Free The Adventures of Kid Combat Volume One: A Secret Lost by Christopher Helwink

limousine sped
down the street.
    We need a break, Kid thought. He has to slip
up sooner or later.
     
     

Chapter Seven:
    Jones Sets a Trap
    9:00 pm
     
     
    Checking: System Bios
    Initiating: Operating System
    Starting: Configuration
    Boot: ../home/gears/j_trk.inf
    Process: Started!
     
    Samantha sat at a desk in a dimly lit office.
Her shadow, created from the small lamp sitting on the corner of
the desk, silhouetted off the wall behind her. She was exhausted
from a long day’s work. Her arms and legs were sore, and her back
wasn’t much better. She wasn’t in prime shape for a ten-year-old.
With her head in her hands, she hovered over her desk and thought
for a moment.
    Earlier in the day, she had started moving
all of the alliance’s materials from its makeshift hideouts in
Samantha’s garage and Gears’s tree house to its new permanent base.
With the heavier equipment already moved in, Samantha spent most of
the day moving in boxes. They were littered all around her, and
there was still a lot of work to be done. But everything was
finally safe and secure at The Playground. No more worrying about
parents, neighbors, or any one else finding their sensitive
materials and gadgets. They were safe.
    As she straightened things on her new desk,
she heard a faint sound. Knowing that nobody else could possibly be
there, she wondered what could be making the sound.
    Beep, beep, beep, beep.
    Samantha stood up and followed the signal
into the hall. As she exited her office, she heard it to her left
and slowly walked down the hall, listening to the beeps. She
followed it until she stood in front of another doorway.
    It was Gears’s workshop. The room resembled
Samantha’s office a little. There was a brown desk on the far side
of the room that also was found at the abandoned factory, along
with the silver filing cabinets on the other side. The office had
yet to be decorated, but it would soon be filled with formulas that
Gears was working on, posters of the periodic table, and other
scientific stuff. The main difference between the two rooms was the
two rows of workbenches in Gears’s office. These would be used for
his tools and working on inventions.
    Samantha looked through the boxes in Gears’s
office for the source of the noise, which had grown louder. After
moving piles upon piles of boxes, she narrowed the search down to
one corner. She dissembled the pile and reached into the bottom
box, pulling out a small round device with an even smaller light
blinking on it.
    “It’s Gears’s remote for his triangulator. It
must have kicked on when I was putting these boxes in here,”
Samantha said as she sat. “It’s still tracking Jones. And it looks
like he’s on the move!”
    Samantha watched the white blinking light
move ever so slowly across the screen. It sent out a small beep
with every flash of light.
    “This may be important. I wonder what Jones
is up to now, and at this hour?”
    She wouldn’t wonder long. Samantha wasn’t one
to sit on the sidelines. She needed to be nose-deep in the action
to be happy. That’s what made her perfect for her position with
SOCKs. She stood up and gave the device a quick flip in the
air.
    “There’s only one way to find out …”
    At the far end of town was a large industrial
park. Hundreds of businesses used this area for shipping and
receiving goods. For a square mile, all during the day, it was a
busy sight. Trucks zoomed down the streets, trains loaded and
unloaded box cars, and people worked all around. But the site was
much different at night. With most of the factories and businesses
closed, it was a ghost town. The only people around were hired
security guards.
    At one end of the park, Two drove along the
street in the blackness of the night, approaching his destination.
He turned right down a dead-end street and made his way half way
around the cul-de-sac. Finally, he spotted the building he was
looking for and pulled his car onto the driveway of an