Pass/Fail (2012) (28 page)

Jake licked his lips. He wanted to laugh. Free? He knew exactly why Mr. Zuraw had chosen this last test. If Jake actually did it, if he shot Cody up on that platform, it would be in front of thousands of witnesses. From that moment on, for the rest of his life, he would have to do everything Mr. Zuraw said. If he didn’t, Mr. Zuraw could just go to the police and have Jake sent to jail for murder.

“Seriously, I just need my towel,” Jake said, walking toward the gym’s interior doors with as much confidence as he could manage. “This won’t take a second—”

“I know your locker number, Jake, and it’s not 1337. I know everything about you, including what you’re planning on doing right now. But how much do you know?”

“Enough to know I want no part in this,” Jake admitted.

“Are you sure? Don’t you want to know why we did it?”

Jake blinked. He stopped where he was. “Did what?”

“Everything.”

Jake turned and stared at the guidance counselor with wide eyes. “I thought I didn’t learn that until after I graduated.”

Mr. Zuraw shrugged. “I see no harm in it. Not now, when you’re so close.” He smiled. “You’re going to be famous, Jake. You’re going to be powerful. It’s possible, with a little luck that you could become President of the United States when you’re old enough. The YSC are very influential people. They have a lot of money to work with. They could make that happen.”

Jake said nothing.

“This country is in trouble. Crime is high, and the economy keeps falling. Pollution turned out to be worse than we expected, catastrophically so—the environment is collapsing as we watch. Worst of all no one believes in their leaders anymore. The people we expect to make the hard decisions, to get us back on track, are so desperate for re-election that they promise anything, anything at all to get votes—and then they never deliver. They only make things worse. We need someone, Jake. Someone who can see our problems for what they are. Challenges, but not insurmountable obstacles. Someone who can find solutions everyone can live with. We need someone who can solve the most fiendish puzzles imaginable, and do it without breaking a sweat. We need someone who can really, truly, think. You’ve proven your suitable for the job. And all it takes is for you to go back out there, right now, and do one very simple thing. Something you should find enjoyable.”

Jake felt hot and cold all over. He had no idea what to think, or what to do next.

Mr. Zuraw didn’t suffer from that problem. He reached into his jacket to grab something. The movement spurred Jake into action. His hand was already in his pack—when it came out it was holding D’s stun gun.

Mr. Zuraw’s hand emerged from his jacket holding a gun. He didn’t get to use it. Jake jabbed the stun gun into the guidance counselor’s chest. There was a startlingly loud noise and Mr. Zuraw collapsed to the varnished boards of the gym floor, twitching spastically.

Jake didn’t stop to see if he’d hit his head on the way down. He rushed through the gym doors and out into the hallways of the school. Locker 1337—D had said that if things didn’t work out, if they came to a crisis, he should go to locker 1337. He had no idea what he would find there but it would be worth finding out, he thought.

Unless D worked for Mr. Zuraw, too. Everyone did in the end. Maybe D’s return had been staged. All part of an elaborate test.

No, Jake told himself. He couldn’t think like that, not right now. Sometimes paranoia saved your life but sometimes it cost you everything.

Behind him the doors to the gym creaked open. Mr. Zuraw staggered out, grasping his chest.

“Oh, no,” Jake said.

D had warned him there wasn’t much charge left in the stun gun. Clearly there hadn’t been enough to do more than stun Mr. Zuraw.

Locker 1337 was right ahead. Jake ran to it and started dialing in the combination. The same as his own locker combination, D had said. He turned the dial left to 2, then right to 48, then left again to 6.

Behind him Mr. Zuraw was crawling down the hall. Crawling toward him. He didn’t have a gun—Jake guessed this was his lucky day.

“I’m—giving you—a choice,” Mr. Zuraw said, biting off the words as if cost him great amounts of energy to speak. “You can—go back—right now. Or fail. If you—don’t—do this, it’ll be your third—fail. You know—what that means.”

Jake laughed. “That’s a choice? That isn’t a choice. Picking between two options when there’s a gun to your head and picking the wrong one means your death. That’s no kind of choice at all.”

“So you’re going—to run?” Mr. Zuraw grimaced in sudden pain. “There’s no—incomplete for you. I’ll—find you. And kill you.”

“Or I can stay here and be your slave.” Jake pulled open the locker door.

“Stay here—and be—with Megan,” Mr. Zuraw said. “Or go—and never—see her again. How’s that for a—choice?”

Jake closed his eyes. Mr. Zuraw knew how to push his buttons—the man always had. They were, after all, buttons he had given Jake in the first place. Kill Cody, be a slave, but a slave in love with the girl with those blue eyes… or run, run and be free, free to hide in caves in the mountains forever, to always wonder what could have happened.

He opened his eyes. Inside the locker were a six pack of bottled water and a folded piece of paper. Nothing else. Jake opened up the piece of paper and saw it was a map. It showed the main roads and more secluded tracks leading up into the foothills. It showed places to hide, places where it was safe to sleep. That was all that D could give him. What he had sacrificed his life for, to give Jake this chance.

“I can’t—stop you—like this,” Mr. Zuraw said. “But I can—warn you, you’ll never—be safe—never be at peace. There is no—going back.”

Jake looked down at the man crawling toward him across the floor. He could still say yes. He could still turn around, go back up to the top of that platform, and graduate. He looked up and saw a doorway leading outside, into the desert. He could still say no. He could run. He could be free.

For the first time in his strange life, Jake McCartney made a choice.

THE END

About The Author

David Wellington was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended Syracuse University and received an MFA in creative writing from Penn State.

In 2004 he began serializing his novel
Monster Island
online. The book rapidly gained a following, and was acquired for print publication by Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Since then, Wellington has published more than 15 novels, and has been featured in
The New York Times
, Boing Boing and the
Los Angeles Times
.

You can find him online at davidwellington.net.

More Books by David Wellington

DIGITAL EDITIONS

Plague Zone

Pass Fail

Rivals

PRINT AND DIGITAL

The Monster Island Trilogy

Monster Island

Monster Nation

Monster Planet

The Laura Caxton Vampire Novels

13 Bullets

99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

32 Fangs: A Vampire Tale

The Frostbite Werewolf Novels

Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale

Overwinter: A Werewolf Tale

AS DAVID CHANDLER

The Ancient Blades Trilogy

Den of Thieves

A Thief in The Night

Honor Among Thieves

A Sample From Rivals

If you enjoyed this digital edition of
Pass/Fail
, look for the digital edition of
Rivals
by David Wellington, in stores now.

Rivals

Chapter 1.

“When are you going to start rebelling, kid?” Brent’s father asked. He shifted his pack on his back and started clambering down a rough-walled ravine, where a flash flood had cut through the desert like a knife after last month’s storms.

“I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to rebel against,” Brent answered. He reached forward with one boot and found a rock that didn’t shift when he put his weight on it. It was easy enough going, but you had to be careful. Brent grabbed at the tough roots of a juniper bush and stopped still when a scree of pebbles started shifting under him. “It seems to me we have it pretty good—you look at some of the people in this world who don’t have anything to eat, or their government forces them out of their homes, and—”

At the top of the ravine, Brent’s older sister Maggie appeared silhouetted against the sun. “Would you two hurry up?” she whined. “I want to get back to civilization. You know, where people have cell phones that actually get a signal?”

Brent’s eyes narrowed. He started thinking of the perfect reply, something really nasty, but then his dad put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Don’t,” his father said. “I wish you two wouldn’t fight so much.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “I thought this trip would do her good but I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be having a good time, does she?”

“We’ll just have to hit the outlet mall on the way back,” Brent said. He was pleased when his father actually smiled, though he knew he would never get a laugh. Their dad was always scrupulously careful not to favor one of them over the other, and that included never saying a bad word about Maggie.

Even when she deserved it.

“Come on down, kid. It’s not too much farther. I saw the sun shining on something this morning. It looked like there might be an oasis out here. Maybe we can go for a quick swim!”

“I didn’t bring my bathing suit,” Maggie answered, but she started carefully picking her way down the rocks. For all her lack of enthusiasm she had no trouble with the climb down. Brother and sister were both experienced rockhoppers. That was entirely thanks to their parents, who had dragged them out into this desert for hikes every year since they’d been old enough to walk. Now that their mother was gone, the hikes were even more frequent.

Brent didn’t mind at all. He loved how quiet it was when you got more than an hour’s walk away from the highway. He loved the shade at the bottom of ravines like this, and the thin breezes that dried all the sweat on your skin. He thought maybe when he was older he would like to live out there, and just watch the clouds go by overhead everyday until the sun turned them a million shades of red and orange.

“Hey,” Maggie said. “I think I see it. But that’s no oasis. God, what a stupid goose chase. It looks like an old car somebody left to rust to death.”

Dad rushed down the bottom of the ravine, where the footing was a lot more stable. Brent hurried after. This would have been a bad place to be when the rain came through—millions of years’ worth of mud and sand had been washed away in a foaming wall of water—but now the ground had dried out so much it shrank away from itself, making a fine pattern of cracks like a gigantic spider web. Tiny flowers surrounded by thick spiky leaves sprouted up through some of the cracks, thriving on whatever moisture remained. The flowers’ petals were soft, delicate colors you couldn’t find anywhere else in the desert.

“Is it even worth checking this thing out?” Maggie asked.

For his father’s sake, Brent held his tongue. Maggie had been like this ever since their mother died a year ago. Dad claimed it was because he didn’t know how to talk to a teenage girl so he wasn’t doing a good job helping her through her grief. Brent thought otherwise. He thought Maggie was just a jerk. The two of them had never gotten along very well. There had been a brief time, after the accident, when the two of them had hugged a lot and cried on each others’ shoulders. But that had ended all too quickly.

“I hate to tell you this, Mags,” Dad said, “but that is no rusted-out car.”

Brent came up around a bend in the ravine and saw what he meant.

Cars weren’t fifty yards long, for one thing.

It was funny, though. He could see why Maggie had been confused about its size. If you didn’t look right at it, it seemed smaller. And it got bigger as he got closer to it—much bigger. It was almost like it couldn’t decide how big it really was, or what its real shape might be. But that didn’t make sense, he thought.

Whatever it was, it was made of metal and yes, a lot of it had rusted away. But parts of it were still shiny, even though it had clearly been buried in the sand for a long time. The flash flood must have uncovered it, or at least, uncovered part of it. It looked like the top part of something much bigger that was still buried.

Brent thought it might be a crashed airplane. It had a roughly cylindrical shape. Part of the top of it had been eroded away but the side walls still rose up like steepled fingers to form a series of huge arches. The surface of the object was pitted and scratched by time and weather, but it looked like it had once been very smooth, even aerodynamic.

It lay across the ravine running perpendicular to the course of the flood. It looked like the water had tried to go around it, failed, and then just gone over it instead. Looking down through one of the arches Brent saw puddles of water inside that hadn’t even evaporated yet. “What is it?” Brent asked.

“I don’t know,” Dad confessed. He moved closer. Brent started to follow but his dad put up one hand to stop him. “Just let me check it out first.”

Maggie came up beside Brent as Dad stepped through one of the arches, into part of the cylinder that was still mostly intact.

“Is this going to take long?” she asked, but before Brent could answer a hundred dusty-winged birds came swooping out of the cylinder and flapped vehemently away. One came close enough to brush Brent’s cheek with its wingtip.