He cut me off. "All of them! Every last one of my mighty toys!"

I glared at him lost. "This isn't possible."

"I don't care, Mr. Ryan. I want answers. I want my guns back, and I want what's in that locker. I want your weapon, now," his joking tone faded.

"Weapon?" My head spun. Could it be a weapon?

"E.M.P., magnetic time-bomb, school locker nuke...I don't care what it is. I just want it!" General Love's voice trembled with a weird desperateness.

"I...don't..." I stuttered, and found Olivia's worried face. Even as scared as she was, she would not let go of my arm. In my head, Sophia's voice rang out...

"Save me."

I had to do something. I had to try and save Olivia's sister. I promised.

"Well, are you going to help, Mr. Ryan?" General Love said, with a nudge.

"I'll try."

"Good," he smiled.

"For you," I nodded toward Olivia. She watched as I pulled from her grasp, and slid my bag over my shoulder.

With a new quaking in my hand, I placed my flashing phone directly in front of me. The pulsating yellow lights stopped with a crackling hum. Both my phone and locker fell dark. I inhaled a long breath. Suddenly, the sound of stretching metal sc.r.a.ped at my ears. It was loud enough for most of the audience to hear too. Uneasiness spread through the crowd behind me. Slowly, my phone started to vibrate. My fingers pulled from its surface, stretching themselves in relief, but my phone remained attached to my palm, as if magnetized. I was terrified to move. So was everyone else.

"Lucas, what's happening? Olivia whimpered. My eyes found hers. My phone slid down my palm as if it was coated in baby oil, leaving a sparkling trail. It slowly came to a rest between my lower wrist and forearm. It was vibrating so hard now that I thought for sure my bones might shatter. I grabbed at it with my other hand, but it wouldn't budge.

"Lucas?" she asked, again.

"It hurts," I winced. My phone centered itself along my skin and dug into my flesh. It burned as it burrowed in, but the vibrating slowed to a dull throb. Thump, thump, thump. I could hear my pulse synchronize with it. Thump, thump, thump, as if we were one, now.

General Love took a large step backwards, motioning for his men to do the same. I enjoyed their fear, but I wasn't sure why. My phone continued to amaze. It molded itself into a more elongated shape, sleek and formfitting. It no longer hurt. Amazingly, it felt good, comforting. It felt...right. I flexed my arm, staring at my new, alien gauntlet. Strength filled the muscle in my arm and hand.

"This is weird," I smiled at Olivia. "A good weird."

She glanced at me worried. "Are you...okay?" Her stare accused me of being crazy. For all I knew, she was right. None of this was sane. I slowly lowered my arm to my side and took a small step forward, sensing a growing confidence coming from inside my locker. In front of me, the wall of ammunition and death began to tremble and shake. Gently at first, but then, violently. With a wicked grin, I pushed myself forward.

"Lucas!" Olivia yelled. I glanced over my shoulder, finding her worried stare, and winked at her.

"Let's get this party started!" I called out, flexing the new strength in my fist. I shouted at the top of my lungs, "MOVE!"

As I ordered it, the wall of weapons came alive like an army of toy soldiers. They spun and twisted around, jumping out of order and then back in place. All standing at attention. All in a unified line down the hallway. I flicked my new mechanical wrist and they all flew toward the wall. Every piece of weaponry lined themselves along the corridor of lockers, their firm casings clanking against the metal. The line of ammunition covered every locker down the whole hallway. Each gun and blade stuck against the wall like overpowered refrigerator magnets. General Love blinked in amazement.

"Incredible," he said, wickedly.

As the onlookers studied the impossible sight, something caught my attention. Stuck against the locker door next to mine, was the backpack that magically held my schoolmate, Grant, imprisoned. I could still hear him as he screamed out for someone to help. I wondered what exactly was hidden away in that bag. I reached out and removed Grant's backpack without any resistance. Easily, I removed its contents; a couple school books, a sack lunch, and a small, black bag with a gold drawstring. Along the back of the bag, sewn in white thread, was a few words of wisdom...

... 'HEAVEN SMILES ABOVE ME. WHAT A GIFT, THERE BELOW.'

"What is it, Lucas?" Olivia asked, from just over my shoulder. She had moved up, right behind me. I smiled and emptied the tiny bag out. Three silver throwing-stars fell out and hovered in the air. They looked like a relic from a Bruce Lee movie. They spun in the air, fluidly dancing around each other before slamming themselves into the locker door. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

"More weapons," I chuckled. Was it some sort of 'peace bomb' in my locker? Did it come here to rid the world of all our evil death machines, starting with the Valley of the Sun, Phoenix, Arizona? I placed my hand on the surface of my locker door, enjoying the buzzing hum of the sheet-metal. Maybe it was some sort of super computer sent from the future to stop some horrible catastrophe? A laugh filled my chest at the ridiculous thought. I really have played too many video games.

"Go on, Mr. Ryan," General Love ordered from a safe distance. My exotic armband began to blur with metallic silver smoke escaping its touchscreen. The smoke curled itself upward and into the vents lining the top of the locker door. In my mind I asked the door to open, and on cue, it did. With a thin and eerie creak, it slid open. As everyone around me held their breath, scared completely by the vision before them, I stepped closer.

"Pick me up," I said, with a crooked smile.

LEVEL 11: Uprising.

I stared at the mystery in my locker with a new smile. What lay before me was unbelievable and beautiful. Emotions and feelings began to possess me, but they made little sense. I felt misguided, but understood. Angry, yet calm. Hot and cold. Up was down. Yes was no. So, I did the only thing that came natural to me...I poked at it.

"Here goes nothing," I shrugged. Olivia inhaled a chunk of oxygen from behind me. I stole a quick glance her way to see if she could see what I was standing in front of. She could.

Before me was one thing and one thing only, my reflection. My excited face, staring back at itself. In place of my open locker door was a long mirror that stretched the entire length of the opening. It was crystal-clear, with cold air coming from it. Soothing and inviting, like an opened refrigerator door on a hot summer day. The shiny surface shuttered with tiny ripples, like a pool of water. Gentle waves would dance along its surface as my breathing increased. In the wild reflection, I could see General Love clutching at his bare gun holster behind me. I couldn't hold in my smile.

"Lucas?" Olivia spoke, cautiously. When she did, a small portion of the magic mercury pool bulged out for her, as if reaching for her words. I immediately thought, 'TRUST ONLY HER.'

"Trust me," I whispered back. My eyes found hers in the reflecting pool. With a quick wink, I reached out in front of me and tapped my fingertip against the silver waves. A thousand miniature eruptions scattered across its perfect surface. Mirrored bubbles popped and fizzed liked a soft drink. I found it hypnotically exquisite. Electricity filled my fingertip and raced through my body, down to my toes. Purple waves of energy pulsed off of me, shooting down the school halls, in all directions. The weapons that aligned the lockers popped from their magnetic prison and fell to the floor in a domino effect.

"Lucas!" Olivia screamed. Our ears filled with a whirling buzz. It was everywhere, and building in strength. Olivia slammed her hands over her ears. I closed my eyes and jammed the rest of my hand into the unknown. My mystical armband followed easily until my arm had disappeared past its elbow. I waited for something to grab my hand, or my arm to disappear into another dimension. None of that happened. Instead, the buzzing stopped and the sound of laughter came from over my shoulder. With half my arm still embedded in the pooling mercury, I turned to find General Love and all of his soldiers, standing in a circle around Olivia and I.

"Uh oh," I swallowed.

"Thank you, Mr. Ryan," General Love smiled. With a wicked twitch in one eye, he stabbed a large handgun into my face. Its barrel settled right between my eyes. The rest of his team were eerie statues with freshly loaded a.s.sault rifles pointed at us. Something was off though. There was an unnatural gleam in all their stares. Their eyes looked wrong, evil. Whatever it was, it sent a warning signal to my gut. I tightened in place and Olivia started to shake.

"I think I'm stuck..." I mumbled.

General Love bellowed like a crazy hyena, "Looks like you broke it, boy!" He stomped one step closer, just an inch from my face. So close I could taste his bad breath. "You mind getting out of my way, I want that weapon!"

His voice burrowed itself in my head, but that wasn't what stole my attention and scared me to my core. When he spoke his last few words, he did it with two tongues. At least that's what it looked like. A set of blood red snakes taunting me from behind perfectly white teeth. Both snapped inside his mouth like two tiny whips before disappearing again.

I tried to scream, but nothing came out. The rest of my arm slid into the locker.

"Give me the weapon!" General Love demanded, again.

I gritted my teeth together. "It's...not...a...weapo..."

FFZZZZZZZZZZZ...BOOM!.

The top of my locker exploded in cold, silver light that shot through the ceiling of the school. A giant wave of sparkling energy flashed outward, covering everyone in its chilly wake. My sight blurred and every inch of my skin covered itself in fresh goose b.u.mps. Another pulse of energy rolled over us, stunning General Love and his men. More energy filled the halls, growing with ferocity and the sound of a freight train. With a dull thud, I jerked my arm free from the locker opening.

"Olivia! Hold on!" I screamed out. Her hands had found my waist before I had even finished my panicked announcement. My locker continued its a.s.sault on the school's structure, carving an even larger hole into the roof. Cla.s.sroom doors flew open, desks flipped over inside of them, and gla.s.s shattered and ricocheted everywhere. All the locker doors imploded, sucking themselves in with the familiar sound of metal crinkling.

With the next round of explosions, General Love found himself flying backwards in slow motion, three feet off the ground. His team of hooligans suffered the same fate. All of them slowly rolling and spinning through the air, their weapons just out of reach from their emptied hands.

"Urrrgggh!" General Love gurgled. It sounded inhuman and echoed loudly. His rage was almost as deafening as the mind bending explosion. Fear choked me and I made the only decision I could think of...I ran.

"Come on!" I yelled through the storm, and jerked Olivia behind me as I started to run. I had no idea which way I was headed, only that we needed to get there, fast. Olivia locked her fingers in mine. Our feet carried us quickly down the hallway while everyone else spun around in mid air, turning like the second hand of a clock. We ran down the hall, watching as jagged pieces of gla.s.s and debris bounced off of our moving torsos. I couldn't believe it.

We made our way around the final corner of the building, where the school library was located. The two large entrance doors were now gone, probably because they were mostly made of dark, tinted gla.s.s. We pushed through the opening and found ourselves surrounded by all the library's books. They were attached to the ceiling in messy stacks that reached below like an upside down city of words. They were only a few feet away from our heads. As we ran underneath them they would rustle and slam their spines against the closest stack next to them. The empty bookshelves lay toppled over, spinning on the floor. All the desks in the room had scattered themselves along the walls, hanging crooked and broken.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any weirder, my cell phone, slash, magic gauntlet, began to ring. My personal ringtone started to play much louder than expected. It was a very popular song from the 80's and absolutely embarra.s.sing...

'TURN AROUND, BRIGHT EYES...EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART...'

Olivia looked at me with wide eyes. "You gonna answer that?"

Embarra.s.sed and terrified, I pulled my gauntlet up and reached for the touchscreen.

'TURN AROUND, BRIGHT EYES...' it continued to serenade us.

It was blinking with two small ovals on the screen. The shapes resembled the outline of my index and middle fingertips. I placed them on the flashing images and my musical ringtone stopped with a tiny pop.

"Um...that's better," I tried to joke. Olivia smiled with a tiny pout. Just then, all around us, the room began to change back to normal. The bookshelves stood up in place again. The desks crawled down the walls like mechanical spiders and marched themselves back to their original resting spots. The books flew down from the ceiling and perched their paper bodies back where they belonged, on the shelves. Spinning shards of gla.s.s found their way back into the frames of all the windows and picture frames. Within seconds, they healed themselves, leaving fresh new gla.s.s and reflections.

"Not possible," Olivia whispered. I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the situation.

* Keep moving. Room 99. *

The voice was back. I was too shocked to argue with it though. I pushed past Olivia, s.n.a.t.c.hing up her hand as I did.

"Let's go, the computer lab is just around the corner."

"What's in the computer lab?" Olivia asked, but followed me easily.

"Hopefully, some answers," I said. We exited the library and ran into the computer lab that was located just outside. The door slammed behind us and I quickly turned out the lights. There was a computer keyboard and monitor on each desk in the room. All of them powered off and still. I tapped on the nearest computer's keyboard, trying to wake the machine up. Click, click, click. Nothing. If this one didn't work, none of them would. I had hoped the voice in my head directed us here to send for help. I didn't know what to do next. I shook my head in defeat and watched Olivia for a moment. The world fell quiet, for a few seconds, at least.

"This isn't happening?" Olivia cried, still holding my hand tightly. It felt wonderful, even with all the apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo going on.

"We're okay, for the moment," I said, with renewed confidence. She looked at me intensely. She was far from believing me. I leaned in to repeat my last statement when something stopped me. Her eyes, they were different. Well, one of them was. She had one bright blue eye, but her other one was a deep brown now. She had lost one of her contacts and her natural color was right in front of me.

"How do you know that?" she snapped, as if I was crazy. I couldn't stop staring at her eyes. She filled with anger and insecurity.

"I promise we'll be okay," I said, in a goofy fog. My stare locked on the newly discovered secret. She realized something was wrong.

"What?" she huffed. "What's wrong?"

I blushed a little, "You have a brown eye now."

"Oh," she cringed, and whipped her head away from my prying eyes. Her hands searched her pockets for her contacts case, but she quickly realized, it was gone. She hid behind her falling hair.

"You okay? Are you hurt?" I asked, softly. She slowly pulled her hair from her face and slid it behind her ears. She looked up at me for a moment and then reached up and removed the other blue contact. She let out a long deep sigh and tears began to well up in her eyes. She was scared and unsure of everything.

"Those were my favorite pair of contacts," she said. Her mouth pulled down into a frown. I could see the weight of the day on her face as she became overly shy. With all the horribleness of the morning, she was worried about someone seeing her without her contacts in. We had just survived an impossible explosion, and that's what she was upset about. Nervously, I let a small laugh escape my mouth.

She snapped at me, "Is there something funny?"

"No," I said.

"Spill it." Her paranoia was in full bloom.

"Brown eyes," I said, carefully. She stepped closer to me, forcefully wiping away her fresh tears.

"So!" her voice cracked. I gently took her hand in mine. She tried to pull away from my advance, but I wouldn't let go.

"Better," I smiled.

Seeing her true eye color made me forget about everything. The futuristic explosion in my locker, the out-of-his-mind General chasing us, the fact that the school was being held hostage, or that I had no idea what to do next. There was only her big, wonderful, brown eyes. She started to calm down as my answer started to sink in. She ran her purple streaked hair behind her ear, and waited for me to say something. But before I could say anything else, one of the black screened monitors came to life, with a blip of wild colors.

"Lucas, look," Olivia pointed to a familiar image on the screen. It was the hallway in front of my locker. We were watching a live feed from the schools security system. I leaned in for a closer look.

"It's the General and his men," I said, surprised. They were all spinning in slow motion, just above the ground. With a quick thud they were all on the floor again, flailing around, trying to find their bearings.

"What's happening? How can we see this?" Olivia asked. I shrugged my shoulders in confusion.

"I don't know."

General Love climbed to his feet, quickly. He ordered his men to do the same. All of them found their weapons and disappeared off screen. General Love slowly stepped to my open locker, studying the emptiness that was before him. A hollow black sh.e.l.l of tin and dust. He smashed his fist into the locker next to mine and turned toward the camera we were watching him on. His eyes studied it for a long, paralyzing minute. Staring up at us through the digital screen, I could feel my skin crawl. Could he see us? No way he could see us.

"I think he can see us," Olivia trembled. On the screen, the General's eyes began to glow white. It was faint, but it was there. And just as quickly as they started to shine, they stopped.

"So do I," I gulped. The computer screen fell black again. Olivia and I looked at each other, nervously.

"I'm scared, Lucas," she whispered.

"We'll be fine." I tugged on her fingers, lightly. I found it amazing that she was still holding my hand. She nodded without a word and followed me as I led her out the door of the computer lab. It had been a waste of time going in there. Why did it tell me to go there? Maybe so I could see that image on the computer monitor. Maybe it wanted me to see the General's eyes, those ghostly eyes.

"Come on. We need to find Sophia," I said, softly. Down the hallway I could hear the General and his team. They were close. He was barking orders to his men and he was irate.

"Double the guards at every possible exit! No one gets out of here! Find those two kids! Now!" General Love's voice echoed everywhere. It seemed to follow us no matter how fast we ran.

So, we ran even faster.

LEVEL 12: Short Change Hero.

Olivia and I had made our way in and out of a dozen cla.s.srooms, three dead ends, and a girls restroom. General Love had tripled the guards at every possible exit in the school. There was no way out. As I tried to catch my breath, doubt and fear curled themselves around me. I was close to giving up when something along the wall of the latest cla.s.sroom, caught my eye.

"I remember those," I said, winded. Olivia settled next to me and turned toward the wall I was pointing at. An oversized pair of leather boots sat on top of a dusty shelf. They were worn, musty and faded black.

"Me too," she sighed. We had stumbled into our Art cla.s.s, Room 102. Those particular pair of boots were our cla.s.s semifinal last year. Sketching them with messy chalks, counted as a third of our grade. She earned an A, I didn't. I hated those boots.