Disruption (18 page)

“Argh,” I said, “why do people keep bringing her up? It was an accident.”

“And speaking of bandaged hand,” Angie added, “what is it they call you in archery again?”

“Squirt,” Juno said, laughing.

The others joined in.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, “hilarious. I won’t have a squirt gun today, now, will I?”

Angie tsked. “Twenty bucks says Captain Squirt gets shot in the first fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll take that bet,” Juno said.

Really?
I wouldn’t have taken it if I were Juno. It did feel nice that someone believed in me, though. I smiled. “Thank you, Juno.”

“Don’t mention it.” He shook hands with Angie, sealing the bet, and added, “I think he’ll make it twenty minutes. But just barely.”

Chapter 27

We met at the soccer field just before noon and geared up. I had to admit that, dressed in camouflage and holding paintball guns, we looked intimidating. I felt like a commando. The other teams were grouped along the sidelines. They looked pretty intimidating, as well. Most of them, anyway. Team Hyena still looked a bit weak, what with their captain on crutches. It was a bit difficult to be frightened by someone who couldn’t walk. But I had to give her points for being tough about it. Most girls at my school would’ve left in tears if they’d been confronted by a mosquito, let alone a land mine.

Our extra campers were also there dressed in camouflage and already divided up into groups. Rob, Alexis, and Duncan were front and center. They had been thrilled when I approached them and said they’d be guarding the flag.

“We won’t let you down,” Rob said. “No one will get the flag.”

Alexis placed her small fist into her other palm and grinned. “Yeah, if anyone gets near our flag, we’ll crush their faces into the dirt and stomp ’em.”

I laughed, and then stopped when I noticed that none of them were laughing. “You
are
joking, right?”

The trio looked at one another like they hadn’t understood what I said. I was about to remind them that I didn’t want them to do anything crazy. We were just supposed to protect the flag. If they ended up crushing some poor camper’s face into the dirt, it would be because things went very wrong. But before I could speak, Mr. Dalson stood on the raised platform and addressed the teams.

“Welcome to the first group Delta event.” He wore khaki pants and a polo shirt and looked like he was ready to go to a church picnic—just as soon as he sent us paintballing kid spies out to the woods to blast one another. “You’ve been given the rules,” he continued, “so let’s not waste time. When you get to your bases, you’ll wait until you hear this horn.” He held up a can that looked like it might hold spray cheese and pressed the top, splitting the air with a blast that sounded like a ship’s horn. “At that time,” Mr. Dalson continued, “you can begin. Understood?”

The kids in each group nodded.

He pointed across the field into the woods. “Off you go, then.”

Our base was a circular clearing about the size of a classroom. In the center was a chest-high wooden pole bearing a flag embroidered with a grizzly bear.

“Cambridge,” Juno said, “give me your gun.”

“Why?”

“Just hand it over.” Juno smiled as he took it and dropped to his knees. He pulled out a small knife, opened up one of the side panels, and started messing with it.

“What are you doing?”

Rylee and Amara leaned over him and nodded.

“You’re making it automatic,” Amara said. “Resourceful.”

“Pleased to have your stamp of approval,” Juno said. He took out a piece of the gun, reassembled it, and then handed it back to me. “You’ll use more paint, and you might go through your C0
₂
pretty fast, but one squeeze will fire half a dozen balls.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t sure an automatic paint gun was really what I needed.

Rylee grabbed a stick from the ground and called everyone over. “Yak and I looked up the locations of the other bases on satellite this morning.” I wished I’d thought of that. She drew a circle in the dirt. “This is us,” she said. She drew four other circles, one by one, glancing over her shoulder into the trees, presumably to get her bearings before each one. “Octopus,” she said, pointing at the one farthest away, “and this is Squirrel . . . and Hyena . . . and this is Arctic Fox.” She looked at me. “Which flag do you think we should go for first?”

I shrugged. “The plan was for you to come up with your own plans. Go for whichever flag you want.”

Rylee tsked at me
.
“You’re really just going to leave us to it while you go commando through the woods?”

Juno burst out laughing. “Go commando?” He laughed again, and I couldn’t help but laugh as well.

Angie wrinkled her nose. “Our captain goes commando? That’s gross and TMI.”

“Ha ha,” Rylee said, without a hint of humor. “You know what I meant.” She glanced down at the circles she’d drawn in the dirt. “We’re going for Squirrel.”

“We’re going for Arctic Fox,” Amara said.

Rylee winced. “Can you go for Octopus instead?”

“Why?” Amara asked.

Rylee huffed. “I have a temporary alliance with Arctic Fox. Just for this game.”

Juno swore and shook his head. “You can’t trust Bratersky. He’s not going to honor that alliance. He doesn’t even try to hide his background. Why’d you even bother?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What background?”

“His tattoos,” Juno said. “He’s ROC, it’s as clear as the scowl on his face.”

ROC? What in the world did that mean? I decided to just nod and figure it out later.

“He’ll honor it,” Rylee said. “It’s just for this one game.”

I nodded. “Great! It sounds like we all have solid plans.”

“Where are you going?” Rylee asked.

“Hyena,” I said.

“Hyena?” Rylee asked. “Everyone’s going to go for that flag. It’s going to be a shooting gallery down there.”

It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to Hyena. I was going to find a large tree, climb it, and sit there and shoot people who wandered by. “Well, you’re not going,” I said. “Maybe others had the same thought.”

She considered that for a moment and then nodded.

The horn blast echoed, and birds scattered from the trees.

I imagined all the sports movies I’d seen over the years, ones where the coach gives the team a big pep talk and the players get all worked up and run out onto the field full of energy. I tried to remember one, or part of one. Nothing seemed to quite fit for a game of paintball with a bunch of kid spies. So I just forced a smile and said, “Good luck, everyone.” I spun on my heel and took off into the woods.

When we played Capture the Flag back home, it was mostly in the neighborhood. Sometimes it would spread out into a park, but never a forest. The trees were really dense in here, and under some of the sections of canopy, it actually felt like dusk. I tried to keep my bearings, but not five minutes later, I was turned around and unsure which way was out. I stopped in a section of sparse woods that had some sunlight streaming in through the breaks in the canopy and turned around, hoping one of the directions would jump out at me as the right one.

Should’ve brought a compass, you idiot.

Twigs snapped to my right, and I dropped into a crouch, ducked behind a bush, and held my breath. A full minute later two campers crept into view, their guns held like they were ready to use them. They scanned the woods, back and forth, as they walked.

I adjusted my grip and brought my gun up to my shoulder. This was going to be great!

The campers moved carefully a few paces past where I was hiding. I considered taking them hostage, but then decided they might turn around and get a lucky shot before I managed to shoot them. I’d only played paintball once, but it was enough to remember the sting of getting shot. I wasn’t keen to feel that again.

I held my position. I’d let them get three more steps, and then I’d pop up and blast them.

One.

Two. They paused and then . . .

Three—

Just as I was about to stand, someone cleared their throat behind me, and I froze.

“You can stand up now,” the voice said.

I turned and faced the wide smile of Chase Erickson and two other campers beside him.

“Hey, Bryce?” Chase said.

“Yeah?” said one of the campers I’d been planning on shooting a second before.

“Is it Christmas? Because it feels like Christmas.”

“Then it must be Christmas,” Bryce said.

The five of them laughed, and then Chase’s expression dropped.

“Take his gun,” Chase said.

Someone from behind me snatched my weapon out of my hand. I raised my hands. “Okay, okay, you got me. Congratulations.”

Chase shook his head. “You’re our prisoner.”

One of the campers behind me grabbed my arms and pulled them behind my back, hard.

“Hey!”

They jerked me backward against a tree. Chase removed a roll of industrial tape from one of the pockets on his cargo pants and threw it to another camper. They quickly moved over to me, mask still down so I couldn’t see their faces, and started taping me to the tree.

“Okay,” I said, “really funny.” I struggled to get away, and the camper wrapping me in tape paused and punched me in the stomach hard enough to knock the wind out of me. By the time I stopped coughing, I was secured to the trunk by three thick bands of tape—one across my chest and upper arms, one across my waist that also pinned my arms to my side, and one over my knees.

I cursed and struggled against the restraints and then cursed some more. “You can’t do this,” I said. “This is a total violation of the rules. No physical violence.”

“Are you in pain?” Chase asked.

I nodded to the camper who’d just punched me in the stomach. “He hit me, so obviously I am.”

“I slipped, sir,” the camper said. He tossed the mostly empty roll of tape into the air and deftly caught it. “I certainly wasn’t
trying
to hit him.”

“There,” Chase said, “you see? It was all a misunderstanding.” He walked over and patted my face. “So we’re not using violence to hurt you. We are simply restraining a POW.” He looked over at one of his teammates. “Is that against the rules?”

“No, sir,” the camper said. He glanced over his shoulder and then up at the sky. He took a couple paces to his right until he was standing beneath the leafy branches of a huge tree. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone, or a camera, or maybe a cell phone with a camera, and held it up to record what they were about to do.

Chase nodded at his teammate and then moved half a dozen paces away and held up his gun. “We can shoot you too, and that’s not considered too violent.”

“Once,” I said. “You can shoot me once.” Every muscle in my body tensed. “So get on with it already.”

“Once?” He turned back to his teammate. “Is that the rule?”

The camper smiled and shook his head. “In the event that the paintball does not break,” he recited from memory, “the camper will not be presumed hit and will be entitled to stay in the game.”

“Wha . . .” I felt my mouth drop as Chase unscrewed his paintball feeder from the top of his gun and took another one out from a bag at his feet. Steam wafted from the new tube, and frost covered at least three quarters of it.

Chase screwed it onto the top of his gun and then turned to me and fired. The round hit me in the shoulder, and I yelped as pain ricocheted down my arm.

“There,” I growled through clenched teeth, “I’m hit. It’s over. I’m out.”

No one moved. I glanced around the clearing. Why hadn’t I started shooting right away the instant I’d seen them?

“You’re not hit,” Chase said. He pointed at my shoulder. “It didn’t break.”

I glanced down. Sure enough, my shoulder was paint free, and a few feet away, the yellow paintball that had come from Chase’s gun sat unexploded on the ground.

Chase fired again. This time it hit my thigh and felt like someone had punched me with an incredibly tiny fist. I forced myself not to cry out, but when I looked down and saw that once again the paintball hadn’t broken, I let out a string of curses that only stopped when Chase fired another round, hitting me in my other leg.

“Oh, no,” Chase said. “Somehow the paintballs I have must’ve been frozen before the game. None of them seem to be breaking.” He glanced toward his teammates.

With the exception of the one recording it all, the other Squirrel members unscrewed their paintball feeder tubes and replaced them with ones from the same backpack where Chase had retrieved his. Each was just as frost-covered as the next.

“Help!” I yelled. “He—” One of the campers pressed their palm over my mouth, silencing my shouts for help, while another pulled out the tape again and, this time, pressed a piece over my mouth.

Chase held a finger to his lips. “Quiet now,” he said. “Don’t want the enemy to know where you are.” He gave me an evil grin, the kind of grin you get from the big kid at school who’s about to steal your money and shove you into a trash can. “Oh wait. We are the enemy.”

The paintballs came in quick succession, sometimes in spurts of two or three, sometimes in bursts that felt like at least a dozen. Each time it was like being pelted with rocks.

I wasn’t counting, but the number of times I was hit had to be over a hundred. It felt like I’d stepped on a wasp’s nest and now they were taking their revenge.

The shots ended abruptly, but I kept my eyes closed for a few more seconds.

“Well, this is . . . unexpected,” Juno said.

My eyes opened, and sure enough, there was Juno, standing behind Chase and his four goons as if he had every reason in the world to be there. The five members of Team Squirrel spun and leveled their weapons at Juno and seemed at a loss as to whether they should shoot him or wait to find out why he didn’t seem the slightest bit worried.

I fought again against my restraints and tried to tell him to get out of there or to start shooting or something . . . anything. But all I managed was a stream of frantic mumbles that even I didn’t understand.