Authors: Jay Budgett
She pulled a keychain from her pocket.
“And the badge?”
She nodded again.
“Let’s move, then.”
Phoenix scanned the badge to the right of a metal door in the hall’s center and pulled a circular device from his pocket. He placed it between his upper and lower eyelids and covered his iris before pressing his face against the door’s retina scanner.
“Digital retina duplicator,” he said to me as the scanner beeped and the door clicked open. “Sparky hacked the system and downloaded Howey’s retina signature last night.”
“Couldn’t he have hacked the codes from Howey’s badge, then?” I asked.
Phoenix shook the badge in the air. “The badge contains a small blood sample. The codes are fragments of his DNA that aren’t stored on the server.”
“Right,” I said, as if storing blood droplets in ID badges made perfect sense.
The room we entered consisted of walled concrete and steel pillars. A single staircase in its center led directly to the ninety-third floor. We climbed, and at the top of this staircase, we found another door and a slab of thick glass guarding the Indigo Reserve room’s entrance.
Around us, six women in white lab coats stood flabbergasted at their workstations. The first to recover from the shock pulled a gun from under her desk. Another threw a handful of mints at us. The one with the gun shook her head and muttered, “
Jesus
, Trish.”
I’ve seen many movies where the hero gets shot. Usually, he’s breaking into a bank vault at the end of the movie, and some clerk behind the counter pulls out a gun and shoots him in the chest. Despite the blood that pours out of him, he manages to stanch the bleeding, continues robbing the bank, and then sleeps with the nearest blonde before receiving any medical attention. I knew this was not one of those movies.
Phoenix fired his gun twice in the air, and the Federal employee who’d been holding hers threw it across the floor, crying.
I picked the gun up off the floor.
“We need someone to give us an eye,” said Mila. “Now.”
The group of women gave more watery sobs, and I heard one of them mutter something about Trish giving up one of hers because she had a lazy one. Trish responded to this suggestion by showering the mutterer with a handful of Tic-Tacs.
Mila shook her head. “Oh, for God’s sake. You get to keep it in your head. We just need it for a minute.”
“Sorry, Trish,” muttered a woman.
An employee with black hair hurried toward the stairs and the retina scanner. “But I don’t the know codes,” she said.
Phoenix scanned the badge again and held his eye to the scanner. “We’ve got them.”
The woman placed her eye in the scanner after him. Five clicks sounded, and the door swung open.
“We needed two different retina signatures,” he explained to me as the woman ran back to her colleagues.
Behind the door, a towering warehouse five stories tall loomed. Rows of glass racks stood perfectly aligned, filled with cases of Indigo that sat undisturbed below dimmed lights. The room’s refrigeration sent a shiver down my spine as it leaked through the open door.
The vaccines were kept at a constant temperature of fifty degrees to ensure their viability. There were no workers or drones roaming the warehouses’ hundreds of rows.
We stepped inside, and the door clicked shut behind us.
Mila shook her head. “This isn’t right.”
A clock flashed 12:00. The room’s power had been recently reset. I wondered if the grand chandelier’s fall down on the seventh floor had caused it.
“You got the stuff, Meels?” asked Phoenix. She shoved her hands into her pockets and nodded. “What about you, Kai?” he said. “Check your pockets.”
I reached into my front and back pockets, and felt the lint balls I’d touched earlier. “Just these stupid things.” I moved to toss them.
“WAIT!” He grabbed my wrist. “Didn’t you learn anything from the paper clips?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t trust anything around here.”
Mila rolled her eyes. “I’m pretty sure you thought that before the paper clips.”
Phoenix gripped my wrist tight in his hand. “Those are gum wrapper bombs. Altogether, they have a combined force of ten kilotons when detonated.”
“Holy shit,” I said, remembering Bertha’s comment. The others nodded. “And you wonder why I can’t trust things around here…”
Phoenix ignored my comment. “We’re going to line them along the warehouse’s left wall, spacing them equally to make the most of the blast.”
“Won’t that knock out the Indigo?” I asked.
Phoenix gestured toward my recently acquired gun. “Shoot the rack.”
“Uh… what?”
“Shoot the rack,” he said again.
I fiddled with the gun the woman had slid me, pointed it at a rack of Indigo, and fired.
Nothing. I tried to pull the trigger again.
Nothing. The stupid gun was jammed. I shook it and tried to fire again. Mila rolled her eyes. Maybe I had the safety on. I slapped its sides with my fingers.
Mila grabbed it. “Give it here before you shoot your brains out.”
She fired at the nearest rack of Indigo. The space around the rack rippled, and the bullet dropped to the floor.
“Force fields,” I muttered.
Phoenix rubbed the stray hairs on his chin. “Something of the sort.”
We lined the gum wrapper bombs along the wall, hid behind a rack farther back, and poked our heads out to watch.
I stared at the line of gum wrappers that seemed incredibly unlikely to explode. “How do we set them off?”
“It’s a somewhat scientific process, really,” said Phoenix, sucking in a breath. “Significant force must be applied to the wrapper at just the right angle to trigger an appropriate chemical reaction within its solution-soaked paper. The first bomb’s detonation will trigger a similar process in the others, instigating a chain reaction, and, subsequently, a series of detonations.”
Phoenix was really well read.
Mila shrugged. “I’m gonna shoot one until it blows.”
Phoenix nodded. “That works too.”
Mila fired at the first bundle of gum wrappers along the wall. An explosion of fire erupted. I jammed my fingers into my ears as I fell to the floor, knocked back by the chain of explosions that followed. Smoke and debris slammed against the rack’s side, but the force fields appeared, absorbing the blows and protecting both the Indigo and us. The wall the gum wrappers had been lined against wasn’t nearly as lucky: it was blown to smithereens.
My ears rang as the smoke cleared. One side of the warehouse was now exposed to open air, and the cooling system’s engines hummed furiously as they fought to keep the warehouse chilled.
Mila pointed to helicopters hovering overhead.
Shit
, she mouthed.
Feds
.
Phoenix shook his head and grinned.
Not Feds
, he mouthed.
Music blared and trumpets thundered as the ringing in my ears gave way to the blistering beat of mariachi music.
Big Bertha was here.
Phoenix stared at the other copters. “Caravites,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “Vern kept his end of the deal.”
I pretended not to catch the last part. Bertha’s helicopter door swung open, and Dove poked his head out, aiming a gun in our direction. I leapt out of the way as he fired. His projectiles hit the ground just below the first rack of shelves. Thin, clear nets with metal prongs rushed across the tiled floor. Phoenix and Mila each grabbed an end and secured them to the racks’ sides. As soon as the prongs were secured, they sprouted small metal legs and crawled along the racks, wrapping them in the clear net like industrial-strength saran wrap.
There was a flash of light around the racks, and then Dove held three fingers to the side of his left eye. Phoenix did the same, and the helicopter pulled away. Dove—or more likely Sparky, remotely—must have deactivated the force fields. The Lost Boys salute was merely the signal to go. The racks of Indigo flew from the building in chunks, the Indigo cargo secured by the clear, crawling net.
The other helicopters repeated the process. Nets were fired, prongs were attached to the racks by Phoenix and Mila, and then a signal was exchanged and the racks were carried away. I watched from the corner as a third of the racks disappeared through the hole we’d blown. It seemed too easy. Where were the Feds? Hadn’t they felt the chandelier fall? Or the gum wrapper explosions? Hadn’t Howey called them?
As Phoenix and Mila clipped the last copter’s net to a shelf, a plane dropped from the clouds and knocked the copter toward the ground, pulling the shelf of Indigo with it. Vaccine cases smashed into the ground, and I wondered how many kids would have to go for weeks without their Indigo as civilian screams echoed from below.
Phoenix turned to Mila. “That went better than I expected.” She nodded.
I felt sick to my stomach. The thought of crumpled bodies burning in the wreckage of the fallen helicopter made me want to puke. I ran to the warehouse’s edge and hurled through the wall’s opening.
“I’m sorry!” I yelled below, hoping my voice would carry down with the wind, but realizing that from ninety-nine stories high it was probably futile.
“No need to apologize,” called a deep voice from within the warehouse. The chancellor stood at its entrance, flanked by two dozen Federal guards. His lips twisted into a sick smile. “After all,” he continued, “we’re the ones who are late.”
“Hide!” shouted Mila as more guards poured in.
“Find the Lost Boys!” ordered the chancellor. The Feds formed two lines along the front perimeter as I stood there, dumbstruck. I pulled up my cheeseburger socks: it was time to be brave.
Mila hit me hard in the side, knocking me to the ground. “I’m starting to think you’ve got a real death wish.”
“If only I had a magic lamp.”
What good would it do to try and escape? I was dead either way. The Lost Boys wanted to kill me. The chancellor wanted to kill me. With the exception of Kindred, lately everyone seemed like they wanted to kill me. (Kindred probably just wanted to bake me muffins.) There’d be no escape. In all honesty, my odds were probably best with the megalodons. When it came to killing, at least they were indiscriminate.
Mila dragged me behind a case of smashed Indigo and pointed to the ledge where the copters had once loomed. “We’ve gotta jump, Kai, and soon.” She stared at my socks. “You better pull those socks up so damn high you get a wedgie.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.
She yanked them to my thighs. “Today, my friend, it’s going to have to. We’re jumping out and diving down.”
Blue fluid trickled along the floor. Indigo, gallons of wasted Indigo. Vaccines that wouldn’t find their way into the veins of kids who were dying. Outside, the rain poured. The world was crying for the vaccines that were broken and the lives that would now be lost.
The Feds fired a round of projectiles I recognized as Dummy Darts. They hadn’t come here to kill us—if they had, they would’ve brought bullets rather than Dummy Darts. No, they wanted to capture us. Probably put us on trial. I thought about Charlie and her shaved head. Her bright blue eyes, hollowed, and her chopsticks long gone. I thought about jumping from the building. I thought about saving Mom from the Caravites and Charlie from the Feds. If I died, they were both doomed. I shook my head. “I—I dunno if that’s such a great idea…”
On the horizon, a fleet of copters formed lines in the sky. The Feds fired another round. Mila narrowed her eyes. “You’d prefer to stay here?” A Dart clattered to the floor next to us, its pseudo-poison oozing from its syringe in thick droplets. I shook my head. “Then it’s down we go,” she said.
“You don’t have a—er—jetpack? In your pants? Or pockets or something?”
“No.” She winked. “Just a death wish.”
“I guess that’s almost as good.”
Across the warehouse, Phoenix held his fingers up and counted down from five.
“Hold fire, men,” called the chancellor. His voice had a certain silky smoothness to it—characteristic of a used car salesman. He stepped toward the smashed Indigo case Mila and I hid behind. “I think I need a moment with my friends.” His leather shoes clacked against the tiled floor as vaccines cracked beneath his toes.
Phoenix held up a one, then gave us the Lost Boys’ salute—the signal. We ran. I stumbled over Mila’s shoe, knocking the grappling gun she’d used earlier from her belt and to the ground. My legs burned beneath me as it clattered to the floor. We couldn’t turn back. Not now. We had to move. We had to run. The chancellor’s leather shoes clacked louder behind us.
Phoenix bent his knees and threw himself over the edge, snapping his eyes shut as his face fell forward. Mila nodded slightly: we were to do the same. There was no time to be afraid. No time to listen to the screaming in my chest. I had my cheeseburger socks on, after all. I had the power to be brave. I bent my knees and pushed off the building’s ledge as the chancellor yelled behind us.
For a split second, Mila and I were suspended in midair—flying. Just floating as the island of Oahu lay sprawled beneath us, its hospitals and clinics mere specks of sand. My stomach dropped in my chest. I was falling now, and, like Phoenix, I snapped my eyes shut.
Then something clamped around my wrist. I watched as Mila continued falling, and a copter dropped from the clouds. Though its music had stopped, I recognized it as Bertha’s, on its way to save Phoenix and Mila.
My shoulder was nearly yanked from its socket. The clamp around my wrist held me in the air as Mila fell below. I hung there, flat against the side of the Ministry’s marbled tower. The chancellor’s face grinned at me from far above; he held the grappling hook gun I’d knocked from Mila’s belt.
I tried to slide the grapple from my wrist, but the chancellor merely laughed. “Pity about the Indigo, Bradbury,” he shouted over the thunder and rain. “And about your friend.” His lips twisted into a sick smile.
“She’ll be fine,” I yelled, glancing at Mila as the clouds engulfed her. I wondered why I bothered saying anything to the chancellor. Maybe it was his twisted smile, and the swagger in his shoulders when he walked—his smugness evident even in his step. Dad would’ve called him a “real politician.”