The Light Brigade - Chapter 2
Everything just seemed like a normal day. He’d been hoping for chimpanzees swinging through the halls or aliens showing up on the playground.
This is an installment of my new serialized middle grade novel - The Light Brigade. When new kid in town Will finds himself in the midst of a sea of brainwashed middle schoolers, he has to join the Light Brigade, an unlikely group of heroes, to save them. Can he trust the Man Upstairs who guides them with fortune cookie directions? Will he find his place in the Brigade? Will he be able to stop the shadowy New Moon Group from forcing his classmates to collect acorns for a cartoon squirrel until they all collapse? Subscribed? Get caught up here.
By lunch time, Will was pretty disappointed. Everything just seemed like a normal day. He’d been hoping for chimpanzees swinging through the halls or aliens showing up on the playground. He would even have settled for the mice escaping from biology class. But today just seemed like any other day.
The only exception was some new, annoying music playing in the hallways. In addition to the cringy oldies that played on repeat, every few minutes the same ad would break in with a catchy tune: “This music for your listening enjoyment is brought to you by the New Moon Group – ‘The Start of Something Incredible.’” Figures, thought Will, they would put their stupid slogan all over the school; they already have it everywhere else in town. Even my parents are always humming their theme song. I wonder if they hear it all day at work, too.
Dragging his feet, he headed to his locker to drop off his books and spotted the sandwich Lily had given him. He reached out to grab it and paused. What if she had done something to the sandwich? On the other hand, what if she was right and there really was something wrong with the school lunch – well, more wrong than usual? She was right about the platypus. Besides, it seems unlikely that a crazed tween serial killer would start with the new kid in town by poisoning him, Will thought. At least the sandwich will be better than the meatloaf, even if it’s something gross like peanut butter and jelly. He took the sandwich and headed to the cafeteria.
Before undertaking the usual grueling process of finding an empty table, Will headed to the soda machine for a drink. As he was waiting, a girl walked up with long brown hair braided in cute pigtails, a neatly pressed school uniform, pearl earrings, and tall boots. Will felt his mouth grow dry – it was Sydney.
Sydney smiled, “Hey, you’re Will, right? From church?”
Will smiled back, “Yeah. How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know, school,” she said, with a chuckle.
“Do you have Mr. Cardrig for math? I just got finished with one of his tests – they’re crazy hard!”
“Oh, yeah, we call him Mr. Hardrig. I had him last year, but I lucked out this year and got Ms. Spellman – much easier,” Sydney said.
By now they had reached the front of the line and gotten their drinks.
“Well, see you around,” said Will, heading toward the back corner of the cafeteria where there was an open spot.
“Do you want to sit with us?” asked Sydney, pointing to her group of friends – all girls. They all had cute bows in their hair or gold bracelets. One of them saw Will looking over at them and gave him a look that would have cut him to ribbons. It certainly didn’t seem like he would be welcome there with his tennis shoes and thick glasses.
“That’s all right, I was hoping to get some reading done while I ate,” said Will and sped off before Sydney could talk him out of it.
With a resigned sigh, Will plopped down in the chair in the corner, facing back toward the table of girls who were now all giggling together over their trays of school lunches. I’m definitely not lonely enough to want in on that, he thought.
He unwrapped the sandwich, expecting the worse. You see, Will is extremely picky about his sandwiches; he always has been. When he was three, it was strawberry jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off. When he was eight, it was roast beef and American cheese with exactly three squirts of ketchup.
Will peeked into the sandwich and his jaw dropped open. It was his exact sandwich. One slice of ham, one slice of Swiss cheese, extra, extra mustard, and a slice of onion cut from the exact middle. For at least thirty seconds Will just sat there blinking in disbelief. How could she have given him his favorite sandwich? Even his own mother never got it right without checking first. The odds against it were so astronomical, and yet here it was in all its stinky, yellow glory. This Man Upstairs is either psychic or spying on me, Will thought.
Will dug into this most perfect of sandwiches with glee, pulling out his book to continue from where he had been interrupted that morning. He was getting to the most exciting part, involving fireballs from wizards’ staffs and streaks of lightning from elves’ swords, which was probably why he didn’t notice when weird things started happening all around the room.
It started seemingly normal enough, with people starting to fall silent as they munched away on their lunches. You might have thought that perhaps the mashed potatoes were just cooked to perfection today. Then, as though controlled by invisible strings, everyone pulled their phones out of their pockets and began tapping away at the screens in an even more mindless way than usual. There wasn’t even anyone to stop them as the teachers, too, seemed thoroughly entranced by their phones. Before long the room was filled with a sea tap, tap, tapping replacing the usual clamor.
Will finally noticed the strange silence that had fallen over the room when he heard a girl’s voice break it, saying, “Sophie! Sophie! Are you ok?”
Will looked across the room to see a tall girl with neat, kinky hair shaking the girl next to her. She began scanning the room to assess the situation. Seeing that Will was the only one without his head buried in a phone, she hurried over.
“Did you eat the school lunch?” she asked, setting her knuckles on the table and staring at Will with piercing brown eyes.
“No, I...had a sandwich,” said Will, not sure how much to tell her. If Lily was to be trusted, there were more people in the Light Brigade. Was this girl one of them?
She glanced down at the wrappings and narrowed her eyes. “Are you Will?”
“Yeah, I am.” He was starting to get annoyed at all of these complete strangers who seemed to know him. He felt like he was at a disadvantage, but he wasn’t sure what game he was losing.
“I see you forgot to duck,” she said, gesturing toward Will’s forehead, “I’m Tamara. I’m part of the Light Brigade with Lily. I’m glad that you listened to her on the sandwich, at least, rather than eating… whatever has turned everyone into zombies.”
“They don’t look they’re out for brains just yet. What are they all doing?”
They started walking around the other tables. Each phone showed the same cute squirrel chomping on acorns that the person had collected. One person had reached the end of a level, where the game’s logo appeared with the words “Acorn Grab” across a cartoon nut. In the corner of the screen was a black moon with an arc of light flashing around one edge.
“Hey!” said Will, “I know that symbol. It’s the logo of the New Moon Group.”
Tamara rushed over for a look. “You’re right. Not them again! What do you think it’s doing to them?”
“I’m not sure….” Will had meandered over to Sydney’s table, still peering at the adorable chomping squirrel on each and every screen he passed. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the people who were playing the game, other than their extreme fixation on what looked to Will to be quite possibly the stupidest game ever invented. It certainly wasn’t affecting him at all, even as he stared at the screens.
As an experiment, he tried to wave his hand in front of Sydney’s face to get her attention, to no effect. He then tried to hold her arm so that she couldn’t keep tapping. With a shocking show of strength, she wrenched her arm from Will’s two-fisted grip to continue playing. Finally, Will tried to grab the phone away from her. Sydney looked Will straight in the face and began to growl until he let go. Sour panic started to rise in Will’s throat. What is it doing to her? How can I help her? Will thought.
“I can’t get them to stop,” Will called over to Tamara, who was back with her friend Sophie. “Do you think we should try to turn the phones off?”
Tamara considered this. “No. I think that could potentially hurt them. We’re going to have to figure out what is causing this before we can fix it.”
Just then, the bell rang for the end of lunch. In unison, everyone stood up, put their phones away, and filed out of the cafeteria, like a creepy flash mob of puppets. Will and Tamara looked at each other across the now empty room.
“What the heck just happened?” asked Will.