The Flinkwater Factor (19 page)

50

Fast Food

You remember Johnston George, aka J.G.? Billy's psychotic older brother? Who later became the most popular kid at Flinkwater High? Yes?

Well, it was J.G. who opened that door.

We all just stood there, stunned.

“Who are you?” Gilly asked after a few seconds.

“That's my brother,” Billy said. “Approach with extreme caution.”

“We'd better get going,” J.G. said. “I don't know how long it'll be before those guys are done.”

“Done what?” I asked. “Where did they go?”

“I put a little Ultra-Lax in their lunch burri­tos,” J.G. said.

“They took off in quite a rush,” my mother observed. “How much laxative did you use?”

“I guess about twelve capsules.”

“
Twelve
laxative pills for
three
guards?”

“No. Twelve for each burrito.”

“Oh.”

“We gotta go,” J.G. said, heading out the door. “Come on!”

Considering that the DHS has more than three million employees and is one of the most powerful institutions in the government, their security was rather
lax
. Pun intended. J.G. led us around the back of the holding facility to a twelve-foot-tall high-voltage chain-link fence topped with an endless loop of deadly-looking razor wire.

“How are we supposed to get through
that
?” I asked.

J.G. laughed and pointed at a weathered sheet of plywood lying on the ground next to the fence. He dragged the plywood aside to reveal a hole about four feet deep. The hole led to a tunnel under the fence. I noticed another sheet of plywood on the other side. Mavis Dunhill's stolen wheelbarrow was parked nearby.

“You dug this just to get us out?” I said, impressed.

“Nah, I've been going in and out of here a lot doing my food runs. Those DHS guys, they tip real good.”

“Why don't you just bring the food in through the gate?”

J.G. looked at me as if I were the psychotic one.

“What fun would that be? Besides, this is faster, and I don't have to answer a bunch of questions.” He climbed into the tunnel, followed by Billy and Gilly. “Last person through has to pull the board back over the hole,” he called back.

My mother was looking into the hole askance. “I am not crawling through the dirt,” she said.

“Well
I
am,” I said, and jumped into the hole after Gilly. As I made my way under the fence I heard my father say, “Honey, if you want a shot at Agent Ffelps, you're going to have to get dirty.”

Moments later we had all made it to a small wooded area outside the compound. My mother was brushing frantically at the soiled and shredded knees of her tights with one hand and holding her high-heeled shoes in the other.

51

Set to Kill

Getting out of the compound was easy compared to figuring out what to do next. Mom wanted to go straight to Agent Ffelps and give him a piece of her mind, but of course that would just have gotten her thrown back in a cage. Dad wanted to send me and Billy to Florida to stay with Uncle Ashton, but there was no way we'd make it through airport security. Gilly wanted to break into the ACPOD research center where he hoped to discover the details of Josh Stevens's nefarious plan.

As for J.G., he wanted to go home and take Billy with him. To no one's surprise, J.G. hadn't sprung us out of the goodness of his shriveled black heart. He had ulterior motives.

“I can't work my tablet,” J.G. said. “Something's screwy with it. I need Billy to fix it.”

“You broke us out of jail so that Billy could
help you with a computer problem?” my mother said, incredulous.

J.G. shrugged. “He knows how to fix stuff.”

“Did you try turning it on?” Billy said.

J.G. thought for a moment. “Yeah, I did. A bunch of times.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, it sort of belched.”

Billy nodded as if belching tablets were perfectly common. None of
my
tabs, I want you to know, have ever belched.

“What did you do to it?” Billy asked, giving his brother a suspicious look.

“Nothing much  . . . well  . . . I was shooting at a fly this morning, and it landed on my tablet.”

“Shooting at a fly? With what?”

J.G. hesitated, then said, “A Projac.”

“You have
another
Projac?”

“I sort of borrowed it from Dad. After the first Projac got swiped from the lab, he brought a second prototype home for safekeeping, and  . . .” J.G. grinned and shrugged. “There was this fly.”

“Where is this Projac now?” I asked.

J.G. reached under his shirt and came out with the Projac. I grabbed it.

“Hey!”

I pointed the Projac at his face. That shut him up fast. He started backing away.

“Ginger, honey,” my father said in a shaky voice as he reached for the weapon. He looked scared. I handed him the Projac. He made an adjustment to a small slide control on the handle. “This is a Military Model PJ-297,” he said. “It was set to kill.”

J.G., white-faced, had put about ten yards between us. He turned and ran.

“I wasn't going to shoot him,” I said in a small voice. I was lying. I had almost pulled the trigger.

My father put the Projac in his pocket. “We can't go to our house—it's the first place they'll look. And we can't go to J.G. and Billy's home. Gilly's right. Our only hope is to break into the ACPOD labs and try to find some evidence that will clear us. The question is, how do we get in without being caught?”

“I know a way,” I said.

The ACPOD campus was only a quarter of a mile away, but it felt like longer—especially to my mom, who was attempting to walk through the woods in her high heels. After falling down a couple of times, she hung her heels on a tree branch and continued in her stockinged feet, complaining all the way. The five of us eventually reached the edge of the trees just behind Area 51, the animal research building.

“Myke Duchakis told me he hacked the lock on the south door,” I said. “We should be able to walk right in.”

“What about the cameras and motion sensors?” my dad asked.

“Myke said they've been disabled. At least they were a week ago.”

“If I ever get my job back I'm going to beef up security.” He looked at Gilly. “You ready?”

Gilly nodded, and the two of them left the cover of the trees and headed for the door. I started to follow, but Dad turned back and said, “Ginger, you wait here with Billy and your mom.”

A few seconds after my dad and Gilly entered the building, Billy said, “Forget that! I'm going in.” He ran toward the door and disappeared inside.

“I'm going in too,” I said. I looked at my mother.

“Well, I'm certainly not standing around out here by myself,” she said with a grim set to her jaw.

52

Area 51

Inside we found the saddest collection of animals you could imagine. Monkeys, dogs, rats, and even a raccoon, each confined to their own cage, many of them with odd-looking devices attached to their bodies. We caught up with Gilly, my dad, and Billy in the dog section. They were standing in front of a standard poodle who was wearing a collar similar to the one Redge had been wearing.

My dad saw us coming and said, “Of course, I never
really
thought you would follow my instructions.”

I read the sign on the poodle's cage. “‘Subject TX9301,'” I read. “That's a terrible name,” I said to the morose-looking poodle.

The poodle yipped piteously.

“My name is Kill Bark Kill,”
said the poodle's collar.

“Much better,” I said. “I'd like to put that collar on Agent Ffelps and see how
he
likes it.”

“I like the way you think,” said Gilly. He looked from me to Billy and raised one eyebrow. Billy laughed, then reached though the bars of the ­poodle's cage, removed the collar, and gently detached the leads cemented to the dog's partially shaven skull. He put the collar in his pocket and continued down the row of animals. Billy, Gilly, and my dad led the way, discussing something in low voices.

“How come there's nobody here?” I asked.

“It's Sunday,” my mom said. “Most of our employees take the day off.”

We proceeded through the building until we reached the main entrance. A single guard was sitting slumped at his desk, snoring. My dad checked the setting on the Projac and shot him. The only difference was that the guard began snoring a bit louder.

“When I get my job back, this one's fired,” my dad said, pocketing the Projac. He lifted the unconscious guard from his chair and laid him out on the floor.

“I think he's closest to your size,” Gilly said to my dad.

Gilly took a seat at the guard's terminal and began typing rapidly as my father removed the guard's shirt and cap.

“What are we doing?” I asked Billy.

Billy grinned and said, “Baiting a trap.”

“Trap for who?”

“You'll see.”

My dad took off his shirt and donned the guard's blue uniform shirt and cap. He and Billy then dragged the guard back down the hall and locked him in one of the empty dog cages. When they returned, Gilly had finished whatever it was he'd been typing.

“He'll be here shortly,” he said.

My father took a seat at the guard station, while the rest of us retreated back down the hallway and waited. A few minutes later we heard the front door buzz, and a familiar voice.

“Well? You said you had some information for me?”

I peeked around the corner. Agent Ffelps, hands on his hips, was standing before the guard desk, looking rather impatient.

“Actually,” my father said, “I'm afraid it's you who have information for me.”

He raised the Projac, smiled, and shot Ffelps in the chest.

53

Franklin Foster Ffelps

“Please state your full name,” my father said.

Agent Ffelps pressed his lips together, but the speaker on the collar around his neck spoke:
“Franklin Foster Ffelps.”

Ffelps's eyes widened. Billy, who was sitting beside my father, grinned.

“I told you it would work,” he said. “The Collar of Truth never lies.”

The three of them were sitting in one of the observation rooms used by the animal researchers. Ffelps was tied to a chair, and not at all happy about it. Gilly, my mom, and I were in the next room, observing them through a one-way-glass window.

“And what is your relationship with Josh Stevens?” my father asked.

Ffelps gritted his teeth, his jaw muscle
bunching. But the Collar of Truth spoke.

“I do whatever he tells me.”

“And why is that? I thought you worked for the Department of Homeland Security.”

“I do!” Ffelps said.

“Stevens pays me,”
said the collar
.

“No!” said Ffelps.

“Yes!”
said the dog collar.

“Agent Ffelps, you cannot lie to me. No matter what you say, the collar will transmit your true thoughts.”

By this time Ffelps was turning bright red, his cheek was twitching, and his eyes had a teary glaze. “Take it off!” he cried.

“Who gave Stevens access to the ACPOD protocols and mainframes?”

“Please—take this blasted thing off me!”

“There's no way out of this,”
said the dog collar
. “I'm trapped!”

“I'll tell you everything!” Ffelps wailed.

The collar continued to speak:
“They know everything.
My career is over. I'll be in prison for the rest of my life. What have I done? I'm ruined. I'll never—”

My father flipped a switch on the collar. The speaker fell silent.

“It was George George,” Ffelps said.

In the next room Gilly set down the microphone
into which he had been speaking and smiled.

“Good job,” said my mother. “You could have a second career as a mind reader.”

“Just a few educated guesses about what the man was really thinking,” he said modestly.

“George George was behind the SCIC outbreak?” my father asked Ffelps.

Ffelps, utterly defeated, said, “No, that was Stevens. George just went along with it. Stevens rigged every tablet D-Monix shipped to Flinkwater with a coma-inducing infrasonic program embedded in that ridiculous Brazen Bull screen saver.”

“Not screen saver,” I whispered to myself.
“Screenie.”

“Why use the Brazen Bull?” my father asked. “And what about the subliminals Billy added to the program?”

“That was merely a convenient coincidence. Stevens used the screen saver to hide his ELF program because it was the most commonly used app in Flinkwater. The subliminal images were simply a lucky break—Stevens discovered the boy's little joke and used it as a trigger. That way if it were discovered, Billy George would be blamed. The entire SCIC crisis was a ruse to give the DHS an excuse to come in and take over the town, while giving Stevens total access to ACPOD. He planned to create a new line of cybernetically-controlled animals
here, then use the animals to replace ACPOD's robots. He thought it would be amusing to use ACPOD's own research facilities to create a line of robotized animals. He had plans to breed a line of cute little cyberbunnies.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Dustbunny two-point-oh,” Ffelps said. “A fuzzy little bunny makes for a good dust mop. Stevens is determined to win the Dustbunny/DustBot war and drive ACPOD out of business.”

“But people still won't want a houseful of rabbits,” Billy pointed out.

Ffelps shrugged. “I never said it was a
good
idea.”

“What did Stevens have on George George?” my dad asked.

Ffelps coughed out a bitter laugh and looked at Billy with an expression that was equal parts amusement and despair. “Have you ever wondered why you don't look anything like your parents?”