Badd Read online

  And Jared Jones was stuffing Black Cats down the door to their pyramid and blasting it to pieces.

  “Yeah!” they all yelled as another firecracker exploded. “Kill those little suckers.”

  There wasn’t any question in my mind what I had to do. I walked right up to those boys and slapped Jared hard across the back of his fat head and told him to stop it if he didn’t want to end up eating a handful of dirt.

  He rose up with this look in his eyes like he was ready for World War III, but when he saw me, the fierceness pulled up short. “You’re lucky you’re a girl,” he said. “I’d feed you one of these Black Cats if you weren’t.”

  I just stared him down and said, “You’re gonna stop blowing up those ants.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I doubt that,” he said.

  I put out my hand. “Give me those firecrackers.”

  “Why don’t you stick one up her butt,” said one of his buddies.

  I left my hand where it was.

  “What are you gonna do?” Jared asked, sizing me up. “Go tell your big brother on us?”

  “I don’t need to tell my brother,” I said, and before I even finished, I whipped my hand over and grabbed the string of firecrackers away.

  Of course, he wanted them back, said he’d forget I was a girl if I didn’t hand them over. I didn’t say anything. I just turned around and started to walk away. I knew what would happen, though. I’d seen the same situation with Bobby. He had some words with this guy Ally Taylor, and just when Bobby turned around to leave peacefully, Ally rushed him from behind. I learned something important from Bobby that day. Movie fighting is crap. You don’t need spinning kicks and fancy karate fists of fury. You just need to get the other guy on the ground as quick as possible and don’t let him up till he knows he’s beat.

  So I did just what I saw Bobby do. As soon as I sensed Jared coming at me from behind, I whirled around low, under any punches that might be coming, and tackled him at the waist. In the next second, he was on the ground and I was sitting on his chest, slapping his face. His friends just laughed.

  Fat tears boiled out of Jared’s eyes, and as much as I despised him, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. Beat up by a girl. His friends would spread the word around like a bad case of the bird flu. But I guarantee you, they didn’t want any piece of me either.

  After that, I wasn’t just the badass’s little sister anymore. I was a badass in my own right. That’s a lot different from a bully. Bullies start things. Badasses finish them. And as the baddest girl in Knowles, there are certain things I’m bound to do.

  Dealing with Captain Crazy is one of them. He started something, and I’m going to finish it.

  3

  It’s me and my two main boys, Gillis Kilmer and Tillman Grant. Gillis and I grew up two houses apart. Tillman joined up with us as soon as we hit first grade. Whereas Gillis is stocky and hard, Tillman’s tall and lean and twice as hard. Black-haired, brown-eyed, dark-skinned. He looks Italian, but he’s not. From that Adam’s apple of his, you’d think he got a hand grenade stuck in his throat. He’s the kind of kid who never has you over to his house and doesn’t hang around there much himself if he can help it. It’s a dump. His dad’s long gone, and his mom’s kind of a tramp. Tillman would probably be in reform school by now if it wasn’t for us. Who knows, our whole group may still make it. I’d probably fit in better there than in this town anyway.

  I don’t ask my girl Brianna along. She’s too big and clumsy, and for someone who tries hard to look scary, she gets too nervous to drag along on a mission like this. Anyway, she’s the worst paintballer in town.

  That’s the plan—to wreak paintball devastation all over Casa Crazy. Gillis is an okay paintballer, but Tillman and I are heroes. Not that we have an official paintball field in Knowles, but that’s all right. It’s probably better in the woods anyway. We play a couple of times a month with two teams of five. Our team is me, Gillis, Tillman, Brianna, and either Charles Lyman or Kelli Sundy, depending on what day it is. Tillman keeps trying to get me to kick Brianna off our team because she always gets tagged in about thirty seconds, but I say no way. She’s a friend and we’re sticking. Besides, I’m good enough for two people.

  At dusk, all decked out in our camo, we load our gear into Gillis’s car and head off on our mission. On the way to the edge of town, I lay down the strategy. We already know the basic layout of Captain Crazy’s place, a crumbly old ex-farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Just about everybody within fifty miles stops by there now and then so they can look at the sculptures the captain makes out of junk—the fat boy, the giant robot, the two-headed lady, the twenty-foot-tall winged giraffe, all constructed of old tires, washers and dryers, car fenders, rusted farm equipment, aluminum guardrails, paint cans, and warped shingles. They’re not bad for something made by a lunatic.

  “First,” I explain, “we’ll park in the woods on the other side of the captain’s place, about a hundred yards away. Then we’ll split up and each take a different line of attack. Wait till I give a whistle, then we’ll come screaming in from three sides.”

  “We gonna light this dude up?” asks Tillman, grinning maliciously.

  “No,” I tell him. “No body shots, just property. Hit the house hard. And that old lime-green pickup.”

  “How about the sculptures?” asks Gillis.

  “Hit as many of them as you can.”

  “Hell, Ceejay,” says Tillman. “We need to put some bruises on this dude. What good’s marking his property gonna do? He’ll just wash that off.”

  I’m like, “That’s the point. While he’s washing up, he’ll have plenty of time to think about things.”

  Once we get parked in the woods, we pull out our rifles and helmets and put on our fingerless gloves. Since real Spider rifles are too expensive, we have semiautomatic Spider clones with ported barrels for quieter firing. You might think we wouldn’t really need the helmets since we’re not shooting at each other, but they’re important for getting into the warrior spirit.

  Gillis heads for the right flank, and Tillman takes the left. Me, I want to come roaring straight down the middle of the yard, just like Bobby would do if he was here. The sky is mostly dark by now, but the stars are coming out and the moon hangs over the trees. It’s eerie. I’ve never looked at the captain’s sculptures at night, but as I sneak up to the far edge of his yard, they seem like dark, intergalactic demons standing guard.

  Off to the right, something crashes in the brush and then Gillis lets out a goddamn. I freeze. Stupid Gillis, tripping around and making noise. He’s sure to give us away. Silence is key. We need to get a lot closer before letting the hellhounds loose.

  I study the dark windows, checking for any sign of movement, but everything remains still. Lucky for Gillis. I’ll blast him in the butt if he screws up this mission.

  The captain’s weathered old lime-green truck sits about thirty yards from his front porch. I crouch behind it and check my rifle to make sure it’s ready to shoot. Captain Crazy deserves our fiery wrath. I have no doubt of that. He sinned against us. And really, we’re doing it for Bobby, who’s halfway around the world and can’t do it for himself. Still, I hesitate. I can’t help wondering if maybe I should try to talk to the captain first. Isn’t that what Bobby would do?

  But I’m here. And Gillis and Tillman are out in the woods waiting, expecting things from me. I can’t cut and run.

  The dark shapes of the sculptures gaze down on me, giving off this feeling like the captain is judging me through them. I stare back hard, determined, and the captain’s song bursts back into my brain—War is the coward’s way. Well, my brother’s no coward and neither am I.

  I’m right to be here, I tell myself. It’s too late for doubts. Like I said, Revenge is for the mighty.

  I whistle the attack signal as loud as I can.

  Gillis and Tillman charge from the woods, and I dart out from behind the truck, firing one ball after another, splattering the fat
boy and the robot, the front of the house, and the porch steps. Globs of orange paint blossom everywhere, like mutant peaches. We’re all laughing, but at the same time, ready to run into the sanctuary of the woods if Captain Crazy tries to chase us.

  Then the lights in his house flick on.

  Expecting the door to fly open, I half turn toward the tree line, but nothing happens. Inside the house, a dog barks like wild, but everything else is as still as a tombstone. None of us fire another shot. Something’s up. We can feel it—some kind of Captain Crazy weirdness.

  Suddenly a voice rises up over the dog’s bark, a long, ripping cry, so loud and metallic it must have come through a bullhorn. “Yaaaahhhhhhh!”

  “Holy crap,” says Gillis.

  Then the bullhorn voice goes, “Stop in the name of the nine prophets of the Yimmies. You are surrounded by titanium angels. There is no escape.”

  I look at the silhouettes of Gillis and Tillman.

  “I’m gone,” says Tillman, and just that fast his silhouette tears for the trees.

  “I’m behind you,” says Gillis, and there he goes too.

  Me, I’m not backing down so easy. Besides, I haven’t achieved my main goal yet—to smack a big orange splotch dead in the middle of the front door. I raise my rifle to take aim when the bullhorn screeches again.

  “Search yourself for your inner heaven or end up stuck in limbo!”

  This is weird. Now the voice is coming from a new place, somewhere near the fat boy, just behind it, maybe. I can’t figure out how he could have got there so quick.

  I fire my last shot, but I don’t know whether I hit the door because I’m too startled by that weird voice crying out again, a long wail like something dead and come back, and this time it sounds even closer. Fast as I can, I sprint to the lime-green truck and crouch by one of the tires. Footsteps crunch in the gravel close by, and the dog’s bark starts up again, only he’s not in the house anymore. I can’t tell exactly where he is, maybe behind me. Maybe the captain is closing in from one side and his dog’s coming from the other. They’re tricky, but I’m trickier. I slide under the truck, where nobody can see me from either side.

  For a long time, the place is quiet. Then I hear the soft trot of the dog’s feet, probably about ten yards away. He circles the truck once and stops. I know he’s sure to smell me, but I don’t know which side of the truck I should scramble out from without running into the captain.

  The dog begins to growl, the kind of low growl that starts way back in the throat and gets louder as it rumbles forward. The next thing I know, he’s at the side of the truck, his muzzle thrusting in next to one of the tires, the growls busting into full barks. He paws at the dirt and snaps in my direction. From what I can tell, he’s not too big to crawl right under here with me and have my face for dinner.

  There’s nothing to do except explode out from the other side of the truck and make a run for the trees, hoping the captain won’t see me. The dog squeezes his head and shoulders under the truck as I roll out the other side. I hop up and run, dodge around the winged giraffe, and smack hard into Captain Crazy’s chest.

  He grips the bullhorn in one hand and, with the other, he grabs hold of my arm. I’ve never stared into his eyes this close before. It’s like five hundred years of the world’s insanity staring back at me.

  “Let go of me,” I demand, trying to wrench my arm away.

  His grip only squeezes tighter, and he sticks his face so close to mine I can smell the unexpected scent of his breath—Cocoa Puffs.

  Looking hard through my paintball goggles and into my eyes, he goes, “You are not who you think you are.”

  That’s all: “You are not who you think you are.”

  Then he smiles.

  He lets go of my arm, and for a moment I just stand there staring at him like I’m hypnotized. Then my brain kicks into gear, and I take off across the yard and into the woods, dodging around trees, jumping over shrubs, never looking back. The dog’s barks are far behind me. No one can catch me now.

  But all the way to the car those words keep banging around in my head. You are not who you think you are, you are not who you think you are, you are not who you think you are.

  Gillis and Tillman are lucky they had the sense to wait for me with the car. They’d have a lot to answer for if they left me stranded in the forest of craziness. Driving home, we laugh and replay the invasion, and talk about how much scrubbing the captain will have to do tomorrow. We don’t worry about him calling the police. They aren’t likely to pay attention to him if he does. Still, even when I get home, I can’t help but think about how he looked at me and what he said. You are not who you think you are.

  How does he know who I am? He doesn’t even know who he is.

  4

  The thing is, growing up, I was always one hundred percent sure of who I was—Bobby McDermott’s little sister. That was a great thing to be. It didn’t matter that he was six years older. We were tight. He was the one who started calling me Ceejay way back when I was only two years old. He knew Catherine Jameson was no name for a warrior girl. The two of us just laughed at how corny and goofy our parents were, but we had each other, so it was fun. It was like we were both changelings, brought up in the wrong family together.

  You should see my mom. She’s so bubbly, it’s like her cork could pop any second. And she’s always that way—upbeat and perky as the “Happy Birthday” song. I don’t understand it. How great can life be when you’re a bookkeeper at a body shop? The biggest things that ever happen to her are church and a trip to the hairdresser. But even when Bobby had to go into the army, she acted like it would be great for him, like God was dripping golden blessings on us instead of dumping a truckload of crap on our heads.

  Now her mom, Grandma Brinker, is sick—cancer—but Mom swears it’s not serious. That’s right—cancer. Not serious. Weekends, she’s been making the hour-and-a-half drive to Davenport to help Grandma take care of her house, and every time she comes back, she’s all positive and glowing. “They got it in time,” she says. “Just a few more treatments and she’ll be back to her old self. We’ll all go over for a visit then.” That’s Mom. She can even find the silver lining in cancer.

  My dad’s not much different. He’s just the male version, grinning like hearty is his middle name, slapping people on the back, calling them bud, shaking hands with his hand-of-steel death grip. And the jokes. If he ever comes up to you and says, “Have you heard the one about …,” run the other way as fast as you can. They’re the lamest. To hear my uncles’ stories, Dad used to be a pretty big badass himself back in the day, but now he’s just a jolly, fat tire-plant foreman who gets all sentimental over hokey songs and Christmas movies.

  My big sister’s a replica of Mom. In fact, since she’s eight years older than me, she seems more like an aunt than a sister. My little sister’s a stuck-up priss, and my little brother’s a captain second grade in Halo, so I’ve barely seen him since he got the Xbox. I don’t even know how we ended up with so many kids in our family. Can you imagine my parents having sex? Errrrrg. All I can figure is that every once in a while, during sleep, my dad accidentally rolls over on my mom, and presto, nine months later, there’s a new baby squalling around the house. It’s ridiculous. Why would you want to bring a bunch of kids into this messed-up world? I mean, wake up! Bobby’s in the war, for God’s sake. He’s in the frigging war! And it’s all my parents’ fault.

  Some of the idiots at school say they could see trouble coming for Bobby a mile away, but that’s just because they don’t know the difference between bad and BADD. The first one is small and mean. The second one is vast, like a wild continent. That’s Bobby. Sure, he did crazy things, but he never hurt anyone that didn’t deserve it. Well, except maybe himself.

  When he was ten, he rode his bicycle off a park-pavilion roof and broke his arm. We still have the pictures of him with his arm in that cast, a big smile on his face like he’s showing off the Congressional Medal of Honor.
In junior high, he jumped out of a second-story window at school, just sailed out like Superman because someone told him he couldn’t. He held the record for climbing the highest on one of those high-voltage towers in the alfalfa field off Highway 9, and once, on his motorcycle, he held a wheelie the entire length of Marshall Drive, around the curves and through the intersections. He was wild but always in a fun way.

  Then, when he was just out of high school, he went a little too far. He stole a car, not to keep for himself or to profit from in any way, but just to cruise in, to be a free man in at four o’clock in the morning while his motorcycle was in the shop. No doubt he would’ve brought it back, too, parked it just where he found it, but this time his famous luck let him down.

  The cops spotted him speeding down Gunderson Road on the outside of town and took after him with red lights flashing. Of course, Bobby being Bobby, he gunned it and would’ve lost them, too, if it hadn’t been for that sharp curve and the bald tires on that stolen Ford. Instead, the rear end got away from him, and he ended up plowing through a fence and straight into the water hazard on the seventh hole of Knowles’ shaggy little nine-hole golf course.

  He didn’t even try to run anymore—he just stood there in the knee-deep water with his hands over his head, ready to surrender. Still, Officer Dave and Officer Larry made him lie facedown in the rough and handcuffed his wrists behind his back. “Your joy-riding days are over, Bobby,” they told him. And then they found that baggie of weed in his pocket.