I Have a Bad Feeling About This (13 page)

“It's just me,” Henry insisted.

Ethan snickered. “Then why did five of the cots have people's bags on them?”

It was, Henry had to admit, a superb question. “They're on a field trip.”

“To where?”

“An indoor shooting range.”

“
Bzzzz
! Sorry, Henry. That doesn't match what your uncle Max told me. He said camp was out. I think both of you were trying to mislead me.”

“What I meant was—”

The man held up his palm. “Don't talk. Tell me…have you ever heard of somebody named Mr. Grand?”

“No.”

“Well, you wouldn't have, since I assume you're not familiar with the players in the criminal underworld. But Mr. Grand is me. If I didn't want to preserve your youthful innocence for a few more seconds, I could tell you some of the things I've done. For simplicity's sake, let's just say that I don't mind getting my hands messy. To be more descriptive would be impolite.”

Ethan snickered again. Mr. Grand glared at him and then continued. “What I'd like you to take from this conversation, Henry, is the observation that I am a very bad person who has done a great many bad things. Our whole problem is that you've seen me do one of those bad things, which is information we can't let you give to the police, and yet I've just told you my real name. How does that make you feel, Henry?”

Henry's stomach lurched and his last meal, which until now had done a surprisingly good job of remaining inside his body, ceased being a victim of the digestive process and shot back up into his throat. He slammed his hand over his mouth and instinctively bolted for the bathroom, even though there was no bathroom in this building.

Ethan howled with laughter.

Henry's vision blurred and he realized that it was blind luck that kept him from slipping on the blood, or worse, tripping over Max's dead body. He stumbled forward, desperately trying to keep from spewing all over the place. He wasn't sure how that would make his situation worse, but he wanted to avoid the humiliation if at all possible.

Then a very clear thought:
Work
with
this!
They hadn't shot him and yet he was up and running around when he wasn't supposed to be. If they spent a few more seconds thinking he was a laughable buffoon, he could get into Max's office and crash through the window!

He bolted for Max's office, ran inside, slammed the door behind him, and locked it.

It had worked! It had actually worked! He was just like an action hero!

Then he finally threw up, which made him feel less like an action hero.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and quickly glanced around the tiny office. The first detail that he noticed—and it was an important one—was that there was not a window. Somebody on the other side began to violently pound on the door. It was probably not the cavalry. Since the building itself seemed to be on the verge of falling apart, Henry didn't think the door was going to provide much protection against large men with guns.

Henry frantically looked around for something that could help him, such as the entrance to a bomb shelter. You'd think that a guy as paranoid as Max would at least have a panic room, but nope, it seemed like a regular office.

Where were the machine guns displayed on the wall? Where was the pile of emergency dynamite? Where was the ceremonial samurai sword? Where was the tank? This was all just papers and stuff.

He opened one of the desk drawers. Inside were three bottles of whiskey but no weapons. If they weren't in here, then the big black bag of weapons must be stored in the closet next to the kitchen, which didn't do Henry a whole lot of good right now.

The pounding on the door turned into a kicking and the door shook on its rusty hinges. That thing was going to burst open any moment now, and in the battle of Frightened Teenaged Kid with a Whiskey Bottle v. Two or Three Big Men with Firearms, Henry thought that he had a good chance of losing.

The only thing that even looked like a weapon was a joke grenade on the corner of the desk. A tag with the number three was attached to the pin, and a sign read,
Please
Take
a
Number.
Henry thought his dad had the same gag in his office.

Henry knew that Max, may he rest in peace, would have wanted him to turn a phony grenade to his advantage.

He grabbed the grenade off the desk and yanked off the three just as the door flew open, coming half off its hinges. Henry suddenly had two guns pointed at him by two extremely angry looking men, but he raised the hand with the grenade and tried not to panic.

“Get out of my way!” he shouted. He felt that harsh profanity would be appropriate here but worried that he might not be able to pull off the necessary attitude, so he left it out. “Get out of my way or I'll blow us all to bits!” Without even waiting to see if his bluff was going to work, Henry strode for the doorway, praying that they would step out of his way.

They did. Mr. Grand and Ethan didn't give him a lot of clearance, but Henry was able to push past them, trying to hold the grenade like he meant it.

“Don't mess with me!” he warned them, moving toward the main door to the building. “I'll blow us all up! I'll do it!”

Ethan cackled with laughter. That was not a good sign.

“You don't even know how a fragmentation grenade works!” he said. “You don't blow people up with it. Don't they teach you anything at this camp? Man, if I paid to come here, I'd demand my money back.”

Henry tossed the grenade at him.

Ethan's smile disappeared like…well, like somebody had tossed a grenade at him. His gun fell out of his hand as he scrambled back out of the way. For part of a fraction of a split second, Henry thought about going for the gun, but he'd never be able to grab it before Ethan did, so instead, he rushed for the exit.

He made it.

He sprinted for the woods.

Made it there too.

A gunshot rang out, and though he didn't feel a bullet whoosh past his ear, he thought it came pretty close. He kept running, pumping his legs as fast as he possibly could.

Another gunshot. A leaf popped off a tree in front of him, but that might have been a coincidence.

Don't trip, don't trip, don't trip, don't trip—

Don't hit a branch, don't hit a branch, don't hit a branch—

Don't die of a heart attack, don't die of a heart attack, don't die of a heart attack—

A third gunshot, but this one sounded a bit farther away. Maybe the shooter wasn't actually chasing him. You couldn't shoot very well when you were running.

If Henry didn't trip, hit a branch, or die of a heart attack, he might actually be okay! The trees were definitely too thick now for somebody to get a good shot. In the face of mortal danger, his running abilities were way better than he ever imagined possible.

A true action star would turn around and shout something clever, but Henry felt it was best to skip that step. He kept running.

No more gunshots.

He wondered how mad they were about the fake grenade. Probably
very
.

He wanted to quickly glance over his shoulder to see if anybody was chasing after him, but he didn't want to give them an unfair advantage by falling and breaking his legs, so he just kept running and running and running.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been running before, completely exhausted, he had to stop. Maybe as long as ten minutes but probably something lamer like five. He stopped, braced himself against a tree, and tried to catch his breath.

Henry looked back. There was no evidence that anybody was pursuing him.

He was safe. He'd actually gotten out of that situation without Batman breaking through a window and rescuing him. If Max really did have hidden cameras set up, that would be the most awesome thing imaginable.

Then Henry felt guilty for thinking about the awesomeness of his accomplishment when Max was dead. Max didn't deserve to be shot in the chest. He was strict and insane but well meaning, and given the opportunity, Henry might even try to avenge his death. Not one of those deals where you spend your entire life searching for the target of your revenge at the total expense of anything resembling a social life, but if convenient vengeance ever presented itself, he'd definitely take it.

At least these ridiculous vengeance thoughts were keeping him from focusing on how frightened he still was.

Well, no, he was still focusing on that pretty well.

They could still be coming after him.

He thought that he could probably find the dirt road that had taken him to camp in the first place, but it had been fifteen miles long. Fifteen miles before he could make it to a road that might contain actual traffic to flag down for help.

A much better option would be to find the music camp. Except that he could wander around forever looking for it. Not literally forever. They'd eventually find his shriveled, dehydrated body lying on the ground somewhere. And then they'd say, “Oh, look, the music camp was just past that tree. How ironic.”

So getting help was going to be a nightmare. But really, that wasn't his top priority right now. He had to warn the others. He couldn't let them go back to the building.

Somebody moved maybe ten feet away.

Henry's stomach lurched. How had they gotten so close?

More movement. Somebody running from the cover of a large tree to the cover of another large tree.

“Who's there?” Henry demanded. No way could Ethan or Mr. Grand have followed him that closely without him hearing them. Had he been so unfortunate as to run in the same direction that the third guy had been searching?

Erik stepped out from behind the tree, pointing his paint gun at Henry. The paint gun looked significantly less scary now that he'd encountered the real thing. Henry breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God.”

Erik shot him in the chest. Relieved or not, it still stung like crazy.

Erik shot him three more times as he walked over to him. Henry tried to block one of the hits with his palm, which hurt much worse than just taking the shot to the chest.

“Erik, listen to me,” said Henry, wiping his orange palm off on his shirt.

“No, you're cheating.”

“No, no, it's not like that.”

Erik grabbed Henry by the back of the neck and pushed him forward.

“Erik, listen. Max is dead!”

“Uh-huh. Right.”

“He's dead! Didn't you hear the shots?”

“Yeah.”

“That was Max being shot to death! I saw his body!”

“Stop being such a loser.”

“I'm serious! These three men showed up at camp and they murdered Max!”

“You just don't want him to know you got out first.” Erik continued to push Henry forward. Wow. The guy was even stronger than Henry had expected. Under different circumstances, Henry would have been impressed and perhaps even complimentary.

“I'm not lying! I wouldn't lie about that! Can't you hear me spazzing out? Would I spaz out like this if I wasn't telling the truth?”

“Shut up.”

“You're going to get us killed!”

“You're already dead. I thought you were cool, but you're a cheating weasel. Max is gonna throw a fit when he finds out.”

“Corpses don't throw fits!”

“Just let it drop,” said Erik. “I'm taking you back to camp, so you'd better deal with it.”

Randy and Stu walked through the woods together. They'd both run in the same direction after Erik got to the box first, and since neither of them had acquired paint weapons yet, they figured they might as well have somebody to talk to while they searched.

“Did you hear that?” Randy asked.

“You mean that really loud gunshot that anybody would have heard?”

“Yeah, that.” Randy was very good at ignoring sarcasm. A couple more shots followed. “What was that?”

“A gun maybe?”

“I mean, do you think Max lost his mind and started shooting up the place?”

“Maybe they came from the music camp.”

“Why would there be gunshots coming from the music camp?”

“That stuff is competitive. You don't know what it's like. A piccolo player misses out on first chair and things get ugly.”

“That's not it. It came from our place.”

“I guess you're a human GPS.”

“Do you really not know how to directionalize sound?” Randy asked. “It obviously came from our place. And being a human GPS would not mean that you could tell where sounds came from.”

“Well, ‘directionalize' isn't a word.”

“Yes, it is.”

“If it is a word, it would mean to be able to make sound go in a certain direction, not to tell which direction sound came from. So it's either a fake word or you're using it wrong.”

“Maybe we should walk separately,” Randy suggested.

“That's a good idea,” said Stu.

They continued to walk together. Randy noticed a small box resting next to a tree and tried to be casual about it. “I'm just going to stop and let you go on ahead.”

Stu regarded him with great suspicion. “Why?”

“Because we just established that we're annoying each other.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothing.”

“So let's walk together for another few minutes.”

“I have to tie my shoe.”

“I'll wait. I needed to tie my own shoe anyway.”

They both bent down and pretended to tie their shoes.

“We're not doing each other any good hanging out together,” said Randy. “You go that way. I'll go this way and we'll meet up again when we're ready to kill each other.”

“You see a care package, don't you?”

“Nope.”

“Where is it?” Stu began turning his head in all directions, including a couple of directions that seemed like a head shouldn't swivel without the assistance of a demonic possession.

“I didn't see one.”

“You're full of beans.”

“Beans?”

“Yeah.”

“I've never heard that expression.”

“Everybody uses it. You need to get with the times.”

“I'll say it every day if you just leave me alone.”

“I'd have no way to verify that you said it.”

“Look, Stu, why don't you just—” Randy finished his sentence with an expression that he
knew
was in heavy rotation.

“That's classy.”

“The Survival Games aren't about being classy.”

Stu's eyes widened—again, in a manner that seemed enhanced by spirits of darkness—and he pointed. “That's what you saw! You liar!”

Stu ran for the package.

Randy would have tried to stop him, but he'd been looking at a different box. He ran for his own package, hoping his contained a paint grenade and that Stu's contained a paint turd. But his was about the size of a shoebox and Stu's was about the size of an Xbox box, so he worried that Stu might have the advantage.

Randy tried to lift the lid, but it was nailed shut.

He looked over and saw Stu lift his lid without any problem. How was
that
fair?

Stu reached into his box and removed what was inside. “Another box?” he exclaimed. “How is that fair?”

Randy didn't have any tools with which to pry open a wooden box lid, so he began to kick the box. He assumed that if there were a squirrel inside, he'd have heard it scurrying around in there.

Stu opened the lid to the second box. “Another box!”

Randy's box wasn't breaking. He picked it up and slammed it against a tree. The tree received a much bigger dent than the box, even though they were both wood.

“Another box!” said Stu.

Randy slammed the box against the tree a few more times, but that wasn't doing any good, so he dropped the box on the ground and began to jump on it. That worked. The wood cracked immediately, and after the third jump he was able to see what was inside—another box.

He tossed aside the pieces of the first box, picked up the second box, and swung it against the tree. This turned out to be unnecessary, since the lid hadn't been nailed shut and a long plastic knife fell to the ground.

Filled with a gleeful sense of approaching victory, Randy snatched up the knife and turned toward his opponent. Stu had finally opened the last box and held up his own identical plastic knife.

“You're not allowed to stab me in the face,” said Stu.

“I know that.”

“Just making sure. You also can't stab me in the ear.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“No head stabs at all. That's what Max said.”

“I was there. You don't need to repeat the rules.”

“Just making sure.”

The boys began to circle each other, fierce warriors about to do battle.

“I vote we test these first,” said Stu. “They're only plastic, but if the blade is stuck, one of us could get hurt.”

“That makes sense.”

“Just test it on your arm to make sure.”

Randy jabbed his arm with the blade. It retracted all the way into the handle, leaving behind an orange mark. “Mine's fine. Test yours.”

“That counts as a stab,” said Stu. “Max never said you couldn't stab yourself. You've got one injury.”

Randy felt like this was something they could argue about for the next 857 hours, so he decided to let it drop. Instead, he charged at Stu, tackling him to the ground.

He stabbed Stu in the chest.

Stu stabbed him back.

He stabbed Stu again.

Stu stabbed him back.

More gunshots rang out.

They stopped stabbing each other for a moment.

“What do you think's going on?” Randy asked.

“I'm telling you…Max is hallucinating communists.”

“Maybe we should go back and make sure everything's okay.”

“Maybe you should—” Stu stabbed Randy in the chest “—go back and tell him you're dead.”

“You suck, Stu.”

“Apparently not.”

Randy got up and brushed himself off. Great. He'd lost to Stu. At least if he'd lost to Erik, people would say, “Well, it's a shame that you lost, but Erik is pretty awesome, so if you had to lose to anybody, it might as well be the strongest and fastest of you all.” And if he'd lost to Henry, he could at least say that he'd lost to his best friend. And if he'd lost to Jackie, well, Jackie would be really happy that he'd won the fight, and Randy could have pretended that he'd let Jackie win in an effort to help with his self-esteem issues. But losing to Stu was pure suck.

“A good sport would help me up,” said Stu.

Randy wasn't feeling like a good sport, but he helped Stu up anyway. He half-expected Stu to try to yank him back to the ground so he could get in a hearty chuckle, but Stu probably realized that his twig arms weren't up to the task, so he merely said, “Thanks.”

“I hope you feel good about a dirty win,” said Randy.

“It feels better than a clean win actually,” said Stu. “I'm kind of uncomfortable with what that says about me.”

“Well, have a good game. Maybe somebody else has died already and I'm not the first one out.”

“Max hasn't announced anything over the megaphone, so you may be in luck. Of course, if he's shooting at nightmares, he'd be too distracted to keep us updated.”

“Maybe we should go back and see if anything's wrong.”

“Sure, if a whack nut is shooting randomly, that's where I want to be.”

“What if he hit somebody?”

Stu laughed. “C'mon, Randy, you're way too uptight. Nobody's hurt. Max is out there shooting blanks to rev us up. Here, I'll walk you back as my dead prisoner.”

***

Jackie sat comfortably in a tree. This comic book he'd found in a care package was fantastic.

***

“So what do we do?” Ethan asked.

“First of all,” said Mr. Grand, “we ask ourselves how that little twerp got away from us.”

Ethan shrugged. “He ran to throw up, locked himself in the office, and then tossed a fake grenade at us.”

“Do you really believe that I was asking for a literal answer? Seriously?”

Chad walked back into the building. “What happened? I heard shots.”

“The kid got away.”

“How?”

Mr. Grand ignored the question. “Did you find any more?”

“Nah, they could be hiding anywhere in the woods, I guess, but I didn't see any.”

“There are probably four more,” said Ethan.

“Ouch. Are we calling for backup?”

“I hate the idea of getting backup for a few bratty kids…but yes, that's what we're going to do. It will take a while for a team to get out here and I'd rather pay them to waste their time than have this situation get out of control.”

Ethan and Chad nodded. Ethan hoped that Foamer would be part of the team. It amused him to no end to watch that guy go all rabid-dog on a victim.

“Get the body into the trunk and clean up the mess,” said Mr. Grand. “I'll keep an eye out on the perimeter while I make the call.”

“Shouldn't I hunt for them some more?” Chad asked.

Mr. Grand shook his head. “Waste of time. They could be anywhere.”

“All right. Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll just walk right back here.”