I delivered the homework to Billy. Mrs. Bascom hadn't asked me to, but I went over the work with him in detail and explained it to him. I asked if he had any questions, but he just glared at me the whole time and didn't say a word. He looked a little anxious like he was expecting someone to show up. I had been anxious to leave myself, but I felt I needed to do that much for him, at least. There was a lady doctor in the room at one of the other beds in the ward and she kept glancing at me, smiling at what she thought was an act of friendship.
With my job done, I exited the room and just about collided with the foulest smelling foursome of American pulchritude I had never imagined. The two in the front were young adult males, muscular but tending to fat, blurry-eyed, unshaven and smelling like a brewery. They were followed by two others — and I hesitate to describe them even as 'human — one an older adult male, probably the two boys' father given the similarity of their morphologic features; although I'm not sure there is a specific genome for sneering. The father wasn't tending to fat, he had already made it. He had greasy black hair that looked artificially colored with deep 'Elvis' sideburns. His pockmarked face was partially obscured by an unkempt full beard and he was wearing a wife-beater T-shirt with a good portion of lunch still clinging to the shelf made by his protruding belly. All in all he was filthy and the source of most of the foul smell emanating from the quartet. The last individual in the group was a quasi-feminine amorphous blob of jiggling flesh scantily wrapped in the most garish outfit I had ever seen. If a girl at my high school had worn such an outfit to school she would have never been let in the front — or any — door of the building.
I turned to watch the group lumber into Billy's room. 'Poor bastard doesn't have a chance, ' I thought. 'That's not going to change the outcome, but the bastard doesn't have a fucking chance.' I recognized the three males from the memories from Mr. Griggs' mind, even though he might not know he had seen them. The mind plays funny tricks under stress. These were his attackers, the people he had identified as the 'Jones'.
While I was standing by the nursing station watching the interplay between the five of them in Billy's room and I overheard one of the nurses commenting to another about the apparent 'maturity' of the boy with the broken leg in Room 358. That was Billy's room and he was the only kid in it with a broken leg. There was an appendectomy, a tonsillectomy and an unidentified rash in the other three beds.
The other nurse commented back that his dick and his sexual appetites were more appropriate for a 25 year old than a 16 year old. She said the doctor felt the same way and had ordered a bunch of tests on him tonight to try to determine his real age. They were going to sedate him after dinner, then run him down to radiology when it was quiet later tonight. That got me thinking of a plan for tonight, but then the nurses noticed I was within earshot and they glared at me until I got moving.
I walked back to the empty wing of the hospital, turned into an empty hallway and vanished. I didn't think the people walking behind me would notice. Most people in a hospital have other things on their minds and are not really too observant of the things around them.
One of the experiments that Charlie and I were going to have to do soon was to see if we could teleport while we were invisible. I suspected we could and it seemed to me that it would be a lot safer, just in case we missed our location or if someone had moved the furniture and we ended up in the middle of a filing cabinet or the wall or something; or if there just happened to be someone in the room when we appeared.
I was starting a list of things we still needed to try when Charlie appeared in the lab with me. She dropped off several large bags, waved at me and disappeared again, only to reappear with another load of clothes. She had really gotten into this shoplifting thing.
I was stacking the bags in the sphere when she blinked out and back again. This time she carried a bunch of backpacks and other canvas bags. She helped me fill the space inside the sphere with all of the booty and I started the process.
"That's a lot of stuff, Charlie. I thought you'd get just a couple of things and then we'd do our other clothes at home."
"That was my thought, too, and then I realized that most of your pants have metal zippers and rivets and some metal buttons. You needed more things than I did. I got us a couple pairs of shoes each; I needed to get a bunch more sports bras and underwear. I got you a couple of pairs of shorts, but if you start growing you're probably going to have to go 'commando.' All together, it turned out to be a lot of stuff. It would sure help if we knew for sure what would happen if the clothing had metal pieces in them."
I blushed at the thought of not wearing underwear, but there were worse things in life, I guess.
"I know. I'd like to know about the metal, too. But do you really want to find out now? What would happen if the metal broke the sphere or the laser?" I said. "By the way, how much do we need to pay for all of this?"
"Around $1000.00. Since we're probably going to be pretty active in these clothes — running around, standing out in the cold and stuff — I wanted to get good quality. I looked at the big department store first. They had a lot of stock so they might not miss even this much stuff, but their stuff was crappy and poorly made. So, we need to pay back that small boutique on Hanson Street pretty quick as they will miss this much stuff and it could hurt their business. They're just a small business but they have really good stuff." She giggled and added, "I left them an IOU and ordered a bunch more stuff. I, uh, didn't actually sign the IOU. I just wrote 'Super Chuck.' I hope that was OK."
I was stunned at the cost of the clothing. I had no idea. For me, clothes just magically appeared in my room at the beginning of the school year and then more appeared under the Christmas tree. Once in a while I would get a nice shirt at Easter. Shopping for clothes was a topic I knew nothing about, but I was glad for Charlie's skills.
I had to laugh at the name Charlie left. When we were kids, many of the parents of our playmates didn't know Charlie's gender, especially after hearing of her exploits on the baseball diamond. When they visited to see their kids play, they inevitably wanted to meet 'Chuck.' Charlie took in good humor, and it was a private joke between us when she did something exceptional.
I went over my list of experiments with Charlie, adding her metal test at the end. We still had a couple of items to run through the process, but I wanted the laser disabled tonight. I expected Mr. Griggs to show up anytime to secure the sphere and we were working on borrowed time.
Charlie and I decided to split up; she would transport our processed items back to the house after they were processed and I would run a couple of simple tests with the last run of the process. Then I would have to fix the laser so that it looked like it hadn't been running since Mike, the utility guy, had set it up last week.
I started looking around the lab for a small piece of metal — something that wouldn't create too big of a mess if it shorted out. Then it hit me; why waste this test? If it was successful, why not process something useful? I started to broaden my search. I saw a couple of hammers and tongs that might have some use. There was a long screwdriver in the tool box and a putty knife that could be useful, too.
Suddenly the proverbial light bulb went off over my head and I teleported into the darkened main building of the school. Everyone was gone by this time, even the custodial staff. Our city was pretty good sized and our school was modern but it had not yet succumbed to the trench warfare of many inner-city schools in the larger metropolitan areas of the country. There was no need for a full-time night time guard nor were there metal detectors on the doors.
That didn't mean that the occasional weapon — mostly knives — wasn't confiscated from the students. At one point it had gotten so bad, especially after some of the massacres in other high schools, that the principal had set up a huge display case; he called it the "Westwood High School Wall of Shame". Where before the display case had held all of the athletic trophies and awards the school had won in prior decades, it now held the confiscated weapons.
We were close enough to the great outdoors that many of our students hunted with their dads and uncles. Most of the knives in the display were therefore of the hunting and skinning variety. Of course, it reflected on the relative stupidity of the students who brought them into the school in the first place and then show them off. In the student's defense, however, in our city they were not bringing them in to massacre the other students, but they brought them because they were proud of the equipment.
There were a couple of the knives in the display that were different and had caught my eye, both because of their uniqueness and their deadly purpose. These knives were designed to allow the user to get close to and kill other humans. They were double edged with a tapered point and serrated on both edges near the hilt. They were relatively small, with blades between 5 to 8 inches long and they came with ankle or belt sheaths. They were made of a very light weight metal alloy and were very strong. What was also surprising was that there were so many of them. Rumor had it that they were all from one gang — if you can call a group of naïve kids a gang just because they hang out together. Apparently, carrying these knives to school was part of their 'group-think.' I don't think there was much thinking done by them otherwise, as the first one caught with one of the combat knives rolled over on all of the others.
I blinked out of sight and stepped up into the large case. I was small, so I fit in the narrow space. Once I was inside I blinked visible, slipped several of the knives and the sheaths into my processed backpack, blinked out and stepped back out of the case. I was kind of holding my breath that the sliding glass door of the case wouldn't shatter as the knives were pulled through, but apparently if an unprocessed object was entirely enclosed in a processed container, it behaved as if it was in the other dimension, even though it wasn't processed. It was kind of like they were encased inside of a dimensional bubble. So if they were inside, say my backpack or a bag, then all of the items didn't need to be processed in order to pass through solid objects. This was going to make acquiring things — also known as stealing — much easier.
I teleported back to the lab and used a small piece of nylon fishing line to hang the knives and the sheaths over the top of the sphere. They were sort of in the middle of the sphere, maybe a bit low.
I held my breath as I started the HV generator and then let it stabilize. Crossing my fingers I engaged the switches for the magnets and flinched, waiting for the explosion or whatever.
It didn't come.
I examined the knives in the sphere a little closer and saw that the fishing line had slackened; the magnets had centered the knives in the center of the sphere. I walked over to the laser, checked the focus with the red HeNe beam and then fired the invisible high output laser.
It was a little disappointing; nothing spectacular happened until about two minutes into the process and then the edges of the knife blades started to faintly glow. The bluish-white glow got brighter and brighter; eventually forcing me to turn away from looking directly at it, but by that time I had seen that the glow had involved the entire knife. I kept sniffing for the smell of something burning and thought briefly about the mis-wired smoke detectors. I would have to ask Mr. Griggs about those.
The laser timed out and shut off. The blades slowly stopped glowing. As soon as I could look at them without going blind, I moved closer to the sphere. I tried to feel if there had been any heat generated by the process by holding my hand out as close to the sphere as I could get before the magnetic fields stopped me. I could not detect any heat, but it could have been kept inside by the magnetic fields. Heat was, after all, just the lower end of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. It made sense if the magnetic fields had some effect on it. Then again, it might not, but strange things had been happening lately and I wasn't sure of all of the rules in the other dimension. Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics may not be the same there as they were here.
The 5 minute post laser phase ended. While I was waiting I had disabled the laser and changed out the mirror Billy had used. I replaced it with a beam-splitter device. I also angled the beam-splitter so that the two beams from that expensive piece of equipment were aimed towards our conventional concrete targets. Hopefully if anyone came into the lab and knew about the sphere, they would not put the two projects together. I also moved one of the 6-foot cloth partitions back to its original position where it was directly in the path of the laser beam if it were aimed at the sphere. That should be enough to keep the curious satisfied.
When the HV generator had spun down and the magnetic fields were shut off, I carefully moved over to the sphere to see what had happened to the knives. Nothing had shorted out, no big sparks, no flashes of lightning, balls of fire; nothing, just that bluish-white glow that had now disappeared.
The knives and sheaths were now hanging suspended from the fishing line again, but instead of the blackened metal of the combat knives, the blades and hilts appeared to be made from a crystal clear material. They looked a bit thinner than before, too.
I checked for an elevated temperature using my hand again and couldn't feel any heat at all. Still, I used the tongs from the lab and carefully removed the knives from the sphere and put them on the workbench in the lab. Finally, using one of our scientific thermometers, I check for any heat. The reading was ambient.
Suddenly kicking myself that I hadn't done it before, I also checked for radiation with the Geiger counter we used in the physics lab downstairs. Yeah, it was kind of like closing the barn door after the horse had escaped, but I figured better late than never. Fortunately there was no radiation — at least, none that could be measured by that primitive instrument.
I finally picked up one of the knives in my hand. It felt heavier than it should have for its size. Whatever the new material was that the metal alloy in the knife had changed into; it was very dense. I put one of the knives under the binocular microscope and examined it. The edges appeared to be very sharp. I pulled a sheet of paper across the edge of the blade and watched it in the microscope. The paper seemed to separate before it reached the actual edge of the knife.
I used a higher magnification and a different wavelength light source and it now looked like there was a thin aura surrounding the blade that was almost invisible.
I measured some calipers to measure the thickness of the blade. Again, I kicked myself for not measuring these things for a baseline. Still, I estimated the thickness of the blade was reduced almost 40-50%.
The next test was a test of brittleness. A knife wasn't going to be any good if it shattered when it hit something hard, like a rib. I fastened the blade of the knife into the vise on the workbench and used a block and tackle to pull sideways on the hilt to bend the knife. I was trying to stay out of the way as I applied force to the blade in case it snapped. I was pulling as hard as I could, and even though I was small, the block and tackle amplified my efforts. At full strength, the knife bent a tiny bit, but it didn't break. When I released the tension it returned to the vertical starting position. I was beginning to be impressed with whatever this new material was.
I used one of the knives to try to cut lengthwise with the grain of a piece of Fir 2X4 we had laying around. It cut the wood like a knife through butter. There was also very little resistance when I cut the wood across the grain. This blade was sharp!
I held the ankle sheath in one hand and a knife in the other and watched in the mirror as I blinked invisible. Both items disappeared. It appeared as if Charlie and I could at least have a basic level of defense. I fastened the sheath around my ankle and if felt pretty good. I sheathed the knife and pulled my pants' leg down to cover it.
I cleaned up the lab, put away the Geiger counter and the microscope, swept up the wood shavings and put away the fishing line. I had always been kind of a neat freak, but Mr. Griggs was adamant about cleaning up and putting things away after using them. Some of the students in the physics class had flunked a lab because they left out a Bunsen burner or a set of rollers or something. He had even gotten after me a couple of times.
When I was satisfied with the condition of the lab, I collected all of the remaining items, stuffed them in my backpack and teleported to the house. Directly to my room, actually. Charlie was at home in her room and Mom was just leaving for her night out. Charlie had laid out a set of new clothes on my bed and had put all of my other unprocessed clothes in a large plastic bag. I changed into my new clothes and put the ones I had been wearing into the bag with the other 'old' clothes.
I went into Charlie's room and showed her the knives. When I cautioned her against even touching the blade — most people will run their finger over the edge of a knife to see if it's sharp — she thought I was kidding. When I sliced an old boot in half, including the steel shank in the sole, her eyes got real wide. I showed her how to strap it on her ankle so it didn't show. Of course, she would have to be wearing pants.
I had explained a bit about Billy to her and now I told her what I wanted to do tonight. I had heard he was going to be sedated. I wanted to get into his memories for several reasons. He had tried to kill me and I wanted to know why. He knew, whether he 'knew' it or not, how to run the process. And last, but not least, he knew about our Father. I wanted to know what he knew. I was also curious about his relationship to his four visitors at the hospital.
Charlie got dressed in her new clothes in front of me. She didn't put on a show, but she was watching me watch her. I think it kind of turned her on, knowing how besotted I was with her beauty. Hell, at my age, Miss Piggy naked would turn me on, but she still appreciated that she could get my motor running.
We held hands and I blinked us to the empty room we had used earlier. Sooner or later we would have to find another spot; some poor patient was going to have a heart attack if we suddenly appeared in the room and it was occupied.
We turned invisible and went down to the Pediatric Ward where Billy was staying. We hung around the nursing station until one of the night staff nodded to the female doctor and said that he was out. The female doctor turned and headed down the hallway toward Radiology. This was our chance.
Charlie watched as I got ready to enter Billy's mind. I had suggested that she put her hand on my shoulder. I was thinking maybe she could 'see' inside him too if she was touching me. It was worth a shot. I slipped into Billy's mind and just about vomited.
It was the most vile, disgusting sensation I had ever felt. I heard Charlie gasp and knew she had felt it as well. She had probably also noticed she was one of his favorite fantasy fixations when masturbating, of which there seemed to be an inordinate amount of episodes. They were not nice ones, either, as he had predilections towards masochism. There were a lot of bondage images, images of torture, a lot of blood and strange machinery of all sorts floating around in his head. I couldn't see how he could function at all.
I hardened myself against the filth and focused on finding the information we wanted. I dug deeper into his mind, down past the pornographic images. Billy, down deep, was actually pretty intelligent for a 16 year old kid. Of course, the fact that he was actually almost twice that age at 31 probably had a lot to do with it ... He had had surgery to make himself look younger.
I started with why he had tried to kill me. I was stunned when I 'saw' the instructions in his mind. No, they were orders; military orders from his 'commander.' Young Billy was a radical terrorist. The people pretending to be parents and his brothers were a family he had co-opted with his money, drugs and blackmail. It hadn't taken much persuasion as they were already thugs and were willing to provide him a front for a hefty amount of cash.
His commander — he didn't know who she was — had told him to get rid of me. It wasn't personal against me. She wanted to punish the 'Major.' It was supposed to be an accident timed for when I was in the lab and he was in the hospital. I realized that Mr. Griggs must be 'the Major.' Billy hadn't told her the first attempt on me had failed. He was also the one responsible for downloading the video feeds from the spy cameras and he hadn't gotten around to it before he landed in the hospital.
I realized if I could erase his memories of that night, Charlie and I would be the only ones who knew the laser was a part of the process. I had the file from the computer.
I was stunned to find that Billy had also planned a second attempt to kill me. Tonight, while I was here in the hospital, he had instructed his brothers to pack my locker at school with enough C4 explosive to level the school when I opened it up tomorrow morning. It was supposed to look like I had made some more of explosive.
It was a good plan. I had made up a batch of C4 on a bet with my Chemistry teacher in 9th grade. She had thought I was going to make a tiny bit in a beaker, not 50 lbs of it. When she saw the huge blob of it in the Chem lab, everyone got kind of excited after that and evacuated the school and several blocks of homes around it.
I couldn't understand all the excitement. Heck, I even carried it out to the bomb squad. They put this little dinky padded thing over it and were going to detonate it. I suggested they move further back as I had tweaked the formula a bit. I had made it more stable than the original formula but with about 40% more explosive power than regular C4. I guess you could call it C4+.
The 50 pounds of C4 blew a hell of a hole in the parking lot and demolished their little padded thingy; flinging in about 300 feet into the air. I got an 'A' for the class, but was forbidden to ever go near the chemistry lab again. I didn't have the heart to tell them I could get all the ingredients for more in the grocery store and pharmacy. I never told anyone I had made it on a bet, either, so the chemistry teacher got to keep her job, although she was reprimanded for not supervising the class as she could have. I was 12 years old then, I think.
So Billy was going to make it look like I had made more explosive and blown up the school. It was pretty clever, actually, using a previous incident like that. Everyone would automatically blame me because of the last time and not look any deeper. But it pissed me off. I think it pissed Charlie off, too, as I was beginning to sense her presence in his mind along with mine, although she seemed to be doing her own 'research.'
We had found everything but the information regarding our Father. I tried to 'think' with Billy's memories about what he knew, but there was a block of some sort. He didn't seem to know another Douglass Hornsby, other than me. Dark memories and an intense hatred of me were the only things I encountered in his mind attached to that name. I wondered if he knew my Father under another name. I started to dig in other places, especially in places where he had committed to memory specific things he would need to remember; numbers, names, addresses, things like that.
I found bank account numbers and transfer codes. The accounts had staggering balances in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in them. There were other things, code words for secret websites, how to request more funds, how to contact his superior and, interestingly, how to contact her superior without her knowledge. There was also a list of code names like the Major's and these began to pull up memories and images.
We ran through these images but unfortunately none of them looked like our Father, although neither of us was really sure what he looked like. Mom had kept no pictures of him and he was gone when Charlie and I were very young. There were a couple of names with factoids only, no images. Charlie and I understood that these were probably not his own life experiences but were from reports or stories. Most of the reports were in French, which we also discovered Billy spoke fluently, but neither of us could find a reference to a 'cage' or 'bars' that could help us identify our Father.
There was no image in his of his superior, though there were several horrid images of what he would like to do to and with her, once he had finished this mission. He thought of himself as superior to her and had had to be coerced into accepting her being in charge. The images of the superior were faceless and grotesquely misshapen with huge tits and gaping cunts. I had been hoping to get Bill his absolute proof of Ms. Brisard's involvement, but that was not going to be.
I had one last thing to do. In my innocence, I had weakened and had decided I couldn't kill Billy; he was in the hospital and sedated. It wouldn't be 'fair.' I was, however, going to really fuck him up. He had tried to kill me. I figured this was a form of delayed self-defense, especially with the second attempt they were going to make tomorrow. I found the memory of the night in the lab and imagined ripping it out of his brain.
It felt as if I had actually ripped it out. I consulted privately with Charlie and let her know what I wanted to do. She wanted to kill him outright, but agreed when I told her my plan.
I went back in to Billy's mind and started ripping out every memory I could get my mental 'hands' on. When I was finished, all he had left were the pornographic images, but they were now connect to painful sensations in his cock and asshole. Whenever he would think of them, he would curl up in a ball and scream. In addition, he could speak only rudimentary English and French. I limited his vocabulary to 'Hi! My name is Billy, ' which he would say with an explosive enthusiasm, as if it was the only thing in the world he was proud of. He also had one other phase that would be triggered when he was alone with any male older than 16 years of age. That phrase was 'Would you like to fuck my ass?', again said with enthusiasm. Both of these phases would be triggered by any question asked of him or by any silence lasting longer than 20 seconds. He was going to drive people nuts.
I didn't think young Billy was going to be returning to school.
Charlie and I disengaged from Billy's mind and blinked back to my bedroom. I immediately took a shower to get rid of the feeling of dirt and grime. It didn't help, but I did feel better.
I got on my computer and proceeded to empty out all of the accounts I had found in Billy's mind. It totaled a little over $600,000 from all the accounts he had, some of which were hidden from everyone; I guess that was his 'mad money.' I had broken into and set up bank accounts in several banks around the world when I was 10 years old, more because I was bored than malicious. I had kept them active for the last four years and I routed the money from Billy's accounts through several of these before I felt the money trail had been obfuscated. I left the bulk of the money in a numbered offshore account and put a little into an account I had opened in a nation-wide bank in the name of 'Chuck Smith.' I ordered three credit cards with fake names and had them sent to the bank with the numbered account. The bank there would forward the cards to a blind post office box I set up with Mail Boxes, Etc.
I used his passwords to get onto the secret website. I entered the codes he had memorized to request additional funds. I went over his superior's head on this one and requested a ridiculous amount of $20 million. I 'reported' that I had proof my superior had been compromised by the Major and had been turned against. She was now a double agent and couldn't be trusted. I needed the funds to implicate and capture the Major and bring him in.
I was slightly stunned when the total amount of the funds requested was wired into one of Billy's accounts within minutes of my 'report' and request. Those funds were withdrawn from that account and routed into my accounts before anyone could get suspicious and put a hold on them. Our new enterprise was now funded. Damn, I should have asked for more money!
Charlie and I realized we had an obligation to stop the bomb from going off as it would kill and injure hundreds of kids. We teleported over to the school and appeared in the main hallway. My locker was on the second floor near the front of the building. A huge bomb exploding there would wipe out all the students in congregated in the front of the building, in the library and in the classrooms along that front hallway. That would be the majority of the students.
We went invisible and ran up the stairs to my locker. It was a good thing that these people were not the brains of the operation. Anyone with brains would have armed the bomb with a secondary booby trap. If someone tried to disarm the bomb one way, the second switch would trigger the bomb by another way. These boobs had set it up with a simple microswitch that was more likely to go off when they let go of the door of the locker after they had closed it. There was enough play in the door that it could cause the bomb to go off.
I had more practice with blinking in and out. The hallway was dark, the two boobs were just shy of being totally inebriated, and I really was very quick. I had my knife out, blinked in, cut the wires and blinked out faster than they could recognize me. They may have felt something, but with no evidence, they probably thought it was gas or the last beer they had swilled backing up on them.
They didn't notice the cut wires when they stuffed the bomb into my locker and the bomb did not go off as they closed the door. They snickered as they skulked back out of the building. Charlie and I blinked back into sight.
"What do we do now?" she asked.
"I'm thinking we return it to them, after we fix it, of course," I said.
"It will kill them, Dougie."
"I know. I'm beginning to really dislike those guys. They were going to let a lot of kids and teachers die, just to get me to maybe hurt the Major, uh, Mr. Griggs, uh, Bill. I think they deserve it."
"You want to ask Bill what he thinks?" she asked.
"Might as well. That's what we need him for. We can tell him about the money at the same time."
I reached for the handle on the locker. I looked back at Charlie.
"You'd better go invisible, just in case."
"Screw you, Mr. Superhero. We do this together."
She reached over and we opened the locker. I didn't exactly pee in my pants when nothing happened, but we both let out a pretty good sigh of relief. We grabbed the C4 and teleported to Mr. Griggs' house.
I don't know whether having two teenagers suddenly appear in your living room was a bigger surprise than the large bundle of explosives they were carrying or not, but Bill seemed to take both in stride. He did eye the cut wires pretty carefully, though.
We told him about Billy, but not what we had done to his mind. I figured he would figure that out on his own sooner or later, but knowing about it would probably bother him. It was funny in a way — killing someone was somehow 'acceptable, ' but messing with someone's mind was considered to be too invasive. Something was out of balance in that thinking, but that was for later. Charlie and I had to tell Bill what we had learned about his past, about his being called 'the Major', about the attempts to kill me to hurt him and so on.
"Douglass, I am so sorry. I was just so proud of you that I must have talked of you as if you were my own son. It would be easy for someone to realize they could hurt me through you. I am now convinced, well, almost nearly 100%, that Ms. Brisard was Billy's superior. I talked with her about you often."
Thinking about what we had not found in Billy's memories, I asked him, "Did you speak to any other women about me; other female teachers or the Vice Principal or the Guidance Counselors?"
"Yes. To all of them."
"So, it might not be Ms. Brisard?" I continued.
"No, I'm not certain. You're right about that," he answered.
"But we do know that those cretins were going to blow up the school and kill a bunch of people," I said, pointing to the explosives.
"Yes, we do know that," he said tentatively, trying to understand where I was headed.
Charlie piped up. "Well, I for one think it's a disgrace for them to leave things like this lying around the school. I think we should return it to them."
"I should probably fix the damage I did to it first. It wouldn't be right to return it broken. I'll fix it and then leave it just inside their door. What do you think, Major?"
Bill looked at me sharply as I addressed him by his former rank, then back and forth between Charlie, the C4 and me.
"Well," he said carefully, "given that that material is contraband, I think there should be a penalty for them having it in their possession and being so careless as to leave it lying around like that. Someone could get hurt, you're right. I think you should only return about 25% of that stack to them. That way they won't be able to hurt anyone else in their neighborhood if it should go off accidently. We could keep the rest of it until we were able to get it to the proper authorities. How do you two feel about that?"
Charlie and I grinned at each other. Bill was going to work out really well.
"Be right back," I said and I left with the explosives. I had an image of Billy's house from his memories and I went there, appearing just inside the entry. I was going to repair the wires and set it up just inside the doorway. But then I remembered one of Billy's memories of their life at home. The father would come in every evening, set himself in the lounger and watch TV. He wouldn't move until he went to bed around 3:00 in the morning. Both the mother's and the two son's bedrooms were directly above the room with the TV.
This made a better plan. They might not all be in front of the door. They might not all come back together. But at 3:00 in the morning, they would almost all be in the house and in bed.
I quickly hid the bomb under the tired brown lounger with the microswitch positioned to be activated when someone sat in the chair. It would detonate when it was released, when whoever was sitting in it got out of the chair.
One of the cars the Jones family was just driving up as I finished cleaning up. I took the remaining C4 and went back to Bill's house. I had been gone 10 minutes.
"Shit, Douglass. I still can't get used to you doing that. Everything go OK?" he asked.
I told him what I had done. Charlie and I then told him about the funding and that we now had over $20 million. I also told him it was invested using some of my earlier research and investment formulas; it should be growing rapidly. I was heavily invested in foreign energy stocks and with the current and past administration's self-destructive energy policies, it was as sure of a bet as there was.
We talked about a lot of things late into early morning. We were still pretty cautious with revealing too much about ourselves to each other. Bill, as the Major, had a lot of secrets to keep and we were just kids, really; unproven and untrained. It was going to be his job to teach us and train us. On our side, we didn't really know him and we weren't ready to trust anyone with our secret of the process.
Bill insisted that we both start martial arts training immediately. Not just once a week classes, but very intensive for the rest of the school year. He 'knew a guy' he said, and we understood that we were going to be receiving special training. We agreed.
We talked about what we wanted to do with our lives — when we grew up, so to speak. After we had talked about it for a long time, Bill said that he would see that we both graduated high school with our class, but he wanted us working out and training for several hours a day, school requirements be damned. We all agreed that our futures, the courses of our lives had now been set.
The Major showed us our super secret agent badges. He had us sign a couple of papers and then take an oath in front of him. He recorded it on a small tape player. When it was all done, he took our badges away from us and locked them in a safe in his floor. I kind of jokingly reminded him that nothing I signed or said was legally binding as I was still a minor. He glared at me and asked me if I wanted to be treated like an adult or a minor, my choice. I shut the fuck up.
The highlight of the evening was when I gave Bill one of the processed combat knives. I had told him about them but when he actually got it in his hands, he really got excited about it. He couldn't take his eyes off of it and looked up at me a couple of times, speechless, but mostly he just started at it. He finally got up and went out to his garage. We followed him. He dug around and found some scraps from some project he had completed. He cut through a piece of rebar like he was slicing through a piece of string. When he was done, he strapped the knife on his ankle with practiced moves of which both Charlie and I took note. This was obviously something with which he was familiar.
"Douglass, I don't know what to say. 'Thank you' seems like it is not enough." He seemed really touched.
Just about then we heard the sound of a distant boom and the windows in the garage rattled. It was about 2:30 in the morning. Apparently someone had decided to retire early. It was probably all that excitement at the school...