Mayhem

by Jeffrey Salane

  Then she felt a hand grab her wrist. Instantly she grabbed the arm back, releasing the roots to lock on with both hands.

  “Steady yourself and use your legs to walk up the side of the cliff,” the voice strained above her. It was Jules.

  For a fleeting moment M thought about the fumbled apples from the train. Would Jules drop her, too? But M did as she was told, bracing her feet and legs against the cliff and crawling upward, one small step at a time. Finally Jules pulled her over the edge and back onto level ground. Well, not only Jules. It had been Jules who’d grabbed M, but Zara had held Jules and Evel had held Zara, linked in a desperate human chain. Breathless, everyone relaxed, sprawled out in the grass. The two old friends were next to each other and shared a smile before looking back up at the morning sky.

  “Looks like you owe me again,” said Jules.

  “I’ve always got your back,” M wheezed as best she could.

  Only a beat passed before M heard another noise — the unmistakable sound of car tires rolling across gravel. M held on to the earth as if the world were going to try to shake her off it again. “What now?” she whispered.

  “Let’s hope it’s the cavalry,” said Zara. “ ’Cause if it’s the police, then we’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  “And if it’s the Fulbrights?” asked Evel.

  “Then M had the right idea,” said Zara. “We’d have to jump over that cliff and pray for the best.”

  The crew stayed low and hidden in the grass as a black van rolled out of the forest. The windows were tinted and the vehicle looked sharp and dangerous in the sunlight, like a nightmare reaching into the daytime. The van parked, and nothing happened for what felt like forever to M.

  Suddenly, on the other side of the canyon, there was an explosion. M flipped onto her stomach to find the source of the sound. Her eyes followed the train tracks across the bridge, and there in the distance a plume of black smoke grew into the sky. Someone had blown up the train.

  “Fulbrights,” accused M. She’d know their scorched-earth tactics anywhere. Fulbrights were rarely subtle. But did that mean the van was Lawless, coming to make her pay for what she’d done to their school?

  The side door of the van finally jolted open and a boy came running out. He wore a black shirt and black pants, and his blond hair flopped as he raced toward them with tremendous speed and urgency. “Zara! We’ve gotta go!”

  Zara’s head popped up from the grass and she started waving her hands at the others. “Go! Go! Go! Everyone in the van!”

  The boy helped Evel up first and pushed him toward the van, then he grabbed Jules, but when he saw M, he paused. “You?”

  “You?” echoed M.

  He seemed surprised, but then again, M was surprised, too. She knew him, but she’d been sure the worst had happened to him. His name was Foley, and he’d been with Lawless until he’d fallen in battle with the Fulbrights. The last she’d seen him, he’d been in a medically induced coma and strapped into Doe’s student-eating machine.

  M heard another sound in the distance. Helicopters. The whirring buzzed like a swarm of high-pitched mosquitoes. She turned and saw their small shapes circling the explosion. They were searching for something more. They were searching for survivors. They were searching for M.

  “Hey, lookie-loos, less staring death in the face and more running for your life!” shouted Zara as she waved M and Foley on.

  “We’ve got a half hour before they sort through that wreckage,” Foley stated with an eerie certainty. “After that, they’ll head this way. Best not be here when that happens.”

  M looked at the van across the field as Evel and Jules climbed inside the belly of the autobeast. “You were …”

  “Yeah,” Foley agreed with M’s unsaid statement, because whatever she thought had happened to him had definitely happened to him. She didn’t need to list the tragedies he’d suffered; he’d lived through them all. “I was, and now I’m not. Now I have a chance to help a larger cause and so do you. Come with us if you want to make a difference.”

  Another explosion rocked the countryside. It was probably one of the tankers on the train, but M didn’t turn around to see the new flames licking the sky. She headed toward the black van and jumped in, too.

  There was no driver inside and neither Foley nor Zara made a move to take the wheel. Then the van revved up and took off as soon as the side door closed behind them. The steering wheel turned and navigated itself.

  “Of course it’s remote controlled,” M complained as she reached for her seat belt and buckled it.

  The inside of the van was just as dark and mysterious as the outside. Evel had a wild look on his face, as if he needed a minute to catch up to what was happening. She couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind, but when their eyes locked, she tried her best to calm him down. She whispered, “It’s okay,” and nodded calmly. That seemed to work on him. But Jules was frozen, staring fearfully at Foley as if she were looking at a ghost.

  Bouncing in their seats, the crew reached for anything they could hold to steady them as the van stumbled over the uneven forest floor. Zara and Foley sat on the bench seat in the front and were deep in quiet conversation. M had seen them in this position before, in the limousine right after she’d first discovered that she was going to the Lawless School, when Foley and his recruit Merlyn had been attacked by Fulbrights. Foley was the only person she’d ever seen Zara be human around, and back then, that had been enough to make M trust him. But the M in the back of that limo wasn’t the same M in the back of this van.

  “Answers,” demanded M sternly. “Spill it now.”

  Zara cut her eyes at M and started to say something, but M stopped her short. “I don’t want to hear from you. I want to hear Foley’s story.”

  The van went silent. It was the kind of silence that fills the space in between when the principal walks into a classroom and when they call out someone’s name. It was the silence of every student waiting to hear whether they were in trouble or not.

  “I don’t have the answers,” Foley said apologetically.

  “Let’s start with how you got here,” directed M.

  “Do you want the short story? One minute I was fighting Fulbrights in Germany alongside you, the next I was at home in LA and my parents were freaking out because I’d been ‘missing and presumed dead’ for almost a year. I mean, after the black hole struck the Lawless School, they thought I was lost forever.”

  “You really don’t remember anything else?” asked Jules.

  “I mean, not at first. But then my parents sent me to a therapist, some kind of hypnotherapy doctor. He dragged a lot of bad things out of my memory, things I didn’t remember at first. Things I’d rather forget.”

  “The coma?” asked M.

  Foley nodded slowly … nervously. “The coma, the Fulbrights, the pressure chamber, having the — what’s the right word … essence of me taken or, like, separated from my body. Do you remember that feeling, Jules?”

  Jules’s face went sour. She clutched at her stomach and nodded.

  M watched Foley as he reached over and placed his hand on Jules’s shoulder. He comforted her. He comforted Zara. But still, he seemed off to M — trapped somehow, as if he’d never escaped the Fulbrights. Like a burning building filled with smoke, he had the same shape on the outside, but something mercurial was twisting inside of him.

  “Hey, I’m Evel by the way,” Evel said, interrupting the moment. “Nice to meet you and thanks for saving my life. But let me get up to speed. The Fulbrights kidnapped all of you, then John Doe stole pieces of you, then let you go home to your parents?”

  “He didn’t take me,” said Zara.

  “Or me,” said M. “But he tried.”

  “Doesn’t that seem weird to you guys?” said Evel.

  “He’s right,” Jules spoke up. “What did John Doe want? Why did he steal the best parts of us and send us back home? Why are we still alive?”

  “Like I said,
I don’t know,” Foley repeated. “But it started something. A secret war that’s spilling over into a not-so-secret war now. There have been attacks on Lawless graduates. Large scale attacks. My parents … the Fulbrights found us. I barely escaped.”

  He stopped talking and breathed heavily. Zara wrapped her arm around him, almost in an embrace. M could hear the audible clicks in his throat where he was choking sadness back. And she knew exactly what he was talking about. The coordinated strike on Evel and the other Ronins that she had witnessed was cold, calculated, and ruthless. The Fulbrights hadn’t cared at all who saw their attacks or who was in the way, even innocent bystanders. No one was safe.

  “Foley reached out to me.” Zara finished his story and connected the final dot that led to them working together. “He wasn’t part of the original plan, but we need people on our side now more than ever.”

  “What side? What plan?” M questioned sharply. “I’m not going to be part of some Lawless plot again.”

  “You don’t have a choice,” said Zara. “See, as far as we know, you are the plot. My job was to watch you, remember? I watched you at the Lawless School. I tried my hardest to keep you away from that psycho, Ms. Watts.”

  “Then why didn’t you warn me about her?” snapped M. “Maybe that would have saved us all some time and kept more than a few people alive.”

  “Oh please, you couldn’t know about the plan. A magician never tells the volunteer from the audience how the magic trick works,” said Zara. “The last thing we needed was you giving us away to Watts. She didn’t know what we were planning.”

  “We? Like you and my mom?” spat M. “Or we, like you and my fake parents in Fort Harmon? Or we, like you and Devon Zoso? Did you plan for me to meet Evel, too?”

  “Wait, I’ve never met these people before,” promised Evel. “And my sister has a crazy mind of her own.”

  “Look, Freeman, this is delicate,” reasoned Zara. “Believe it or not, there are parts of the plan that I don’t know about yet or that I can’t even understand. What’s happening is bigger than you and me and everyone in this van. But Devon Zoso, she worked by herself, though she still played a part in the big picture. How was I supposed to know that she was a double agent? I had my hands full saving your hide all over the globe from Watts.”

  “So you delivered me, Jules, and Merlyn to the Fulbrights wrapped up in a bow?” suggested M.

  “Well, in handcuffs at least,” said Zara. “According to your mother, you needed to join the Fulbrights. You learned something there, something important, just like your father did. But what it was, we don’t know. When you chased me down in New York, you weren’t supposed to catch me. I have to give you credit there … you’re more capable than you look. So we tried to tip you off in the subway. Personally, now that we’re getting everything out into the open, I wanted to bring you with us, I did. But that wasn’t my mission. It wasn’t your mission, either. You needed to be captured again.”

  “Your mission was getting the moon rocks,” realized Jules. “You weren’t after M that night, were you?”

  “Bingo, Byrd. Imagine my surprise when your goody-two-shoes crew showed up. So I let you do the sleuthing, then took what I needed. But Freeman couldn’t lose one little battle, even if it meant winning the whole war. We had to throw her back to the ‘good guys.’ ”

  Zara paused. She looked directly at M, almost in the same way she looked at Foley, with emotion. “Then, hours later, we found you wandering the forest miles from your house, M. You didn’t recognize me. You didn’t recognize your mother. You’d been scrubbed clean like a computer. Whatever you had, it was worse than amnesia. Our doctors told us the old M was gone. So we placed you somewhere you’d be safe. Or at least somewhere we thought you’d be safe. But you escaped dreamville. Then my job was to find you. As you can see, I’m good at my job.”

  There’s the old Zara, thought M as she sat still in her seat. Emotional and honest Zara was more than a little unsettling. “Well, I’ve got a new job for you,” she told Zara. “I want to meet your we.”

  It was the kind of house people drove past every day, tucked under a set of trees just far enough from the one-lane highway. Most travelers wouldn’t even give it a second glance. If they did, they’d see only a home with a decrepit quality. The windows were grimy, the siding was rotten in all the right places, and the shutters were a washed-out shade of green. It was all cultivated and expertly planned. M realized it as soon as they turned off the road. This kind of quiet design took just as much effort as prepping the White House lawn or painting a stage set for a TV show. It was made to look like what people saw … and that’s what made it an excellent safe house.

  Three cars were parked in the front yard, scattered as if they’d pulled in from every direction. The placement of the vehicles gave an impression of carelessness, recklessness, but M knew better. She quickly saw that each of the cars was in the perfect position for a clean getaway.

  The others were asleep in the van. They’d driven all day through four different states and didn’t stop for gas once. The rest of their ride hadn’t been rainbows and lollipops, nor had it been the homecoming M had expected. Foley was mysteriously back. Jules was safe and unsound. Evel was basically along for the ride, and good old Zara was her same bad old self.

  M couldn’t sleep. She gazed blankly out the window as they rolled along wooded back roads, trying to think of exactly the right words she wanted to say to her mother.

  Now the van pulled silently behind the house and into a shabby barn that wasn’t visible from the street. The barn doors opened to let them in and closed after they’d parked. Or when someone parked. M hated not knowing who was driving the car. She also hated not knowing who was driving this new organization that dragged her along as a passenger. But when the no-driver turned off the van, M knew that her questions would be answered soon.

  “We’re here,” said Zara.

  “Where’s here?” Evel mumbled as he woke from his deep sleep and wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth.

  “Close to my house, if I’m not mistaken.” M had mapped their path every mile marker along the way.

  “A few towns away,” Foley replied, then caught himself and looked at Zara, who shook her head disapprovingly.

  “So I was right. Thanks for confirming, Foley,” said M. “But how do you know where I live?”

  “I …” Foley sat up quickly but forgot to remove his seat belt. It locked him in place and threw him back against his seat awkwardly. “I wasn’t supposed to say that. Forget I said that, everyone. I guess I’m still the new guy.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Zara as she unlatched his seat belt. The sound of the strap zipping back cut through the silence in the van. It sounded like a threat. “Freeman figured it out before you let the cat out of the bag. Let’s just get in the house already.”

  The interior of the barn was actually in good shape. From the outside M had expected to find peeling paint, rotten wooden beams, and critter nests in every corner, but that was far from the case. The walls were reinforced with steel sheets that gleamed in the bright industrial light fixture that shone from above. Still, there were no gadgets here, no computer server surprises like she had found at Evel’s warehouse, Sercy’s lair, or even at the Fulbright Academy.

  “What’s with the urban design?” asked Jules. She tried to gracefully jump from the van but slipped, catching herself clumsily against the wall with her hands. Instantly her eyes showed panic and she jerked her hands away as if the wall had been scorching hot or shocking to the touch. “Whoa.”

  Interested in Jules’s reaction, M followed her lead and put her hand out. The walls weren’t warm or electrified. They were vibrating. Small pulses flashed silently through her fingers. “What does this do?”

  “It destabilizes radio waves.” An old man shuffled around the side of the van. He leaned heavily on a cane and spoke in almost whispered breaths. His arms were thin and frail, while his cheeks were gaunt.
The whites of his eyes matched the white of his hair, and his face had dark sunspots that stood out against his light mocha skin. He pushed himself forward carefully. “Meaning no GPS or other guidance system can find this place unless we want it to.”

  “Which is very helpful when your enemies have missiles,” added Zara.

  The older gentleman smiled and M caught a glimpse of something familiar in his expression. “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so,” he answered mysteriously. “But we’re glad you’ve arrived. There’s someone inside who has been waiting for you.”

  Zara led the way as the group walked from the barn to the back door of the rickety house. There was a sun-washed back porch with wooden planks that bent and bounced softly under every step M took. She watched the cracked paint flakes blow away in the wind.

  The screen door yawned open and flapped shut with a slap. The furniture was well worn within an inch of the fabric’s life. The smell of mothballs and scented candles mingled in the air. Jules and Evel fell into a coughing fit as soon as they walked inside.

  “You get used to it,” Foley whispered to them.

  “It’s aggressively grandma-smelling,” mumbled Jules as she pulled the neck of her clown shirt up to cover her mouth and nose.

  M stepped forward and heard a faint sound coming from one of two chairs that faced away from them. Someone was humming a song, and the melody transported M years back to her childhood. It was the same song her mother used to hum at night whenever M couldn’t sleep. Instantly, she felt calm and nervous at the same time. With both feelings fluttering against each other, her insides vibrated like the walls in the barn.

  “I found you, Mom,” announced M in a parched voice.

  The humming stopped. “Ahhh, poor miette, I am not your mother, but I am your friend.” An ancient hand motioned for M to come around to the other side of the room. A woman in a headscarf rested there, dwarfed against the high-back chair. She was methodically working two giant knitting needles as she smiled. Her yellow teeth flashed from under her lips and her watery eyes sparkled in the small sunlight that filtered through the curtains.