WEDNESDAY, MAY 27
78 DAYS
I got up early the next morning to catch Dad before he left for work. I’d tried waiting for him last night, but gave up when he still wasn’t back from his meeting with Montag and Ketterley by midnight.
There was no sign of him when I got downstairs. Just Mum sitting on the couch, laminating pictures from Where is the Green Sheep?, looking like she’d hardly slept.
‘Morning,’ I said. ‘Where’s Dad?’
Mum shook her head. ‘Still at work. I got an email from him this morning, saying his meeting turned into an all-nighter and he won’t be home until this afternoon.’
‘Is everything okay?’ I asked, trying to block the nerves out of my voice. ‘I mean, did he say why it was taking so long?’
‘He told me not to worry,’ said Mum, in a voice that told me she was blatantly ignoring this advice. She switched the laminator off and picked her stuff up from the coffee table. ‘It’s just this project they’ve got him working on. They’re really pushing to have it off the ground in the next week.’
‘But he’ll be home this arvo?’ I said, crossing to the kitchen to grab some breakfast.
‘That’s the plan,’ said Mum wearily. ‘At least, it was at two o’clock this morning when he sent that email. Honestly, I know he enjoys the work, but these long hours aren’t good for him. He’s so tired, he can hardly walk straight.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, wishing tiredness was the reason for it. ‘Listen, can you email me at school if you hear anything else from him?’
‘Sure,’ she said. But now she was looking concerned. ‘He hasn’t said anything to you about all this, has he?’
‘Nope. Hardly seen him this week.’
Mum got up from the couch and came over to give me a hug. ‘You okay, Pete? You seem a bit distracted lately.’
‘I’m always distracted,’ I said, twisting free.
‘All right,’ Mum sighed. ‘Well, when you do feel like talking about it, let me know.’
‘Nothing to talk about,’ I said, hating Shackleton all over again for what he was doing to my family. ‘See you tonight, okay?’
I stuck a muesli bar in my mouth and headed into town.
‘Do we have a plan here,’ I asked as we walked our bikes past the mall that afternoon, ‘or are we just going to wander up and down the street until we find him?’
‘Since when have we had a plan for any of this?’ said Luke.
I hadn’t heard anything more about Dad all day, which I was hoping meant that he really would be home this afternoon. But in the meantime, we’d decided to go looking for Officer Reeve and see if we could get anything out of him about the metal doors.
I looked back towards school, double-checking that Pryor was nowhere around. In theory we were meant to be working on her second assignment right now. Some stupid mapping thing. We had to stand out the front of the school every afternoon and measure traffic congestion.
Thankfully, I’d managed to convince Jordan and Luke to just leave it to me and let me fake the results this time. They were both too busy scheming about security doors to put up much of an argument.
For some reason, Jordan had it in her head that figuring out those doors would help us get a message to the outside world. And she’d come into school this morning convinced that talking to Reeve was the way we were going to get that information. Said she had a feeling, and Luke backed her up.
‘We should go to Flameburger,’ said Jordan.
‘Why? Did you see him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Jordan, ‘but we’ll be able to see the whole street from there. Besides, I’m hungry.’
I could think of at least five other places that would’ve given us a heaps better view of the street. But if Jordan was choosing here, then here was fine by me.
‘Okay, good idea,’ I said. ‘What do you want? I’m buying.’
I grinned at Luke. He gave me a pitying look, and we went to lock up our bikes.
Flameburger is what you get instead of McDonald’s when your town is plotting the apocalypse. The burgers are bigger, but the end of the world is kind of a high price to pay for extra cheese.
I went inside to order while Jordan and Luke picked out a table on the street.
Mike’s mum was waiting in the next line over, still wearing her medical centre uniform. I went to say hi and she suddenly became very interested in a menu on the opposite wall.
Weird. What did I ever do to her?
A few minutes later, I was back with the food.
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just go find Reeve’s house?’ Luke was asking.
‘Sure, if we want to get a door slammed in our faces,’ I said, sitting down and handing Jordan a burger.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I don’t think he’d be too happy with us if we started visiting him at home. Not fair on his family either. We have to ambush him in town.’
She glanced sideways at the empty table next to us, like she could see something we couldn’t.
‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘the old sit around eating burgers and wait for him to come to us ambush.’
She kicked me under the table. ‘Just keep an eye out.’
I shoved some chips into my mouth and looked out across the street. There were plenty of security guys around, but no sign of Reeve. And, really, he could be anywhere. Phoenix is a small town, but it isn’t that small.
I turned back to the others. Jordan was making a show of looking around, but her eyes kept flickering back to that same empty table.
‘What are you looking at?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Jordan, quickly staring off in the other direction.
Luke leant over to Jordan. ‘Are you sure this is right?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘Maybe you just –’
He stopped mid-sentence and stood up, staring over in the direction of the medical centre.
‘D’you see him?’ I asked, getting up too. But it wasn’t Reeve that Luke was looking at.
A hundred metres away, Dr Montag was coming down the front steps, talking to a woman in a business suit.
Luke’s mum.
‘Huh,’ said Jordan. ‘You didn’t say anything about a doctor’s appointment.’
‘I didn’t know anything about a doctor’s appointment,’ said Luke, taking a few steps towards them. ‘Although it’s not as if she fills me in on everything she …’
He trailed off as the doc and his mum reached the bottom of the steps. Montag put an arm around her waist, pulled her in close, and kissed her.
From the look on Luke’s face, his mum definitely hadn’t filled him in on that.
The words ‘poetic’ and ‘justice’ floated into my mind, but I pushed them aside as Luke started running towards his mum.
‘Whoa,’ I said, grabbing the back of his shirt. ‘No, you don’t.’
‘Get off me!’ Luke shouted, and I heard something rip as he tried to pull free.
A bunch of other kids stared over at us from their tables.
‘Luke, stop,’ said Jordan. ‘You can’t go over there.’
‘I can if you let go,’ he grunted.
‘And then what are you gonna do?’ hissed Jordan. ‘Attack Montag? Out here in front of everyone? How exactly do you see that ending?’
Luke grunted again, but he stopped struggling. He watched, sweat beading on his face, as his mum waved goodbye to the doc, and walked back around to her office.
We let Luke go and he sat back down in his seat. The other kids slowly went back to their conversations, clearly disappointed they hadn’t got to witness another public beating.
‘We’ll deal with Montag,’ said Jordan, sitting down too when she was sure he wouldn’t bolt. ‘Before this is all over, we’ll –’
‘It wasn’t him I was going for,’ Luke muttered. ‘It was her.’
The rest of the afternoon was a write-off.
Looking for Reeve dropped right off the radar. Luke was too busy fuming about his mum, and Jordan was too busy trying to calm Luke down.
The weird thing was that, as furious as he was at Montag, he seemed to be more angry at his mum for seeing some other guy so soon after his parents’ divorce. Apparently betrayal wasn’t so easy to swallow when Luke was the one on the receiving end.
As far as he was concerned, the fact that this other guy happened to be part of Shackleton’s genocidal super squad was a minor side issue.
Also, funny how no-one jumped to any conclusions about Luke’s mum being in cahoots with the Shackleton Co-operative. I guess it’s only my parents who are guilty until proven innocent.
I got home to find Dad’s bike on the veranda. My brilliant idea of asking him about the security doors was suddenly feeling a whole lot less brilliant.
I let myself into the house, planning to head up to my room for a bit and figure out how to casually bring up the topic of magical mystery doors without sounding suspicious.
Unfortunately, Dad had other plans.
He was sitting at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me, like I was sneaking in at 2 a.m. instead of the middle of the afternoon.
‘Crap,’ I said, seeing the look on his face. ‘I mean, hi. What’s going on?’
‘We need to talk,’ said Dad, standing up. He had a folded sheet of paper in his hands. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a wonky heart drawing.