The Rendering (13 page)

Fine, no problem. I hadn’t collapsed into a jabbering wreck at any of that.

But those
things
I’d seen outside the shuttle? I couldn’t handle them. Not only because the weird factor blew everything else away, but because if I saw what I
thought
I saw …

Then I’d created them. I’d
created
them, and that simply blew my mind.

Jamie stopped and looked at me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, I guess.” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, that’s clear.”

Her expression almost made me grin.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m glad they didn’t kill me.”

She nodded. “I’m happy about that, too.”

“And once we get Auntie M back, I’ll be fine.”

Jamie nodded again as we crossed the weedy lot, and we got four blocks before—

Okay, time out. Jamie just texted me. She wants me to describe her, I guess so you can picture us walking down the sidewalk.

She’s kinda skinny. And if I remember right, she was wearing a T-shirt with this logo:

And jeans. Probably a fancy designer brand with a goofy name. Like once she told me her jeans were “Grass Station Mars” or something.

Oh! And sneakers. Definitely sneakers.

Right. Jamie nodded and we—

She texted me again. She says that describing her T-shirt isn’t enough.

Fine. She’s sorta tallish. Brown eyes, brown skin. Two ears, two legs. The regular number of teeth, I guess.

To be honest, I never counted them.

What I’m trying to say is we got four blocks before the cops spotted us.

“I’ll call my parents,” Jamie said, stepping onto the sidewalk.

“What for?”

“They’re
lawyers.”

“What are they gonna do, sue Roach? Or turn me in?”

“They won’t turn you in.”

“Yeah, the cops say I’m guilty, but they’ll believe I was framed by mercenaries with monkeybeasts.”

“Mm.” She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe I’ll call them
after
we find proof.”

We stopped at the corner and I said, “Gimme your laptop.”

“No way.”

“You’re going that way.” I pointed toward school. “And I’m going to your house.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Auntie M said—”

“I don’t care,” Jamie interrupted. “If she’s in trouble, I’m gonna help.”

“You want to help? Then go to school. Maybe she—”

“No way, Doug. Three hours. That’s all we have.”

“These people are scary,” I told her. “Seriously scary.”

“You’re not the only one who loves her.”

From her tone of voice, I knew that Jamie had made up
her mind. After a certain point, I don’t argue with her. Doesn’t do any good.

Still, I felt kinda odd. Usually Jamie is the good kid, the responsible one. If she started slacking, did that mean I’d need to buckle down?

Nah.

Anyway, we headed behind the Wilkersons’ house—there’s a shortcut through the hedge—and past the spot where we once built the Headless Snowman, and through the playground for toddlers learning to climb stairs and high schoolers learning to smoke cigarettes.

Back on the sidewalk, we turned left, and a siren

A police car squealed around the corner, coming fast.

I started to run toward Jamie’s house, but Jamie yelled, “This way!” and took off toward the school.

I followed close behind.

We cut through the Nguyens’ backyard, around the swimming pool, where Stacy Nguyen sunbathed a cop car couldn’t follow. We ran behind the garden shed and into Mrs. Klein’s yard, then alongside the Coopers’ porch.

This was our neighborhood, and we knew every inch, better than anyone: they weren’t gonna catch us here.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To school.”

“You just said you
weren’t
going to school.”

“You’ll be harder to spot there; we’ll blend.”

“That’s your plan? We’ll blend?”

“Well, Doug”—she grinned over her shoulder—“nobody’s better than you at disappearing into a crowd at school.”

I snorted. “True enough.”

My dad had been a professor, and my mom an engineer, so I guess the teachers had pretty high expectations of me—at least, at first. That was probably why I’d developed my ability to avoid attention, learning how to hide in plain sight to keep them from calling on me all the time. And the truth is … Well, Auntie M said I wasn’t afraid of attention; I just didn’t like people wanting me to live up to their memory of my parents. Like I was afraid I’d disappoint them or something.

I dunno, maybe she was right. Still, knowing how to disappear into a crowd was a good skill to have right then.

We slipped behind the mini-mart, then hopped the fence onto the school’s upper field.

“First stop, the computer lab,” Jamie said. “We’ll get in touch with your aunt. Ask her what to do next.”

“If we’re separated, let’s meet at …” I thought for a second while we cut across the baseball diamond. “The drainage pipe in that ditch across the street.”

Jamie shuddered. “What’s with you and repulsive pits today?”

“It’s the perfect place. Nobody’ll look there.”

“Fine,” she said.
“Outside
the drainage pipe.”

“Sure, that’s what I meant.”

When we got to the pitcher’s mound, Jamie cocked her head. “What’s that?”

“What?” Then I heard it:
whapwhapwhapwhap
. “Oh.”

“Look.” Jamie pointed into the sky, at a distant tiny speck, no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.

Except getting bigger

Fast.

And louder:
WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP
.

A helicopter.

No. A helicopter
gunship
. Swooping directly at us.

Jamie gasped. “Ohmigod.”

“Um,” I said.
“Run!”

I grabbed her hand and yanked her toward school. We needed to get off the field, we needed cover—we needed something between us and that gunship.

But when we turned, guess what we saw?

Another helicopter, swooping down. We were trapped in the middle, sitting ducks between two, um, things that hunted ducks.

Well, long story short: the helicopters landed at each end of the field, trapping us between.

“Great,” I said. “We’ll blend.”

Soldiers poured from the helicopters, fanning into semicircles and pointing assault rifles at us.

“Lie facedown,” one of the soldiers bellowed. “Hands behind your head.”

I looked at Jamie. She looked at me.

We both looked at the soldiers.

Then we lay down and put our hands behind our heads.

We were surrounded. The soldiers prowled forward, rifles raised.

“They’re just kids,” one soldier muttered.

“That kid detonated a nuke at the research site,” said another. “If they move, you are cleared to fire.”

“I didn’t detona—” I started.

“No talking!” a soldier yelled.

“He didn’t do anything,” Jamie said.

“If they
talk
, you’re cleared to fire,” the same guy said.

Then one of them knelt on my back. Which hurt pretty bad. He yanked at my arms and handcuffed me.

“Oww,” Jamie said, lying next to me.

“Suspects secure, Captain,” one of the soldiers said. “And ready for transport.”

A huge crash sounded at the far end of the field.

I scrunched around to see what had happened, and for a second couldn’t understand what I was looking at. Lying on my stomach handcuffed, I didn’t have the best vantage point. Then I realized that one of the helicopters was upside-down.

And burning.

And … crumpled.

Around me, the soldiers reacted. Some of them shouted orders, and others fell to the ground, taking aim. Because in front of the burning helicopter, three … 
figures
stepped from a cloud of black smoke.

For a second, I thought they were wearing gorilla suits. But those weren’t suits. And they weren’t gorillas.

“Are those … skunks?” Jamie murmured.

Yeah, they were skunks. I’d seen them before, outside the blue shuttle the previous night.

Skunk-people. Your basic skunk-people.

And you know what? I could accept a talking snake fridge and a centipedal medic. They’d done crazy cutting-edge stuff at the Center, patching together technology and biology. Heck, I’d even learned to live with a monkeybeast.

But
skunks
?

Yeah, skunks. With short black fur and white stripes that
rose to Mohawks atop their heads. Big bushy black-and-white tails and kinda skunky-looking faces. And humanoid, human-size bodies, heavy on the weight lifting.

Well, mostly humanoid. The big one—Larkspur—looked a little android, too, given he was mostly encased in BattleArmor.

The female—Poppy—wore a leather jacket and biker boots and swung a chain in one hand and wielded a crowbar in the other. She’d been output through the
Street Gang
video game while it was running the Hog Stompers versus the Fists of Kung Fu.

And the last one—Cosmo—looked like a fuzzy Punisher, in combat gear with a bandoleer full of gadgets I didn’t recognize. He’d emerged from the VR combat simulator, with knowledge of a million combat scenarios.

One squad of soldiers advanced warily, yelling at the skunks to raise their hands and lie facedown and drop their weapons—all at once.

“I am Larkspur,” Larkspur told the soldiers, his voice a deep rumble. The morning sun glinted off his armor-encased body. But he wasn’t just
wearing
the Quantuum 19 BattleArmor prototype, he
was
the Quantuum 19 BattleArmor. “The boys come with us.”