Pandora's Gun (16 page)

“If we get the bag,” said Peter, “we can go up the stairs to the balcony and out the back door. Once we’re clear of the cell phone jamming, I can call Wheeler, and she can have the gun. The whole thing will be behind us, you can teach me how to play the opening chord to “Hard Day’s Night” without slicing my fingers open, and I can teach you how to fake a literary essay so well that you won’t be faking. All will be well with the world.”

Christy looked at him, blonde hair falling across her eyes. “The only thing between us and total happiness is a set of stairs? Let’s do it.”

Peter started to get up, checked the door, then flopped down, pulling Christy with him. “Blue-suit!” he whispered.

Wearing his FBI jacket, Blue-suit showed a badge to the soldier guarding the entrance. They exchanged words. The soldier returned to his post. Blue-suit strode toward the prostrate students.

“Don’t let him see your face,” said Peter.

Christy rolled toward him. “Quick, kiss me.”

“Tempting. Too obvious. Just cover your head.”

The other students, though, were watching Blue-suit with interest. Some were sitting up. Blue-suit scanned the crowd. No one else hid their face.

“FBI, police and army. We can’t get any safer,” someone said sarcastically. “They should bring in the Marines.”

“We’re obvious this way too,” said Christy.

“Shh! Stay still.”

Blue-suit’s steps came closer. Peter wanted to scrunch his eyes closed, like when he was a little kid and closing your eyes meant no one could see you.

A hand grabbed him on the shoulder, turned him up, and he was face to face with Blue-suit’s tiny, dark eyes and narrow eyebrows. Peter locked stares with him, but Blue-suit showed no recognition. He let go. Christy had rolled to her side. Blue-suit looked at her too before moving on, checking each student, tapping some on the shoulder, as he had with Peter, until he’d seen every student in the cafeteria.

He picked through the pile of empty bags in the center of the room, nodded to the soldier at the door, and exited.

“How is that possible?” said Christy. “He didn’t know who we were. He was in your house! He talked to Dante and your dad. How could he not recognize us?”

Peter laughed in relief. “He
wasn’t
the one in our house, at least not the one you put to sleep. He’s that guy’s twin brother. He must not have the same information his brother had.”

They crawled to the commissary’s refrigerated display, pulled the bag from behind the milk, then snuck to the door. The students they passed were looking toward the front where the two baseball players argued with the lone soldier at the exit, who now was in charge of keeping a hundred frightened college kids from leaving.

“My dad is a taxpayer, so you work for him,” one of the boys yelled.

The door at the bottom of the stairs cut the sound to nothing when it closed behind them.

“There were two soldiers guarding the back when I came in. They might be gone now.”

At the loading dock door, Peter got on his hands and knees to check for the guards.

“What made you decide Wheeler should get the bag?” Christy knelt beside him, the bag under her elbows.

“When she met me, she didn’t send her men to find you. She didn’t threaten me to find out where you were. Instead, she bargained. She had to know you were close by. I think if she was the bad guy, she would have behaved differently.”

“I don’t see anyone,” Christy said. The loading dock appeared to be empty, and both of the building’s corners were unguarded. “Am I to understand that your plan was to trust her if she didn’t torture you? There’s a flaw in your reasoning. It has a torture scenario in it.”

Peter squirmed forward, under the gate. “I went on a hunch. I had this epiphany about adventures, and it’s that in real life you can’t always tell who the good guys and bad guys are.”

“I think we’re the good guys,” she said. They stayed in the shadow of a delivery truck that was parked in the other bay.

“
We
think we’re the good guys. Wheeler probably thinks we’re the dumb kids, and she’s the good guy; and the Blue-suits probably think that Wheeler is a part of an oppressive government who is restraining their entrepreneurial spirit, while you and I are pesky annoyances. Oh, and the Blue-suits may believe our dimension is disposable, which would be what you would think if there were an infinite number of dimensions to sort through.”

Christy looked both ways, then sprinted for the sidewalk and line of trees on the other side of the street. Peter followed, feeling horribly exposed in the open, and only slightly better as they trotted down the grass-covered hill toward classrooms and dorms.

Peter said, “We need to resolve this and get home. My dad’s probably going crazy, and your parents will be worried too.”

“I called them earlier.” They hit a sidewalk intersection, turned so they were no longer running directly away from the Student Union, and slowed to a walk. “Told them I’d be out late.”

“Do you think they’ll buy that? There were cops and fake army guys at my house not too long ago. There was an explosion at the high school and sirens all over town. They’ll at least want to know you are safe.”

“What my mom would be more concerned about is that I’m running around on a freezing September night without a coat. I wonder if the gun has a bubble-of-warmth app. That would be useful.” She held up the bag.

“Do you want to try a random app? You could fry our brain cells. You could turn living things inside out. Wheeler didn’t make it sound like any of the options include rainbows and unicorns. Let’s get inside. I can call Wheeler when we’re out of the cold.”

The dorms were locked, though, with card-swipe readers. No one answered when Peter pushed the entrance bell button, even though he could hear it ringing inside. The entire school was probably on lock-down. Every building could be inaccessible, but the Grayson Plant Studies building, an imposing, multi-story edifice, was open. They stepped into the foyer, a huge room, forty yards across and three stories tall, filled with palm trees, vines, and ferns. Water trickled and fell down rock faces on both sides of the door.

“Wow,” said Christy. “I want to go to this school when I graduate. They know how to do a major the right way. We have to find the music classrooms!”

Peter walked deeper into the room. A vine enshrouded desk with sliding glass windows was marked reception and registration. The sign above the darkened hallway to the left read bioforms a, and the one to the desk’s right was bioforms b. Display cases, many lit by purple grow lights, lined the walls. It smelled like a rain forest.

Christy said, “What’s that on your shoulder?”

Peter reached around, detached a white button off his back, but barely saw it before a familiar voice said, “That would be a tracer, young lady.” Blue-suit stood in the exit behind them, still in his FBI jacket, with a gun in his hand: an ordinary, black gun like a police officer might carry. “I couldn’t very well do anything with the army all around. Besides, you didn’t have the bag. Would you drop it, please?”

The question had no hint of a request in it.

The bag hit the floor.

“Step back.”

Peter glanced up, to the left and right. Blue-suit couldn’t get the bag. If he did, everything ended. He’d zap them—who knew with what—then rift himself anywhere he’d want to go. Peter had worked out the possibilities. If people from Wheeler’s world could jump universes, they’d be uncatchable. How hard was it to make a jump? What kind of equipment was needed? If it was small enough to be on Blue-suit, like a watch or a belt, he’d jump from here. If it took more equipment, then he’d need to go somewhere, but he’d jump just the same. Peter wondered if a shift from one world to another took calculations. Was it easy or hard?

None of that mattered now, though. He and Christy were expendable. In movies, the hero always figured out what to do at this point. He’d have a button to push, or a hidden weapon, or a backup plan that would kick in. But he and Christy were in the middle of a bare floor, thirty feet from anything. They couldn’t run. He didn’t have a secreted weapon. He couldn’t charge Blue-suit and take the gun from him.

The dark-eyed man, keeping the gun aimed, knelt at the bag. “Putting everyone to sleep at the house was elegant. We have an easy counter to that effect. The sleep trick won’t work again, but I have to admit the efficiency of it.” He opened the bag. This would be where a flash-bang exploded, stunning him, but that didn’t happen either.

Blue-suit paused, reached in, and brought out a book. It looked like the same Econ text the cashier had been reading when Peter bought the hot chocolates, what seemed like hours ago. Another book came out and another. Blue-suit dumped the bag, scattering two more books.

“That’s ingenious,” he said. “Where’s my property?”

Neither of them spoke, but Peter thought about the next step. He’d threaten to hurt one or the other until the one who knew gave him the information. Peter hoped that when Blue-suit shot him in the leg, or knocked in his teeth, that he wouldn’t immediately say that Christy had hidden the gun.

But a fifty-fifty chance said that Blue-suit would hurt Christy first. The only way to delay Blue-suit would be to lie. If he could get him to take them somewhere, if he could get him to look away long enough, he could call for help.

“I hid it,” said Peter. His voice quivered.

“Glad to hear it. We don’t need her.” Blue-suit swung the gun around to point at Christy.

“He’s lying,” said Christy, her voice as calm as answering a question in class. Before Blue-suit could react, she said, “Or I’m lying. I’ll tell you this truth, though. Only one of us knows where the contents of your bag are. You can’t kill either one without risking losing it all.”

“Also ingenious,” he said. “I don’t have to kill either of you. Here’s how it’s going to go. I’m going to break your fingers, little girl, one at a time until the two of you agree on the same story.” He pointed the gun at Peter. “Sit. If you try to get up, I’ll blow your kneecap off, and then I’ll shoot hers too for good measure.”

Peter sat. Blue-suit moved toward Christy. “You know, you two have been a terrible aggravation. I think when I’m done here, I’m going to visit as many of the nearby worlds as I can, the ones closest to this one, and kill you both in each.”

The entrance door pushed open a couple of inches. Peter caught the motion and saw the sputtering ball rolling through, towards them. Blue-suit turned at the noise.

The explosion deafened Peter, even though he’d got his hands over his ears in time. Blue-suit had lost the gun, but he wasn’t looking for it. He vanished down bioforms b hallway at a full sprint. Peter helped a stunned Christy to her feet.

Dante held the door open gesturing at them, his mouth moving, but Peter could barely hear over the ringing.

The three ran from the Grayson Plant Studies building like gazelles, in the opposite direction that Blue-suit had fled, passing dorm after classroom building after dorm, until they reached the edge of campus.

They hid beneath a foot bridge that crossed a stream dividing the school grounds from the last greenway before a bordering street. A suburban neighborhood, cars neatly parked on driveways, porch lights on, looked peaceful, inviting, and so out of touch with what Peter had been experiencing that the scene had a surreal feel to it, like a painting where the colors were a shade too bright, and the images too idealized to be of this world.

A streetlight reflected off the stream’s surface, lighting them as they caught their breath. Christy pressed her hands against her ears, released, and did it again. “Am I bleeding?” she asked loudly, “from my ears?”

“Cherry bomb?” said Peter. Most of the ringing had faded, but his ears hurt.

Dante grinned. “You never know when you’ll need one,” he said. He held up his phone. “I’ve been tracking you since the cops left your house. You’ve made some strange-ass moves. Were you in an airplane at one point? Worried me when the signal vanished at the college.” He turned to Christy. “You put us to sleep! I was dizzy for an hour after.”

Peter said, “What happened, Dante? Why were you and Blue-suit at my house?”

A car drove down the street in front of them. They moved deeper under the bridge and farther out of sight.

Dante’s face became tragic. “I’m so, so sorry, Peter. I thought that Blue-suit really was FBI, that you were right about getting rid of the gun, so I called him and told him I could lead him to it. I knew I was wrong as soon as we got to your house. He shouldn’t get the gun, Peter. I was crazy to trust him.” He hung his head down between his knees, then he snapped upright. “How the hell did he get away from the police? Your dad said he was going to press charges. The last time I saw Blue-suit, he was in handcuffs. The cops were talking false imprisonment or kidnapping charges.”

“Oh, that wasn’t him. I mean the one you took to the house. He’s a twin. He has a brother. I thought they were clones, but there’s just two of them that look alike.” Peter faced Christy. “How’d a bunch of books end up in the bag? Where’s the gun?”

“It’s still in the cafeteria. You were gone a long time, Peter, so I was thinking that if they saw the bag, they’d go for that. They might even have grabbed the bag, run off and not realized that they didn’t have what they wanted until they were long gone. I’d made the switch an hour before you showed up. That plan almost backfired, though. I was afraid Blue-suit wasn’t going to look in the bag before shooting us. I was about to tell him he’d better check but he did without prompting.”

“That’s crazy. When we left the cafeteria, you thought we were going to give the bag to Wheeler. Why would you take a fake bag?”

“Maybe I don’t trust Wheeler as much as you do. Her reaction to getting the bag could tell us a lot. At least that’s what I was thinking when you said we were going to give it to her. Not handing her the real deal the first time through seemed like a good idea. If she’s Blue-suit’s enemy, though, I think I like her.”

Peter looked at them in wonderment. “Well, you’re both crafty. Blue-suits didn’t know what they were getting into when they tangled with us. I think we ought to tell each other what we’re doing from now on though. Agreed?”