The Apocalypse Club (13 page)

The wind was deafening. I could feel the walkie-talkie vibrating as Violet said something, but even if I held it right up to my ear, I couldn’t make out a single word.

Max and I looked at each other in confusion and terror. I pointed at the box and mimed to indicate that I had pulled the stick out, then threw my hands up to show that this experiment had been a failure. Max looked lost for a moment and then his expression suddenly hardened. I saw him reach into his backpack and remove one of his homemade grenades. I’d had no idea that he’d even packed them.

Bending low against the blasting wind, I saw him stride purposefully towards the box, pull the pin on the grenade, toss it in, and then close the lid.

“Run!” he yelled.

The wind was so strong up here that not much running was required. We could barely avoid being lifted off our feet as it carried us across the ridgeline before throwing ourselves behind some trees. I heard a muffled boom and covered my face as a shower of white sparks shot up into the air from the box. We lifted our heads slightly and looked across the valley at the Weather Station, where a similar explosion had knocked two of the three satellite dishes off the roof.

“It must have caused a power surge!” Max yelled.

The second boom took the telescopic device off and started a fire that quickly engulfed the building. As it spread, we noticed the wind starting to die down and the funnel clouds sucked back up into the sky like the last dregs of cola through a straw. A minute after that, the sky was perfectly clear again.

Shortly after that, we were arrested.

W
e were charged with a variety of things: destruction of private property; possession of an explosive device; trespassing; detonation of an unlawful explosive device; mischief. There was even talk of charging us under the terrorism statutes, but we hadn’t made any threats or demands and hadn’t hurt anybody, so that was quickly dismissed. There was no way we could have known that a storm was coming, so our blowing up the weather monitoring station could not legally be classified as criminal negligence.

Still, it was enough to shut down BO-224.

“Bunch of ingrates,” Max muttered. “If we hadn’t blown the box, they’d probably all be dead.”

“That storm started pretty much as soon as we plugged in Violet’s device,” I said. “She must have known that was going to happen.” If I’d had any doubts about Max’s notion that the Weather Station actually controlled the weather instead of just reporting on it, they had been blown away along with many parts of the city.

“Yes, it did,” Max said. “I’m starting to think that the whole thing was a setup.”

Setup or not, it didn’t change the fact that we were now in serious trouble. I was desperately trying to think of a way that I could frame this whole incident that wouldn’t result in my father hanging me upside down from a tree when we were informed that our lawyer had arrived. Max and I looked at each other in confusion. We hadn’t called a lawyer. We didn’t even know the name of a lawyer we could call. The only lawyer I had ever met was the one who had handled the closing on my parent’s house, a nearsighted bald man with a lisp who had miscalculated the land transfer tax, which had caused my father to loudly inform him that in the future, he would not hire said lawyer, and to close that fucking door.

The man who entered the interview room was young, probably no more than 30 years old. His suit looked like it probably cost more than my father made in a year. He asked the police officer to leave, removed a couple of sheets of paper from his briefcase and slid them across the table to us.

“Gentlemen,” he said, giving us a quick nod. “Sign those, if you would.”

We leaned forward and looked at the neatly typed documents. “What is this?” I asked. “Who are you?”

“Call me Black,” he said, sitting down across from us. “And as soon as you sign those, I will be your attorney.”

“So is Black your name or is that just what you want us to call you?” I asked.

“That doesn’t matter.”

Max and I looked at each other. “Sorry,” he said. “Did you say you’re our lawyer?”

“We don’t have a lot of time here, gentlemen, so I’m going to explain this quickly,” Mr. Black said. “I have spoken to the private interests whose property you are accused of destroying this evening. Provided you allow me to represent you, they are not going to press any charges against you. If you go with another attorney, that will not be the case. Defending yourselves against the charges placed will probably cost each of you between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars, give or take. Not counting the civil actions that could be taken against you, which could run into the millions.”

“Millions?” Max said.

“Indeed,” Mr. Black said. “There’s not only the property itself, which is quite expensive, I assure you, but business interruption and so forth. I can guarantee you that if I am your representative, no such civil action will be presented.”

I swallowed. “Do you have a pen?”

He smiled and produced a gleaming pen from his pocket. I took it and scrawled an approximation of my signature at the bottom of the sheet. Max did likewise.

“Excellent!” he said, taking a moment to examine the sheets before tucking them back into his briefcase. “Now as I said before, time is of the essence here, so I’ll explain what’s going to happen. First, you will say nothing more to the police or anyone else. No statements to anybody. Understood?”

We nodded blankly.

“The most serious of the charges against you are going to be dropped. In the end, you will plead guilty to a couple of the lesser ones. Mischief and trespassing, most likely. Not enough traces of the explosive device were found to indicate that it even existed, let alone that it was manufactured or possessed by either of you. It’s entirely feasible that the storm caused the box to short out and explode all on its own.”

“Okay,” I said. This was sounding pretty good. Five minutes earlier, I had been convinced that I was going to spend the next 25 years in jail.

“You’re just two bored kids out for a bike ride who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mr. Black said, as if addressing a jury. He did it with such smooth confidence that even I would have believed him, and I knew it wasn’t true. “As far as any unusual activity surrounding the box or the Weather Station, you did not hear or see anything strange.”

The last part was framed more like a command than a question.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Uh, if you don’t mind me asking you, how much do you charge?”

“Nothing,” he said. For the first time, I noticed that his eyes were the same colour as his name. When he smiled, it didn’t spread to them. “I’m handling this matter on what we might call a…pro bono basis.”

“I thought only civil lawyers did that,” Max said.

“Thought is not a word I want you to use,” he said. “Or an activity I would encourage you to pursue. As for the involvement of anyone else, you know nothing.”

“What about Violet?” I asked.

He examined his nails. “As I said. You don’t know, nor have you met, anyone by the name of Violet Haze. To the best of your knowledge, Miss Haze is a student at your school and you know absolutely nothing about her. The only thing you do know for certain is that she had no involvement whatsoever in any activity that may in any way be connected to the events of this evening.”

I realized that he was right. I really did have no idea who she was. How much of what she had told me about herself was true? Probably nothing. But what was her connection to this guy? I wanted to know, but it would probably be a bad idea to ask.

“So what happens now?” Max asked.

Mr. Black looked at his watch. Like everything else he was wearing, it looked insanely expensive. “In thirty minutes, you will be discharged into the custody of your parents. I will have a word with them first and do my best to explain that, in my legal opinion, you are largely blameless in this situation. Shortly after that we will arrange a deal where you plead guilty on two of the aforementioned lesser charges. The two of you will serve one hundred eighty days of some form of community service, although, if you were to enlist in say, the Junior Defenders, we may be able to cut that time to forty-five. After that, the criminal conviction will disappear on your eighteenth birthday. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another urgent matter to attend to.”

He got up, grabbed his briefcase and walked over to knock on the door.

“Who are you, really?” I asked, unable to hold back.

He picked at an imaginary piece of lint on his suit jacket. “You will see me one more time at the hearing. More than that, believe me, you don’t need to know.”

The door opened and he disappeared through it. Max and I looked at each other in disbelief.

“What in the hell just happened?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Max said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say they’re covering their tracks.”

“What do you mean? If it was a setup, why don’t they just cut us loose and leave us dangling in the wind? Nobody would believe us, even if we told them the truth.
Especially
if we told them the truth.”

“Maybe,” Max said. “But I think they’d rather not take the chance.”

“You think Violet was in on the whole thing?”

Max thought about it. “Sure looks that way, doesn’t it? Even if she is some sort of hacker genius, I don’t think she could have come up with all of that stuff on her own.”

“I still can’t believe it,” I said. “You were fucking right, man! Did you see the way that Weather Station lit up when we plugged that stick in? That storm came out of nowhere!”

“Yeah, it did,” Max said. “I don’t know about you, man, but I feel a whole hell of a lot
less
safe now than I did five minutes before that guy walked into the room.”

“At least we’re not going to jail, though. Or being sued. D’you think that was what he was talking about when he mentioned civil action?”

“What else?” Max said. “Lotta shit got destroyed. The power box…the Weather Station looked like it took a pretty good hit…not to mention all the stuff that probably got wrecked by those twisters.”

“There’s no way they could connect any of that to us!” I protested. “Those are always automatically classified as an act of god.”

Max turned in his seat. “Did it look like one to you?”

I tried to look noncommittal. “I’ve never seen a tornado before.”

“Tornadoes, plural,” Max reminded me. “And they only started up when the Weather Station came to life. Which only happened when we plugged that little stick into the slot in the power box.”

“It’d be pretty difficult to create a chain of causation for that one,” I said. “Extremely tough to prove without a lot of digging. And I got the distinct impression that his position was the less digging, the better.”

“Yeah, unless it’s a couple of six by six by threes for yours truly,” Max said. “They must have been on us the whole time. Shit, probably since the beginning. They’re probably on us right now.”

“You think that Black guy was for real?”

“Sure looked it.”

“So now what?”

“Not sure,” Max said. “I guess for now, we keep our mouths shut and see what happens. We may have underestimated the opposition here. Anyone who can drop a dozen tornadoes on a dozen different targets in the space of two minutes is not someone you want to piss off. Especially if they know where you live.”

A
ccording to the terms of our plea agreements, we joined the Junior Defenders.

We were given an eight-week rotation. The first three weeks would be basic training. After that, we would be assessed and assigned to a specialty division. If everything went well and I didn’t flunk out, I would still finish in time to go to university in September. My parents made it pretty clear that if I did flunk out, I should go looking for a new place of residence, anyway. They didn’t exactly believe my claims that Max and I had had nothing to do with the much-publicized outage at the Weather Station.

“How am I supposed to explain to Dorothy when she asks what happened?” my mother asked me shortly after we were released. “How am I supposed to explain to people that my son was in jail?”

“Mom, I wasn’t in
jail
,” I said. “It was just questioning.”

“Oh right,” she said, voice soaked in sarcasm. “
Questioning
, right. By the
police
. What kind of questions do they ask? They wanna know what your plans are for after school? What TV shows you like? That sort of thing?”

The root of my mother’s anger wasn’t the fact that I had been arrested. It wasn’t even embarrassment. I was her blue chip in terms of bragging rights with her friends. I had always gotten good marks in school and had been accepted to U of T. I was still going to school (as long as I made it through JD, anyway), but my being arrested and pleading guilty to two relatively minor charges had taken all that off the table. Not that the competition from her friends’ kids was all that much. Her friend Dorothy had a son in Grade 10 named Hoyt who was on medication to try to deal with his rampant pyromania. He had, at that point, set fire to three backyard sheds (none of which belonged to his parents), a police cruiser, their neighbour’s Doberman, and a tour bus full of seniors on their way to see Kenny Rogers at Casinorama. My mother’s other friend, Joanne, had a son named Terence who was a year older than me. Terence was supposed to be working while he finished his high school equivalency and saved up enough money to go back to school for horticulture. Or he would have had he not electrocuted himself trying to steal heavy duty copper wire from an electroplating company. I guess he thought the cable hadn’t been fully installed yet. I heard that he crackled like a rotisserie chicken when they pulled him off. Not a pleasant thought.

My mother would always shake her head sadly and say the same thing when any mention of Terence came up in a conversation: “Just goes to show. You never know what kids are up to these days. You’ve gotta keep your eye on them all the time.”

No shit, mom.

My father thought a stint in the Defenders would do me some good. Having been in the military himself, he believed that it was exactly what his bored and pampered son needed to be knocked out of his privileged cocoon.