Pandora's Gun (19 page)

A week later, the crime scene tape was gone. The black smudge on the high school where the bomb had exploded had been cleaned and the broken windows replaced.

The army left Melville Park. The official explanation was that a “micro-burst,” an incredibly powerful and very localized storm had damaged trees and caused the destruction. Their press release called it a “one in a billion phenomenon.”

After the incidents at the college, security was tightened. The board of regents briefly discussed putting metal detectors on the doors into the Student Union, but the gun rights advocates, who’d been lobbying for conceal and carry rights on campus, argued against such an anti-second amendment maneuver.

For Peter, though, the news that caught his eye was a thirty-second interview with a farmer north of town who claimed a chupacabra had cleaned out his chickens. The reporter suggested that chupacabras were supposed to live in Latin America, and that they were mythical creatures anyways. The farmer said, “If you’d seen what I’d seen, you wouldn’t be calling it mythical. Its head was all bone and teeth, and I’ll never forget that one eye staring at me while it ate my prize-winning Wyandotte. Best chicken I ever owned.”

*

“You two are thick as thieves,” Peter’s dad said at dinner. “So, is she your girlfriend or what?”

Peter poured gravy over the Thanksgiving dressing. Most of the time, he and Dad foraged for meals. They’d shop on Sunday, grabbing whatever looked good, and then ate when the mood struck them. A sit-down dinner wasn’t their habit, but on Thanksgiving Dad had always done the cooking for the family, finding the biggest turkey that would fit in their oven so they could live off the leftovers for weeks. The meal itself was a production. Dad put down a tablecloth, brought out the good china and silverware, lit candles, poured sparkling apple cider, and carved the turkey with surgical precision. “Your mom always liked Thanksgiving,” he’d said earlier in the meal.

“No, we’re friends.”

Dad spooned out a second helping of mashed potatoes. “That’s the best way to do it,” he said enigmatically. “I got your e-mail with all those guitar links. Are you doing some pre-Christmas hinting?”

“You said you never know what to get me. A little amplifier would be nice too.”

“Are you going to blast the house with distortion and reverb?”

“Do you know about guitar?”

“You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I used to be a garage band god. Not the video-game kind either like you whipper snappers. We practiced in a real garage. I used to wear an earring too. Don’t you think a harmonica would be cheaper? I can get you a good Marine Band C harp for like ten bucks.”

“Stocking stuffer, Dad.”

Peter mopped up the last of the gravy on his plate with a bread roll. Indian summer lasted only two days. It had snowed the night before, and the weatherman predicted a bigger storm coming in over the weekend. A snow day to extend the holiday was a real possibility. Peter already was composing a list of films that he and Christy could watch. They’d recently discovered the joys of cheesy Hammer horror films. He was in charge of popcorn. She provided drinks. Most of the time they watched at her house because her parents had a sixty-inch screen, a kicker sound system, and a high tolerance for movies turned up loud.

The Sanders traveled for Thanksgiving, though, so he’d had an idea that if he could write essays, maybe he could write other stuff too. He’d spent the morning researching screenplay format. Dialogue didn’t look that hard to make up. He had an idea for a science fiction film without special effects. Story rules, he thought. Explosions are just distractions so the audience doesn’t notice you don’t have a creative concept to start with.

“Cowboys versus the Lions for the afternoon game. Are you interested?” Dad looked longingly at the turkey, but must have decided a third helping would be pushing his luck.

“I’ve got a project. I’ll pass. Great dinner, Dad. Thanks for cooking.”

Dad smiled. “McDonald’s was closed, or I’d just have sent you down there.”

From his room, Peter heard the game playing. He lay on his bed, his hands laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling. What would he write? Was it really science fiction if the events actually happened? Wouldn’t it be more of a documentary? He’d seen a great documentary on the Civil War, and another one of the Manhattan Project. Could he write about Wheeler, the Blue-suits and the gun as if it was a documentary? He could make it sound like a secret history: a story that used real history to tell a story that
could
have happened. Nothing historical could contradict it. H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conon Doyle were practically the same age, for example. He could write a story about the two of them meeting on a train from London to Edinburgh when Wells was fifteen and Doyle was twenty-two. That would be cool, a fifteen-year-old kid who would grow up to become a great science fiction writer hanging out with the guy who would become the great mystery writer. What if they got involved in a mystery on the train, a science fictional one? Peter could see the scene already: a steampunk Victorian railway car. Proper English ladies and gentleman heading north on business or to meet family, and the two, young men, one with a huge imagination, and the other with an understanding of deductive reasoning, seeing something happen, something small that no one else would notice, but the two of them did.

My mind is a weasel, thought Peter. I have this great, real story I can tell, and I’m thinking about Sherlock Holmes and
The Time Machine
. He laughed to himself. He could tell a story with Christy and Dante and himself in it. He’d change the names, of course. The ending would be different.

But he knew he’d be writing soon. He felt the same sort of pressure building within him he felt when he had a big essay assignment. He’d lay back as he was now, thinking about what he knew and what he wanted to say, and after a while, he’d have a first sentence. His computer was only two steps away. He’d push himself out of bed, put his hands on the keyboard, and go.

Wheeler went back to the world she belonged to days ago. Of all the images that stayed with him of the events, it was meeting her in the alley behind Goodman’s Sporting Goods that seemed the clearest. She wore the long raincoat, kept her hands behind her back, and talked to him about the gun. “It’s hazardous, son,” she’d said. “It’s dangerous beyond your comprehension.”

Peter looked at the ceiling, glad in most ways that the adventure was behind him. Writing about it would be a way to keep it alive, though. He didn’t want the experience to disappear like so much else did. He’d need to make notes, he realized. He could interview other people in town to get their perspectives on the events. Vice Principal Bovine, he thought, would be a very interesting interview. Peter hadn’t heard what happened to Bovine at his house and why he missed school for the week.

He remembered the way the duffle bag felt when he first picked it up, how the translucent bricks created the weight. When he held one up to the light, the tiny golden wires caught the sunlight. The brick had vibrated, he’d thought, when he first touched it. Wheeler said the bricks were what the story was about. All they needed were a little electricity, no more than a flashlight battery, and a switch to turn it on and off. A brick was “the heart of the gun.” That would make a great title, he thought.

Not moving felt good. Dinner weighed him down pleasantly. Daydreaming about writing without writing felt good.

He studied his ceiling languidly, the way the tiles created a grid, the way the pattern in the tiles suggested shapes, like clouds. He looked at his ceiling vent.

The ceiling vent.

All thoughts of writing fled. He got up, closed and locked his bedroom door, then stood on the bed to open the ceiling vent. His fingers ran through dust and grit, but the brick was still there. He knew it when it buzzed for an instant against his skin.

Peter sat at his desk for a long time, the brick under his reading light, gold wires buried within, just as he remembered. Wheeler said that it took very little electricity. He found a package of double-A batteries in his desk, then straightened two paper clips to use as wires. When he held a clip to the battery’s ends and touched the brick, the familiar hologram screen, filled with icons neatly in a row, flicked into existence. He broke the circuit. The screen disappeared, but he didn’t move for the longest time.

In the myth, Pandora opened the box that released all the world’s troubles. That was the story. Once the lid swung up, the troubles were out. There was no closing the lid again. Peter held the brick in his hand, thinking about Pandora kneeling beside the horrible box, her hand holding it open, and how she must have felt.