I had a horrible dream. First I was swimming, which wasn’t so horrible, since I couldn’t swim in real life. The sun burned high overhead, the waves rolled gently over my bare back, and the warm water seemed to buoy me up so swimming took hardly any effort. I was in the middle of the ocean, no shore in sight, and the water was this deep forest green and smelled rich, like fertile soil. Then I dived beneath the surface and things started to get freaky. I morphed into this scale-less fish, big-headed, with grayish skin, a white underbelly like a catfish, and a toothless mouth. I changed into this fish, and then I started to grow.
I grew till I was about the size of a whale shark, this gray and white behemoth of the sea, gulping hundreds of gallons into my wide, toothless mouth and shooting them out through my gills. I felt something pricking my fish-skin: hundreds of little silvery fish with suckers for mouths were attaching themselves to me as I swam. More and more of the little sucker fish appeared out of the depths and latched on to me, until thousands carpeted every inch, and I could feel them sucking the life out of me. I began to sink deeper and deeper as my life force waned, and the water began to turn black and very cold.
I shivered. I’m not sure fish are capable of shivering, but in this dream anything seemed possible, even something like a white-bellied Kropp Fish.
I woke up and I was still shivering.
The porthole was shining brightly and light reflecting off the ocean was dancing on the glass. Right beside the porthole, Op Nine leaned against the bulkhead.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“We are two hours from the insertion point,” he said.
“I love your super-secret-agent Tom Clancy lingo,” I said.
“Extreme extraction. Special Subject. Insertion point. What happens after we’re inserted into the point?”
I sat up and a wave of dizziness swept over me. Someone, probably Op Nine, since I had a feeling he had been assigned as my minder, had brought me another big glass of orange juice. I gulped it down.
“Then we have approximately six hours,” Op Nine said.
“Six hours to do what?”
“Stop the Hyena before he can unlock the Lesser Seal.”
“ ‘Hyena’?”
“Mike Arnold.”
“That’s his code name, Hyena?”
“You don’t like it? We thought it most apropos.”
“It’s okay, but my big problem with code names is why use one when everybody knows the real name?”
“Because that would offend our super-secret-agent Tom Clancy sensibilities.”
He motioned toward the foot of the bed.
“Perhaps you would like to dress before we reach Marsa Alam.”
“Huh?” I had no idea I wasn’t dressed. Then I saw I was wearing a hospital gown. Why had OIPEP stuck me in a hospital gown?
I slid out of bed and grabbed the bundle of clothes. He just stood there, staring at me with those dark eyes. I hoped he didn’t plan to stand there while I got dressed.
“Is there someplace I can maybe wash up and brush my teeth?” Running my tongue over them felt like I was licking carpet, and not the thin, worn kind in the Tuttle house, but something with a thicker pile.
“Of course. Left down the corridor, last door on the right at the terminus of the hall.”
Terminus of the hall. He didn’t have any accent that I could detect, but he talked like English was his second language. Who says “terminus of the hall”?
Op Nine opened the round door for me. I turned left, one hand pressing the clothes against my chest, the other clutching the gown closed behind me as I shuffled down the hall. In case you didn’t know, hospital gowns are open in the back with just a little drawstring to tie them, and therefore my na**d butt was flapping in the breeze. The hall was packed with agents hurrying up and down, and a few stopped and stared as I passed.
I thought I heard a couple of snickers and once the word “pimple,” though it might have been “dimple,” which made sense too.
I reached the terminus of the hall and went through the last door on the right.
I was in a tiny bathroom, maybe two or three times the size of an airplane bathroom. I barely fit in the shower, but it had one of those removable shower heads on a flexible tube with the adjustable sprayers for regular or massaging.
I stayed in that shower for a long time, leaning against the wall as the water pounded on my dimple, wondering what this dizziness was about and if it had something to do with jet lag. I found a sore spot in my left armpit and worried about that—I knew your lymph nodes were in your pits, and my mom had died of cancer. Cancer ran in families, though hers didn’t start in her armpits.
I grabbed a towel from the peg on the wall and dried off, getting a little dizzy when I bent over to do my legs. I wrapped the towel around my middle, took a deep breath, and sat on the toilet.
I hadn’t cried since this whole thing began back in Knoxville, but I finally had a little time on my hands and some privacy to get some quality crying in, so I started to cry.
Half a world away, kids were piling onto the school bus. Was anybody saying, “Hey, whatever happened to that big kid, Kropp?” Were any teachers looking at the empty desk and frowning, or was Horace camping out at the police station waiting for news? Was Kenny lying in his bunk, whispering in the dark, wondering aloud where Alfred Kropp had gone?
And in the afternoons the parks and practice fields would be packed with players, soccer and football teams wallowing in that sweaty camaraderie of jocks. Geeks would be playing the latest version of Doom and IMing each other with tips. The garage bands would be revving up the amps, moms would be sticking the chicken in the oven, and neighborhood streets would echo with the shouts of kids playing in the fallen leaves and soon it will be Thanksgiving . . .
I tried not to think of all those things, but the more I tried, the more I thought. Once, I thought normal life was boring and I hated it. Now I would give everything to go back.
But Thanksgiving made me think of food and food made me think of my teeth, and that brought me back to my senses. The thought of brushing my teeth calmed me down, I guess because it was an everyday activity that had nothing to do with biblical kings and extreme extractions and secret organizations with vaults filled with deadly artifacts that bring catastrophe if you mess with them.
I found a toothbrush still in its packaging and a travel-size tube of Crest in the cabinet mounted next to the mirror. No floss, but you can’t have everything. I brushed until my gums bled and watched my pink spit swirl down the drain.