The electric clock radio on the nightstand read 2:45 AM. Her partner, undisturbed, continued to snore.
Minutes later, she heard sirens in the distance, some sweeping past the motel on Telegraph Road.
“Sounds like they’re coming from several municipalities,” she said. “Maybe a plane crash …”
The clunky mobile phone on the nightstand rang. Her partner, by instinct, reached for it first.
“Preston Percy,” he answered, surprisingly crispy since he’d been roused from a dead sleep. “What’s up, Seedy? What? An explosion ….” He turned to Lemon Lime. “Did you hear anything?”
“Yes …”
“No, we didn’t hear anything. … Where? …That’s five miles from here. Of course; we’ll check it out.”
Preston sat up as he set the mobile phone back down. “That was our beloved Dr. Mercedith Robeson James, all mighty empress of the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning—She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Says there’s been a ‘mysterious explosion’ at a nearby high school. Since we’re in the vicinity, she wants us to have a look.”
“Word travels fast,” said Lemon Lime, already out of bed and slipping on her jeans. “How did she even know we’re on the ground? Does she think it’s connected to our orbiting radar blip and possible extraterrestrial visitors?”
“No idea,” said Preston, lighting a cigarette and scratching his boxer shorts. “Our job to find out.”
Fire trucks and police cars already filled the parking lot as the rental car carrying the two secret agents pulled into Robert Louis Stevenson Senior High School. Although it was still the pitch-black wee hours of the morning, a crowd of onlookers from the surrounding subdivision had already gathered under the lot’s tall street lamps, and crews from a glass company were boarding up broken windows along the side of the long building with plywood.
“It must be way in the back, near the athletic field,” said Preston.
Lemon drove as close as she could to the scene of the disaster until brick impeded the tires. Fire hoses were still dousing what appeared to be an attachment, practically an outbuilding, to the main building. “Was that the boiler room?” asked Lemon.
“What’s left of it,” said Percy. “Appears to have been totally blown away. Lucky it wasn’t attached to the main building.”
They got out of the car and flashed their ICHHL credentials at the police.
“Can you tell us what happened here?” asked Lemon.
“Furnace exploded, a tank of fuel oil. Took out the whole physical plant, as you can see. Lucky there wasn’t a chimney attached, like in some older schools. Would have toppled over onto the indoor swimming pool. Some broken windows from the shockwave, but otherwise the main building’s intact.”
A station wagon drove up. A woman emerged in a light raincoat. “I’m Vice Principal Victoria Bryant,” said the African-American. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Two custodians,” said the police officer. “They looked like one of those cartoon characters after a stick of dynamite goes off in their hands—covered in soot but largely unscathed. Minor burns, some abrasions, and they’ll be hard of hearing for a while, maybe some permanent hearing loss. But it’s a miracle they survived at all. They were taken to Garden City Osteopathic.”
“What happened?” asked Victoria.
“They couldn’t tell us much,” said the officer. “Appears to have been a freak accident. Has there been anything strange going on around the high school?”
You mean like the preternaturally gifted visiting artists who appeared out of the blue to save my arts camp? Victoria thought to herself.
“Not particularly. Why?”
“One of our squad cars was by just a few minutes before the explosion. Some suspicious activity in your machine shop. But they didn’t find anything disturbed.”
“In the summer we have crews that go around to all the schools in the district that clean all the class rooms and polish the floors. Sometimes they work nights, but we weren’t scheduled until the first week of August. But I can doublecheck.”
“No, it’s probably unrelated,” said the officer.
“As long as it wasn’t a terrorist bomb,” said Victoria. “Can the school still function tomorrow? We’re in the middle of our day camp for the arts.”
“You’ll have to check with your superintendent, but I don’t see why not,” said the officer. “He’s probably going to want building inspectors to go over it first thing in the morning, but there doesn’t seem to be any structural damage. Stevenson’s all one sprawling, horizontal, one-story layout; if it were two or three stories, like the older type of urban school building, that might be a different story. You’re going to need a new furnace when the cold weather starts in the fall, but I imagine they can have the boiler room rebuilt and up and running by Labor Day if the district expedites the project. And I’m sure they will.”
“Well, thank you,” said Victoria. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go talk to some concerned parents now.”
After Victoria left, a fireman called out, “I found something.”
The officer and Agents Lime and Percy waded through the soaked rubble to a clearing amid the debris. On the tiled floor of what had once been the boiler room was a small, handheld device, a black pistol.
“Don’t touch it,” said Lemon.
“I wasn’t planning to,” said Preston.
“What is it?” asked Lemon.
“I don’t know,” said Preston. “Some kind of pneumatic staple gun… ?” “Ain’t no staple gun,” said a new voice.
It was Jasper Johnson, who was craning his elongated neck over the agents’ shoulders.
“Rubber Brother,” said Preston. “How’d you get down from Troy so fast? Seedy must have called you before she called us.”
“We got our own sophisticated alert system at the Troy+Thems headquarters,” said Jasper. “But yeah, she called. Looks like we have a specimen to take back to the lab.”
“On the contrary,” came another voice. “Dr. Robeson James is going to want Ann Arbor to take over—only the labs of Megatonic University are equipped to study a weapon of alien origins.”
“Well, if it isn’t Grady Grinnell, unshaven, disheveled grad student and malevolent lab tech,” said Preston. “Lemon, you’re getting acquainted with all our Michigan friends tonight.”
By this time, another car had pulled up. A spikey-haired woman in a raincoat and a young man shielding his spiral-bound sketchbook from the drizzle approached the group.
“I already know the Phantom Jungle Girl,” said Lemon. “Even without her wig and jungle getup. But who’s the kid?”
“Chase Bradford,” said Donna. “He’s a comic book artist and my houseguest. Thought he might find an actual case interesting.”
“Wow, where’d that come from?” asked Chase, looking at the odd weapon that still lay on the ground, that the group encircled but still hadn’t touched.
“Looks like a job for Roberts, doesn’t it?” said Donna.
“You know Roberts?” said Percy. “Funny; that’s just what I was thinking.”
“Who’s Roberts?” asked Lemon Lime.
“Any time there’s a UFO wreck or an alien robot or what have you, Roberts comes and collects the remains, at least on the East Coast,” explained Jasper.
“He’s in charge of reverse-engineering any technology recovered from the future,” Grady conceded. “Yeah, he’s probably going to snatch this one up to, unfortunately.”
“So, you think this is connected to the flying hotrod?” Donna whispered to Jasper, out of earshot of Chase and Grady.
“Has to be,” Jasper replied.
“What hotrod?” asked Lemon.
The three compared notes on the recent sightings of UFOs over the Detroit area.
“Interesting,” said Lemon.
The mobile phone Lemon was carrying buzzed.
“Yes? Uh-huh; we’re at the site,” she answered. “Who? Of course. Roberts,” she glanced wryly at Preston. “Yes, we’ll keep our eyes on it.”
The mobile phone buzzed; Lemon answered this time.
“Yes? Uh-huh. We’re at the site. Who? Of course. Roberts,” she glanced wryly at Preston. “Yes, we’ll keep our eyes on it.”
She clicked off the device.
“That was Dr. Robeson-James,” said Lemon. “Roberts is on his way—he’s on a plane right now from Alexandria.
“What are you doing?” asked Donna, noticing Chase crouched over the weapon. He was quickly scribbling in his sketchbook while trying to shield it from the drizzle.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” replied Chase. “In lieu of a camera, I’m documenting this object, whatever the heck it is.”
“That’s classified,” said Lemon.
“Go ahead, confiscate my sketchbook,” said Chase, still scribbling away. “It’s filled with studies of naked ladies, if that interests you. Even if you do, I’ll still be able to draw it from memory.” Finished, he stood up and tucked the sketchbook into his denim jacket, smiling at the female agent smugly.
“Smart ass,” said Lemon, who left the young man alone.
The drizzle dissipated as the group stood vigil for another ninety minutes. The police and fire vehicles, one-by-one, left the scene, as has the vice principal after dispersing the crowd of onlookers. Finally, as the predawn skies to east began to lighten, a plain, white ICHHL van pulled into the parking lot from Six Mile Road baring the legend, “Identifiers of Confiscated Hidden Heir Looms.”
“Boy, they are really cheating on these phony front names,” said Jasper.
A slight, aging, but spry African-American gentleman hopped out of the side door of the van. He had spectacles and greying temples and wore a navy blue windbreaker over slacks and polished shoes. He wielded an aluminum briefcase and a clipboard.
“Mr. Roberts,” said Preston.
“Just Roberts,” said Roberts. “Well, where is it? Customarily, when I am called in, there is a mysterious object of peculiar interest.”
Lemon replied, “It’s right over …”
“Where’d it go?” exclaimed Chase, who had turned and was looking at an empty spot near his feet, amid the rubble, where the strange weapon had been.
No one in the group had moved a muscle, yet somebody had made off with the spitfire.
Next: The Bizarre Files
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| Preston Percy and Lemon Lime from Megaton Man #7 (Kitchen Sink Press, December 1985). |
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