Authors: James van Pelt
Peter sat in a computer kiosk at the public library, a baseball cap pulled low to hide his face from the security cameras, wishing he hadn’t thrown away the floppy garden hat. The computer was as far away from the front desk and any foot traffic that he could find. He thumbed through his e-mails on his phone until he reached WE KNOW YOU HAVE OUR PROPERTY. WE WILL TAKE YOU APART IF IT IS NOT RETURNED. REWARD OFFERED, and then copied down the return e-mail address. On the library’s computer, he set up a new e-mail account, typed in the address, then wrote YOU CAN HAVE IT. WILL MEET AT THE OLD GOODMAN’S SPORTING GOODS AT 7:00 TONIGHT.
Dante messaged him as Peter closed the computer’s browser. Peter ignored it as he considered wiping down the keyboard, thought that was too paranoid, and then did it anyway.
At 7:00, after not replying to three more messages from Dante, Peter retrieved the duffle bag from its hiding spot in his dad’s workbench. He punched up the X-ray program, pointed the gun toward Goodman’s Sporting Goods, which was over a mile away, and began magnifying. This is an amazing app, thought Peter. The telescope effect seemed infinite. He could continue to magnify anything that the curve of the Earth didn’t take out of sight. The more magnification he applied, the more difficult the gun was to move. He wondered if there was a super gyroscope in it to stabilize the image, but the gun was perfectly silent.
The challenge was picking out the store when the gun erased the buildings. He counted streets as he zoomed by naked people in invisible houses and invisible cars until the screen showed what had to be the abandoned store. No one was in it or in front of it (although when he upped the magnification, he could see the building had a rat infestation). Had whomever sent the message not checked for replies? That didn’t make sense. They would have been as careful as he was to not be traceable, but they also had to hope someone would contact them. How else could they retrieve the gun?
He backed off on the magnification a tiny bit so he could see more of the area. Luckily, the empty store was in the business district instead of a residential one, and almost all the businesses were closed this late in the afternoon. Not very many people to see. He spotted a naked man on the second floor in the building next door to the sporting goods store, which were mostly realtors’ offices. He looked like he was suspended twenty feet above the street. From his motions, he was vacuuming. Also, he needed to get more protein and calories in his diet. A concentration camp victim would have more meat on him.
At the end of the block, near the intersection, another man sat. Peter found it difficult to see people without whatever was around them. Almost everyone seemed to be levitating! From the height, Peter guessed the man was in a car, facing the store. Slowly Peter magnified the image until the man’s face filled the screen. Familiar blue eyes and narrow dark eyebrows greeted him. It was the same man who’d been spying on the military operation in the woods. Peter flicked the screen off. He didn’t want a repeat of the man looking right at him. The feeling that he’d known Peter was present still spooked him.
The gun went back in the bag, and the bag dropped into its hiding place.
Better to know who I’m dealing with, thought Peter. I know him. He doesn’t know me. That has to be an advantage.
He went into the house for dinner.
*
A small item on the newspaper’s online police blotter noted that East High School Assistant Principal Hermann Bovine had been assaulted in his home, suffering only minor injuries. He could not describe his assailant.
Dad, wearing a frilly apron that he always wore in the kitchen, fixed macaroni, cheese and bacon, one of Peter’s favorites. He asked Peter if the kids were worried about being so close to the site of so much unexplained destruction, and Peter assured him that they were not.
“And how are your grades?” Dad said, toward the end of the meal, even though Peter knew Dad could check his progress online.
“Mediocre to bad.”
“You’re not going to embarrass the family, are you?” Dad said.
“No worse than grandpa’s public drunkenness charge or your counterfeiting scheme. I told you Herbert Hoover wasn’t on a twenty-dollar bill.”
“Good,” Dad said. “Just want to make sure you’re maintaining the family’s reputation. Don’t you go earning any A’s. I don’t know how we could deal with the shame.”
“Got you, Dad. I mostly copy my homework off of Dusty Carmichael.”
“Nice choice. Very discerning of you.”
Dusty Carmichael was a name the two of them had been using for the mythical worst student of all time since Peter had been in third grade and made the list of “Students of Distinction.” Peter had asked if they had a similar list for the worst students in the class. Dad invented Dusty Carmichael on the spot, a student he said had attended school with him, but never risen high enough for graduation from elementary school. “I suppose most kids mistake him for someone’s father,” said Dad. “Not many third graders shave, you know.”
Dad picked up their plates. “I see you hooked up with the Sanders girl.”
“Excuse me?” said Peter, horrified.
“Hooked up. You know reconnected. I thought you two had forgotten you knew each other.”
“I don’t think ‘hooked up’ means what you think it means.”
“I’m sure you are very proper and dignified with her. Dipping her pigtails in the inkwell and whatever else you newfangled kids do nowadays.”
“We’re not carving our initials on a tree inside of a heart, if that is what you’re asking.”
Dad wiped the table. “Pity. I always thought she was very cute for a girl with buckteeth like that.”
Peter spluttered. Christy’s teeth were perfect.
They could have continued the conversation like that for longer, but a knock at the door turned out to be Dante. Peter shut the door behind himself so they stood on the porch. A breeze had picked up, making Peter wish he’d grabbed a coat on the way out.
“I checked your normal hiding places, Peter. No duffle bag. I even checked the fort we’d built in my backyard. No bag. You’re not keeping it in the house, are you? If they track us down, going through our houses will be the first thing they do. Give me the bag. I know a place they will never find it.”
Peter wrapped his hands around his arms. It truly was cold. Some trees had begun losing their leaves. The wind whipped them across the lawn and skittered others down the street. It had clouded up again. Maybe tonight would be the first snow.
“It’s safe.” Peter thought Dante looked tense. He’d buried his hands deep in his pockets and shifted foot to foot.
Dante lowered his voice and moved close. “We need to use it, Peter. We need to go through the rest of the gun’s capabilities so we can protect ourselves.” A car with tinted windows slid by the house. Peter didn’t recognize it, and anything he didn’t recognize made him nervous now. Dante said, “We’re fools not to use it. We can become crime fighters if we want. We can solve mysteries and help the helpless, but we’ve got to know everything it can do. Let me have it tonight. I’ll go out in the country. My grandma’s farm isn’t that far away. I can test it in the barn and then tell you what the other icons do.”
Peter thought about sharing with him about the man he’d seen in the woods and outside of the sporting goods store, but there was something about Dante’s intensity that scared him a little. Peter backed up and put his hand on the door knob.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’re better if we stay out of sight. One of those icons could be a come-hither. You press it and the gun screams for its owner to come save it. I have it in a good spot.”
Dante’s hands came out his pocket. For a second, Peter thought he was going to grab him, but he retreated instead. “You don’t trust me,” he said. “You’ve changed, Peter. You told me once that you thought we were twin brothers of different mothers, but I see now that was a lie. You’re just a selfish jerk. It’s not yours, you know. I dug as much in that dump as you have. I have as much a right to it as you do.”
Peter wished right then that he had the gun on the porch with him. He wished that he could point it at himself and become invisible, if it had a function that could do that, because if he could, he would be able to slip away from Dante and his anger. He wouldn’t have to admit that at least in one way, Dante was right.
Peter didn’t trust him.
“It’s not that,” said Peter. “Of course, I trust you. But we have to keep our heads about us. We don’t have to rush. There’s no way they’ll ever find out who has the gun in the first place. I’m sure of it.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You were never a good liar.” Dante stomped off the porch, down the sidewalk to the street. He didn’t look back.
Despite the cold, Peter didn’t move. His breath felt heavy and dull. He wished again that he’d never found the gun.
Christy crossed her front lawn to Peter’s in a gray hoodie top that was too big for her that said CSU ATHLETICS in faded letters on the front.
“Brrr, it’s chilly,” she said. “What’s up with Dante? He acted pissed.”
“He’s unhappy with me.” Peter couldn’t think of any more explanation that would capture the moment.
“Can I come in? I’ve got to show you something.”
Peter opened the door for her.
“Hi, Mr. Van Meer. Long time, no see.”
Dad typed on his laptop at the recliner. “Good to see you too, Christy. What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
“Peter said he found a good terrorist bomb site. I wanted to check it out.”
Dad turned back to his computer. “Okay, but don’t blow up anything in the neighborhood. It’s terrible for home values.”
Peter led her to the back of the house and his bedroom. He wished he’d picked up his dirty clothes from the floor, but she stepped over them without comment and sat at his computer. “I really do have something for you to look at,” she said as she typed an address into his browser.
“You could have just sent it to me.” Her presence in the room felt unreal, like that painting of an ordinary living room, but there’s a mountain floating in the middle.
“We don’t have to do everything electronically,” she said. “A little face time won’t hurt.”
“You sound like my dad.”
She motioned him over. On the screen, a video was paused. “Daneele Salazar posted this yesterday, after the FBI had us all in the gym. She was goofing around, but watch the background.”
Daneele looked into the camera, making faces. First she crossed her eyes, and then she licked the tip of her own nose—Peter didn’t know that was possible. Whoever was filming said, “Show us some cleavage, girl.” Daneel gripped the top of her blouse closed. She said, “I’m not that sort.” The other voice laughed. “Since when?”
“There,” said Christy. She stopped the video. In the background, a man in an FBI jacket stood in front of the students, holding a microphone. His narrow eyebrows gave him away.
“I’m seeing him all over the place. I think that’s the blue-suit who tangled with Assistant Principal Bovine.”
Christy said, “So the question is, is he a good guy or a bad guy?”
Peter sat on the desk’s edge, facing her. “Why do you assume he’s one or the other? I mean what if everyone is bad?”
“Are you talking about the fake army helicopter guys?”
“Yeah. I don’t think that Blue-suit and the helicopter guys are working together. In fact, I’m pretty sure they are not, but what if they’re all bad, like rival gangs? We can’t just flip a coin and give the gun to one or the other and hope for a fifty percent chance that we chose safely. Everyone who is after the gun might have ulterior motives.”
“You mean like Dante?”
Peter paused. On the desk by her had sat a picture of Dante and Peter holding the Little League western region third place trophy. They wore their team hats at the same angle, and had the same smile. Dante had started a double play at shortstop that ended with Peter making the final out at first and won them the trophy. They’d sworn that day that the next year they would be co-captains. Peter’s mom died during that winter, though, and he didn’t go out for the team the next year.
“Dante’s not like Blue-suit.”
“But he might have an ulterior motive, right?”
“No . . . it depends on how you define ulterior.” Peter could see Dante turning on the X-ray app just to look at girls. The thought of Dante watching Christy in her house—and he was sure that he would—was enough to keep the gun out of his hands, but he wasn’t sure that Dante wouldn’t open the rift to the orange world just to see again what it looked like, and that was much, much more disturbing. “No, not ulterior, but not safe either.”
“What do you mean?”
Peter thought about it for a moment. On one hand, they were talking about Dante, his best friend, or he had been until lately; on the other hand, they were talking about . . . Dante. “He might sink all of our boats.”
Christy turned in the chair so that she was facing him. “That’s a metaphor, right, like
Of Mice and Men
?”
“I’m saying he’s hard to predict. What I’m more worried about are the fake helicopter army guys. I can’t believe that they’d bring in so many men to look for the gun, and then take off so quickly. They’ve got to be around.
“And there’s the skull dog from last night.”
“I think he attacked T-Man. Did you see him today, bandaged and with a limp?”
“We’ve got too much to think about.”
Peter said, “Maybe we can lay low, do nothing, and it will fade away. If they don’t find it, they’ll decide they need to look elsewhere, or write it off.”
“It won’t fade away for me,” she said.
“Not me either, I guess. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep tonight?”
“Thanks for asking. I hope so. I’m exhausted.”
“Me too. Text me, though, if you need to.”
She nodded as she got up from the chair. “I’ll have my mom hold my hand if I get too nervous. She’ll probably have to hold it for the next month.”
Peter couldn’t tell if she was joking.