Read Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night for Free Online Page B

razor blades taped to the back of the report—but nothing
happened. I did get a thrill when I opened the cover and saw the word
“CLASSIFIED” stamped in red on the first page.
    That was about the only word I
could understand.
    I was pretty good at science,
but this was way over my head. There was stuff about “exothermic reactions” and
“polymer binders” and velocities and distances. There were mathematical
formulae with symbols I didn’t even recognize, and names of scientists
(including Dad’s).
    Then I came to something about
“test animals.” I could follow some of what came next: whatever this was that
they’d been working on, when they tested some part of it on chimpanzees, the
adults were fine, but “younger subjects exhibited extremely aggressive and even
dangerous behavior.”
    I heard their bedroom door
suddenly open, and I jammed the report back in Dad’s case, flipping the paper
open to the comics.
    I tried to look calm as Dad
marched into the living room. He looked immediately at his case. Then at me.
    “What are you doing out here?”
he asked.
    I tried to look irritated. “You
guys are fighting next to my room. I came out here to get away from it.”
    It worked. He was abashed
enough to give up interrogating me. He did snap the case closed and lock it,
but while he did that he said, “I’m sorry about the fight. It’s just that…well,
things have been kind of stressful at work lately…”
    “Gee, Dad,” I said before I
could stop myself, “are your friends dying at work? Because that’s what’s been
happening to me at home. So I guess stuff’s pretty stressful for all of us.”
    He stopped, and for a second I
thought he might come clean or at least apologize. Finally, though, he said
only, “Don’t stay up all night with the comics.” He hefted the case up and
returned to the bedroom. A few seconds later, I heard the door close again.
    I went back to my room,
thinking about what I’d just read in that report. Something—some kind of
fuel?—that Dad was working on had made younger chimps act crazy. Had it somehow
gotten loose, out of the laboratories and air force bases, and infected kids in
the neighborhood? Did the Russians have something to do with this? Was it
intentional on their side…or an accident on ours? I thought back on everything
that had happened over the last few weeks, starting from Mary Ann Wilson—the
first dead girl—and I realized something:
    This all started when we
thought the moon had blown up, when the smog got even thicker and turned our
skies into a perpetual molten yellow. What was it I thought I’d heard Dad say
that day?
    “ This shouldn’t have
happened .”
    No, Dad, it shouldn’t have, but
it did…and I think you know everything about it.
    I went to bed trying to figure
him out. In my imagination, my dad became like a combination of Ernst Stavro Blofeld
and T.H.R.U.S.H. He was a criminal mastermind, a spy overlord, a comic book
villain. He was a mad scientist creating a new super rocket fuel that turned
young chimps and teenaged humans into killers. And all he had to offer in
return was, “This shouldn’t have happened.”
    I hated him.
    Maybe I would have felt
differently if I’d known that I’d never see him again.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 13
     
     
     
    By morning, I’d decided that I was
going to tell Mom about the report in Dad’s briefcase. I knew she might be a
little mad at me for sneaking it out and reading it, but at this point Mom was
my last ally, and the more she knew, the better.
    I was out of bed and getting
dressed when I heard Mom shouting in the kitchen. “CJ, unlock this right now!”
    I finished pulling on my shoes
and ran out to the kitchen. To say I was unprepared for what I saw next would
be putting it mildly.
    Mom was standing by the
refrigerator gripping the door handle, and it took me a second to realize that
it wasn’t just that she was gripping it but that she was handcuffed to
it.
    CJ stood a few feet