Chapter Two: The Second Bombshell
Point Of View: X-Ray
One Week After The First Bombshell
September at Camp Green Lake is not a single degree cooler than July.
I always knew there was something crazy about the place...well, all right, a lot of crazy things...but this was going beyond the limits of the term "crazy" as I knew it.
Granted, a few other things stretched the limits of that term as well...Zigzag, for example. But even Zigzag usually at least somewhat deferred to me, as the unofficial leader of D Tent. The heat deferred to no one. Not even to the laughable images of authority to whom we were expected to defer. Mom could tell the sun to have a positive attitude, and Mr. Sir could inform it that Camp Green Lake wasn't no Girl Scout camp, and the Warden could recite a whole mantra of, "Excuse me?" until she lost her voice. The sun would just keep right on beating down on all of us, and not the slightest puff of cloud would appear in deference.
Did I mention that it didn't rain?
No one could be sure when it had stopped, how many times it had happened since the big storm on the day that Caveman and Zero were sent home and the camp shut down. All anyone knew for certain was that not a drop had fallen since the day those three aforementioned fools were declared "reformed."
From what I know of the whole "curse" theory...that is, what Caveman told us, at that crazy pool party of his...that disgusting word, "reformed", would have old Kate Barlow turning in her grave. But I've never been the superstitious type. I like to rely on a nice solid combination of intellect and intimidation. It's gotten me plenty of little things before, from some extra bread at dinner to a full day off from digging. I just keep my eyes open...the mental eyes, you know, the ones I can actually see out of...for opportunities. Nothing can get you further than watching for opportunities.
Unfortunately, this was one opportunity that I happened to miss. Not that I let my guard down or nothing, mind you. It's just this particular opportunity had to come in visual form, which has always been the worst kind for me.
Translated, that paragraph reads, "I wasn't the one who spotted the car." For the record, Zigzag was. Figures. With that long neck of his, it just figures. All of us were bent over our holes, shoveling away that damn dirt like sensible little campers, and Ziggy was up there craning that giraffe neck all over the place, probably watching for enemy planes to come zooming out of the blue and start dropping bombs on us. Acute paranoia: understatement of the year.
So what does our jolly little D-Tent gang hear all of a sudden?
"Hey, guys, look! It's a car!"
Now, let me point out that cars do not just randomly come gliding across the vast expanse of desert in which Camp Green Lake was located. If they did, Twitch would have had us all out of there ages ago. And since this was, as I mentioned, Zigzag, the first assumption that hit me, and probably all of us, was that he'd finally cracked for good. Actually, it wouldn't have been his first hallucination.
But at the word "car", Twitch just had to look up. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, several holes down from me, following Zig's gaze, then suddenly dropping his shovel and hauling himself out of his hole. That brought all of us out of ours, and in a moment we were gathered in a cluster, gaping like fools.
Of course, we couldn't tell from there whether it was a nice car, and as it turned out, it was far from it; but Twitch was in car withdrawal, and it only took this distant glimpse to start his whole body jerking and writhing worse than ever. Squid grabbed him by the back of the shirt out of reflex. Those creepy eyes of Zigzag's...wide, unblinking, bright electric-blue...were about twice their normal size.
"It's the secret police," he muttered, half to himself, half to whichever among the voices in his head might disagree with him. "Undercover, man. The Warden's troops. Secret army. They're comin' to finish us off. Gonna shoot us all, straight into the holes. We been diggin' our own graves all this time."
Armpit slung an arm around Zigzag. "Hey, man, chill," he advised earnestly. "You gotten worse since last time, y'know that?" He turned his worried gaze to me. "I don't think that bombshell last week was good for him, X."
"Will you shut up?" I snapped. "The rest of us are tryin' to watch here."
Let it be noted that my entire view at that moment consisted of the dust that clouded the inside of my glasses, a few feet of dust in front of me, and the blurry shapes of the other guys around me. But hey, I had a rep to protect. No one but Caveman had ever known the truth about my vision, and Caveman was gone.
Magnet, meanwhile, had shielded his eyes with one hand. "It's gettin' closer," he informed us in his strong Spanish accent. "It's headin' this way."
"You sure it ain't the water truck?" Rep or no rep, the opportunist in me wanted to know what was going on here.
"It ain't the water truck," Twitch immediately scoffed, still absentmindedly struggling against Squid's grasp. "It's loads smaller'n the water truck, an' it's green, looks like a pretty old model, kinda beat-up, guess we won't be seein' another gorgeous Jag stop by here anytime soon--"
I gritted my teeth; that kid's fast-paced, scatterbrained chatter had more than once caused me to start twitching, with the urge to punch him in the face. I knew the only thing that had stopped him now was the wistful resentment accompanying his last statement; he was still mourning the injustice of never getting behind the wheel of that Jaguar. Anyway, I didn't get the chance to think about hitting him at the moment, because two slightly more interesting events occurred to distract me. The real water truck came rumbling across the camp, driven by Mr. Sir, to fill our canteens as usual. And the supposedly beat-up green car that everyone had been watching, which I had been hearing about secondhand, took a very loud and startling nose dive, straight into a hole.
