0062120085. (C) (3 page)

I
SLOWLY GOT TO MY FEET. I WASN’T EVEN SURE THAT I REALLY
wanted to see what was inside. A real live lawn gnome? A spirit that I’d just freed after years of captivity? A talking shoe with a beard?

But it wasn’t any of those things; it was nothing alive at all. Inside the box, just below the surface, was an LCD screen. Its display was entirely blue, except for this message in white letters:

Touch Here to Continue
. . .

I just stood there and looked at the blue screen for a while. I wasn’t even trying to figure out what to do. My brain was too shocked to process or entertain those kinds of thoughts. So mostly I was just gaping at it.

Then it spoke again and I nearly jumped right through my ceiling and into the kitchen one floor above me.

“Please touch the screen to continue.”

The woman’s voice was friendly and polite, a little robotic. It sounded just like any other automated voice I’d heard before. Like the ones that play over the intercom at the airport, repeating the same messages over and over again.

If this was a prank, it was elaborate. Too elaborate. For the first time, I realized, I was really, truly considering that this might be real. That the sweaty guy in the suit really was serious about this box being important and that I was suddenly in possession of something I had no business being in possession of. But I also had to admit that I liked the possibility that this was real. For the first time pretty much ever, I truly didn’t know what was going to happen next. Just sitting there staring at a metal box had suddenly become the most exciting thing I’d ever done, as strange as that sounds. Even more
exciting than when Dillon and I snuck onto the Zipper for the very first time at the circus when we were in fourth grade.

There really was only one option at this point, the way I saw it. After all, I had already opened the box, which the courier had specifically told me not to do.

I reached out and touched the screen with my index finger.

“Thank you,” said the box and then the screen went black.

I wasn’t sure what to do next. My mind began to run wild with all sorts of crazy things I might have just initiated by pressing the button on the screen. Like maybe I’d just launched ten nuclear missiles at Denmark. I had no idea why anyone would want to bomb Denmark, but my mind wasn’t exactly working rationally just then. Or maybe I’d just activated a huge killer robot that shoots swarms of killer bees out of its eyes and had been living below Disneyland and now it would rise up and turn the earth into a huge ball of honeycomb.

But then the woman’s voice started speaking again. The words she spoke scrolled across the screen. And had I not been able to read them for myself, I might not have believed what she told me next. I would have assumed I’d
misheard. I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to believe it, anyway.

My eyes kept passing back over the word
destruction
. Then all of the words disappeared and were replaced by a large digital clock.

48:00:00

47:59:59

47:59:58

I rubbed my eyes and blinked a few times just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

47:59:54

Nope. It was real.

47:59:52

What had I just done?

T
HERE IS NOT MUCH OF A CHANCE THAT I WOULD HAVE BEEN
able to get any sleep after activating a top secret self-destructing data device. But even that small chance was wiped out by the fact that the device insisted on reminding me over and over what I’d done in its polite voice.

“You now have forty-six hours and forty-five minutes to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction,” the voice said to me.

I found out after the first hour that the voice reminded whatever moron (i.e., me) who happened to have opened
the box and now happened to be hanging around listening just how much time was left every fifteen minutes. And who knows what would happen when the counter reached zero? What did “self-destruct” really mean, anyway? Would it actually explode like a bomb? Or just, like, fry its own internal hardware? I’d already considered just dumping the box somewhere, but what if it did actually explode at the end of the forty-eight hours? Even if I left it in a Dumpster, or in the middle of a field, who’s to say that some kid or farmer wouldn’t happen to find it with only ten seconds left in the countdown or something?

Plus, all of that isn’t even mentioning the fact that the computer most likely contained highly sensitive and important information that someone needed to see for the safety of the whole country. Why else would it have such serious countermeasures?

So I’d placed the device on my desk and stared at it while trying to figure out what to do. An hour after I opened it I was still sitting there staring at it—no closer to an answer than I had been sixty minutes before. I made a mental note that the next time some harried and panicked guy in a suit gave me directions, I would probably follow them, no matter how cool or exciting the alternative seemed.

And whatever you do, don’t open it!

Idiot!
I thought to myself.

“You now have forty-six hours and thirty minutes to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

“Shut up, Betsy!” I yelled at it. “I know how much time I have!”

I’d decided to name the computer Betsy. Because the shrewdly calm and passive-aggressive diabolical voice reminded me of this girl named Betsy in my second-period class who was always tattling on kids. Or bragging about how her dad got two free tickets to the Super Bowl, or how her dad was going to buy her a car when she was in ninth grade. Or about how their house had a four-car garage, which was super rare. Or making comments about some other girl’s ugly shoes. Or blah, blah, blah.

Then I heard my dad thundering down the stairs. He stopped at my door and knocked in a way that was just short of pounding.

“Carson, what are you yelling about? Go to bed! I have a flight at five in the morning!”

“Sorry, Dad,” I said. He traveled a lot for his job and was awake before the sun came up most mornings.

He didn’t answer me and I heard his heavy footsteps marching back upstairs to my parents’ bedroom. Their
door shut and then the house was mostly quiet again.

I closed the box and put it inside my lower desk drawer. Maybe I just needed to sleep on it. Tomorrow morning I’d know what to do. I climbed into bed, trying to think of some way I could go back and undo the past twelve hours.

But even through the closed metal lid and the drawer, I could still hear Betsy:

“You now have forty-six hours and fifteen minutes to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

The volume was muffled, but Betsy’s sharp words still cut right through me like hot shrapnel. I got out of bed and scrambled over to the desk, grabbing Betsy with the intention of putting her up on my windowsill. And that’s when I saw it out my ground-level basement window.

A dark sedan with tinted windows rolled slowly past the front of my house. Too slowly. Our street was residential and didn’t get much traffic this time of night. The car didn’t stop moving, but it was going so slow it was almost as if it wasn’t even moving at all.

There was something else extremely sinister about the car, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I mean, it was the same kind that had apprehended the guy in the suit, and sure it had windows tinted so dark they were
like black souls spilled around the glass, and yeah the car was moving so slowly the driver was probably using the brake to accelerate it. All of that was definitely creepy. But even beyond that stuff, there was something else that felt wrong about it.

I tried shaking it off as I shoved the black box into the back of my closet. It would likely be less audible there than on my high windowsill anyway. I peeked outside again; the car was gone. Somehow, that made things even worse. The shadows on my wall had never appeared to be so cold and uncaring. They looked like they wanted to turn me in, like they were pointing the dark sedan right to me.

So this is what it must be like to be Mr. Gomez.

“You now have forty-six hours to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

The closet didn’t do much to muffle Betsy’s words. I was never going to get to sleep again, I decided—tonight and tomorrow because of Betsy’s announcements, and after that because I’d likely be locked up in some super-secret government prison in Siberia or something.

I got up and piled my spare blanket on top of Betsy. Then my comforter. Then my spare pillow. Try talking through that, Betsy.

Before getting back into bed, I looked out the window again. And my heart slowly sank down into my right leg where it bounced past my knee and eventually plopped into my ankle area. Or at least that’s what it felt like was happening.

The sedan was back, making another pass down my street. And this time, I noticed what it was that made it so menacing: Its headlights were off. It was pitch-black outside and the car’s headlights were off. Who does that? Also, it had no license plates or make or model markings of any kind.

I quickly ducked down as the sedan rolled past our front yard. A bead of sweat trickled into my eye and clogged my vision momentarily. What was I going to do? Getting rid of Betsy would be even harder with whomever it was in that car creeping around my neighborhood. I mean, they had to be related, right?

But even if I could find a way to sneak Betsy out of here and into the school and past Mr. Gomez, there was a whole other problem.

The guy who handed it to me had told me to deliver it to Mr. Jensen. I didn’t know if this thing was good or bad, if the information it held could be used to save the country or ruin it. But something about the way the guy
had looked at me said that he was one of the good guys. That whatever was in the package was something important, something that couldn’t fall into the wrong hands. I knew the only chance I had of finding out what that was was to get it to Mr. Jensen.

But that was the problem. Simply handing it to Mr. Jensen wouldn’t be that easy.

Because there were two Mr. Jensens at my school.

One taught music, and the other taught sixth-grade social studies. They even spelled their names the same way. How was I supposed to know which one was the right one? And what would happen if I delivered the package to the wrong one?

I swallowed, hoping to ease this sudden urge I had to barf all over my pajamas. As much as I had to admit that all this was actually pretty exciting, it was also terrifying because I simply didn’t feel like I was capable of handling it. I mean, this kind of stuff simply doesn’t happen in North Dakota. The most exciting thing to happen around here is when some kid places fourth at the regional Midwest 4H Competition for matching the right calves to the right mother cows. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but only slightly. The point was the same, nothing that had ever happened to me before could have
remotely prepared me for suddenly being in charge of some crazy top secret self-destructing computer files containing who knows what kinds of national secrets. I liked to shake things up, to pull pranks. But those pranks didn’t actually come with any real consequences besides a little detention now and then.

“You now have forty-five hours and forty-five minutes to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

I sighed and sat down at the desk below my bedroom window. There was no point in even trying to sleep now. Betsy’s voice was definitely softer under all those blankets, but it was still unmistakably the voice of real consequence. Which made it impossible to ignore.

O
KAY, LET ME JUST START OUT BY SAYING THAT I KNOW BRINGING
a secret, mysterious device that may or may not be dangerous to school is about the worst, dumbest, most horrible thing a kid could do. But what else was I supposed to do with it the next day? Leave it at my house for one of my parents to find? Call the cops and risk the information not getting where it needed to go? I mean, for all I knew the cops might be in on whatever kind of shenanigans the guys in the dark sedan had going on around here. In the movies, the local police are always
on the take. Or was I supposed to pay some random guy to watch it in the hope that he wasn’t as stupid as I was—that he wouldn’t try to figure out what was in the box? Or should I have just put it on my neighbor’s stoop then rung the doorbell and run away? No, I couldn’t possibly have done that to poor Mr. Sherman. The old guy could hardly even see anymore, and he was definitely deaf. So he’d have no idea that Betsy was potentially dangerous.

So, anyway, the point is that, yes, I had to bring Betsy to school. Even if it was just my bad luck for being where I was at the exact moment that guy in the suit showed up, it was my responsibility now. I couldn’t put this one on my parents or anyone else.

Besides, to be honest, part of me didn’t want to pass this off to someone else, even as scary as it was. Because then everything would go back to normal, and that almost seemed worse somehow.

When I woke that morning, if you could even call my tossing and turning “sleep,” Betsy greeted me by saying, “You now have thirty-nine hours and fifteen minutes to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.” Reminding me both that last night was not some sort of crazy dream and also that the device itself had a habit of loudly announcing its existence every fifteen minutes.

The first challenge was getting it from my closet, onto the bus, and safely into my locker without anyone noticing. It wasn’t like I could just cram it into my backpack and act like nothing was wrong when she started talking about imminent self-destruction. It wouldn’t be easy to get a mysterious talking device into school, but I had a plan . . . of sorts.

I dug out an old digital wristwatch I’d gotten for my birthday a few years ago. Amazingly, the battery was still working. I switched it to timer mode and synched up the timer with Betsy’s automated message. My first thought had been to just use the timer on my phone, but the problem with that was that I couldn’t be looking at my phone all day in class. Our school had a policy that no phone could be seen at all by a teacher during class, or else it would be confiscated for the rest of the day.

After wrapping Betsy in one of my old T-shirts and stuffing it into my bag, I ran down to the corner to wait for the bus. As it approached, Betsy’s slightly muffled voice in my backpack said, “You now have thirty-eight hours to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

“Wow, thanks, Betsy,” I said under my breath as the bus squealed to a stop in front of me.

Grins, high fives, and fist bumps greeted me as I walked down the aisle. It took me a second to remember what that was about. Everyone in school must have known I was behind the fainting goat stunt yesterday. I’d honestly completely forgotten about that, you know, with the talking secret package and everything.

I sat down in an empty seat a few rows from the back.

“Hey, nice job yesterday,” a seventh grader in the next seat over whispered. “That was hilarious. I mean, goats?”

“Thanks, just wait until you see what happens today when we get to school,” I said distractedly.

Twelve minutes and six seconds until the next update from Betsy, according to my watch. The bus ride usually took at least fifteen minutes. I sat there and fidgeted as I watched us hit every single red light possible. There was no way I’d get my backpack off this bus before the next update.

At the next stop some kid sat down right next to me. If I’d been paying attention, I’d have stopped him before he did. But I’d been lost thinking about just what kind of secrets this thing might actually hold. Was it information about secret government facilities where aliens are experimented on? Did it contain the truth about who really shot JFK? Or the coordinates to the missing loot of
Billy the Kid? Would all that stuff really be lost forever if I wasn’t able to deliver it before the timer reached zero?

Anyway, the kid who sat next to me was named Olek. He’d recently moved here from some country I’d never heard of. All I knew was that it had an
ia
on the end. I think it was Lastonia or something like that. I’d heard from other kids that he was weird. Like, really weird. But he seemed okay to me. Besides, I usually liked the weird kids. My best friend was a genuine conspiracy theorist after all. To me,
weird
simply meant
interesting
, as in something different from the same old North Dakota stuff, where it seemed like everybody aspired only to be just like everybody else. Sometimes it seemed like every kid here could have been swapped at birth with some other random kid and nobody’s parents would notice and it wouldn’t have made any difference to how we all turned out.

Anyway, I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been the real Betsy who’d sat down next to me on the bus. She’d totally have grilled me about what I was hiding in my bag and then eventually tattle on me like always.

“Greetings,” said Olek, in a thick accent.

“Hi,” I said, and instinctively pulled the backpack closer to me.

He must have noticed, because he glanced at the bag and then asked, “What’s in bag?”

“What do you mean?”

“You guard like you have gold pieces inside, yes?”

I tried to shrug it off casually. “No, Olek, I’m just anxious to get to school, that’s all. There’s nothing inside here but books. And pens. And some pencils. Yep, just full of normal school stuff, that’s all. Nothing else. Nothing unusual whatsoever.”

I gave my bag a pat to show that it was just a normal old backpack.

“Oh-leck,” he said.

“Huh?”

“My name, is say Oh-leck. Not Ah-lick. Oh-leck.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Olek.”

“It’s not problem,” he said, and grinned.

Then he took out a phone and started playing some game or texting someone. I breathed out slowly and checked my watch. Just six minutes left. Then five. Then two. We were still nowhere near the school. The minutes on my watch slowly bled away until there were only ten seconds left.

I looked around. The bus was pretty full and the kids talkative enough, but it was still too quiet. The kids in the
seats around me definitely would hear Betsy and maybe, if it happened at just the right time, the bus driver would, too. Then it’d be game over for sure.

Seven seconds.

Six.

I shoved my bag as far under my seat as it would go. I put my legs in front of it.

Three seconds.

I took a deep breath.

One.

“OOOOOHHHH, beneath a mist of corndog,” I sang (or shouted is likely more accurate) as loudly as I could, “I have found a sack o’ mang, it’s overture collaboration is of horticulture thang!”

At first the kids were quiet, but then they all started laughing before joining me for the second verse of the song. Last year at the end of our homecoming assembly, I had switched these new lyrics with our school song’s real lyrics on the PowerPoint presentation that they projected onto a big screen. It took a few passes before kids noticed, but once they did, they started singing my new lyrics instead of the real ones. Principal Gomez eventually realized what was happening and shut off the projector, but it was too late. The whole school had
been roaring by that point.

Anyway, later that week I had the modified lyrics distributed around the school so kids could learn them. For the next several assemblies every kid in the school sang the new lyrics instead of the real ones. Now, they don’t even play our school song at assemblies anymore. But we all still sing “Beneath a Mist o’ Corndog” at every sporting event. Although Gomez would never admit it, I think it actually gave kids more school spirit than the old lyrics did. Besides, the old lyrics were the same as when my parents went to school here.

As the bus finished the fourth verse of the song and everyone laughed, I realized that I had been loud enough so that even I hadn’t heard Betsy give her most recent time update. It had worked. Of course, the bus would be the easy part. The bus driver didn’t much care what we did as long as we stayed seated. Hiding Betsy’s constant updates during school would be a whole different challenge.

“Why you sing song on bus?” Olek asked.

“A school custom,” I said.

He made a face like we were all crazy. “Ah,” he said. “Okay. In my country we sometimes sing, too.”

I nodded. “Yeah? Cool.”

“Yes, but our songs much better. In our country we mostly sing Jimmy Buffett song.”

“Who’s Jimmy Buffett?” I asked.

Olek’s jaw hung open. He looked as if I’d just told him I didn’t know who Abraham Lincoln was or something.

“You not know Jimmy Buffett?”

“No, should I?”

“Yes, of course, he is like American cowboy plus hippie on desert island. In my country he is hero. Jimmy Buffett song replace our national anthem and he has statue in Logan Square in our capital city.”

“Wow, you guys really love this Jimmy Buffett dude. He must be pretty good.”

Olek nodded wildly. “Yes! Yes, he is like . . . like musical diamond sauce!”

I looked at him and even in spite of the device under my seat I laughed and then clapped Olek on the shoulder to make sure he knew I wasn’t laughing at him. After a few seconds, he grinned and then started laughing himself.