The Apocalypse Club (7 page)

“And how will we know that they are, uh, committed to the cause, exactly?”

“They will share our ideology. Also, they will be willing to join the crusade alongside us, like liberty leading the people.”

“By which I take it that you mean they will be willing to fight with one boob hanging out?”

“Fight?” Max said, looking puzzled. “No, that would be impractical. If however, after the fighting, they wanted to remove their clothing, then that would be entirely in keeping with our guiding principles.”

I just nodded and went along with it. I thought that my chances of seeing a naked woman were about as good as actually blowing something up during an armed assault.

I was wrong about both of those things.

S
ome of the items on the list were surprisingly easy to get.

The money was easiest. Max knew the combination for his mother’s safe and was able to lift a few hundred dollars’ worth of bearer bonds that he sold to a shifty-looking bald guy at one of the local pawn shops for 50 cents on the dollar. We used the money to get some furniture and a generator for the headquarters. We also got our own 3D printer and once again attempted to try to generate some kickass, military-grade weaponry. Unfortunately, the results were less than ass-kicking. Our first couple of attempts yielded a lumpy-looking HT-562 assault rifle and an SS .75 fully automatic handgun with no hole in the barrel. Since we couldn’t print our own ammunition, they were mostly supposed to function as visual deterrents, but the only reaction they would inspire in anyone was laughter. Both of them looked like props from a made-for-TV sci-fi miniseries.

“I don’t think we should use these,” I said, weighing the unnaturally light TF-15 in my hands. It looked like the printing schematic we had used was seriously buggered up. Although I had never seen a real HT-562 up close before, I was pretty sure that the front half was not supposed to be twice as large as the back. I had also never seen one that was bright green.

“Relax,” Max said. “We’ll paint them so that no one can tell the difference. They look badass.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is dumb-ass.”

“Admit it. If I pointed that at you in a darkened area, you’d shit your pants.”

“Only because I would assume the darkened area in question is a circus tent and I happen to be afraid of clowns. Which you would look like if you were running around with something like this.”

“Maybe you’d rather just charge through the door with your dick in your hand.”

“At least my dick is capable of launching projectiles.”

“All in good time, Commander.”

Most of the ingredients that went into the explosives were commercially available. A midnight raid on the school chemistry lab yielded the rest of what we needed. Following simple instructions that we found online, we were able to fashion the contents into six small grenade-sized devices and two larger ones designed to work off a timer. We stored them in an underground auto repair bay on the other side of the complex. We both agreed that it would be a good idea to test them, but we couldn’t risk doing that anywhere near HQ without drawing attention to ourselves. We would need to do it somewhere outside of town.

Since we couldn’t just carry 200 pounds of explosives through a suburban development without being noticed (or just carry 200 pounds, period), we needed the second item on the list: transport. I was the one who came up with the foolproof plan to locate that one.

“There’s this convenience store near my old neighbourhood that’s open 24 hours,” I said, pointing to the intersection on the map. “Every Thursday, they get this huge supply of cold medication and the meth mules come out of the woodwork to buy the stuff up, no questions asked. They all leave their engines running so they can just shoot in and out before they get spotted or busted. All we have to do is stake the place out, wait until one of them is inside the store, then hop into the vehicle in question and away we go. I bet you anything they don’t even report it to the cops. Free and clear.”

I was quite proud of this plan. I thought it was a good, possibly even great, plan. One of the top ten, all-time, best-ever plans, in fact. The take wouldn’t be as high as the great train robbery or the Lufthansa heist, perhaps, but the execution would be no less brilliant. Even better, we didn’t have to worry about the morality of it because we were stealing from meth heads. I had never actually seen a meth den before, but I had seen the inside of a house in my old neighbourhood that had been used as a marijuana grow op, and anyone who associated with the type of people who caused a quarter million dollars in mould remediation were not worthy of sympathy. These were junkie scumbag dealers.

It didn’t work, of course, but in all other respects it was still an excellent plan.

We staked out the convenience store parking lot from a park across the street. It was supposed to rain, but it didn’t, which was good, because I would have felt strange if I’d tried to jack a car while holding an unreliable folding umbrella. One that would probably open unexpectedly and poke one of us in the eye during the getaway.

“Where are they?” Max asked. Although it was already 3:30 in the morning, the usual onslaught of cars had not materialized.

“They’ll be here,” I said, trying to maintain my confidence. By this time, there should have been ten or fifteen cars by now, but we hadn’t seen a single one. The only person who had even set foot in the place was a skinny guy on a bicycle that he left propped against the wall next to the door. In terms of our required speed and load-bearing capacity, a bike was not going to cut it.

Had they changed their delivery night? Had they been busted? Had the shipment failed to arrive? Was I thinking about the wrong store? Had I just imagined the whole thing? No matter what it was, I was starting to get pretty desperate by the time the camper van pulled in.

Max and I hunched down behind a tree as a middle-aged-looking man got out of the driver’s side, coughed so loudly that we were both surprised to not see any lung tissue come flying out, spat on the sidewalk, then lurched into the store like he was carrying an invisible air conditioner on his back.

He had left the engine running.

Max and I nodded to each other. It was go time.

So what the hell was I doing? I still wonder about that. I was a typical middle-class suburban kid from a nice family. Sure, my father sometimes experienced some PTSD-related flashbacks and would show up three days later, buck naked and in line at the bank where he would always apologize profusely for forgetting his ID and my mother was slowly going crazy trying to pretend that this wasn’t a problem, but it wasn’t like family life was a Broadway play. Bottles didn’t get smashed. We didn’t have screaming arguments that ended with tearful explanations to law enforcement officials. School was okay. I was good at English and history, but sucked at math. My brain just doesn’t seem to have the calculator function installed. If I needed to add even two relatively simple numbers together – like seven and eight – I couldn’t just automatically do it and come up with the correct answer. I would add seven and ten and then subtract two. More complicated things, like the concept of
per second per second
, would leave me scratching my head for days. And, as soon as I thought I had it figured out, I would relax for a moment and the explanation would run out the back door of comprehension like a stray dog.

So why was I now running across a darkened parking lot at three in the morning about to commit a felony?

When you’re a kid, you have so little control over what happens to you that you’re not even aware of it. You just breathe it in every day. You get up when you’re supposed to. You eat what you’re told to eat. Learn what you’re told to learn. As far as I could see, it was a situation that didn’t improve a whole hell of a lot when you became an adult. In fact, an argument could be made that it got even worse. Most of the adults I knew did not appear to be doing the kind of work they wanted. Or living where they wanted. Or even living with the people with whom they genuinely wanted to spend their time.

Max was the first person I had ever met who suggested that there might be some choice in the matter. If control wasn’t ours, then we were going to take it back. If there was a man out there calling the shots (Max never referred to this mysterious string-pulling figure as “the man”, but he might as well have), then he wasn’t going to be doing it for us anymore. The man’s days were numbered. We were coming for him. We just needed to arrange transportation.

We hit the first snag as soon as I pulled open the driver’s side door and jumped up into the seat.

“It’s a fucking standard!” I yelled, looking at the stumpy black gearshift sticking up from the matted floor immediately to my right. The van smelled strongly of cigarettes and wet dog. I took a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure there was no attack beast loose in the back about to lunge for my throat, but it was too dark to see.

I wanted to abandon the whole operation right there. I had never actually driven a vehicle before, but since I was, at that time, the (marginally) taller of the two of us, I had been assigned that duty during the planning and pre-operations phase. I grabbed for the door handle, but Max was remarkably calm.

“Relax!” he commanded. “Just push down the pedal on the far left. That’s the clutch. I’ll handle the gears.”

I took my hand off the door and did as instructed. The pedal provided little resistance and in my excitement, I pounded it to the floor with a thud. Max manoeuvred the gear shift into place. It sounded like a large and rusty clockwork.

“Okay, let your foot off the clutch and give it a lot of gas or it’ll stall,” Max said.

I lifted my foot off the pedal on the far left and stomped on the one on the far right. The engine grumbled, but we weren’t going anywhere.

“Parking brake!” Max said, grabbing the shorter lever next to the gear shift and disengaging it with a click. The engine noise dropped to a low rumble. “Give it more gas!”

My foot was already as far down on the accelerator as it would go. After a moment, the pitch began to rise and the camper van started creeping forward instead of backward. There was a bump as the front wheels hit the sidewalk in front of the store and climbed over the edge, pulling the vehicle up like a sea monster climbing out of a swimming pool.

I looked at the gear shift. Max had pulled it over and down, but he hadn’t pulled it far enough. Instead of reverse, we were in fourth, and now that the sidewalk was out of the way, the van was getting ready for highway speed.

I let out a yell and tried to stomp on the brake, but I missed and hit the clutch again instead. The van had enough momentum to drive forward over the sidewalk and straight through the front window of the store, shattering the glass and sending a large display of energy drinks rolling across the floor.

The owner of the van was standing at the counter holding a knife while the clerk was in the process of emptying the contents of the register into a large but uncooperative plastic bag. The van owner was younger than I thought. He had a bald head, heavy five o’clock shadow and a T-shirt with the words “No, Fuck YOU” printed on the front. The sight of his vehicle crashing through the front window was apparently too much for him to process, as he just stood there for a moment with his jaw hanging open.

“Hey!” he shouted as comprehension dawned. “That’s my fuckin’ van!”

Turning momentarily away from the clerk and the register, he took a step toward us and tripped over a loose can of Roid Rage, which caused him to fall sideways into the lottery machine. Forgetting the clutch, I grabbed the gear shift with both hands and pushed it into reverse, smashing down on the accelerator at the same time. The van lurched a couple of times and then rocketed back out into the parking lot, where our rearward progress was sharply terminated by a telephone pole.

I was shaking my head to get the two steering wheels I was looking at to resorb back into one when I heard a voice from the back seat.

“Hell’s goin’ on, Maynard? You get them smokes?”

A woman with oily yellow hair and horrific green teeth stuck her head between us. She looked at me first and then Max. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had some kind of band aid stuck to her chin. She seemed to have no awareness that we had just crashed the van into a pole.

“Where’s Maynard?”

My vision came back into focus and I saw Maynard pulling on the front door of the convenience store. Our crash through the front window had bent the frame, however, and it looked like the door was stuck. Realizing that the door was not going to open, he climbed over the ice cream freezer and started making his way through the hole we had made.

“Abort abort abort!” I shouted, grabbing the handle and pushing open the driver’s side door. Operation Rolling Thunder had, I decided, reached the point of no return. The van was probably damaged beyond repair and had an unpleasant-smelling blonde woman in the back seat, both of which were definite cons in terms of assessing it from a mission effectiveness standpoint.

I hit the ground and ran blindly down the street with Max on my heels. I could tell he was yelling something, but my head was so full of white noise that I didn’t know if he was trying to get me to go back and complete the mission or if Maynard was right behind us and he was imploring us to run faster.

We only made it about half a block before the police cruiser caught up and arrested us. Max told them that we had seen what looked like a robbery in progress and, since we didn’t have a cell phone on us at the time, had done the next logical thing, which was to drive a van through the front of the store.

It turned out that Maynard had sliced open his radial artery trying to climb through the window and was taken to the hospital, where they determined that he had lost three pints of blood. He also had 13 outstanding warrants ranging from grand theft (yes, the vehicle we were trying to steal was already, in fact, stolen) to failure to pay child support.

I don’t think they believed our story about using the van to stop the robbery, but the clerk and security camera footage didn’t contradict it. They did consider charging us with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle and destruction of private property, but that was quietly dropped after the news got a hold of it. The resulting story portrayed us as a couple of brave, albeit slightly inept, young civic heroes. Why were we in front of a convenience store at three in the morning? We were bored kids. There wasn’t a hell of a lot else to do in our town.