Free The Apocalypse Club by Craig McLay Page A

three pints of blood. He also had 13 outstanding warrants ranging from grand theft (yes, the vehicle we were trying to steal was already, in fact, stolen) to failure to pay child support.
    I don’t think they believed our story about using the van to stop the robbery, but the clerk and security camera footage didn’t contradict it. They did consider charging us with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle and destruction of private property, but that was quietly dropped after the news got a hold of it. The resulting story portrayed us as a couple of brave, albeit slightly inept, young civic heroes. Why were we in front of a convenience store at three in the morning? We were bored kids. There wasn’t a hell of a lot else to do in our town.
    It turned out that the police were also aware of the meth distribution and had been watching the place for a while. They had swooped in with their task force and taken it down only two weeks before I came up with my brilliant plan. I admit that I should have paid more attention to the news that week. The woman who was waiting in the van, Carla Heisen, had the same brilliant idea I did and had talked her boyfriend, Maynard Felschbek, 32(!), into sticking the place up, thinking that he would walk out with more meth than she would be able to smoke in ten lifetimes. She claimed that she had never heard of Maynard and had no idea how she came to be sitting in the back seat of his camper van with a stolen home theatre system and a quarter pound of marijuana that definitely wasn’t hers, man. I guess her story was less credible than ours. She was on probation for various drug and prostitution convictions and was immediately sent back to serve the remaining four years of her term.
    I would have thought that getting away without charges would have been enough for Max, but I was wrong.
    “We looked like a couple of idiots!” he said back at our HQ. “We’re supposed to be going after the man. Right now, the man is laughing his ass off!”
    I take it back. He did refer to our target as “the man.” I forgot about that.
    “Live to fight another day,” I said. I was sort of feeling pretty good about how the whole thing had turned out. We had gotten involved in an adventure and inadvertently stopped a crime and contributed to the arrest of two known felons. People at school couldn’t stop asking us about it. Girls were suddenly aware that we existed. Nathalie Gausden, whose wearing of a 19th-century corset during a costume demonstration on a field trip to Pioneer Village had caused no shortage of embarrassed male stooping, had smiled and said “Hi.” As far as I was concerned, we had lost the battle but won a larger war. “At least we’re not dead. Or in jail.”
    “We should’ve brought the ordinance with us,” Max said, referring to the grenade-sized explosive devices stored in the repair bay. This had been his desire from the start and it had taken a great deal of persuasion on my part to convince him that we could pull off the job without them.
    “I think we probably did enough damage to the building with the van,” I pointed out.
    “We could have used them as a diversion,” Max muttered.
    “I don’t know that we really needed one,” I said. “Maynard seemed pretty diverted when we drove through the front window. And then by the fact that he was rapidly bleeding to death. More on top would’ve just seemed like overkill, I think.”
    “We can’t lose sight of our objective,” Max said. “We need to take out that weather control station.”
    I stayed quiet on that one. After barely escaping with my life and liberty intact after our first top secret operation, I was not exactly champing at the bit to dive into another, more ambitious one involving high explosives. In fact, I would probably have abandoned the whole insurrection idea at that point had it not been for Violet Haze.

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    S he was born in Egypt. Her parents fled the country when the Nile ran dry and formal