"Deke, could you please tell me where we're going?"

"To Pleasure Island!" Payne shouted in my left ear, d.a.m.n near startling me into the luggage rack. "Where we turn naughty boys like you into jacka.s.ses!" I uncringed my neck again and turned around to look at him. For a flash, Payne's face softened a little, maybe. "And once in a great while we turn jacka.s.ses into decent men," he added.

The softness flashed off. He spun around, walked up to the front of the plane, went into the pilot's compartment. A second later, one of the engines made a chunk! and a whine and started turning over. Soon's it66 caught, they fired up the other. Two minutes later we were rattling out onto the runway, and five minutes after that we were groaning into the air.

When we finished climbing and banking the sun was shining straight in Deke's window. Okay, we were going north. The sunlight bugged Deke, so he closed the shade, pulled an a.n.a.log book out of the camo gym bag (also stenciled D.K. Luger) beneath his seat, and buried his freckled nose in reading. I tried to look around for somebody else to talk to, but n.o.body'd look me in the face. By and by, my stomach started reminding me that it was expecting breakfast.

Great. I was hungry. I was tired. I was cold, now that Deke had closed the shade. And I was flying into Canada with a bunch of depressed punks and twenty junior jarheads who were treating me like a total zero.

I didn't have a clear idea yet of what I was gonna do to Dad when I got back, but it was gonna be good.67

Chapter 0/ 8.

After the bleary eyes wore off, most of the jarheads started to get real chatty. I managed to tap part-way into a couple of the conversations going on around me-the engine noise put some garble in everything, but I caught enough to make sense-and I picked up we were going to someplace called The Academy. With capital letters. I also learned that, while none of the kids had actually been There before, a few had friends or older brothers who'd gone last summer.

I detensioned a little. So it was a summer camp. Not a life sentence.

Further, the story going around was that the friends/ brothers had had nothing but non-stop fun at The Academy. Just when I started to think this might be worth an actual look forward, I picked up that fun meant exercise, drilling, and playing soldier. Jarheads define things weird, I decided. When the kids in front of me started talking about war games at The Academy I tried to crack in and tell 'em all about my Battle of Peshawar program, but they clammed and pretended not to hear me.

Okay, if that's the way they wanted it, I could go into silent mode for awhile. Their idea of war gaming sounded pretty lame, anyway.

Around 11:0/ 7:0/0/ , Deke lifted the shade again. Then he reached down and pulled a sandwich out of his bag: Bologna on Wonder-not something I'd eat, normal-but I was starting to get real concious that it'd been 17 hours since my last meal, and I'd have eaten a dead mouse on rye if he'd had one and offered to share it. Never taking his eyes off his book, Deke unwrapped the sandwich and started to munch it, slow. I watched him until it was gone. I watched his cheeks pouch out and his jaw grind; I watched every crumb that fell into the book. I chewed my nails and tried to get up the nerve to beg half of it off him.68 No, cancel that. I needed to make a friend out of somebody on that plane, and I'd already made Deke squirm once. Pushing myself in D.K.

Luger's face was not gonna make it any better. Derzky was how I needed to be. I'd be derzky, I'd be smart. I wouldn't push him. He'd loosen up.

About the time he finished the sandwich, the plane started nosing down and the wheels groaned into landing position. Still trying to keep cool, I casual looked around Deke and got a peek out the window. All I could see was big trees, small lakes, and more trees. No roads, no houses, no smokestacks; nothing but tall pine trees coming up fast. Just when I was starting to do a little worry about whether this landing was planned, I saw a bunch of plowed fields flash by the window and then we set down in a clearing.

Or maybe it was another plowed field. We hit the ground, bounced hard, hit the ground again. The pilot reversed engines, braking us, and I kept looking out the window, trying to get some idea of what The Academy looked like. Still nothing but trees.

When we'd almost stopped rolling, I finally saw some buildings: A pathetic little shack covered with camo netting, a couple green corrugated tin sheds that might've been hangars. I didn't get more of a look, though, 'cause that was when Payne stuck his face into the pa.s.senger compartment and yelled, "Plane's on fire! Clear and take cover! Now!"

The jarheads went crazy. I would've too, if my brain hadn't been running on five-second delay. Sudden, everybody was up and clawing for their stuff. Deke pulled the gym bag out from under his seat, climbed over me to get his duffel bag off the overhead rack, knocked my suitcase down. Missed my head by about two inches. The plane stopped moving; the propellors stopped turning. Someone popped the front and rear hatches, and then it registered.

Jesus Mary and Joseph FIRE? Most of the other kids were already compressed into two tight jams around the front and rear hatches; looked like the Ticketron booth the day Stag Preston tickets went on sale.

Someone near me got a bright idea and popped the emergency exit over69 the wing. I hesitated a second, then got a good grip on Mom's suitcase and dove through.

Just for laughs, sometime, find yourself a nice big slab of aluminum and jump on it, face first. They make it look so easy on video.

I lost hold of the suitcase, of course; it went sliding down the wing and I went rolling after it. The suitcase and I flipped off the back edge of the wing together. It bounced one way and I bounced the other, but together we put a pretty good dent in the ground. When my headchips reseated themselves in their sockets, I flagged everybody was running for the woods like they were being chased by a pack of LowerTown rollerbladers, so I decided I'd look for the charred remains of the suitcase later. Stumble-running after the jarheads, totally expecting to feel a blast of flames behind me at any second, I reached the edge of the airstrip, closed my eyes, and dove headfirst into the weeds.

Silence.

Incredible, awesome silence. I could almost feel my ears growing, as they struggled to grab some audio they recognized. The first sound that soaked through to my brain was my own heavy breathing.

Then a nervous young whisper or two. Then birds chattering up in the treetops; a rustle of wind seeping through green leaves. Some kind of insect buzzing by, slow, droning, and erratic, like it was flying drunk.

A minute or two more and I realized the plane was continuing to not explode, so I opened my eyes and looked back. Payne had lowered the boarding ladder, and he and the pilot were taking a nice, leisure stroll towards the camo net-covered shack. There wasn't any fire. There wasn't even any smoke. I remembered the thing Payne had said back in Seattle about liking to keep us disoriented, and fed that to the inference engine in my head. It kicked out the idea that this was going to be one long summer. If I didn't get out.

The pilot went into the shack and started talking to someone. Payne stayed outside and brayed, "Fall in!" When the jarheads and most of the punks had trotted over he looked straight at me and shouted, "Are you waiting for an invitation, p.i.s.sant? Or do you like lying in poison ivy?"70 Poison ivy? Oh, just fritzing terrific.

Slow, gingerish, trying not to touch one more leaf than I absolute had to, I started getting up out of the weeds. Payne turned back to the rest and began barking out orders. "Ten-shun! For mup! By twos! Rye face!" All that kind of military babble stuff. A couple seconds later most everybody had collected their bags and gone trotting off down a jeep trail into the woods, except for me and the two McPunks. I was just standing there, wondering what the h.e.l.l I was 'sposed to do about poison ivy now that I'd been lying in it, and trying to figure out how cooperative I felt. The McPunks were staring at the rutted, weedy dirt trail, and fondling the wheels of their skateboards.

One of them started giggling. The other one got a fierce scowl on his face and punched the giggler on the shoulder, but that just made him giggle harder. He kept building up, and building up, until finally he was laughing and howling like he'd gone full-blown nutzoid. Then he took a big spinning windup and threw his skateboard off into the trees just as hard as he could throw it.

The other one stared at him a minute longer, then shrugged, grinned, and followed suit. Laughing Boy settled down long enough to program his Casio for a funky marching rhythm, and then the two of them started off after Payne and the rest.

Since I didn't have any better ideas, I walked over to the plane, picked up Mom's suitcase, reset the mileage counter in my right shoe, and followed them.71

Chapter 0/ 9.

Up and down, twisting and turning through the deep shadowy woods, the trail wound on. And on. And on. Around .27 miles, I noticed that my suitcase was getting real heavy. That, and Payne and the rest of the kids were moving a lot faster than I was. I'd already lost sight of the group; even the Style Statement wimp who was bringing up the rear.

(How he ever managed to move that fast in those shoes, I don't know).

At .56 miles, I started to flash on them all being in on the scam.

Yeah, that was it. Dad had paid them all off. They'd flown me up here just to ditch me in the woods, and now they were back at the plane, laughing hysterical.

At 1.12 miles, I came out of the woods and into The Academy.

The basic layout was a bunch of long, low, prefab buildings lining the sides of a big rectangular field. The forest came right up to my end of the field; at the other end they'd stacked a mess of the prefabs to make a vaguely high-schoolish looking building. There was also a sort of reviewing stand or something out in front of the big building, with two flagpoles, a Canadian flag, and a U.S. flag even bigger than the one at Perkins. Something bothered me about that, and I kept looking at those two flags until I traced it down.

The flags were the only splash of bright color in the whole scene.

The sky was a kind of a washed out pale blue, with the occasional fluffy white cloud scattered around. The woods were a lush, deep, mottled green, tall pine trees stretching on forever. The underbrush came right up to the edge of the Academy, like a thick, dark green wall. The gra.s.s on the field was cropped short and sunburned a greenish-tan; the buildings were green, the reviewing stand was green, every d.a.m.n rock and garbage can was painted green. There must have been two hundred guys around the buildings or out on the field, and every single fritzin'72 one of them was dressed head-to-toe in green!

Except for two electric blue mohawks at the tail end of a line going into a large, low building. I walked over and rejoined my group.

Step by step, we filed slow into the building. The McPunk who'd done all the laughing was still in Sputter 'n' Snicker mode so he wasn't much use, but after awhile I got the other one talking. Turned out his name was Scott Nordstrom, and he was from Iowa or Illinois or someplace with an I like that.

"How'd you wind up here?" I asked him. He ejected the CD from his boombox and handed it to me. Angina Pectoris: The bimbette who'd made the tatterblouse famous. I'd never thought much of her music, but Lisa really grooved on the image. "So?"

Scott shrugged. "My folks are like, Springsteen dweebs, y'know? I mean, Big Time. Souvenir decanters, paintings on black velvet, the whole bit. Like we even went to Asbury Park for our vacation last year.

Christ, it was a pilgrimage."

"So?"

"So we mixed it up the other night, y'know? I'm listening to Diamonds from the Veldt, and they start getting on my jammy about how Angie is so yoko, total trash, and all the rest of that metal, y'know? Then they go into the usual spew about how I should be listening to some Genuine Boss and getting in sync with the working cla.s.ses."

"Sounds familiar," I said. I'd lucked out. My olders had never had it that bad. They'd just collected every version of Born to Run ever recorded.

Scott pointed to the CD label. "So I program my boombox to be playing track #3 ninety-nine times in a row. Then I crank it to def volume, lock it in their bedroom closet with all the sweetleaf plants, and leave the house." He smiled. "I take the closet key with me."

I looked at the disk. Track #3 was, Brucie B Dead (And I Glad He Gone). I handed the CD back to Scott. "No sense of humor, huh?"

Scott shrugged. "I expected them to get messed, y'know, but they smoked their voice coils! I was hanging out in front of Mickey D's with73 my homeboys when eight sides of bacon rolled up in their stymobiles, and we all wound up spending the night in the drooler's lockup. The boys got out the next morning, but my dad refused to take the call. Max dweeb!"

Scott calmed down. "It took the bacon a week to get my folks to admit they were my folks, and by that time Dad'd jammed through the academy admit. I went straight from Vagrant Heaven to the airport, to some private slammer in Seattle. My luggage caught up with me there.

My folks sent along some clothes, my skateboard, my boombox." Scott took the Angie Pectoris disk back from me. "And one CD."

I started to mumble something sympathetic, but he threw me an interrupt.

"You want to know what's really yoko?" Scott blurted. "Listen!" He cranked up the boombox's volume control and started spinning through the FM dial. "Zippo, man. Flat nothing!" He shut the boombox off. "I don't know what state Canada is in, but we are a zillion miles from anywhere I want to be." By this time we'd shuffled up to the door of the shed. Scott turned to step inside.

"The Von Schlager Military Academy," he grumbled. "Hah! They should call it Absolute Fuggin' Nowhere."

A little flag went up in my head. "Break! A nano back you said- Scott, you know something about this place?"

He turned back to me, surprised. "Don't-? Uh, sure. Like you never heard of the Von Schlager Military Academy?" I shook my head.

"Oh, b.u.mmer. Look, dude, this place is def bad. I don't mean 'baaad,' I mean bad. I mean, the Fundies don't send their kids here, 'cause they don't like the way they think when they get out. Even the Posse don't send their kids here." A look of big concern took hold of Scott's face.

He pointed to himself. "It's like, I'm not worried about myself, 'cause I am so together, y'know? But if you're going into this cold blind ... ," he shook his head and frowned.

I grabbed his sleeve. "Scott, you gotta tell me-"

"Will you two wimps kindly get your candy a.s.ses in here?"74 Somebody grabbed hold of Scott's other arm and dragged him inside. I got pulled along in the cavitation.

The room was small, windowless, and dusty hot airless. Four big kids, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, were standing just inside the door. One grabbed Scott's suitcase as he came in and ran with it out the door on the other side of the room. Another grabbed Scott's boombox and threw it on a folding table, while a third started going over Scott's body with an airport detex. The fourth one-a big, red-haired guy with a face like a pepperoni pizza-just stood back and looked mean.

"Hey dudes," Scott said, as boombox batteries went rolling all over the floor, "this is not cool."

n.o.body answered. The guy who'd taken the boombox pulled out a screwdriver and started cracking open the case.

"Hey, man! You're wrecking my tunes machine!" Scott started to move, but Pizza Face stepped forward.

"'Hey, man!'," Pizza Face said, on maximum mock. "We won't break your 'tunes machine'." He smiled, nasty, and added, "We let your bunkies do that."

"Relax," the guy with the screwdriver said, a little friendlier. "I'm just checking for contraband."

"Riiight!" Scott said, all smiles. "ContraBand. I heard of them; salsa group out of Miami, right?" n.o.body smiled.

"Well, he's clean for metal," the guy with the detex said, "but the sniffer's picking up something." He waved the loop around Scott a few more times, then announced, "D-Lysergic. Right front pants pocket."

Scott never had time to react. Neat and businesslike, the two inspectors dropped their tools and pinned his arms, while Pizza Face reached into Scott's pocket and pulled out his handkerchief. "Hey dude,"

Scott said, "if you needed to blow your nose, you just hadda ask."

Pizza Face whipped out this enormous thing that looked like a cross between a Bowie Knife and a ripsaw and split the kerchief along one seam. The kerchief turned out to be made of two sheets of thin fabric, with a thick layer of soft white paper in between. "Oh, crud," Scott said,75 quiet. Pizza Face sheathed the knife, pulled a plastic lighter out of his shirt pocket, and fired it up. When Scott realized what was happening, he made one more desperate lunge to break free. They had him solid.

Fighting was getting nowhere, so Scott tried talking. "Hey look, dude. That's five hundred dollars worth of really def blotter there. Let me go and I'll have my homeboys put some maximum 'roids in the next load. You look like a dude who'd appreciate some really fine 'roids."

Slowly, Pizza Face brought the lighter to the paper. He was enjoying this.

"No, really, I'll get you top drawer s.h.i.t," Scott said. "Make you feel like Rambo."

Pizza Face touched the flame to the edge of the blotter.

Scott started to cry. "C'mon, dude! I traded my Casio for that!"

Pizza Face smiled at him. "Toughski s.h.i.tski. From now on, you go straightedge. Everybody here goes straightedge." The flames enveloped the blotter. Scott just stood there, watching and whimpering, until it was all gone.

They let go of him, and the guy with the detex made one more pa.s.s.

"Clean," he announced. The other guy collected all the pieces of the boombox and handed them over, and they pushed Scott through the door at the other end of the room.

Pizza Face turned around, smiling. "And now for you."

Don't misunderstand; I was still in orientation mode, looking sharp for an escape hatch, and not at all interested in being cooperative. Only, this didn't seem like a good place to prove it, y'know? When Pizza Face moved forward I stood total still, raised my hands slow. The baggage guy came back into the room and ran off with Mom's suitcase. Pizza Face took a step back and let the other two guys start working me over with the detex. Honest, I was trying my best to ride out the flow!

Until the detex beeped as it went over the inside pocket holding my Starfire, and the scanners dropped their tools and pinned my arms to my sides.

Maybe it was 'cause I was fierce hungry. Maybe it was 'cause I was76 burned-out tired. Maybe it was 'cause I had this horrible flash forward of ham-hands with the screwdriver trying to take apart my Starfire, or maybe it was 'cause I'd spent most of the last 24 hours getting my arms pinned by various kinds of gestapo and I was just real tired of being grabbed like that. Anyway, Pizza Face came swaggering over, saying, "Let's see what he's got, shall we?," and reaching for my jumpsuit zipper.

Then he stopped cold, looked down, cracked a smirk- "Not again," I whispered.

Pizza Face grabbed my chin, tilted my head back so he could look me right in the eye, and smiled nasty. "What happened, boy?" he asked, quiet. "Some dog mistake your feet for a tree?"

That did it! I stomped down hard on somebody's instep; I wriggled, I kicked, I spun; I don't know how I did it but suddenly I was free and looking straight down my arm as my skinny fist zeroed right in on Pizza Face's big zit-covered nose! I think I even screamed something fierce right out of Seven Blades for the Dragon!

I don't know how Pizza Face did it, either. All I know is that one moment my fist was six inches away from his nose and dead on course, and then a nano later I was punching empty air. Pizza Face grabbed my wrist as it went past, helped my spin along with a tug, gave me a sidefoot kick in the back of the knee.

What I do know is that it hurt. A lot. I started to go down. He put more pressure on my knee to make sure I kept going. When I could focus again I was lying on the floor, flat on my back, and Pizza Face was crouching over me. I could see his nametag, clear. His name was Rogers. Roid Rogers.

Rogers kneeled down, so he could shove his left shoulder in my face, and growled, "Cute stunt, candy-a.s.s." His face was turning bright red, making his zits look like sunspots on Betelgeuse. I tried to get up.

He pushed me back down again, hard.

"You see this, candy a.s.s?" he said, pointing at the knotted black cord stuck on his shoulder. "This means I'm a Cadet, Grade Four. You77 know what that means? It means I can beat the p.i.s.s out of you any time I feel like it."

"Hey Rogers," the guy with the detex was saying, "ease up on the kid, okay?"

"And now, to make sure that you remember this lesson," Rogers growled, leaving the sentence hanging in the air. He made a fist with his right hand, drew it back like a pinball launcher, and gave me one last evil smile.