13
The next morning, it happens like this: I call The Man and say, “I’m tired of running. Do you want to know where my friend is?”
“The last time I received a call of this nature,” The Man says, “it was a trap, if you’ll remember. I was threatened by some teenagers whom I had to buy off.”
“It’s not a trap.”
“Just be decent and let me know if I need to restock.”
“It’s not a trap. I just want everything to go back to the way it was.” Which is kind of true. More accurately, I want everything to go back to the way it was except now I’m friends with a kid who can make anything real. I want to go back to school like that. I want to own the place.
“Where is he now?”
“No. No meetings. Not where he will be, only where he is. Right now.”
“Home. He’s at his house. As far as I know he’s at his house.”
“Alright. If this all works out you will be amply rewarded.”
“I just want you to leave me alone.”
“If this all works out I’ll be out of your way and you’ll be rewarded. It won’t take much on your part. Just silence.”
“Okay. What are you going to do to him?”
“He won’t be harmed.” The Man hangs up.
I call Eric and tell him we’re going ahead with the plan early and he should head out behind the house, to the hole in the dirt, to the pylon, our staging area, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.
Stealing my brother’s car and the rest of his medication involves going into his room, where he’s still asleep with his arm wrapped around some girl whose hip bones are tent-poling her underwear, she’s that skinny, and taking his keys out of his jeans on the floor. When I have them almost worked out of the pocket one of the keys clanks against his studded belt and he stirs but he doesn’t wake up. The girl opens her eyes. She stares at me. I freeze and open my mouth to start to explain. But she closes her eyes again, like she was never fully awake. My brother and this girl seem to be violating what he once told me was one of the “Ten Crack Commandments,” which is to never get high on your own supply. I guess he figures if it’s not crack, it’s okay. It’s like ten a.m. I guess they’re not going to school today. Since they’re almost comatose I get way less concerned about noise and root through his drug drawer. I take the whole bottle of Adderall and go downstairs.
I don’t really actually know how to drive, but the bus is going to be too slow and if careening around the suburbs is the most dangerous thing I do today I’ll be lucky. I teach myself how to do a rolling stop and I make Eric’s neighborhood in five minutes and I don’t fender-bend anybody.
There are no cars in front of Eric’s house, and no helicopters hovering overhead, and no SWAT teams coming up from the storm drains. I roll up the driveway and hop out, cut through the backyard and hop the fence.
Trudging through the dirt I think maybe I’m going the wrong way because I get to around where the pylon should appear between the cacti and the scrub brush, but it isn’t where it should be. There’s a big mound of dirt, though. Eric covered it up. It’s just a little hill and maybe it will be forever but probably just until they start building houses here. Maybe it will get uncovered by the wind along with the Tllnar Defender and my brother will come out here and shoot it with paintballs when the semiconscious hip-bones girl breaks up with him.
“Dude! It’s me!” Nobody comes out of the dirt hole. I jump down and there’s nobody in there. The tarp is gone, and the Yerum Battlebeast.
“Darren?” I look up and standing at the mouth of the hole is Eric’s mom. “What are you doing here?”
“Uhm. Looking for Eric.” Talking to moms is never not hard, especially when you’re not pretending to be someone else, and I’m out of practice. “You wouldn’t happen to know where he is, would you?”
“He went to school,” she says, mystified because it’s a Wednesday and of course he’s in school. Except he’s not supposed to be in school, he’s supposed to be back here with me getting ready for the showdown. “How was your college experience?”
“What? Oh. It was good. It was really interesting. I think I’m probably gonna go there. You know? Or, uhm. Or NAU.”
“Well, Eric would sure miss you. If you’re going by school, bring him his backpack.” She holds out Eric’s red bag. “He forgot it. He can be such a space cadet sometimes.”
I take Eric’s bag. “Have a nice day,” she says, and she walks back toward the house. It makes me really sad to see her go for some reason, and I have this overwhelming desire to be normal. To give it all back in exchange for being allowed to be normal, even more normal than I was before this whole thing started. It makes sense for me then why Eric needed to go home. Maybe I’ll have him generate me a mom. But right now the sun is moving across the sky and the plan is already going haywire and my friend needs me.
The rock is still over in one corner of the hole, and underneath it is Eric’s dad’s gun. I unzip the bag, put the gun inside, put the backpack on my back and rolling-stop my way to our high school.
My brother has a parking space and even though parking is a concern for me the two spaces next to his are empty as well, so I don’t clip anybody. He and Jake and Alan all got parking spots together. I guess they aren’t coming to school today either.
It’s the very end of second period and I catch Eric coming out his class, no backpack and empty-eyed.
“What’s going on, man? What happened to behind the house? Our final stand?”
“I went back there and, I don’t know, it’s too empty back there. If he comes for me and he takes me there’s no one to notice. But here, we’ve got a whole audience.”
“Right, and he’ll probably just hold off until you leave. I thought the whole point was to lure him in so we could fight him off once and for all. And the reason he can’t come and take you here is the same reason you can’t end him here.”
“Huh,” he says, “I guess you’re right.”
“Do you want your bag? You look pretty conspicuous without it.”
“Uhm…”
“It’s got your dad’s … uhm … thing in it. I figured …”
“Oh, in that case, hold on to it. In a minute I’m not gonna be somebody you want handling a firearm.”
“Dude! Don’t say firearm in the middle of…” The reality sort of dawns on me, being in school with somebody else’s backpack with somebody else’s gun. I’m glad we don’t go to an inner-city school with metal detectors. I think about how I’ve gotten to the point that Carl Whiteman with his list of kids who “deserved it” could only have angry revenge-fueled daydreams about getting to. Standing in the hallway during passing period, secretly tooled up.
We’re both going to class as usual, and I guess just on instinct we end up out by the auditorium ramp at lunchtime, although neither of us has a lunch or really any desire to eat.
“Maybe it won’t go down today,” I say, “maybe he won’t come.”
“My mom told you I went to school?”
“Yeah. She was really nice to me.”
“Last night she said it reflected well on you, that you would go to this honors college program. She told you. If he shows up she’ll definitely tell him. She thinks he’s from college.”
“Yeah,” I say. “How come it’s taking so long?”
“Marshaling his forces,” Eric says. The sun beats down on us. I guess it’s almost spring.
“I’m really fucking sorry, man,” I say. “This whole fucking thing is my fault. I told somebody in the first place and then when I had the chance I turned you in over some fucking girl.”
“It’s not your fault,” Eric says. “I told somebody first. And anyway, I think it is my fault because I think I accidentally created him.”
“Who?”
“The guy. The Man. We thought him up and I think I brought him into being. That day in my room. If the glasses can be real, he can too.”
“Does he look like this guy?”
“A little. Not really. I dunno. It’s pretty egotistical to think I made him, I guess, huh?”
“We did make him. In a way. Or I did. I called him. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. But if we made him, that means we can undo him,” Eric says, washing an Adderall down with ginger ale.
It doesn’t start like the Altratroops invading the school in Time-Blaze. All that happens is a cop car pulls up by the flagpole. No siren or anything. Two cops get out, normal fat cops who bust kids for skating. I think one of them might have been my DARE officer even. But then another police car pulls up, and another one, and another one. Slow as can be, a little army of cops shows up in front of the school. Their radios buzzing, all looking at each other like “It’s a living.” And I know they’re not all inhuman monsters because the one who’s driving the car The Man gets out of gives The Man a look like “Who is this asshole?” But it looks like he’s in charge, and they all take orders from him because someone has told them to.
Eric doesn’t freak out. I think I say “shit” and I can feel the backpack on my back and I can feel the gun inside of it screaming out prison time, screaming “shot on school premises.” The garage door starts to open. I look back and see Eric at the controls.
“Let’s go,” says Eric, “this is as good a place as any,” sounding all kinds of adult.
We get up and as we do I see a rock drop out of nowhere onto the concrete, making a loud crack. The Man and the cops hear it and turn to see their two soft targets walking into the drama department.
In the couple of months Christine and I went out I never made it back here. Whenever she’d talk about something that had happened that day in rehearsal or at a Theater Division meeting I’d imagine everything looking like the grainy video of clips from their plays being shown once a month on the school newscast. Kids in half assed costumes, clownish in makeup, their “flats,” as we learned they were called that one day out on the loading dock, being dwarfed by the size of the stage itself. It was a little hard to respect. But right now this seems like the ideal place for our purposes: as dark and expansive as the rest of the school is narrow and too well lit. “I don’t really know how to use this gun, man.”
“You won’t have to,” Eric says, and pulls on one of the curtain ropes. The curtain comes up and instead of revealing a plywood-and-tempera-paint New York, underneath the curtain is a mech.
If you are a kid of a certain age and male you will know what I mean. A giant metal exoskeleton, like Voltron, like Battletech. Like TimeBlaze, because someday if we make it out of this alive people will read it and totally give us credit for changing the whole interpretation of mechs in sci-fi. The thing about mechs is, they’re fucking badass. The thing that’s different about ours is, they’re more badass.
I am good at drawing, I think. I am fucking good. Look at how cool this thing is, how well designed, how imaginative. I holler with joy and swing up into the cockpit. The thing is about three of me tall and one of me wide. I slide right in and the cockpit conforms to my body and the HUD slides over my face and I am home, this is perfect, this is incredible. I look down at Eric.
Eric: “That works, right?”
By way of response I rocket across the auditorium, a jet-propelled leap that’s just graceful as hell, and I crush some seats but I do it beautifully.
“How long have you been hiding this in here?” The mech amplifies my voice to this metallic screech that would hurt my ears if I weren’t in the cockpit.
“Since this morning,” Eric said. “I came in early. If I ever have to drink another energy drink again, I think I’ll kill myself.”
“It’ll be worth it,” I say.
“Yup,” Eric says, and at that moment I’m fine, I’m in a mech and everything I ever wanted to be real can be and we are unstoppable and Eric’s thing means we’ll be around forever, we’ll be fine, and we will be.
I turn around to make sure there’s no one else in the auditorium because I want to fire a rocket-propelled grenade but I don’t want to hit anybody and when I turn back Eric is a ball of blue flame because suddenly he always has been. And just in time too, because the law is here. In the dim light of the stage are three cops, then five, then probably all the cops in our suburb.
“Drop it, assholes!” Drop what? The gun is in a backpack lying on the stage, and they can’t know that, a backpack is normal in a school, a backpack makes sense, not a kid in a mech or a kid who’s a glowing avatar. “Step out of the impossible vehicle” might make sense. Or “Extinguish yourself.”
I make another leap for the stage and all of the sudden it’s on: guns are out and blazing, cops who’ve never pulled a piece before in their lives are unloading rounds here in the auditorium of the school some of their kids probably attend. Maybe Tony DiAvalo’s dad is here, I think he might be a cop. Hey, Mr. DiAvalo, look what I can draw. Fuck your son and his hustling M&Ms.
The rounds go ricocheting off the mech, we designed it to be bomb-proof so bullets are nothing, bullets are from this world and this thing is from beyond the stars, and I keep advancing on this one cop and he keeps firing right at the blast shield I can see through, and one bullet, I don’t know how, one bullet bounces straight back and he catches a round in the hand and his gun blows up, classic. His hands are bleeding and I pick him up with the mech’s mechanical arm and hold him out over the orchestra pit.
“Let us go,” I screech mechanically.
The guy twists around in my mech’s hand and stares directly into the blast shield. I don’t think he can see me, but there is a look on his face of absolute un-cop-like shit-scaredness, and it bugs me that he is human. That he did not ask for this. That for all its videogame aspects this is not a video game.
“Stand down!” someone screams, and it’s The Man. He comes out from behind a piece of stage furniture. “Stand down.”
The cops put their guns away and I put the cop down on the stage. The Man was ducking. He’s nothing we have to worry about. If Eric had created him, if he were what we made him, he would’ve dodged bullets and come for us like it was no big deal; our Man wouldn’t need fat suburban cops. There’s us and there’s them now, and we’re something else entirely.
“No need for this,” The Man says, “no need,” and comes out from behind the end table. Then, while I’m listening to The Man say something about how we can work this whole thing out, Eric screams.
“STOP!”
But it’s too late. The bloody-handed cop has his gun out in his good hand and he fires into the vent on the mech that is its us-given weakness, the little one right below the blast shield and to the left of its gyrostabilizer. The whole thing powers down at once, the blast shield pops open, and Eric turns to see what the fuck is going on. In that second, The Man pulls something from his coat and stabs Eric in the neck with it. Eric’s a kid again in that instant, no more blue flame, and the mech is no more and I’m down on the floor with the cop who just shot the vent, and I see that the thing the guy has driven into Eric’s neck is a needle, the plunger totally depressed.
Eric is getting woozy. His eyes are starting to roll back in his head, and that’s when he starts running. He starts running, his limbs puppet-y like he’s drunk, like he’s back in the IHOP parking lot. Tranquilizer in the veins of someone who can’t be totally tranquilized.
God bless him but he goes and the Man runs after him, grabs him by the waist. Eric flails and fights and it’s no use and I think, just go to sleep. Goddamnit, go to sleep. You did everything you could have done.
“What the fuck,” says the cop with the bloody hands. “What the fucking fuck.” The other cops must be thinking the same thing because I have enough time to roll over and unzip Eric’s bag and train Eric’s dad’s gun on The Man, who is still holding a half-dead, drunk-looking exhausted Eric.
“Put him down.”
“You can’t get out of this,” The Man says, and there’s a loud echoing click of fifteen suburban cops pointing their weapons at me, just a kid with a gun, no more mech and maybe there never was.
“I know. But just put him down.”
The Man does so, his hand still on Eric’s collar so he can’t go anywhere.
“There.”
“Drop it, fuckwad!” one of the cops screams, and now I have something to drop so I do, and I’m still alive because I do what they say.
The cops walk me to a police car in handcuffs and The Man walks Eric to a black van with tinted windows and they don’t need handcuffs, his legs are too heavy to run, heavy with what would put you and me in a coma but him it just slows him down.
When the van doors close that’s the last time I see him.