Flash Virus: Episode One (2 page)

Billy Carver didn’t have that problem.
 

Billy Carver wore that grin of his like a lucky rabbit’s foot. He wore it like he was laughing out loud behind his back at the whole wide universe. He wore it like everyone just had to like him – like he hadn’t swish-dunked my head in the boy’s room toilet bowl just last week for the thirteenth time this month. He wore it like all of the teacherly sarcasm in the whole entire world wouldn’t ever really change a thing.
 

“What-ever,” Billy Carver said – breaking the word up into two separate pieces so that it sounded even ruder than it was – which is the perfect thing to say to any high school teacher who thinks that he is twice as smart for being double-rude at a student’s expense.
 

What freaking ever.
 

Billy slid the brand new cell phone out from his right butt pocket, snapping it open like he didn’t even know that he was actually trying to look like a younger and cooler version of Captain James T. Kirk – who we all still watched in Star Trek reruns when we didn’t think anyone was really looking at us.
 

The cell phone was flashing red-blue-green.
 

The flashing wasn’t coming from any of the buttons that you would expect to flash. What was flashing was the body of the cell phone itself – as if someone had stuck a flock of red and blue and green fireflies inside of the black plastic casing.
 

I had never seen a cell phone flash like that before and probably neither had Billy Carver, but he was way too cool to let us know that the fact that his brand new free cell phone was actually playing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and flashing red-blue-green over and over was about as weird as a tree full of ballet dancing rhinoceros.
 

“Yeah? Hello?”
 

Those were the last two words on earth that Billy Carver got out of his mouth before the Santa cell phone took him.
 

His face glazed over.
 

I could see it turning – like every single atom of emotion and individuality was being sucked simultaneously from out of his eyeballs, grin and ear holes. His face even paled a little as he turned. I could see the tone of it kind of devolving from a zit-scarred skin-color to a sort of shade of grayed-out newspaper ink.
 

And then he grew a cheek-to-cheek Santa-Claus-is-Coming-to-Town sort of a smile – sort of the same kind of plastic cheesy smile that a Ken doll might smile after he’d slipped a hot hard one to Barbie’s kid sister while Barbie was out cruising the cougar bars in her Barbie-mobile.
 

Then Billy Carver walked over to the classroom window and stared through the dirty glass like the schoolyard had just turned into Disneyland and candy – before dropping his gaze down to the cell phone in his hand – and whispering.
 

And that’s where his gaze stayed – like he was thinking about sending an absolutely important text message to God – only he hadn’t quite managed to think the words up – and his lips were moving like he was praying to himself – only there were no real words coming out of his mouth as far as I could tell – just that wet whisper-whisper-whisper noise that you usually save for the back of the theatre or maybe in the library.
 

He just stood there, gray and whispering.
 

Which was right about when the second free cell phone rang.
 

This cell phone belonged to Susie Diamond – who was probably the prettiest girl in our whole high school and therefore the girl most likely to sleep with Billy Carver on prom night – or maybe even before that. I knew that she was the prettiest girl because I had looked at Susie way more times than not – from the front and back - but even then I knew that I didn’t stand a flying
hope in hell of spending any sort of real quality time with Susie unless she was struck deaf dumb and stupid in one single stroke of blind wonderful lightning.
 

I just wasn’t even in her league - which didn’t stop me from looking at the way her butt curved out and grinned in her blue jeans whenever she stood up in front of me.
 

Only right now she was standing up and her cell phone was playing the exact same tune as Billy’s was.
 

Santa Claus is Coming to Town.
 

“Don’t answer that,” I told her.
 

Too slow.
 

She had that cell phone open and up to her ear without even stopping to think about it.
 

Susie was a cell phone girl.
 

She was always talking on her cell phone.
 

I wasn’t all that certain – but I was pretty sure – that the first thing Susie Diamond did every morning was to check her text messages and then maybe she might breathe.
 

“Hello?” was the only word that got out – and then she was standing at the window directly beside Billy - and somehow or other Tommy Puckers – who we all called Kissyface Tommy on account of his unfortunate last name - had picked up his own free cell phone and had answered it even though no one else had even noticed it ringing – most likely because we were all too busy staring at Billy Carver’s back and Susie Diamond’s butt.
 

The three of them stood together – cold and grey and whispering.
 

“This is some kind of a flash mob thing, isn’t it?” I asked aloud to no one in particular. “Any minute now somebody is going to jump out and yell surprise.”
 

Which was right about when all of the free cell phones in the entire class room began simultaneously playing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and flashing red-blue-green.
 

Which was really weird – no two ways about it.
 

“There is no freaking way that I am answering that phone,” Burt Hertle said, throwing his free cell phone down onto the tiled floor.
 

Then Bert also threw the cell phone that his parents had paid good cash money for onto the floor beside the free phone that he’d been given today. He hadn’t really needed a free cell phone – but hey, it was free – but now the two of them lay together on the floor and he was stomping on them
both like he had just seen a bug - with one mighty work-booted stomp after another. His own cell phone smashed completely but the free cell phone just bounced and kept on flashing red-blue-green like you couldn’t kill it with a sledgehammer.
 

Santa wasn’t stopping.
 

Burt stomped again – harder than before.
 

Santa kept on coming.
 

Burt kept on stomping, over and over – hard enough that I half expected his work boot to begin glowing red-blue-green all by itself.
 

Either that or the floor would break through.
 

Stomp.
 

“Santa is coming,” Burt whispered, between every stomp.
 

Stomp – stomp!
 

Santa is coming.
 

Ho-freaking-ho.
 

All right.
 

So I lied about where this whole thing about the end of the world all started.
 

You might as well get used to me telling you lies.
 

Remember, I’m sixteen years old.
 

The thing you ought to know is that sixteen year old teenagers DON’T always tell the truth.
 

I know.
 

It’s a shock but I’m being truthfully honest here.
 

We learn to lie early in life.
 

It is a necessary skill.
 

If you don’t believe me just try asking the nearest sixteen year old if they’ve really done their homework, completed all of their household chores and if they really and truly like coming to school.
 

We’ll lie.
 

Even if we have to lie to ourselves.
 

That’s the truth about being sixteen.
 

We learn to lie because it was a survival mechanism.
 

The truth is this whole thing began with the truck. Just this morning a large cube van, painted black enough to lose a bucket full of midnight in, was parked directly in front of our school in the exact same spot where the propane truck delivers the gas for Mrs. Mabel’s lunch room kitchen.
 

I can see it like it happened just this morning – which it did.
 

There was a large black metal folding table set up beside the big black van. Two men in black business suits that were nearly as black as the van itself were standing there beside that table – which was completely covered with a towering stack of small black boxes.
 

These guys were tall.
 

We’re talking skyscraper tall.
 

Harlem Globetrotters tall.
 

In fact tall was way too little of a word to use on these guys. They kind of looked as if each of them could have stunt-doubled as a cell tower.
 

Of course they might have been drug dealers or hit men or serial killers – but we figured that they were okay because Principal Feltspur was standing right beside the two men in black – and he was smiling.
 

I didn’t know it then but these guys were what we would come to call Black Masks.
 

Remember that word.
 

You’ll be tested on it later.
 

And you get an extra point if you noticed that Black Mask was really two words, not one like I said.
 

See, I told you that I lied.
 

Now these two Black Masks weren’t wearing masks at first. They were just bare faced but for the life of me I can’t tell you just exactly what they looked like. They looked plain – like every recognizable feature had been belt sanded from off of their faces. It was like nothing about them stood out or was the least bit noticeable. It was like looking at a pair of twin brothers whose
middle names were most likely Anonymous Nothing and Beats The Heck Out Of Me and whose last names were absolutely and totally forgettable.
 

Then the two Black Masks each reached into their pockets – like they had practiced in a shaolin temple getting that pocket-reaching movement together simultaneously for their entire life – and they each placed a very large pair of dark black sunglasses over their eyes.
 

“Cool,” Jemmy Daniels said. “It’s the Blues Brothers.”
 

Like I told you in the last chapter – or was it two chapters back – Jemmy Daniels is the closest thing to a best friend that I’ll ever have.
 

Which makes him awfully rare.
 

You see - I just don’t have too many friends in the first place – and some of them are dead or worse now – but that all comes later.
 

“The Blues who?” I asked Jemmy.
 

“Never mind,” Jemmy said. “The important thing is these guys are getting ready to give away samples. Stacks of small boxes on a table ALWAYS means free samples.”
 

He had a point – but I argued with him just on the principal of the thing.
 

“They could be salesmen,” I said. “Maybe those boxes are for sale.”
 

I took a look at the two Black Masks. I tried hard to remember just what their faces had looked like before they had put on the black sunglasses but for the life of me I could not remember. It was as if their faces had burned into a single white spot in my memory and then faded out to nothing.
 

All trace of it was gone.
 

“How many kids do you see here that are carrying money with them?” Jemmy asked. “It’s not like this is a shopping mall.”
 

He was right again.
 

You see, our school was a little school in the middle of a little town in the middle of nowhere at all. Don’t even bother looking for it on the map. Map dots are way too valuable to waste on the likes of our town.
 

It has always been a real kind of mystery to me why anyone living anywhere even close to their right mind would even bother building a town this far out of anywhere-worth-being. The fact was our town had been nothing worth talking about for so long that the sign at entrance to the town read WELCOME TO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL THIS TOWN WHICH
DOESN’T REALLY MATTER BECAUSE YOU WON’T EVER REMEMBER IT’S NAME BY THE TIME YOU DRIVE THROUGH AND OH YEAH - THANKS FOR LEAVING.
 

Would I lie to you?
 

There wasn’t a city near to us for at least a hundred miles – and the closest McDonald’s restaurant was almost twice as far away. Most of our parents worked on pickle farms except for the forty or so adults who worked at the local guitar pick factory.
 

I swear to God it’s a guitar pick factory.
 

My Dad was foreman at the factory and let me tell you - there isn’t a whole lot of profit in guitar picks. He sometimes sat up at night worrying what I-pods, Guitar Hero and Facebook were going to do to the guitar pick industry.
 

I’m not saying the man had much of a life.
 

“Oh my God,” Jemmy said.
 

As the black sunglasses touched their faces the black plastic of the lenses – or whatever it was - began to spread out and widen and roll completely over the two Black Mask’s faces. It was like they each grew a separate black fish bowl directly over their heads. They got done and the two of them looked as if they were something that looked something along the lines of a deep sea diving helmet crossed with a crystal-clear jet black bowling ball.