Pandora's Gun (10 page)
Authors: James van Pelt
As Mrs. Pickerel wrote historical background for
Of Mice and Men
on the white board, Peter thought about how social media messes with information security. Jenny Pearson, the one whose mom was a police officer, was dating a first-year police officer. Since Jenny was eighteen, and her cop boyfriend was twenty-three, the chat was that her mom wasn’t too happy about it, but moms almost always disapproved of their daughter’s boyfriend at some time or another. However, the young policeman, in an effort to impress his even younger girlfriend (or maybe he didn’t think the information was that important) had been updating Jenny about what he was hearing of the investigation. Jenny, who also didn’t think it was that big of a deal, mass-messaged what she learned with her friends, and since everyone else was interested too, facts and rumors spread quickly. The most persistent one was that Captain Montgomery’s investigators had found a body. Peter read the text during 5th period, trying out the “under the desk” strategy he’d learned earlier.
Also, the military had ruled out the “bad weather” theory. Chemical residue, shrapnel and other evidence pointed to explosives at the site, which would explain the noise he’d heard that night much better.
Mrs. Pickerel handed out a poem Peter already knew by Robert Burns called “To a Mouse.” She said the language was old Scottish, but if students listened they’d understand it perfectly. However, when she started with “Wee sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie” in a really terrible Scottish accent, Peter knew he would be hitting SparkNotes later to refresh his memory.
He glanced over at Christy, who studied her phone under her desk. She turned it so he could see her screen. It was the same message about Montgomery. She looked intently toward Mrs. Pickerel, who had stopped reading to regard the two of them suspiciously. All the while appearing to pay attention, Christy’s thumbs flew over her hidden phone. “Was it an accident in the park, or a war?”
“War, I bet,” he texted back. “I thought at first that they just wanted to destroy the site, but it sounded like a fire fight. The body confirms it. I’ll bet Blue-suit knows.”
His phone buzzed again. Dante was looking toward him, so Peter wasn’t surprised the message was from him: “We can’t get to the woods. Bad guys after the gun. Don’t know who to trust. Only option is to figure out the rest of the gun’s capabilities.”
Peter put his phone between his legs to think. Mrs. Pickerel said, “The poet compares himself to a mouse when he says ‘But Mousie, thou art no thy lane.’ He says that mice and men are the same. In what way are mice and men similar?”
What way, indeed? thought Peter. None of the poem made sense except the part that said, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ which Pickerel said meant that man’s best plans often don’t work out. Peter wanted to add that even not having a plan didn’t work out. It seemed now that no matter what he did with the gun he was in trouble. If he kept it, either Blue-suit, the FBI (or the fake FBI) or the military (or the fake military), or Dante would try to take it. But he couldn’t give it away, either. The handful of capabilities they’d discovered so far rendered the device invaluable, and in the wrong hands, who could tell what might happen?
Not having a plan sucked too.
Dante stopped him in the hall on the way to 6th period. Kids passed all around them. He leaned in so he wouldn’t have to speak too loud. “You’re Bilbo Baggins with the ring of power,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and the reason you’re scared of the gun isn’t that you think it does bad stuff, but that you think we might take it from you. You’re just like Bilbo when Sam offered to carry the ring. You freak out.”
Peter took a step back. “You mean Frodo.”
“What?”
“Sam never offered to carry the ring for Bilbo. You mean Frodo.”
Dante frowned. “Bilbo, Frodo, hobo, who cares. The point is that having that gun is messing you up. Before you know it, you’ll be babbling about ‘My precious’ and eating raw fish from the river.”
“That’s Gollum. Frodo never ate raw fish. Besides, it’s a terrible analogy. The gun doesn’t take over your mind. We can be rational about it, and rationality says that we need to keep it hidden until we can give it to the people who’d know best what to do with it. The problem is that Blue-suit is out there, and from what happened in the woods the other night, he’s willing to fight for it. I think as soon as he knows who has it, they’ll be in awful trouble, whether it’s the army or the police. He’ll tear through them without slowing. All we have going for us is he doesn’t know who has it. He might not even be sure that it’s a high school kid. He’s guessing because the park is near the high school, and he found our tracks in the mud. He might be desperate.”
Peter thought about the FBI guy in the gym. If that was Blue-suit, then he truly was taking a risk. The army was only a field away, and whoever the fake army guys were who came in the helicopters in the morning, they probably hadn’t gone away either. What a colossal con job to convince a high school administration to bring every person in the school into his presence! The more Peter thought about it, the more audacious and nervy the move seemed.
Unless, of course, that had been an actual FBI agent this morning.
Christy passed them and waved.
“I’ll think about it Dante. Honest. Maybe you’re right, but remember, Frodo couldn’t share the burden. Everyone knew the ring would destroy them too. Galdalf, Galadriel, Tom Bombadil. None of them took it. You wouldn’t want to become Boromir, would you?”
He caught Christy outside of her next class. Even with makeup, he could tell there were bags under her eyes. She probably didn’t sleep any more last night than he did.
“Are you okay with, you know, everything?” he asked.
Christy met his gaze. She truly had stunning eyes, a brown so light that they were closer to gold. Peter realized he hadn’t looked at them this way before, or maybe she’d never really looked into his eyes before.
“You’re sweet to ask. When I woke this morning, I tried to remember what we saw yesterday. Already, the memory is fading some. I’m scared, still. God, I’m scared, but I think I’ll get over it. My psychology class said that teens are resilient. The word stuck with me, ‘resilient.’ It means we can get over stuff. That’s why kids who are abused, or whose parents die, or who live through a war, can come out on the other side okay.”
“Not all of them are okay,” said Peter. He had taken the same psychology class. They learned about post traumatic stress disorder, too, and how some people needed years of therapy to cope with childhood disasters. Not
all
teens were resilient.
“I’m not all teens,” said Christy. She touched Peter’s shoulder, an oddly intimate gesture for the hallway. Her fingers were warm. “I have seen hell, or at least
a
hell, and I’ll survive. So will you. We need to keep telling ourselves that.”
The tardy bell rang. Peter hadn’t noticed that the halls had emptied.
Christy said, “We have a mission, Peter, to be heroes. We need to make sure no one gets that gun who might open the hole again between that world and ours. If we accomplish nothing else in our lives, we must accomplish that.”
Peter and Dante played at being heroes from the beginning. In the sandbox when he was eight, Peter built a circular wall around his toy soldiers. He smoothed it with his hands and put grooves in the top so it would look like a castle. When he was done, Dante’s men stormed the structure. “We must take the fort,” said Dante. They stood outside the sandbox and tossed pebbles like mortars: Peter, trying to knock down all of Dante’s men, and Dante trying to breach the wall before his men were down.
The best game they played on the Highline canal, and it lasted several summers. They’d save their allowance to buy model battleships. Dante’s porch became a makeshift boat yard. The boys would glue for hours, but they modified the ships to hold firecrackers. Dante’s dad kept a shoebox full of Ladyfingers in his closet that he always bought cheaply after the Fourth of July. He never missed the few the boys pilfered.
The point was to put the firecrackers in vulnerable spots in the ship, but not too vulnerable. If the first firecracker destroyed the model, then the fun was over too soon. When they started, they just liked to destroy the ships. They’d light the long fuse, set the boat into the current, and then watch it go down the canal. The fuse smoked enough that the boat looked as if it was under steam, or on fire (it didn’t matter). Then the first firecracker would blow. Sometimes the force threw plastic parts into the air, and the battleship continued until the next firecracker blew. The ship listed, more pieces gone. A third explosion deepened the list, and then the boat’s bottom blew out, sending the vessel down, stern first. All that remained was a smoky haze on the surface.
But the game became better when they made it a battle. Each boy assembled his ship and placed the firecrackers. By this time, Peter had learned more about fuse length and the best spots to put the firecrackers. He’d learned where to place smoke bombs for better pyrotechnics, and how a well situated pop bottle rocket looked like guns firing (and moved the ship impressively). Dante, too, had become a plastic model demolitions expert. Colored smoke, sparklers, Roman candles. The boats bristled with explosives.
Now the point was to create a war. The two ships sailed into the current, side by side. Each explosion they pretended was a result of a shell from the other ship. The best battles went on for several exchanges, each ship taking more and more damage, but not going down. The ship that was on the surface last won, but only if the remaining fire crackers sunk it too. Both boys had become expert enough to damage their ships but not sink them immediately. A boat that didn’t sink wasn’t heroic, though. Not sinking meant that you cheated.
The last time they’d played the game, they’d bought big models. Peter went with the Yamoto, a Japanese destroyer, while Dante assembled the Bismarck, a German battleship. The boats were almost two-feet long and had taken a summer of delivering papers to pay for.
“The Japanese and Germans were allies during the war,” Peter said as they bought the models.
“Alternate history. In our world, they’re enemies. England and the U.S. side with the Germans while China and Russia ally themselves with Japan.”
Peter sat on the canal bank, his boat in his lap, admiring the detail in the guns and superstructure. The Yamoto could launch planes, which were glued to its deck. Unlike the other models, Peter had painted some of this one. The longer he worked on it, the more he wanted it to look real.
Dante’s version of the Bismarck was equally impressive. He’d done a meticulous job with the decals. It almost seemed a pity to blow them up.
The sun pressed down around them warmly, while the canal whispered at their feet.
“I wish we could film this,” said Peter.
“It will be epic.” Dante sighed contentedly. School started in a week, but for today, it was still summer. Today they could be admirals. “Let the battle begin,” he said.
Peter set the boat into the water gently. They’d lost more than one ship to a careless launch that soaked the firecrackers and ruined the game. “Fire in the hole,” he said as he lit the fuse, before sending the boat toward the middle.
Both ships looked so brave, side by side in the canal, heading away from them. The boys walked along side on the road that paralleled the water course.
A sharp crack knocked a hole in the Yamato’s deck, sending an airplane spinning away. Flames spurted from the hole.
“Wow!” laughed Dante. “How’d you do that?”
“A little bit of lighter fluid,” Peter said breathlessly. He thought about where the other explosions would take place. It was a delicate art to create damage but not sink the ship, and he never knew if the force of a firecracker wouldn’t rupture the hull.
The first explosion on the Bismarck ripped away a front gun emplacement, followed by a second near the bow.
“Good shot!” shouted Dante, as if the damage really had been the result of the Yamoto’s actions.
More of the Yamoto flew away. Smoke surrounded both vessels as the currents pushed the Bismarck around, almost as if it was lining up a broadside.
Fire had spread to the highest parts of the Yamoto’s superstructure, melting the plastic that dripped into the canal. It leaned a little to the side, taking on water from somewhere. Another explosion shook it. Peter imagined his crew manning the guns, fighting for their country and lives, but all of them courageous in the face of the enemy action. There could be no surrender.
The Bismarck vaporized with a huge bang, louder than any firecracker Peter had heard before. Plastic whizzed around him. Something sharp stung his cheek. He was sitting on the road, not even aware that he’d fallen.
Both boats were gone. Only the smoke remained. It eddied away while Peter’s ears rang as if the explosion still was going on.
“What was that?” he yelled, his voice sounding small against the ringing.
Dante stared at the water, his jaw dropped. “That was the best, ever,” he said.
Peter barely heard him.
“What was that? What happened?”
“Cherry bomb,” said Dante. “My step-dad had a secret stash, and now I do too. He’s had them since he was a kid. I don’t think anyone makes them anymore. Purely illegal. Of course I had to take some. You never know when a cherry bomb will come in handy.”
All that Peter knew about cherry bombs was that he’d heard you could light one, flush it, and it would blow up a toilet. “You destroyed your own ship. You lost!” said Peter. “Why would you do that?”
“Both boats were going down,” Dante said. His grinned like he’d never stop grinning. “That was awesome. If you’re going to sink no matter what, you ought to do it with a bang.”
