Pandora's Gun (15 page)

Wheeler covered her ear again. “If they aren’t answering, then assume they’re compromised. Go in. You’re looking for Christy Sanders. Get her picture off the high school list.”

“Who is not answering?” Peter felt his voice rise. “We need to go back.”

“I told you these were serious people. I’ve lost contact with two operatives who were on the cafeteria entrances. That probably means they have been neutralized. I’ve got more resources on site, though. This may resolve right now if the Blue-suits overplayed their hand.”

The copter pitched to the side, slowed, and then landed.

When the door opened, Peter jumped out. Green lights, close to the ground and shrouded, illuminated a large glade with four other helicopters parked in it and several long tents. From his phone’s GPS, Peter knew they were in BLM property west of town, north of the interstate. He said to Wheeler, who unfolded a set of steps to exit the copter, “Wasn’t the point of my leaving was that they would follow me? Leaving was supposed to keep Christy and the duffle bag safe.” He checked his phone. No text from Christy.

“Would this boy, Dante, who was at your house, have told them about her?”

“Ask him,” said Peter, furiously. “Why are you a step behind in all this?”

Wheeler shrugged. “We would have, but he took off before he’d been debriefed.” She turned her head to the side, a gesture Peter now recognized to mean she was listening to her agents. “Divide them into groups. Scrutinize the groups and let them go. Then, a room by room sweep. Hustle. The army should be there soon when they realize we took off from the parking lot.”

“Here’s a puzzler,” she said. “One of my men was knocked out of commission by someone coming into the cafeteria, but the other one was knocked down from behind, from someone coming out. They assume it was a spooked student, but we haven’t found Christy yet.”

“Maybe they already have the bag. They found Christy and the bag and you aren’t looking in the right place.” He followed Wheeler as she walked briskly toward a tent.

“If they had the bag, we’d know.” Outside the tent, she stopped to face him, her expression a shadowed green in the glade’s weird light. “There’s a setting on the gun that would end us all if they had it. They’d make a mess of the stability of this reality too. We’d be dead. They’d be gone, and this fine place you call home would disassemble itself.”

Wheeler listened to the air again. “Get our people out of there . . . no, don’t look for her. Retreat. We’ll get it another way.” She said to Peter. “The army was faster than we thought. They must have been close by.”

“Then let’s fly back. I can’t do anything here.”

“There’s plenty
I
can do here, and you can stay safe, where they won’t grab you.” She pushed the tent flap aside, addressed someone inside, and a large man, about twenty-five with a square jaw and broad shoulders exited.

“Peter, this is Agent Coles. Coles, this is Peter, the boy we’ve been hunting. We need to keep him out of trouble while he’s a guest with us. Could you look after him?”

Coles smiled like it was something he did often, and his handshake was firm and sincere. “Glad to meet you. We’ve been impressed with how you’ve managed to stay a step ahead of everyone for so long.”

“I didn’t know I was being chased most of the time.”

“Still, most people wouldn’t have lasted. Come on, I can get you some food.”

The image of Christy in trouble in the student union filled Peter’s head. He left her there! Peter followed behind Cole for a dozen steps before breaking for the woods. The first trees were behind him, and the darkness was nearly complete before Cole called out, “Hey, where’d you go?”

What worried Peter most, ten minutes later, as he tripped over another unseen root, was that the helicopter base wasn’t north of the interstate, but south. It wouldn’t be the first time the GPS on his phone misled him. If they were south, he’d just be walking deeper and deeper into BLM land, without hope of finding the road or anything else for miles. If they were north of the highway, it couldn’t be more than a mile or two, and he should find it pretty soon.

He stopped. Even though it hadn’t rained for a day, all the bushes dripped. His pants were soaked to his knees. No message on his phone. He tried calling Christy, but it switched straight to voice mail. The phone almost went back into his pocket before he had a thought and texted his dad that he was okay.

Nothing stirred around him in the black woods, and no sounds reached him other than the steady drip from leaves to ground. He checked his phone to make sure he was still heading in the right direction.

The next step sent him sliding down a short embankment. His knee slammed into a tree trunk that he didn’t see, and he spent a few minutes limping heavily until it loosened up, relieving him that it hadn’t broken.

A low, windy sound overhead that rustled the trees told him a copter had passed. If they used infrared, he thought, they’d find him instantly. He’d stand out in the cold underbrush like a torch, but the copter didn’t pause or change course. The next windy sound he heard was a car passing on the freeway in front of him when he climbed to the top of a short rise.

The second car that came by picked him up. The farmer-boy driver chatted amiably all the way to town about the dangers of hypothermia, pneumonia and bears. “They hunt at night. Most people don’t know that,” he said.

Peter thanked him when he dropped him off at the gas station near the exit ramp. This would be so much easier if I could drive, thought Peter. As he walked down the street from the gas station, he scanned the yards and porches he passed. This was the less expensive part of town. Lots of vehicles on cinderblocks, beat-up washers and dryers rusting in the backyards, and homes that looked like they only needed to be jacked up and get their wheels remounted to be moved. He spotted what he wanted on the other side of an unpainted picket fence that was falling apart: a bicycle. He checked the address so he could return it later, then quietly lifted the bike over the fence, made sure the tires had pressure, then pedaled away.

It had been about an hour since he’d left the Student Union, which was now in total chaos. Numerous army trucks and police cars were in the parking lot. Policemen were arguing with a preternaturally calm soldier who kept saying in a measured cadence, “No, no, no, no.” A television truck arrived, spilling an eager reporter and camera crew. Several searchlights pointed skyward, probing back and forth; students—some of them in pajamas were on the sidewalks—watching what was going on, and everyone had an opinion.

“I heard there was a shooter.”

“No, a bomb.”

“Police and army, what a waste of taxpayer money.”

“Do you think we’ll have class tomorrow?”

“I didn’t know you had a Buzz Lightyear bathrobe!”

Peter worked his way to the front of the crowd. A line of soldiers held everyone back, fifty yards from the Student Union. “What about the people inside?” Peter asked the nearest soldier.

“I don’t know a thing, kid. They’re setting up an information table near the admin building.”

The cafeteria was lit from the inside with what looked like emergency lighting. Harsh spotlights cast long shadows, and people moved within, but while he watched, the normal lights flickered and then came on, as did the lights in the rest of the building and the dorms behind it.

Peter circled the building to come up from the delivery truck side. Unlike the front, there were no spotlights and only a pair of soldiers more than a hundred feet apart. When they both weren’t looking, he sprinted across the delivery platform, then rolled under a loading platform door that hadn’t been lowered the whole way. From there, he went through a door into a long hallway that opened onto a balcony above the cafeteria. He hadn’t realized the back of the Student Union building was higher than the front. The lights were out and chairs were upside down on the tables, but he could see most of the area below.

Students sat at their tables, talking, many of them angrily. In the room’s center, all the jackets, book bags and backpacks were in a pile. Soldiers were examining the coats or emptying the bags brusquely, spilling their contents together. When the bag was empty, the soldier would toss it.

Soldiers who looked more like officers sat at two tables near the front doors. They were interviewing students, and checking IDs. A photographer took a picture of each one. While Peter watched, two of them were allowed to leave. “I need my books!” said one loudly, but the officer shook his head.

Peter sidled along the rail, trying not to step into the light, looking for Christy, thinking, Does the army know what they are looking for? There was a good chance that they were completely clueless. They knew something was going on. They knew about the mystery helicopter brigade, and they knew the spot where Peter torched the tree, but how could they know anything else? This had to be driving them crazy.

He had almost completed his circle of the cafeteria from the second level, when he saw Christy. She was sitting at a table with three college students, chatting. Peter almost called to her in relief, but he stifled the urge. Instead, he took out his phone to text her. No signal. The army must be jamming cell phones.

He felt both relief and helplessness. Christy looked fine, and as long as the other students and soldiers were around, the Blue-suits probably couldn’t get her, but the army was searching bags. Where had Christy put the bag? The army might not know what they were looking at when they found it, but they certainly would recognize that it wasn’t a normal assortment of college necessities.

And this thought nagged him. Blue-suit had been passing himself off as an FBI agent. Who had authority in a case like this? If the army found the duffle bag, could Blue-suit walk in, flash his FBI credentials, and then confiscate it?

Peter couldn’t do anything. He sat in a chair where he could see Christy, but kept himself hidden in shadow. No one knows all the information, he realized. In
The Lord of the Rings
, Frodo was in terrible danger, as was the entire fellowship, but Peter never had the sense that they didn’t know what was going on. Orcs were bad. Elves were good (generally), and the beings you met along the way revealed themselves quickly as being on your side or not. Of course, the enemies were confused. The Orcs didn’t know exactly what Frodo was carrying, and they quarreled among themselves. Gollum didn’t know that Frodo intended on destroying the ring. And Sauron and Wormtongue were just clueless.

Maybe
The Lord of the Rings
wasn’t that far off in the way an adventure could go. The best circumstance for the hero was for everyone else to not know all the information.

A shout from below. A bright flash, then glass shattering. Students screamed. Peter jumped to the rail. One of the floor to ceiling windows was knocked out. The soldiers at the doors rushed through the hole. More shouting outside. Another bright flash. Several gunshots. Spotlights on the trucks swiveled, pinning a running man in their crossing beams. He stopped, put his hands up at exactly the same time a soldier, shoulder down, emerged from the darkness, tackling him.

The students had bailed out of their chairs after the gunfire and lay on the floor, covering their heads. Peter ran for the stairs, taking them three at a time. The soldier who had been manning the door at the stair’s bottom was gone. Running bent over, Peter jumped over several students, stepped on the back of someone’s leg, then skidded to a stop on his belly next to Christy. The soldiers were focused on the busted window. Most of them had gone after whoever blew it up, but the few that remained weren’t looking at the students behind them.

“You were gone long enough,” she said.

“I’ve decided the Blue-suits are bad and the fake helicopter army guys are good, at far as we’re concerned. There’s no way we can let the government or police get the gun. From the sounds of it, at least one of those apps could destroy the entire world.”

Christy whispered fiercely, “Why would anyone make an app that would do that? It would kill them too.”

“It’s something to do with parallel dimensions. This reality could be obliterated, but they wouldn’t be here anymore. Total doom to hear Wheeler tell it. Not a bad lady. Very official, though, and business-like. Where’s the gun?”

“I’m all right too, thank you for asking,” said Christy. “You need more detailed text messages if you don’t want someone assuming the worst. ‘Don’t go home’? What was I supposed to do with that? It’s not like I have a secret apartment on this side of town.”

Peter opened his mouth, but nothing seemed appropriate. He suggested, lamely, “You could have gone to Village Inn. They’re open twenty-four hours.”

“I’d have to keep ordering, or they’d throw me out. Besides, do you know who comes into Village Inn late at night? Police officers. I just don’t think you had my side of the plan well designed.”

“It was an ad lib. I’ll do better next time. Also, according to Wheeler, there’s only three Blue-suits, including the one in custody. Where’s the gun?”

“Behind the fat-free milk in the student commissary, about thirty feet from here. We’re okay until they restock.”

Peter raised his head. It didn’t look like the army managed to hold whoever went through the widow. There was a lot of yelling and soldiers running about outside. One of the trucks roared to life and pulled away.

“We want to get out of here!” a student shouted.

Two boys wearing university baseball team shirts were arguing with each other about walking out. “They’re not going to shoot us,” said one.

“They shot at someone, doofus. Once gunfire starts, I stay down.”

Christy rolled over onto her back. “You know what bums me out most about this is they cut off the cell phones. I’m in a Rock Guitar league. We’re supposed to be jamming right now. I play lead. We’ll forfeit.”

Peter had a realization. Lying on the floor, surrounded by frightened college students, angry soldiers (who recently were shooting), hunted by parallel dimension terrorists and Wheeler’s parallel dimension patrol, they were at this moment as safe as they could be. It was unlikely the army would shoot at them, at least as long as they didn’t do anything stupid. Whoever went through the window was probably one of the two remaining Blue-suits (who else would have brought explosives to a late-night study session in the Student Union?), and the parallel dimension cops wouldn’t expose themselves to the real army.