The Apocalypse Club (11 page)

Making it to the top of the stairs undetected, I spotted Violet making her way down Hall 2-5 (so named because it runs directly over top of Hall 5 but is on the second floor). This hall was not as crowded as the ones downstairs and I was forced to allow more space between me and my quarry. She reached the end of 2-5 and turned right into 2-6. I made it to the corner just as she disappeared into the girls’ washroom.

The hallway was almost deserted now as students began making their way to last period class. I leaned against the wall and waited, trying to look like I was waiting for a friend. I even glanced impatiently at my watch a couple of times for good measure.

The bell rang and she had still not come out. Shit. I was supposed to be in Ancient Civilizations right now. It was presentation week. Pete Fife was going to give what would no doubt be an incredibly dull, historically inaccurate and hastily assembled overview of the rise and fall of the Persian Empire based largely on his multiple viewings of the movie
300
. I was supposed to be there as one of the three student evaluators, which meant I would have to sit through his travesty, ask a few penetrating questions (“You’re aware of the fact that Xerxes looked nothing like that, right?”) and then provide some sort of a mark out of 50 that would be factored into the teacher’s own evaluation. If I didn’t get moving right now, I was going to miss all that.

I looked at my watch again. I couldn’t just keep standing here. The washrooms were directly opposite Mr. Louvern’s Business Studies class. I had dropped Business Studies last semester, mostly because I thought Mr. Louvern was an ass. If he spotted me standing around out here, he surely wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask me what I was doing standing outside the girls’ bathroom, something he would do both for the amusement of his remaining students and as punishment on me for dropping his class. Mr. Louvern was always singling students out to make himself look better in front of the jock assholes who clustered in the back row. He had played hockey when he was younger and never failed to tell every successive class that he had been asked to try out for the Phoenix AAA team before a twisted knee diverted him into academics. The first time I heard that story, I felt kind of bad for him. By the sixth time I heard it, not so much.

I looked at the bathroom door. What the hell was she still doing in there? It had been at least five minutes. Maybe she had spotted me and ducked in there to shake me off. Well, I wasn’t going to make it that easy.

I pushed open the door of the boys’ washroom and stood just inside the entrance. It smelled, as always, like urine, vinegar and 400-year-old gym clothes. At least now I was out of the hall, so I wasn’t so conspicuous. Plus, when she finally came out of the girls’ bathroom, I’d be able to hear the door and could resume my pursuit.

I waited for ten minutes without a sound other than noises from the nearby classrooms. What the hell was she doing in there? Did she have some sort of bowel condition? A difficult period? I was definitely going to have to try and explain my absence from Ancient Civilizations now. I couldn’t just say I was held up in Biology. Ten minutes guaranteed that my lack of presence would be categorized as absent and not late.
Shit
.

I heard a footstep in the hall and stuck my head out the door for a look. It was just somebody from Louvern’s class jogging down the hall, probably to get something they left in their locker.

Screw this, I thought. I pushed open the door of the girls’ bathroom. I couldn’t hear any sounds from inside, so I snuck in. All of the stall doors were ajar. There was nobody there.

“Violet?” I said in a low voice. A loud, deep voice emanating from the girls’ bathroom is likely to be investigated as unusual, after all.

Nothing. Somehow she had managed to give me the slip. How did she know I was following her? And how in the hell did she manage to walk in here and disappear?

I heard more footsteps out in the hall. Oh well. There was no point in waiting around in here any longer. Since I was too late to evaluate Peter Fife’s Persian war-porn extravaganza, I went home. I had no sooner closed my bedroom door and turned on my computer than Violet Haze stepped out of my closet.

“Simms, what in the hell are you doing following me around the school?”

I let out a yelp and stumbled backwards, landing rather painfully on a partially deconstructed Rubik’s Cube on the desk. I had taken it apart after months of fruitless attempts to solve it, but one of the corner pieces had flown across the room and landed behind the dresser. The dresser was heavy and had an aquarium on top, so I wasn’t able to move it out to get the missing piece back. If anyone asked about it, I was calling the cube a piece of installation art.

“Jesus!” I shouted. “What are you doing here?”

“Good question,” she said. “Especially coming from a man who just spent twenty minutes hiding in the women’s bathroom.”

I rubbed my hip where it had made contact with my art installation. “Max thought it would be a good idea to try to find out more about you,” I said, not bothering to hide my embarrassment at being such a lousy investigator.

“I see,” she said. “And what have you found out?”

“You’re much better at spying on people than I am,” I admitted. “Other than that, not much.”

She looked around the room appraisingly. Other than the fact that the bed was not made, it was relatively neat, by my standards. My sister was the slob of the family. Anyone trying to cross from one side of her room to the other would have to wade through a waist-deep pile of clothes, makeup cases and electronic devices.

“You know,” she said. “If you wanted to know more about me, you could have just asked.”

“That had not occurred to us,” I said. “Our methods are more…uh…”

“Ineffective?”

“Some might use that word. We prefer to call ourselves covert.”

“I suppose that’s accurate in the sense that neither of you seem to know where you are or why most of the time.”

I was getting a little tired of being called an idiot, even if there was a foundation to some of her arguments. “All right then, Miss Smarty Pants, start talking then.”

So she did. She told me about coming here from Egypt (she was too young to remember many details, but she did remember the strange feeling she got when she looked out the window and realized that she was no longer connected to the ground). Her father’s illness. Their landlord, Mr. Stavros. The fact that she wasn’t sure, but she thought she might have killed Mr. Stavros with some kind of psychokinetic power. At that point, I had to interrupt.

“Wait a minute. Seriously?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Have you killed anybody else?”

“Not yet.”

“You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

“Not as long as you don’t keep following me around.”

“Can you make things move? Could you get that Rubik’s Cube to float up off the desk? Better yet, could you get the piece of that Rubik’s Cube that fell behind the dresser back out?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know you really have this power? Maybe the guy just had a massive stroke or something.”

“Maybe.”

I sat back against the wall and pondered this. It occurred to me that we had been here a while and I was thirsty. Maybe she was thirsty, too. “Do you want something to drink? Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“I’m just going to grab something, so it’s no problem. You’re not going to take off, are you?”

“No.”

I jogged down to the kitchen and grabbed a ginger ale out of the fridge. When I got back to my room, she was gone. I ran to the window, but there was no sign of her shimmying down the drainpipe or running across the lawn. I checked the closet to make sure she wasn’t just messing with me, but she wasn’t in there, either.

Who on earth was this girl? Was she even for real? What about her story? Had she made the whole thing up? Maybe I should go in for a CAT scan myself. I looked at my watch. Max would be home by now. I decided to call.

“I found out some more about this Violet chick.”

“Code names!” Max hissed. “Remember, they’re listening to everything.”

I sighed. “Okay. I found out more about Miss X.”

“Excellent!” Max said. “Where does she live?”

“Actually, I didn’t find out that part.”

“How could you not know that? It’s pretty much the most pertinent piece of required information. It’s the thing that you find out
first
.”

“You wanna know, then I suggest you spend an hour trying to tail her, Marlowe. She shook me off like a homeless flyer and then tailed
me
all the way home.”

“What?”

“I just got back to my room when she stepped out of the closet. Scared me so bad I sat on my Rubik’s Cube.”

“So you’ll be shitting red and green squares for the next couple weeks. What did you find out?”

I related a synopsized version of the story she had told me.

“Mind powers?” Max said when I was done. “You’re full of shit. Did she demonstrate anything?”

“No. I asked for a demonstration, but she declined.”

“I bet you did, you horny bastard. Neglected to levitate your todger, did she?”

I allowed myself a brief moment to think about such possibilities. I had never before been alone in my room with a girl of roughly the same age who was not in some way, shape or form related to me. Maybe if I acted suspiciously, I could get her to come back. My knowledge of seduction techniques was limited. I did not know anyone who would be able to provide me with recreational drugs. There was a kid in my grade named Ernesto who claimed to smoke a lot of weed, but he had called me a narc the one and only time I had asked him about it, so that avenue was likely shut off. My parents had a few bottles of wine on the rack in the basement, but not so many that they wouldn’t notice if one of them just disappeared or was replaced with tap water. I did not look 19 or have access to a fake ID, or anyone who could provide me with one.

Based on what I had seen of her so far, I didn’t think Violet Haze was the type of girl who would respond to those sorts of overtures, anyway. She seemed more like the kind of woman who should be dating James Bond, except that Bond women almost always get bumped off.

“So what now?” I asked.

“We wait,” Max said. “Based on the way this woman operates, it sounds like she’ll be the one to come to us.”

I looked at the chair where she’d been sitting while she had relayed her extraordinary story. I hoped Max was right. This girl interested me.

O
f course, our assault on the Weather Station was a disaster.

Quite literally.

Shortly after we cut the power and the station went offline, a tornado – or, rather, 15 separate tornadoes – rolled through the city within a ten-minute span. Some of them touched down, wrecked something, and then almost immediately disappeared, while others carved long and wide swathes of destruction across much larger areas.

Amazingly, nobody was hurt. The buildings that were destroyed during the destruction included a vegan restaurant, a safe injection site, two community drop-in centres, the headquarters of the local Green Party candidate, four legal medicinal marijuana grow op sites, and a Jesuit retreat that had been trying to block Walmart from building a new store next door to their meditative garden. All of them were empty at the time the funnel clouds touched down. In every case, the buildings on either side of them were left completely unharmed. Two tornadoes also struck just outside of town. One carved a perfectly straight seven-mile diagonal through a butterfly preserve that matched exactly the proposed route for a contentious natural gas pipeline. Another one wiped out a century-old farmhouse that was the sole obstacle to a planned suburban development in the south end.

Meteorologists and storm watchers were baffled. Although it wasn’t unusual to see two or three tornadoes touch down during a major storm, there had been no storm activity in the area at the time. Many were reluctant to confirm that tornadoes were the culprit. The damage was so extreme and also so contained that some even floated the theory that some of the damage must have been due to some other cause, although none of them could offer up any theory as to what that might be. Conspiracy theories quickly sprang up, giving rise to a whole “Tornado Truther” movement that believed all of the damage had been the result of some co-ordinated mass demolition operation. This was not a position that gained a lot of traction in the media.

Max, of course, believed that the wave of destruction only re-enforced his theory that the Weather Stations controlled the weather and that, by taking one offline even briefly, we had exposed this truth to the world. The fact that the world did not immediately recognize this was something he was confident would change over time.

“Look at the sites they hit!” he said afterward. “Those twisters weren’t the Finger of God, they were the Finger of The Man!”

I couldn’t argue against the fact that if there was such a thing as The Man, the affected sites would probably have been pretty high on His hit list, but there was one aspect of his logic that didn’t square.

“But if that was the case,” I said, “and you were correct in your assessment that the Weather Stations controlled the weather, then why did all of that happen
during
our assault?”

Max, as he did so many of my arguments against one of his deeply entrenched and beloved positions, waved this away. “They probably had them all programmed in and ready to go. I bet when we took the station down, it removed the control. As soon as they got it back up again, the twisters disappeared.”

This opinion was not widely circulated in the media. There the general consensus was that two idiotic juvenile delinquents (us) had, for reasons unknown, sabotaged the one piece of equipment that might have provided even a modicum of advance warning about the dangerous storm that materialized out of nowhere and did so much damage. The fact that nobody was killed was the only thing that kept them from demanding that we be transferred to adult court and sent to the worst maximum security facility possible to become the sexual slaves of the largest, ugliest and most densely tattooed individuals in the place.