside of the window. But I truly wasn’t sure how long he’d hold on. Tears began to well up again, and I forced them back down.

  I didn’t understand how the two agents could be so unconcerned over each other’s wounds. If Danielle were shot or bitten by a poisonous snake, I’d be freaking out. And that’s when it dawned on me. The mission was still on, and they knew better than to waste time worrying over each other’s injuries. We still had a job to do; we had to stay 100 percent focused on getting the virus back. There simply wasn’t time to ask one another if we were okay or how badly things hurt or to worry about whether or not our friends would die. This was why they were as good as they were. If it were me sitting there looking at a nearly dead Danielle, I’d probably be nonfunctioning and the virus would be as good as gone.

  “Who’s up for driving?” Agent Blue asked.

  I looked at Danielle.

  “I think you got this,” she said to me.

  She was right. I was the best option; she didn’t even like driving bumper cars. It was up to me. The problem—and it was a big one—was that my only experience behind the wheel had been earlier that year when Olek and I had driven that car and crashed it into a ticket booth at the fairgrounds. Not exactly the best first attempt. I had to hope I’d get the hang of it this time.

  “DON’T WORRY, IT’S JUST LIKE DRIVING A GO-CART,” AGENT Blue said. “You’ve done that before, right?”

  I sat behind the wheel and nodded. Agent Blue was up front in the passenger seat. Danielle was in the back with a still-passed-out, and still-bleeding, Agent Nineteen. She put pressure on his wound according to Agent Blue’s instructions, and looked at Agent Nineteen with a sad and worried expression.

  “Okay,” Agent Blue said. “Gas pedal on the right, brake on the left. That’s it. You can do this, Carson. You have to.”

  I nodded again, pressed down on the gas pedal, and we were off. Or, we should have been. But instead the car just sat there as the engine roared.

  “Ease off the gas,” Agent Blue said. “Put the car into drive first.”

  I shifted the gear stick to D like I’d seen my parents do plenty of times before. And then, for real, we were off. The going was slow and awkward at first. The car jerked forward as I switched between the gas and the brake.

  “Which way to the House of Scandinavia?” I asked as we pulled up to the parking lot exit.

  “Take a right,” said Blue. “That will put us on westbound Highway Sixteen.”

  I did as instructed.

  “They have such a big head start—how will we catch them in time?” I asked.

  “They likely don’t want to attract the attention of the police,” Agent Blue said as I gradually got comfortable taking the car over fifty miles per hour. “Plus, they have no idea that we know where they’re really headed. As far as they know, we’re following the tracker signal.”

  The Black Hills highway was winding, which made the drive more terrifying than it should have been. The rain that just happened to start when I got behind the wheel certainly didn’t help either. Several times the car skidded several feet left or right as the tires lost traction on the increasingly slippery pavement.

  “Just take it easy,” Agent Blue said. “If we crash, we’ll never catch them.”

  I nodded and eased off the gas.

  We didn’t pass many other cars along the way, which made sense considering that it had to have been eight or nine at night by that point. Plus, there wasn’t exactly a ton of residential housing out in the forest. And with the tourism season mostly over, the whole area was rather vacant.

  As I got a bit more comfortable behind the wheel, Agent Blue finally turned around to check on his partner. I glanced over and saw his normally stolid and emotionless face destroyed with worry and fear. It was one of the more unnerving things I’d seen all day, and let me remind you that it had been an insanely crazy day involving poisonous snakes, mountain climbing, an imploding secret base, machine gun fire, and more.

  “How is he?” Agent Blue asked, grabbing his leg and wincing at the effort of turning around in his seat.

  “I don’t know, not good,” Danielle said. “But the bleeding has stopped. I think.”

  “He’s going to make it,” Agent Blue said, likely more to himself than anything. “He’s going to make it. He’s taken ten bullets in his career. They’ve never stopped him before.”

  Ten bullets, seriously? I did my best to ignore him. Driving a car for the first time in sleet on winding mountain roads was hard enough as it was without worrying about my mentor dying slowly in the backseat.

  A short time after we got on the highway, we turned a corner and spotted red taillights up ahead in the dark.

  “I think that’s them!” Danielle said.

  “How will we know?” I asked.

  Agent Blue looked at the tracker with an annoyed expression and then tossed it on the floor between his feet.

  “There’s no way we can know for sure,” he said. “Just keep your distance, we don’t want to tip them off.”

  “But how will we know it’s them if we can’t get closer?” I said.

  “Carson, trust me,” he said. “They’ll know they’re being tailed if you get too close.”

  “How?”

  “Does it matter?” he said sharply. “They will know—trust me, I’ve done this before. Now ease off the pedal!”

  I glanced at him. He was clearly keeping something from me, and his eyes were wide and sweat poured down his face. He kept shaking his head rapidly and muttering things under his breath as if trying to shake away a voice inside his head. He clearly wasn’t himself; the snake’s venom was making him delirious. I wished he’d just tell me what he was thinking. Phil didn’t have any problem bringing Jake in on what was happening back at Snaketown. Why couldn’t Agent Blue trust me now? I made an executive decision right then and there and pressed down on the gas pedal.

  Agent Blue rolled his head to the side and groaned, not seeming to notice.

  “Carson, what are you doing?” Danielle said as the speedometer passed eighty miles per hour. “He said to stay back!”

  “I know what I’m doing,” I said.

  As if to perfectly punctuate how wrong that statement was, there was a flash ahead of us and then a bullet hole appeared in the upper right corner of the windshield and cracks spiraled out from it. I flinched instinctively and the car spun out of control. Danielle and I screamed as the left side of the car lifted into the air, and for a second I thought for sure it’d start rolling down the hillside.

  But by some miracle, the car spun to a stop just off the left side of the highway.

  “I told you to stay back,” Agent Blue shouted. His face was pale and sweaty, and he looked barely conscious. But he still managed to yell at me loudly. “If we had just followed them to the rendezvous point and not tipped them off, we could have captured them and Medlock all at once!”

  I hadn’t considered that. If he just had told me his reasoning I might have actually listened to him.

  “Come on, get this thing back on the road!” he said. “Now we have no choice but to try to intercept them. No doubt they’re contacting Medlock as we speak to come up with a new plan now that they know they’re being tailed.”

  The car was still running and I tested the gas pedal. The tires spun in the mud under us but slowly the car inched forward and then
there was a squeal as we got on the paved road. I turned back onto the right side of the highway and resumed the pursuit, pressing the gas pedal almost all the way down.

  “But how did they know it was us?” I said, desperately looking for justification for my just blowing our chance to nab Medlock. “I mean, they wouldn’t just shoot at a random car, right?”

  “They must have recognized the car,” Agent Blue said. “It was the only one in the Snaketown parking lot.”

  We rounded a curve, and then once again their red taillights were visible in front of us. More muzzle flashes came from the side windows, followed by popping noises. Several holes appeared on the hood of the car. This time I held steady, knowing that at this speed, one jerk would crash us. We’d never be that lucky a second time.

  “Keep your heads as low as you can,” Agent Blue said, straining to get each word out as sweat poured down his face. “Try to catch up, Carson.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Shoot back,” he said as he rolled down the window, filling the car with a rush of cold air and rain.

  Agent Blue extended his arm out the window and started firing shots at them with his handgun. The sharp blasts of the gunshots almost caused me to swerve off the road again.

  Another crack appeared in the windshield right near where my head was. I gulped. The good news was, whoever was driving the car ahead was also having a tough time staying on the road while going this fast in the sleet.

  Agent Blue fired two more shots as we got closer to the car.

  One of his bullets must have hit a tire, because suddenly the car veered off the road and right through a massive chain-link fence on the side of the highway. Then it smashed through another fence before finally coming to a stop at the base of a large tree.

  “Pull over there!” Agent Blue pointed at the fence with the SUV-shaped hole in it. “We’ll have a picnic. Did you bring jam? The blueberry kind, I mean. Not the other one . . .”

  “What?” I asked, pulling the car over.

  “I think the venom is making him hallucinate!” Danielle said.

  “Venom! Venom was voiced by Azaria . . . or was it someone else?” Agent Blue mumbled. “I don’t remember.”

  “What is this place?” Danielle asked, studying the double layers of barbed-wire fence illuminated by our headlights.

  Agent Blue pointed up through the car’s sunroof and said, “Berenstain Bears!”

  We looked up at a sign looming above us. It read:

  WELCOME TO BEAR COUNTRY!

  There was a picture of a massive bear next to the words.

  Great, first snakes and now bears. What were the odds?

  I looked at the SUV for signs of movement. It had hit the tree pretty hard. Hard enough to crunch the front end of it like an accordion and smash one of the passenger-side windows. A body lay draped over the hood, having crashed through the windshield.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Danielle said, sounding truly scared for the first time. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “We’re on our own now, clearly,” I said, trying not to let the fear show in my voice. “Should we go after them?”

  “We have to, right?” Danielle said. “We have to get the virus back.”

  “What if the vial broke open in the crash?” I asked.

  “Crash course!” Agent Blue mumbled. “You have to go. Get the Romero . . . you know, he’s always inconsistent about the meaning of the, uh, you know . . .”

  Agent Blue kept mumbling, but I stopped listening because one of the SUV’s passenger doors opened and two dark silhouettes emerged, black against the nearby billboard sign’s light.

  They started running.

  “I can’t go,” Agent Blue said in a rare moment of clarity.

  I looked down at his leg and then had to look again. And again. If I hadn’t looked at least three separate times, I never would have believed what I was seeing. His leg was so swollen now that it basically filled the entire space between the passenger seat, floor, and dashboard. It was like some kind of puffy marshmallow. Or something. I’d never seen anything like it. There was no leg down there anymore, just a massive blob of swollen flesh. And his face was a shiny mass of sweat and pasty skin.

  “We have to get you to the hospital!” I said.

  “No, this is too important,” he said. “Here, take the Cheez Whiz.”

  He held out his gun. I took it carefully. It was much, much heavier than I expected.

  “Agent Blue,” I said. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I should have told you why. You’re an agent. It doesn’t matter now. Go! Get the virus back. The world’s Pop-Tarts are counting on you. And so are the elk. Or at least, they’ll be lawyers. But they still want to win.”

  “I’m going, too,” Danielle said, and we both got out of the car. The sleet hit my face, and the woods were lit creepily by the SUV’s flashing hazard lights. This was all my fault. If I had just listened to Blue, we might have been taking Phil and Jake and Medlock into custody by now.

  I took one last look back at Agent Blue. He gave me a thumbs-up and a smile. Then he saluted me and said, “Sailor! To the moon with ye!”

  I would have laughed but I was pretty sure he didn’t have much time left.

  “We have to go—they’re getting away,” Danielle said.

  “Okay.” I tried to cock the gun like they do in the movies, but I didn’t really know how. “Let’s go get the virus back.”

  THE FIRST THING WE DID WAS APPROACH THE CRASHED SUV cautiously. It was empty aside from the body draped over the hood on the driver’s side. It was some guy I didn’t recognize and there was clearly nothing that anybody could do for him now. And so we started running in the direction of the two figures who had gotten out of the SUV moments before.

  It didn’t take long for us to discover that they had crashed right into the part of Bear Country where the grizzly bears were kept. It was dark, but the light from the star-filled sky and moon was just bright enough for us to make out dark, furry shapes lying in shallow holes and man-made fake caves off the side of the road, attempting to stay away from the rain.

  I saw at least one bear poking his massive brown head out of a shelter near a small man-made pond. All the commotion from the SUV crash probably woke them up, and now they were eyeing the gaping hole in the fence, which they’d likely waltz right out of before too long.

  But as with the snakes, none of that mattered. We needed to focus on getting the virus back. Bears or no bears.

  We’d only run maybe thirty yards when a voice suddenly called out from behind us.

  “Stop right there!”

  We complied. There was something about the command in the voice that told us all we needed to know. The man was armed and had a bead on us.

  “Turn around,” he said. “Slowly, of course. And you’d be smart to drop that gun as well.”

  I let the gun fall from my hand and clatter to the ground as we turned. Phil stood near a tree maybe fifteen feet away from us. His handgun was pointed right at me. He was grinning, but when he saw my face, the grin faded.

  “You?” he said. “You should be dead. How is this possible?”

  “I’ve got friends,” I said.

  “What do you mean by that? Ah . . . you know what? Never mind.” He waved his free hand in the air. “I don’t care. As we speak, my associate is making his way up to that hill over yonder with the virus, and we’ll be meeting with an evacuation vehicle in fifteen minutes. You two will make a nice addition to our growing cache of bargaining chips. But first, a question, and I want the truth. How did you know to follow us this way?”

  “We overheard you talking to Jake inside Snaketown,” Danielle said.

  Phil nodded slowly. And then he sighed.

  “Of course. You snuck quietly into the base while the other agents assaulted the front gate. Clever.”

 
; “You’re never going to get away,” I said. “We have back-up coming right behind us.”

  “I seriously doubt that.” He raised the gun. “If you did, they would have met you at Snaketown. Now, come with me.”

  “Wait!” I said.

  Surprisingly, he did.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Why are you doing this? I just don’t get it.”

  “What is this, some terrible action movie?” Phil scoffed. “Why would I waste my time explaining my actions at all, let alone to two kids?”

  “But why would you betray the Agency?” I asked again. “Your partners? The government?”

  He paused. But then something gave way and he scowled.

  “You should know why,” he finally said. “Jake told me all about how the Agency made you lie to your best friends, while it consistently withheld information from you. Doesn’t that make you mad?”

  It did. A little. It had since I started working for the Agency. But it still didn’t make me mad enough to ever think about doing what Phil was doing. At least, I hoped not.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Phil said. “Well, imagine fifteen years of that. Of never being trusted. Of knowing you’re under surveillance, even when you’re in the bathroom or going to the movies. To not even know the name of the agency you work for! It’s ludicrous. To be treated like that is demeaning. We’re supposed to trust the Agency, to trust that they are always doing what’s right. But how can we trust them when they don’t show the slightest trust in us?”

  I was speechless. What he was doing was wrong, there was no question about it. But the things he was saying . . . They were all things I’d thought about myself. And it did make me wonder whether I’d still be able to overlook those things so easily after fifteen years of it. I had been an agent for only a few months and it was already getting to me.

  “No!” he shouted. “No! Trust is a two-way agreement. Now, Mr. Medlock—he does trust me. He trusts all his associates, completely. He runs his operations transparently. Whatever you want to know about his plans, you know. It doesn’t matter what you need to know. Do you have any idea how refreshing that is?”