Shell Shocked (13 page)

“Heroes!” I yelled at him. “You're a hero!”

“Oh, yeah, okay … thanks.”

Jack dug his index finger into his right ear and started working away, trying to make his ear work.

“I'm sorry, Jack. We'll get you to a doctor,” Mr. Granger said very loudly. Then he turned to me. “I guess, under the circumstances, I'll have to talk to your brother later to find out what he saw. One thing's for sure, though—having you two at the plant was an excellent idea. Do you know how many lives you saved today?”

“No idea,” I said.

“Neither do I, but it could have been dozens, maybe hundreds. If that explosion had ignited a building, the whole plant could have gone up.”

“Wow.”

Jack continued to dig his finger into his ear. He was shaking his head, turning it from side to side as if he were trying to get water out of it.

“But now we have another problem,” he said.

“We do?”

“Within a few minutes every employee in the whole plant will know what you did. Do you know what that means?”

I shook my head.

“People are going to be looking at you. It's hard for you to observe anybody else when you're being watched by everybody. Your effectiveness has been severely compromised.”

“But maybe you don't need us any more,” I said.

“I don't follow.”

“Maybe that was their plan, and now that we've stopped them they won't know what to do next.”

“The failure of this attempt might slow them down temporarily, but now we know that our suspicions were correct. There definitely are enemy agents operating within the facility. That was no outside attempt. That was internal sabotage.”

He was right. What had happened had only confirmed what they feared—the reason they had us here.

“And, of course, what you did is going to make those people very unhappy—unhappy with you and your brother.”

A ripple of electricity went up my spine. We'd no longer simply be hunters. We might now become the hunted.

I STUDIED THE FRONT PAGE
of the latest edition of
The Commando
. It was posted on the bulletin board of the building I worked in, and in every other building around the facility.

There, above the fold, was one of the pictures I'd taken of the burning bus. It was a good picture. But that was the only thing in the whole article that was real. The story was about how the bus had overheated, resulting in a fire in the engine. It went on to say that three people, “the driver and two passengers who were on the bus,” had suffered “minor injuries” and that the bus itself was “beyond repair.” I guess that was true since it was now in a few thousand little pieces, none much bigger than the size of a seat cushion.

It wasn't so much what it
did
say as what it
didn't
. There was no mention of sabotage, dynamite, Jack driving the
bus away or our names at all. My first chance at a big story—a story I'd witnessed myself—and I didn't get to write it. Mr. Chalmers wrote it, but he only wrote what he'd been told by Mr. Granger, and that was what Bill had told him to say. I'd learned that Bill was a master at making up stories on the fly. When he told the story it was so real, with so much detail, that if I hadn't been there myself I certainly would have believed him. After the war was over I could see him becoming a famous author, maybe writing spy stories—who knows, they might even become movies. I could picture Little Bill as some sort of secret agent guy, cool, calm and lethal. Then again, I knew nobody would ever write about any of this. The Official Secrets Act would make sure all this secret agent stuff stayed secret.

I knew the truth and I knew this was all a lie, but I figured in this case lying made sense. There was no need to worry the people in the plant, and it was best to downplay what Jack and I had done. There was no point in drawing any more attention to us, and this story kept us out of the picture. Really, not many people had seen us at the scene. There'd been only a few people standing by the bus, and then it had all happened so fast and we'd got far away pretty quickly. When the bus did blow up there'd been nobody out there in that field but Jack and me. And if it had blown up a few seconds earlier, we would still
have been out there in the field … scattered around in little pieces so small you wouldn't have known they were parts of a person.

At least that's what Bill had told us when he'd led our debriefing the next day. Most of Jack's hearing had come back by then, but he didn't have much more to add to what I'd already told Mr. Granger. Bill confirmed most of what Mr. Granger had suspected. There had been something rigged under the engine and there had been dynamite on board. What Mr. Granger had wrong was the amount. Bill figured it had to have been almost forty pieces to create a crater that big.

I'd wanted to go back out and have a look at the site, but so far, I hadn't. That way it didn't seem as real, and it was probably better that way.

There was really only one person who knew what we'd done, and that was Daphne. She had seen the two of us get on the bus. Mr. Granger had asked her not to talk about it to anybody and she'd agreed, although she told us she wasn't happy that people wouldn't know that her “Jackie” was a hero. If the two of them had been all goo-goo eyes before this, they were much worse now.

Daphne had been at the infirmary waiting when Jack was finally brought there. She'd stayed until almost the second my mother arrived. I'd thought for sure she was going to stick around to meet her, but no. It was probably
better that way. That wouldn't have been the best time for the two of them to meet.

My mother was not happy. Once again she'd walked into a hospital room to see one of her boys all banged up. This time, though, she was told what had really happened. And that made it a lot harder. I wondered if she was feeling guilty because this time she'd been the one that got us into everything. But there was nothing I could do about that.

It looked as though people were buying the story in the paper. Nobody came up and talked to Jack or me about it. People didn't realize that we were the “two passengers.” I figured that made us less of a target and better able to keep doing our jobs—watching, not being watched. So far it looked like it was working. And now I had another story to research.

I pushed open the door to the factory floor and peeked in. Stretching out in front of me were five gigantic assembly lines. Women—hundreds and hundreds of women—were standing on either side of long, thin conveyor belts. Shells, each about the size of a thermos, moved down the line, but instead of warm chicken noodle soup being poured inside it was a deadly mixture of explosives. These shells were called twenty-five-pounders and they came in three types—smoke, armour-piercing and high explosive.

The women had their hair pinned up under bandanas made of colourful pieces of material. It was like a rainbow, like a flock of parrots. They really stood out because they added practically the only colour to the room. Everybody had on white or grey overalls and almost everything was painted to match. The people running the plant were interested in things being clean and sanitary, but not necessarily pretty.

The only other splashes of colour in the room were the posters on the walls. They were pictures of men in uniform with headings like “EACH TO OUR PART, EACH TO OUR STATION” or “THEY CAN'T DO THEIR JOB UNLESS WE DO OUR PART.” The posters were there to promote worker production and morale. People had to know that what they did here was helping to win the war. Those posters were what had given me the inspiration for this column I was writing about working hard on the line.

As the women worked there was constant conversation and laughter, which was louder than the noise of the machinery. It always struck me as strange. Here they were working on high explosives, deadly shells that would be used to kill people, and it was like they were at a social club.

Stranger yet, I'd be around lines where everybody was singing. Often it would be popular songs, but I'd heard
whole lines singing church hymns. Somehow praising God and creating ammunition didn't quite fit. Or maybe it fit really well, since some of those shells were going to send our enemies to meet their maker.

Although a lot of the women were married, nobody wore a wedding ring. All jewellery, all metal, had to be left in their lockers. They couldn't risk anything, even the static from a belt buckle, causing a spark. The women had to wear rubber-soled shoes for the same reason.

Mr. Chalmers had asked me to come and write a story about what it was like to work on the line. I'd write it, but what I was really there to do was find enemy agents. Thinking about it, though, what were the chances of me wandering through this plant and finding out anything anyway? It wasn't like the enemy agent would be goose-stepping around or yelling out “
Heil Hitler!
” as I passed by.

I walked down the line, looking at the ladies working on the shells. Occasionally I'd get a smile or a nod, but most were too busy talking to the women across from them, and of course working, to notice me.

I got to the end and turned around, walking back between two different lines, which actually looked identical. I couldn't imagine doing what these women were doing all day long. No wonder they spent so much time laughing and talking. They had to do something to break the monotony. Nothing more to see here, I figured.

Back in the lobby, the picture of the bus in the paper again caught my eye. That bus had cost me more sleep … like I could afford to lose more sleep. I took my jacket from the coat rack by the door—I'd had to leave it there because it had metal buttons—and left.

It was cold outside, colder than I would have expected for the middle of November. It was below freezing, but the way the wind was whipping along it felt much colder. The sun was up there somewhere in the sky, but the clouds were blocking it from view, so it didn't provide any relief. It almost looked like it was going to start to … thick flakes of snow began to swirl out of the sky.

I turned the collar of my coat up. I wished I had brought mitts and a hat or boots, or at least shoes that didn't have a hole in the toe. Up ahead was a building I'd never been inside. If I walked in the front door and out the back I could at least be out of the weather for a while. I didn't know what they did in there, but I did know it would be warmer, and it definitely wouldn't be snowing inside.

I opened the door and was hit by a wave of fumes. This had to be one of the mixing buildings, a place where they combined different chemicals to create the explosives.

“Hello, son, can I help you?” asked the guard. He had a rifle on his back and was standing by the door that led to the shop floor.

“I'm with
The Commando
,” I said. “I'm a reporter.”

“You?”

I pulled out the letter that was signed by Mr. Chalmers and Mr. Granger. It gave me permission to go anywhere I wanted. I handed it to the guard.

“I don't seem to be able to find my glasses,” he said as he fumbled around, patting his pockets.

I pointed up to the top of his head where they were perched.

“Lose my head if it wasn't attached.”

That was the sort of thing that always made me nervous. Guards who couldn't find their glasses might not be able to see other things that were right under their eyes.

“I guess they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel when they have old men as guards and kids as reporters,” he said.

“I guess so.”

He handed me back the letter. “You can go in there,” he said, gesturing to the door, “but are you sure you want to?”

I gave him a questioning look.

“Son, if you think the smell out here is bad, wait till you go inside there. Be my guest.”

Tentatively I pushed the door open and the smell practically knocked me off my feet. I cringed and stepped back, letting the door close.

“I'm hoping I'll be going to Heaven, but either way I have a pretty good idea what it smells like in Hell,” the guard said.

“What are they doing in there?” I asked as I peered in through the small window in the door.

“See those large vats?” he asked.

I nodded.

“They contain different chemicals. Nitrates, fulminate of mercury, toluene and nitroglycerine.”

“Nitroglycerine I've heard of,” I said. “It's really dangerous, isn't it?”

“Everything in there is really dangerous. A regular witch's brew of everything ever made that can cause an explosion. That's why they have a guard stationed here. You sure you want to go in?”

I shrugged. “Maybe not … maybe another day.”

“Wise choice, son. I pity those men who have to spend their days in there working. Even with those masks they wear, it still can't be a good thing for them to—”

He stopped as the outside door opened and another guard came in.

“You're late!” he called out to him.

“Two minutes.” He stomped his feet and brushed snow off the shoulders of his coat. “Snowing like crazy out there,” he said.

We both walked over to the door as though, despite the
snow he'd brought in, we didn't believe him. The snow was coming down so thick that I could hardly see the buildings in the distance, and the ground was already frosted over.

“I think I'd better get myself home while I can,” the first guard said.

“I'd better get going too,” I said.

I headed out the door with the guard. “I'm not dressed for this,” I said, looking down at my shoes.

“We'll try to stay where the snow hasn't settled.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Follow me.”

He shifted over to the side and I quickly saw what he was talking about. There was a long line, like a dirt path, where no snow had accumulated. Why was it like that?