Mr Popular

Chapter 9: Ghosts in the Machine(Continuation)

Julian looked down at her. He thought about the three years he had spent as Mr. Popular. The forced smiles in the hallways, the hollow victories on the field, the suffocating weight of being a golden statue in his father’s corrupt empire.

​"I passed the point of no return when I threw that football away yesterday," Julian said, his voice quiet but lined with steel. "I'm not going back to the glass box, Maya. Not for him. Not for anyone."

​Maya stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then, she reached into her pocket, pulled out the sleek silver flash drive containing the encrypted ledger, and handed it to him. "Then let's go burn the castle down."

​The storm outside had escalated from a steady downpour into a violent gale. The wind whipped fiercely through the skeletal remains of the abandoned lumber yard, violently rattling the loose corrugated steel sheets on the roofs.

​Julian and Maya moved like shadows through the muddy brush, staying close to the rusted chain-link fence that ran parallel to the old train tracks. The darkness was absolute, broken only by the sporadic, jagged flashes of lightning that illuminated the town of Westbridge in sudden, stark relief.

​The two-mile trek back to the high school was agonizing. The mud sucked at their boots, and the driving rain chilled Julian to the bone, seeping through his hoodie and aggravating the deep ache in his fractured shoulder. But he forced himself to focus entirely on the rhythm of his footsteps. Left, right. Left, right. He channeled the pain into a cold, hyper-focused adrenaline.

​Thirty minutes later, the massive, brick silhouette of Westbridge High loomed out of the darkness.

​They crouched behind a thick line of wet hedges at the edge of the visitor parking lot. Through the rain-streaked branches, Julian could see the front entrance. Three county sheriff cruisers were parked in a diagonal blockade across the main doors, their red and blue lightbars cutting through the deluge in slow, sweeping arcs. Two deputies in heavy yellow rain slickers were standing under the concrete awning, holding flashlights and drinking coffee from styrofoam cups.

​"They locked down the front and the east wing," Julian whispered, wiping rain and mud from his face. "If they're following standard protocol, they'll have a cruiser near the gym loading dock, too."

​"What about the boiler room?" Maya asked, her voice barely audible over the wind.

​"It's on the north side, completely blind from the parking lot," Julian said, pointing toward the dark, windowless expanse of brick wall facing the athletic fields. "There's an old steel grating hidden under the bleacher stairs. It covers the original coal chute from when the school was built in the fifties. The janitors use it to vent exhaust, but the lock rusted off four years ago. I used to sneak out through it during sophomore year pep rallies to avoid the crowds."

​"Lead the way," Maya said.

​They crept along the perimeter, moving in low, rapid bursts of speed from shadow to shadow. When they reached the towering steel structure of the home bleachers, Julian slipped beneath the scaffolding, the metal grid above them shielding them from the worst of the rain.

​Hidden behind a stack of moldy tackling dummies was a heavy iron grate, set flush into the concrete foundation of the school.

​Julian knelt down, gripping the iron bars with his right hand. He pulled. It didn't budge. The rust had fused it tight to the frame. He gritted his teeth, his injured shoulder screaming in protest as he tried to leverage his body weight against it.

​"Move over," Maya whispered.

​She knelt beside him, wedging a thick, flat piece of metal she had picked up from the train tracks into the gap between the grate and the concrete. "On three. One, two, three!"

​They both pulled backward. With a harsh, grating screech of rusted metal, the heavy iron cover broke free, swinging upward to reveal a pitch-black, narrow chute sloping sharply downward into the belly of the school.

​A blast of warm, stale air smelling of ancient coal dust and floor wax wafted up to hit their faces.

​"I'll go first," Maya said. She didn't wait for his argument. She swung her legs into the dark hole, sliding down the steep concrete incline until she disappeared into the blackness. A moment later, a soft, double-tap echoed from the bottom.

​Julian took a deep breath. He sat on the edge, tucking his injured left arm tightly against his chest, and pushed off.

​The slide was brutal. The rough concrete tore at his jeans and hoodie, and when he hit the bottom of the chute, the impact jarred his taped ribs so violently he saw white flashes behind his eyes. He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, choking back a groan.

​Maya was instantly there, her cool hands gripping his good shoulder in the dark, steadying him. "You okay?"

​"Yeah," Julian gasped, tasting copper in his mouth. "Yeah, I'm good. Let's go."

​They were in the subterranean maintenance tunnels, a labyrinth of pipes and fuse boxes that ran beneath the main floor. Julian navigated purely by memory, tracing the wall with his hand until he found the steel ladder leading up to the janitorial supply closet on the first floor.

​He pushed the trapdoor up with his good hand. The closet was empty.

​They climbed up and stepped out into the main hallway of Westbridge High.

​The school at night was a terrifying, surreal place. The bustling, noisy corridors that Julian had ruled for three years were now vast, silent caverns bathed in the eerie, greenish glow of emergency exit signs. The rows of blue lockers looked like a standing army of metallic ghosts. Without the crowd, without the noise, the school felt dead. It felt like a tomb.

​"The media lab is on the second floor, past the library," Julian whispered, moving silently along the tiled floor.

​They hugged the walls, avoiding the large windows that looked out onto the front courtyard where the deputies were stationed. Every squeak of their wet rubber soles sounded like a gunshot in the silent building.

​When they reached the second floor, they saw it.

​At the far end of the darkened corridor, a thin sliver of warm, golden light spilled out from beneath the heavy wooden door of the media lab.

​Julian held up a hand, stopping Maya. He strained his ears. From beneath the door, he could hear the rapid, rhythmic clacking of a mechanical keyboard.

​Chloe.

​Julian looked at Maya. He nodded toward the door. "I need to go in alone. If she sees you, she’ll panic and scream. She’s been conditioned to hate you by Tyler and my dad. She only knows the script."

​Maya hesitated, her eyes scanning his pale, exhausted face. "You have exactly two minutes before the deputies do their hourly perimeter walk. If she hits the panic button on that console, the silent alarm drops the fire doors and traps us in here."

​"She won't," Julian said, though his heart hammered against his ribs. "I know how to talk to her."

​Maya backed slowly into the shadows of a recessed locker bay, melting entirely into the darkness. "Two minutes, Vance."

​Julian took a slow breath, walked up to the door, and pushed it open.

​The media lab was cold, the air conditioning blasting to keep the massive server towers from overheating. The room was illuminated only by the glowing screens of a dozen iMacs, but at the main administrator desk in the center of the room sat Chloe Bennett.

​She looked immaculate, even at seven o'clock on a stormy Thursday night. Her blonde hair was perfectly straightened, her pink cashmere sweater spotless. She was furiously typing data from a stack of paper invoices into the school’s master digital ledger.

​She didn't look up as the door opened, assuming it was a teacher or the night janitor.

​"I'll be done in ten minutes, Mr. Henderson," Chloe said, her voice carrying that polite, rehearsed sweetness she used on adults. "I just have to finish inputting the athletic department's structural grant numbers."

​"It's not Mr. Henderson, Chlo," Julian said softly.

​Chloe froze. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Slowly, she turned her head.

​When she saw Julian standing in the doorway, soaked in rainwater, covered in mud, with a face pale from pain and his left arm strapped tightly to his chest, the color drained entirely from her face.

​"Julian?" she whispered, her voice trembling. She instinctively reached for her cell phone resting on the desk. "Julian, what are you doing here? The police are looking everywhere for you! Your dad called my dad... they said you had pills. They said you ran away!"

​"Don't touch the phone, Chloe," Julian said, taking a slow step into the room. He kept his hands open, his posture non-threatening. "Please. Just listen to me for sixty seconds."

​"You're a fugitive!" Chloe’s voice rose, panic edging into her tone. She stood up, knocking her chair backward. "You shouldn't be here! If they catch me with you, my dad will kill me, Julian! You're ruining everything!"

​"I didn't have pills, Chloe," Julian said, his voice dropping into a calm, steady register that forced her to stop and look at him. "Tyler planted them in my locker. Or my dad did. They needed a reason to destroy my credibility so I wouldn't talk."

​Chloe blinked, her mind struggling to process the information outside of the neat, perfect boxes her life was organized into. "Talk? Talk about what? Julian, you're not making sense. You need to turn yourself in. They can get you into rehab.