up. Jason didn’t shake easily, and he looked shaken. Storm—her real name was Tempest, but she hated it—was downright pale. Maxine’s mom was right on their heels.
“So what is it, what’s burning?” Max asked.
“It’s Spook Central,” Jason said without even missing a beat. “It’s bad.”
“It’s awful,” Stormy added, and her round jewel-blue eyes were damp. “I don’t think anyone got out alive.”
Spook Central was Maxine’s pet name for the large, nameless government compound just outside town. The main building was huge and sat well back from the road behind a large, electrified fence, surrounded by surveillance cameras and shrouded in secrecy. A research lab—that was the party line, anyway, and so the gullible locals believed. Medical research was done there—they were working on finding cures for cancer and AIDS, stuff like that. Good work. Almost holy. Too sacred to mess with or poke around in. Who would question such a saintly mission?
Maxine had her own theories, as she did about most things, and right now she hoped to God the one she had always considered the most likely—that the place was a military lab working on germ warfare and chemical weapons—was dead wrong.
Nightmare images from Stephen King’s The Stand coiled and uncoiled in her mind until she shook them away and stepped into action. She turned, reaching back into her room to snatch a jacket from the back of a chair. Then she was striding down the hall. “Let’s go.”
“Go? Go where?” her mother asked, falling into step behind the three of them as they headed for the front door. When no one replied, Ellen got around them, stepping right into their path. “Max, don’t you go over there. You’ll just get in the way and maybe get hurt.”
“Come on, Mom, I’m twenty years old. I’m not going to bother the firefighters. I just want to know what’s going on.”
“Then read about it in the morning paper, like everyone else.”
“God, how can you be so innocent?”
Ellen Stuart sighed, looking worried, but also resigned. No one had ever really been able to change Maxine’s mind once it was made up about something, and her mother ought to be getting used to that by now, having experienced it firsthand from the day she brought the three-month-old orphan home for the first time. “Be careful.”
“Always.” Maxine yanked a mini-backpack off the hook by the door. An iron-on patch with the words Trust No One and the X-Files logo decorated its front. She slung it over her shoulder, and the three friends trooped out of the house.
They all piled into Jason’s creamed-coffee colored Jeep Cherokee. He liked to joke that he had picked the color to match his skin. And it did, pretty closely. Maxine took the back seat. Stormy, a pixie-sized psych major with short, spiky, bleached hair, got into the front with Jason, closing her door just as he backed out into the street and headed out of town.
Maxine sat on the edge of her seat, her head between the two in the front. “You can see the fire from here. Look at that.”
They did. Stormy shivered, lowered her eyes. Jason stared as if mesmerized for a moment, then snapped out of it, flicking on the radio, turning the dial. “I knew you’d want to go,” he said. “It came over my brother’s scanner. If he wasn’t a volunteer firefighter, I probably still wouldn’t know.”
“Still nothing about it on the radio, Jay?” Stormy asked. She was nervous; playing with her eyebrow ring was always a sign of that.
He kept flicking the dial, then gave up, shaking his head slowly. “I expected special reports, crap like that, but there hasn’t been a word.”
“They report what they’re told to report,” Maxine said. “Despite my mother’s gullible belief in the system, the phrase ‘free press’ is an oxymoron in this country.”
“I like your mom,” Jason put in.
Max blinked at him as if he were speaking another language. “I like her, too. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“I just don’t think you ought to be calling her gullible. She wouldn’t like it.”
Maxine closed her eyes, shook her head, then glanced at Stormy for backup.
“He’s right,” Stormy said. “Your mom is cool. You’re so lucky.”
“Of course she’s cool! Hell, I would have gotten a dorm room or an apartment or gone to college out of town if she wasn’t cool, instead of staying home and going to a local school. But this has nothing to do with my mother or how cool she may or may not be! I’m talking about the government here. Cover-ups. Covert operations.”
Stormy shrugged, averting her eyes. Topics like this always made her uncomfortable. But Maxine wasn’t uncomfortable discussing it. She was more uncomfortable having lived practically in the shadow of that huge, fenced in, well-guarded compound all her life, and never once knowing what went on inside.
She knew only one thing for sure. It wasn’t cancer research. She would have given her eyeteeth for a look beyond the tall, electrified fences of that place. Just one look. Now maybe no one would ever know the truth.
Jason drove on, pulling the Jeep over onto the right-hand shoulder before they got to the point where emergency vehicles lined both sides of the road. Highway flares lay across the pavement. Orange and white striped sawhorses with red reflectors were lined up behind them, forming a boundary that was supposed to tell them to keep out. They got out of the Jeep. Flames in the distance licked at the night sky, and Max could already taste the smoke in her mouth with every breath.
“This way.” Maxine walked along the road’s right shoulder, beyond the parked vehicles, and her friends followed. The burning compound was on the left, at the end of a long curving drive. She led the others forward until they were directly across the street from the entrance to the compound. Firefighters were across the street, partway along the drive, facing away from them. They were completely focused on their work, anyway. Maxine crouched near an ambulance, tugging the others down with her.
The fire trucks had apparently driven straight through the gate at the head of the drive. The guardhouse nearby was empty, the gate itself lying flat. The fence to the left and right of it was buckled and broken. The surveillance cameras that had been mounted on poles lay smashed to bits. Volunteer firefighters in yellow jackets marked with glowing silver reflective tape manned huge hoses attached to tanker trucks in the curving paved drive. Every time they beat the flames down a little, the trucks would roll closer, the men pushing farther into the fury.
“I don’t know how they can stand it. God, I can feel the heat from here,” Stormy said, pressing a palm to her face.
“I’m surprised their hoses aren’t melting,” Jason whispered. “If they move any closer …”
“If they move any closer, we’ll be able to get in.”
The other two looked at Maxine as if she had sprouted horns.
“What?” she asked.
“You gotta be out of your freaking mind, Max,” Jason told her, while Storm just shook her head. “We can’t go in there.”
“No one’s watching the entrance. They’re all distracted, fighting the fire. We can get in without even trying.”
“Okay, I’ll rephrase that. We can go in there. But we shouldn’t.”
Now it was Maxine’s turn to gape. “What are you, crazy? I’ve been dying to get behind those gates since I was old enough to see through that lame cancer research cover story they’ve been using.”
“Which was when she was about six,” Stormy muttered.
Max shot her a look but hurried on. “Don’t you guys get it? This is our chance. No guards, nothing. We can finally see something besides the lie.”
“And