Shell Shocked (3 page)

“Yeah, right. If I'd been smart, do you think missing a month of school with pneumonia would have meant taking the whole year again?” he asked.

“I hadn't really thought of that.”

“I have. A lot. They think I'm not very bright. And I'm not the only one in my class who's failed. There are at least two others. One of the guys even failed twice.”

“Twice … wow.”

“I'm not sure why he's still in school. He's old enough to drop out and get a job. He could even enlist.”

“You have to be eighteen to enlist, don't you?” I asked.

“Seventeen with a letter from your parents.”

“That's only a couple more years for you. I guess one more year if your records show you're sixteen instead of fifteen.”

“I think Mom knows my real age. I just wish I didn't have to be the stupid brother.”

“Would you rather be the sleepy brother?” I said.

“Sleepy beats stupid. Are you making any new friends?”

“I talk to some of the guys, you know, play at recess, but nobody that I'd really want to hang around with after school,” I said. “You?”

He shrugged. “Not really. They all seem so young.”

“That's because they are young … well, at least compared to you, with you failing a grade and all.”

I jumped out of the way, sidestepping Jack's playful swipe at the side of my head.

“I actually know what you're talking about,” I said. “Everybody in my class seems like such a
kid
.”

Jack laughed. “They are kids. You're only in grade seven.”

“You know what I mean. It seems like all they want to talk about is comic books or hockey, or they want to play kids' games like tag or hide-and-go-seek or stupid things like that.”

“The sort of games you liked to play a few months ago,” Jack said.

“It seems more like a few years ago. So much has happened.”

Jack nodded his head. “I don't feel like I have anything in common with anybody my age, either.”

“They want to play catch, and I want to play catch-the-spy,” I said.

“Me too. Everywhere I look, I see Nazi agents.”

“Did you notice that van?” I asked.

“The white one that just passed?”

“Yeah.”

“Has it passed us before?”

“No, but if it
did
, I'd notice,” I said.

“Me too, I guess. I'm always watching, always waiting for something to happen,” Jack said.

“I can't seem to stop watching everything all the time,” I said.

“I thought it was only me.”

I shook my head. “I'm in school and wondering if my teacher is a Nazi spy.”

Jack laughed. “If the Nazis are recruiting sixty-year-old women with pop bottle bottoms for glasses, then we've pretty well won this war.”

“A spy could be anybody. You know that,” I said. “But it's not just her, it's everybody.”

“Yeah, and if you think about it, there
should
be enemy agents here,” Jack said. “This is the biggest munitions plant in the entire British Commonwealth, so you have to figure that the Nazis want to infiltrate it. Hitler would love to have this plant destroyed.”

That wasn't simply us making things up. Agents who
were training at Camp X tried to break into the plant all the time to test security. We knew that from experience, because
we'd
infiltrated the plant once.

Bill had asked us to do it as part of a test. Really, it was a game he played with the head of security at the plant, Mr. Granger. It happened the first time our mother worked there. We told security that she'd forgotten her lunch, and then we walked right in. If the guards had bothered to look inside the lunch bag they'd have seen that we were carrying a chunk of mud that was supposed to look like some kind of plastic explosive and an alarm clock that was a pretend detonator. We walked right up to Mr. Granger in his office and handed it to him. At the time it seemed like a game. Now it was plain scary. If we could do that, who else could get in?

“Do you think that they might call on us again?” I asked.

“Bill?”

“Of course Bill. Or Little Bill.” Little Bill was like the top spy, the guy in charge of everything, not only at Camp X but everywhere. “Do you think they might want us for another mission?”

Jack shrugged. “On one hand, I could see them asking us to try to smuggle a fake bomb in again.”

“That would make sense. We could do that.”

“We could, if they asked us,” Jack agreed. “But I'm thinking that probably they're not going to ask us to do anything ever again.”

“Why not?”

“Well, they probably don't use kids very often.”

“They used us twice, well, really three times,” I said.

“But it was always sort of by accident after we'd stumbled into something that we shouldn't have. And I sort of hope we don't stumble into anything here.”

“You do?”

“Don't look so surprised,” Jack said. “It's probably good for us to go back to being kids again.”

I understood what he was saying, but I didn't know if it was possible for us ever to be just kids again.

“I'm spending so much time thinking about things like that, it's like nothing at school seems important,” I said. “That's why I can't seem to concentrate.”

“Well, you wouldn't have fallen asleep in
my
class this afternoon,” Jack said. “We're studying World War I.”

“I guess that would be more interesting than math.”

“
Everything
is more interesting than math. Do you know what they used to call that war?” Jack asked.

“The Great War,” I said, feeling smugly satisfied.

“That was one of the names. They also called it ‘the War to End All Wars.'”

I laughed. “That didn't work.”

“It was the War to End All Wars for less than twenty years,” Jack said. “Today, we learned about the Halifax Explosion.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“It happened in 1917. Like now, back then they made explosives and ammunition here in Canada and shipped them over to Europe for the war. There was this ship in the Halifax harbour and it was loaded with explosives, ammunition, and it was hit by another ship. It caught fire.”

“Wow, that would have been something to see.”

“That was part of the problem. Hundreds and hundreds of people came to see it burning in the harbour. And then, when it exploded, the impact was so huge that they were all killed. A thousand people died instantly, and then another thousand died of their injuries within the next two days.”

“Unbelievable,” I gasped.

“There were over nine thousand people injured, including more than a hundred who were blinded.”

“By the flash?” I questioned.

“Flying glass. They were standing behind windows, watching, and when it blew, the windows shattered and shards of glass shot into their eyes.”

I cringed at the thought.

“Almost every building within a mile of the explosion was flattened, and there were fires everywhere in the wreckage. The streets were on fire. A lot of people were trapped and burned alive.”

Again, another terrible thought.

“Hot fragments of metal fell from the sky. When it rained the next day, the rain was black, but at least it helped put out the fires. And the anchor of the ship, which weighed over eleven hundred pounds, was found two and a half miles inland.”

“Two and a half miles?” I gasped. “No way.”

“They felt the explosion a hundred miles away. It shook things on shelves. They said the fireball was a mile high. It was the largest explosion of all time.”

I nodded my head in amazement. “And that was all from just one ship.”

“One big ship,” Jack said.

“But it was still
one
ship. How much in the way of explosives do you think are here at the plant?”

“I don't know, but it's the biggest plant anywhere. There might be ten or twenty or even a hundred times as much explosives as there were on that ship,” Jack said.

“And our house is less than a half mile from the plant.”

“A lot less,” Jack confirmed.

Jack and I were both thinking the same thing, trying to imagine what would happen if the plant exploded.

“If this plant blew up it would make the Halifax Explosion look like a firecracker,” I said.

“Yeah, but they have lots of safety features, and the plant has lots of separate buildings so fires or explosions would be contained,” Jack said.

“And that makes you feel safer?”

He shook his head. “I've never liked Mom working there.”

“It seems sort of silly to worry about what could happen when she's at work,” I said.

“What's silly about that?” Jack asked. “It
is
dangerous. Something
could
happen.”

“Yeah, but it's not just when she's at work. If you think about it, she's in danger when she's sleeping in her bed at home, too,” I said.

Jack shrugged. “I guess we're all in danger. It would be one heck of an explosion.”

Great. None of this was going to make getting to sleep tonight any easier.

“
THANKS FOR DINNER
, Mom,” I said.

“You're very welcome.”

I stood up, picked up my plate and carried it to the kitchen.

“I'm sorry I can't help clean up,” my mother said. She looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall. “My shift starts in less than thirty minutes.”

“That's okay. We can handle it,” Jack replied.

“I've learned that you boys can handle most anything. Are you going to go to the Community Hall this evening?”

“We were thinking about it,” Jack said.

“You should. They're going to be showing a movie, plus a couple of cartoons and a newsreel. It should be good fun.”

“I guess we'll go.”

“I really think you should. It's important for you boys to go out and spend time with other people your age, make some new friends. Maybe then you wouldn't fight with each other so much.”

“We don't fight!” Jack protested, before he realized that it was way too big a lie to get away with. “Well, not that much.”

“No more than we ever did,” I agreed. “We're brothers. We're supposed to fight.”

“I just remember when our house was always filled with your friends,” she said.

“That didn't stop us from fighting,” I pointed out.

“And that was back home, with our
real
friends,” Jack said.

“The kids here are as real as the ones back home.”

“You know what I mean,” Jack argued. “It's different with people you've known since you were little.”

“Yes, but it's like planting a tree. The best way to eventually have an old friend is to make a new one. You two can make new friends. There are so many new people at the plant, there must be lots and lots of new kids as well.”

“Seems like there are more every day,” I confirmed.

“Right, so it's not like you're the only new kids at school, trying to break into a group of people who've known each other for years,” she pointed out.

That was true.

“Then you should try to make some friends. Promise me you'll try.”

We both reluctantly mumbled something that sounded like agreement.

“Good!” she exclaimed. “Now, I'd better be off. I don't want to be late for my shift.” She gave us each a kiss on the cheek and then headed out the door. “And I expect both of you to be in bed and sound asleep when I get home tonight.”

“We will be,” Jack said.

I could agree to the “in bed” part, but being asleep I couldn't guarantee. Actually, I could practically guarantee the opposite. I didn't like to even try to sleep until I heard the front door open and I knew Mom was home. I really didn't feel great about her walking home alone in the dark. There were too many things that could happen to her—too much that
had
happened to her—and I needed to know she was safe. I would stay in bed, lights off, lying still, just waiting.

Besides, I'd got to the point that I was almost afraid to fall sleep. The last few nights I'd had the same nightmare—me in a tunnel and the walls closing in and then collapsing, and being buried, suffocating and … I shook it off. Bad enough that I dreamed it—I didn't want to think about it when I was awake, too.

* * *

We walked up to the main gate of the plant. Like a lot of things in town, the Community Hall was actually on the factory grounds, and movie night was an event for plant employees and their families.

“Looks familiar, eh?” Jack said.

“Maybe a little too familiar.”

The last time—the
only
time—we'd walked through that gate was to deliver the fake bomb, three months ago. In some ways that seemed like only yesterday. In other ways it was more like a hundred years ago—no, more like a dream or a movie I'd seen, definitely not something that had actually happened to Jack and me.

“Do you think it'll be the same guards?” Jack asked.

“I hope not.”

“Why?”

“Because they might recognize us,” I said.

Jack snorted. “First off, it was a long time ago. Second, we're not that memorable. Third, those guards are so old that they probably wouldn't recognize us if it had happened yesterday. And, finally, so what if they did?”

“But we smuggled a fake bomb into the—” I stopped myself as I realized what he meant. They didn't know what we'd done. Nobody at the plant except for the head of security, Mr. Granger, knew anything about what had happened, and Bill had told us that Mr. Granger had been “briefed” on us being here again.

We stopped in front of the gatehouse. There were only a few entrances into the plant and each was guarded, the road blocked by a long metal rail that needed to be lifted to allow any traffic to pass.