0062120085. (C) (13 page)

T
HE ONLY CLASS OLEK AND I HAD TOGETHER WAS FOURTH
period. Which was perfect, because then we could walk to lunch together. I wanted to sort of warn him about Dillon before we got there.

“So, I have this one friend who is kind of . . . weird,” I said. “He might say some strange things.”

“Ha, is no problem. All Americans say strange things.”

“Yeah, well, okay, but this one might say some really crazy things. He might even accuse you of being a communist or something.”

“Me, a communist?” Olek said with a grin as if that was the funniest thought a person could ever have. “Why he think this?”

“Because of your accent, likely. But don’t pay attention to any of that. He just watches too many old action movies.”

“Okay, no need worry.”

“Good. You’re a positive guy, Olek,” I said.

“I know. I have to be. Is essential,” he said.

I knew what he meant. He had to be because being torn away from your country and family and stuck someplace you don’t want to be (hey, nobody wants to go to North Dakota) sucks, despite what he said earlier. He would always brush things off as no big deal. If he didn’t, the crappiness of his situation would probably just drown him. That’s another thing I loved about him—he
never
complained. About anything. I mean, everybody complains. All the time. And it was always annoying to listen to unless you were the person doing the complaining. But Olek never did. He always saw the bright side of everything. I never knew how cool it could be to hang out with a person like that, because I’d never before met a person like that.

By the time we got to the cafeteria and went through
the lunch line, everybody was already at our usual table. There was one chair open, the one I usually sat in.

“Hey, guys, this is my new friend, Olek. He’s going to sit with us today,” I said.

A few of them nodded, but before anyone else could say anything, Dillon said, “Well, there aren’t enough chairs. The table’s full, see?”

I figured Dillon would be a jerk to Olek, but I didn’t expect it to start up the moment we got there. Dillon has always been a little tough until he gets to know you. Mostly because he’s always skeptical of people. He thinks everyone is hiding something.

I walked over to the next table, grabbed one of the five empty chairs and slid it over next to mine.

“Now there are enough,” I said.

Olek and I sat down.

“A little crowded now,” Dillon whined, but everyone ignored him.

I shot Olek an apologetic glance, but he looked completely unfazed. He smiled and waved at everybody. I introduced them all, and Olek said “hi” aloud after every single name. It was hilarious. Danielle was barely keeping it together.

“So why are you here?” Zack asked.

“To eat lunch, of course. I am so hungry, I will eat like cow,” Olek said.

Everyone laughed at this, and Olek smiled.

“You’re supposed to say
eat a cow
,” Danielle corrected him.

“Ah, yes, but why I want to eat whole cow?” Olek asked.

We all laughed again.

“No, I meant, like, why are you in America?” Zack asked. “Are you a foreign exchange student?”

“Is long story,” Olek said. “I move here with my mom to live with my aunt’s third cousin. My dad contract insane goat disease back home. Very contagious. Was safer for me to move here for school year.”

They kept peppering him with questions, which he gamely answered. Everyone seemed to be finding it pretty amusing, including Olek. Then Dillon tapped me on the shoulder.

“Where were you all day yesterday?” he asked. “I thought we were going to hang out. You never answered any of my Skypes.”

He had that suspicious gleam in his eyes that I used to find more funny back when I didn’t actually have anything to hide.

“Family emergency,” I said.

“What, did someone die?”

“Actually, yeah,” I said, hoping that would encourage him to drop it.

“Oh, oh, sorry,” he mumbled. I’d clearly succeeded. But now I felt bad.

“It’s no big deal; it was my grandma’s cousin. I only met her like twice when I was really young. Plus she was like ninety-nine years old.”

He nodded. He took a few bites of spaghetti and then finally asked what I knew he’d been dying to since we sat down.

“So what’s with the commie?”

“He’s not a communist, Dillon,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Fine, whatever, you know what I meant. Besides, it’s not like you could possibly know that. He could easily be a commie.”

“He’s just a kid, Dillon. How could a kid have a fully formed political ideology? Besides, he’s really funny and nice. Plus, he never complains about anything. Can’t I make new friends?”

“Of course you can,” Dillon said. “It’s just that . . . well, something weird is going on in this town. And it all kind of goes back to when he first showed up.”

I looked at Dillon. He was as serious as ever. And it dawned on me that this was likely not the first time Dillon had been right about something. That he might have been right about a lot of things. There
was
something weird happening in this town. And now I was right in the middle of it.

“You mean weirder than all the other stuff you claim is happening?” I said, trying to pretend like I didn’t know he was right. “Like weirder than how you think the town newspaper is really a front for an illegal exotic pet store?”

“They are! Read the classifieds. It’s all code for what they have in stock!”

I laughed and shook my head. “Look, just try giving Olek a chance. He’s really cool.”

Dillon sighed and then nodded. “Okay, I will. But he better not try to turn any of us, or I swear . . .”

“Dillon, he’s not a communist,” I said. But this time, I’d said it a little too loudly.

Everyone at the table looked at me. Then slowly their heads turned toward Olek. He paused for a few seconds and then started laughing. Everyone else joined in, even Dillon.

Relieved, I finally got a chance to start eating my spaghetti. After my first bite, I noticed something digging
into my gums. I reached up and spit it out as casually as I could when I was sure nobody was looking at me. It was another tiny piece of paper.

N
EAR THE END OF LUNCH, AT EXACTLY 12:37, I EXCUSED MYSELF
and emptied my tray into the garbage. Then I left through the south cafeteria exit. I saw Agent Chum Bucket immediately, by the doors to the kitchen itself. He was a huge dude, the sort of guy you’d never expect to be a school lunch lady. Or lunch guy. Cafeteria worker. Whatever. He was pretty tall, had arms as thick as most people’s legs, and his forearms were covered in tattoos. But he’d worked in the cafeteria as long as I’d gone to school there and he was by far everyone’s favorite lunch worker. He’d
always give us extra helpings of whatever he was serving if we asked, even though he wasn’t supposed to.

He motioned toward a door across the hall with a nod of his head. Then he looked around and unlocked it and led me inside.

Agent Chum Bucket flipped on the light and I saw that we were in a small pantry of sorts. It was a narrow, deep room with a small walkway surrounded on both sides by towering shelves filled with canned and boxed foods of all kinds. There was one shelf that contained at least seven drums of fruit cocktail as big as my mom’s car.

“Zero,” he said. “Welcome to my lair.”

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to laugh or not, because his face remained totally serious. So I just nodded.

“Agents Nineteen and Blue asked me to give you a few things that may come in handy at some point, in case you’re ever in a pinch.” He grabbed a small duffel bag sitting in between a massive box of individually wrapped saltine crackers and a ninety-gallon jar of pickles.

“Cool!” I said, unable to help myself. I mean, I was getting some secret agent gadgets. How could I not be pretty excited about that?

“Yeah,” Agent Chum Bucket said with a grin as he
opened the bag. “It is pretty cool. Okay, first up is this.”

He held up an ordinary-looking pen.

“What does that do? Is it like a bomb, or a memory wiper?” I asked.

“No, it’s going to be your best friend in personal defense in a desperate situation,” he said. He clicked the pen so that the ink part was exposed.

It looked just like an ordinary pen at first glance. But then he beckoned me to look closer. At the tip there was the tiniest, thinnest needlepoint, only about a centimeter long.

“Click again to release the toxin,” he said. “Your would-be attacker will be incapacitated in less than three seconds.”

“It kills someone in less than three seconds?” I didn’t really even like the idea of having that kind of power in a simple pen.

“No, this particular pen merely contains a tranquilizer. A very powerful one, though, so don’t experiment with it on any kids, right?”

I nodded.

He next showed me what looked like a patch of skin from someone’s palm. I thought it was gross, which made him laugh. Anyway, you stick that on your own palm and
inside was a small pocket containing a simple lock-pick needle for handcuffs. There was also another one for my other hand that contained a small razor for other types of restraints, like tape or rope.

Agent Chum Bucket spent the next few minutes showing me how to pick handcuff locks. At first it was sort of difficult, but once I got the hang of it, I realized that handcuff locks were surprisingly easy to pick.

“The bad news,” he said, “is that more and more people, including law enforcement, are no longer using standard handcuffs. So you may find the razor palm more useful. Then again, if you ever get captured, you likely won’t live long enough to use either of them.”

I swallowed and nodded. He merely shrugged.

“This next one is pretty dangerous, so be careful with it,” he said, holding up a fruit roll-up.

“Seriously?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly.

“What would I do with that, give somebody diabetes?”

“That, or you could use it to incinerate their guts,” he said.

“Eww,” I said.

Agent Chum Bucket laughed. Then he explained how
inside the wrapper was not an ordinary fruit roll-up. This fruit roll-up was really a plastic explosive that could be remote detonated with a tiny transponder also inside the package. He showed me how it worked by unrolling one of them. It smelled and looked and felt like a real fruit roll-up. But then he stuck it to a giant plastic jug of mayo. Inside the fruit roll-up wrapper, tucked in the corner, was a small square of paper, barely the size of my pinky fingernail.

“That’s the detonator?” I asked.

He grinned and nodded. “Watch closely.”

He held the paper on the tip of one finger. Then he delicately peeled one layer of it off like a sticker. Inside the peeled paper square was the smallest-looking computer chip I think I’d ever seen. He held it really close up to my face so I could see a small red light illuminate.

“Peeling the paper arms it,” he said. “Now press down and . . .”

He pressed his thumb over the chip as he said this, and suddenly there was a very muted bang just as a small spray of mayo splattered against a box next to the jug. The explosive had only left a small hole about the size of a golf ball in the jug of mayo.

“Cool,” I said.

“It’s not all that powerful by design. It’s intended to be used for doors that have electronic locks or other such situations. Not to be used to try and demolish a car or anything.” He threw the package away. “Anyway, this next one is my personal favorite,” he said, reaching back toward the table.

It was a small tube with skin-colored straps. He attached it to the underside of his wrist. Then he grabbed what looked like a miniature clip of bullets and clicked it into the tube.

“You ever see in cartoons where there are smoke bombs that some wacky character throws to the ground and then vanishes in a poof of smoke?”

I nodded.

“This takes that a step further, in a way,” he said. Then he pointed his wrist across the small storage room, and a second later I heard a faint clicking noise.

Smoke literally exploded out of whatever it was he’d just launched across the room. Only it wasn’t smoke exactly; it was more like thick fog. It had a slightly chemical odor, not like the charred smell of real smoke at all. But just the same, I couldn’t believe how much it was able to generate so quickly. In less than five seconds, the small storage room was completely filled with a thick fog. I
could barely breathe.

Agent Chum Bucket must have flipped a switch to a ceiling fan or something, because there was a whirring noise coming from above me, and a short time later the fog began to clear.

“It has a range of fifty yards, and is completely harmless to inhale. It will linger for close to thirty minutes in confined areas but less than two in open air,” Agent Chum Bucket said.

“Cool,” I said, thinking of how handy this would be for pulling off pranks.

Next he showed me a small pair of contact lenses that would apparently allow me to see in the dark, and also a small grappling hook disguised as a set of keys.

“How does it work?” I asked, holding the keys.

“Here,” he said, taking them from me.

The key ring looked pretty normal. It was just one ring with two normal-looking keys, one larger car key, and a small flashlight keychain. He flipped a switch on the bottom of the flashlight keychain, then he grabbed the car key and pointed it at the ceiling. He pressed down and held the key fob part of the car key for several seconds.

The metal key part exploded up and embedded into
the ceiling. There was a thin wire attached to the end leading back down to the key ring. He gripped the keys tightly and then pressed a button on the small flashlight, and suddenly the wire was retracting and pulling him up toward the ceiling.

He let go and dropped back to the ground after a few feet.

“How did that hold you up there?” I asked.

“The wire is three-hundred-pound strength. The key pad itself is equipped with a state-of-the-art anchor system, capable of suspending weight for several hours from most surfaces. It will latch on to almost anything, so just point and aim.”

He showed me which buttons did what and how to use it. How to unlatch it, everything.

“It’s so simple my three-year-old could use it,” he said at the end of the demonstration.

“Wow, thanks!” I said.

“No problem. Odds are, you won’t need to use any of these, but it’s best to have them just in case.” He helped me load all the gadgets into my backpack. “All right, you’d better get going. Your next class starts pretty soon, right?”