Cover

Title Page

ALSO BY ROBERT MUCHAMORE

CHERUB

HENDERSON’S BOYS

ROCK WAR

Killer T noun A type of white blood cell that kills damaged cells, particularly those that are cancerous, or infected with a virus.

PART ONE

THE BEGINNING

1 SLASHED RUBBER

Deion Powell was the king of high school. Stubbled and swaggering. Powell 03 on the back of his practice jersey and a splayed walk imposed by monstrous thighs. An amber late slip flapped in his hand as the starting quarterback bowled the empty hallway, crunching in desert grit trailed from the parking lot.

‘Whatcha staring at?’ Deion snapped instinctively as a skinny ninth grader came out of an empty classroom. He had to hook the door with his sneaker because there was a set of textbooks stacked to his chin.

The kid jolted. Catching the door frame with his shoulder, almost spilling Algebra 2s, before Deion’s bunched fist set him off in a rodent scuttle.

But there was too much in Powell’s head to enjoy the humiliation. There’d been a tussle in the locker room after Monday night practice. A minor miracle that the coaches hadn’t found out. And that morning, Deion’s kid sister bounced for the school bus, but doubled back before clearing the driveway. Uptight and wide-eyed, the nine-year-old blurted that the front tires on his truck had been knifed.

So, the quarterback took a city bus and fifteen-minute jog, missing first period and catching a lecture from a tattooed school clerk, who’d heard too many excuses to care if they were true or not. Third late arrival since summer recess. Can’t come and go as you please, making like you’re above the rules.

Stress bulged Deion’s veins. Sweat glazed his oak-brown skin. Should have taken a picture of my tires to show I’m no liar. Five hundred bucks for new ones. Must have been JJ. Will everything kick off again? What if we bump JJ’s crew in the hallway? And no way to avoid it in the locker room …

Deion’s locker had been decorated by the rally team. Powell 03, sprayed through a stencil. Rock Spring Rockets stickers and nylon rosettes fixed on with sticky pads. An invite to Aisha’s 18th – Foam Partaaay poked out of the door. He tried fitting a face to Aisha’s name as he turned the locker dial.

Eighteen, six, twenty-two.

There was a grunt of realisation as Deion let his backpack drop off his shoulder. He usually left football gear in his truck on the school lot. The locker was crammed. Books, baseball cleats, protein shake pouches and a Bluetooth boom box he’d tried selling to a teammate who’d never come through with the money.

Maybe it was easiest to keep hold of the stuff. Dump it in Terence’s VW at recess. But this made the walk to the locker another waste of time, on a day when everything was going bad.

Calm down. Think straight. Don’t let stuff get to you.

‘This sucks,’ Deion raged, smashing his palm on his locker, and kicking the one below with his size thirteen.

His thoughts had been balled too tight to hear the girl who’d turned into the hallway behind. Pink cotton pumps, a Rock Spring High gym shirt and milky, vein-pencilled legs. He’d startled her and was about to apologise when …

Noise ripped. So loud it hurt inside both ears. Blazing light. Heat. The girl screaming. The yellow locker door, unhinged and smashing Deion in the face. Stumbling. Blood. Tripping on something. A mouthful of dust, and ceiling tiles falling like oversized confetti.

2 NOT HARRY POTTER

The klaxon yowled as twenty-four hundred high-schoolers bustled out into sun-blasted gravel and hundred-degree heat. Out of fire doors and down clanking metal stair treads. A few straddled first-floor windows. Smoke plumed from the Zone C annexe as emergency sirens wailed.

The clueless school security guard kept a wary hand on his taser. Teens from the dance studio felt scorching sidewalk on bare soles and a math teacher rolled a kid in a wheelchair past the cholla cacti at Rock Spring High’s main entrance.

‘This is not a fire drill,’ a deputy principal yelled, pit stains showing as he waved students away. ‘Do not gather at the assembly points. Just get as far from the building as possible.’

‘Is there a shooter?’ someone asked, almost colliding with a kid who walked backwards, videoing the smoke.

‘Heard shots for sure,’ another body close to Harry Smirnov said. ‘Five or six.’

Harry followed the crowd away from school on a paved path, his jog slowing as bodies funnelled through mesh gates. He was a ninth grader. Fourteen, slender limbs, floppy black bangs, still more boy than man. He’d only been in Las Vegas eight months since moving from the UK with his aunt.

In the run-up to leaving London, Harry’s two best mates joked darkly about American high-school shootings. One even wrote mind the bullets in his leaving card and drew a stick man letting rip with an Uzi. Now the joke seemed thin.

‘Smoke’s from over by the wood shop,’ someone behind Harry noted as a guidance counsellor urged teens not to shove at the gate. ‘My dad’s a carpenter. One place he worked, there was a spark in the dust extraction and the whole joint went boom.’

‘Where you going, Harry Potter?’ Lupita from Harry’s homeroom spat, as he cut off the path. ‘Ain’t no other gate up there.’

First name Harry, a black mop and an English accent made the nickname inevitable. Even his home-room teacher used it.

Vegas didn’t get a lot of rain, but baked-hard ground meant flash floods when a storm hit. The mesh fence around Rock Spring’s perimeter ran parallel to a concrete drainage channel, eight feet wide and half as deep. Harry stepped down into the basin, brushing weeds growing through cracks as he started a crouched jog towards the smoke.

He glanced back, but fellow evacuees saw nothing past backs of heads and shuffling limbs. The drain’s sides were graffitied, the base littered with occasional pyres made from melted nylon backpacks and black-edged textbooks. These had been squirted with lighter fuel and burnt up by college-bound seniors before summer break.

Harry ducked instinctively as an ambulance skimmed the access road across the fence, lights flashing but siren off. It turned through a set of vehicle gates eighty yards ahead. The storm drain went under this access road, but the thought of snakes in the dark sent a chill down Harry’s spine, so instead of charging through he lay against the gently angled wall, checking the scene as the sun cooked the back of his neck.

Smoke had been tamped by a fire crew, and puddled hose water was evaporating into a rainbow haze. This part of the school was single-storey classrooms, with a taller main assembly hall and lunch room behind. Shatterproof panes had twisted out from their frames, and aluminium roof sheets jutted into the air.

But Harry sensed calm. Two relaxed cops guarded the school’s service entrance as a lunch lady in kitchen whites led a fire officer round the edge of the building, seeking a shut-off valve. Harry cupped one ear and listened to a police lieutenant briefing the freshly arrived ambulance crew.

‘Some kind of explosive. Got the area cleared out and locked down, but don’t hang around inside. We can’t be certain it’s the only device until there’s been a full search.’

Harry’s mum had been a photographer and journalist. She’d taken a bullet in the Ukraine and won awards for her vlogs from Brazzaville during the Third Congo War. After living in war zones, her death was ironic: wiped out by an undiagnosed heart defect as she jogged in London’s Hyde Park.

Harry had been seven. His mother’s death had left him with a mortal fear that his heart could explode, a fascination with news websites and an urge to follow her path.

He read biographies of famous correspondents and photojournalists. He liked war documentaries and obsessed over films like Spotlight and All the President’s Men where journalists kicked butt. A swanky Nikon camera topped Harry’s Christmas wish list, back when his mates were still into Star Wars Lego and console games.

Until now, the fourteen-year-old’s journalistic experience comprised an Under 12s Photography Prize, rugby and cricket reports for his old school in London and a Rock Spring Neighbourhood News blog that he set up at Digital Arts summer camp. But here was proper news, and Harry had the first camera on the scene.

His fancy Nikon was at home, so his phone would have to do. Harry unlocked with an iris scan and flipped to advanced camera mode. Sunlight bleached the screen, so he had to click and hope for the best as he shot the little rainbow and buckled roof.

There was a chance the cops at the door would see Harry dash between the storm drain and the side of the building. He was no rule breaker, but he’d waited half his life for a story. Every crunch of gravel felt like a sonic boom, but Harry timed it well and cracked an exhilarated smile as his back hit the wall by an open window.

What if there are more bombs? What if some nut jumps out of a storeroom with a machine gun? This is such a buzz … This is why Mum loved it so much.

Harry wiped a dripping brow on the sleeve of his T-shirt, jumped on to the ledge of the sliding window, then down on to a chair, which kids had used as a step when scrambling out fifteen minutes earlier.

The strip lights were dead. The school’s crisply conditioned air had warmed and caught enough smoke to sting Harry’s eyes. Most kids had grabbed their backpacks, but there were pens and books on desks, clothes over the backs of chairs and a tatty phone left charging.

The classroom door was closed, with water trickling beneath. Harry took four pictures, then kept his ear to the door, before easing the handle and peeking out. A single hallway ran down this part of the school, lined with yellow senior lockers.

A shut-off sprinkler dripped and mini icebergs of fire-suppressant foam drifted on slow running water. Harry had never seen the hallway with the lights off and he stepped into the gloom, placing his Nikes as quietly as the wet allowed.

To the right, things normalised. A few downed ceiling tiles and the flow of water narrowing as it ran into classrooms. At the far end, light dazzled through skylights where this annexe met the main school building.

Hell lay in the other direction. Water dripped from the ceiling; slow-moving fire foam clumped around a collapsed sub-ceiling that had once held up lamps and ceiling tiles. Some locker doors were dented, others torn open by the force of a blast.

Harry crouched low for a gory snap of a dead rat, its black fur singed to bloody flesh.

Dressed in nylon shorts, he was briefly fascinated as his leg sank ankle-deep into foam. A groan sounded over the sprinkler drips and running water. Then a tortured shout.

‘Leave me, leave me, leave me.’

The voice was young, deep, and came from beyond the downed ceiling. Harry edged to the lockers, where the puddle was shallowest, and crept up to the tangle of metal and light fittings blocking the hallway. Beyond the gloom, sun pierced the torn roof.

‘Let’s have a shot of morphine,’ a neon-jacketed medic told a colleague. Then soothingly, ‘Just need to move you on to the stretcher, baby.’

Harry pushed a dangling wad of pipe insulation out of the way, making a gap big enough to see through. The gloomy walls and sunlight through the holed ceiling was a photographer’s nightmare. Harry played with the exposure controls until the image was usable, then tapped the screen, taking shot after shot.

The explosion had taken place twenty feet beyond the collapsed ceiling. On one side, a dozen lockers had been pancaked. Across the hall, the blast had knocked lockers through drywall, exposing an outer layer of concrete breeze blocks. The floor between was littered with books and athletic gear, all smeared in the creamy fire foam.

The victims had been moved further down the hall. Harry caught drips on his head as he pushed deeper beneath the collapsed ceiling frame and switched to video. After a slight zoom, he filmed a cop helping ambulance crew roll a girl on to a stretcher. She was limp and bloody, but a breathing mask meant she had to be alive.

The other victim lay a few yards beyond, head raised on an air pillow as one of the ambulance staff prepped a morphine jab. His clothes were burnt and face bloody, but Harry knew Deion Powell from his cringeworthy school spirit; go, team; come to the game and get behind the Rockets speeches during whole-school assembly.

‘Don’t move me!’ Deion begged.

Harry had visions of some teacher or cop creeping up behind, but kept his nerve, focusing on holding the phone steady, because he wanted his footage to look professional.

‘Gotta get you to hospital,’ the ambulance guy soothed as he stuck in the morphine. ‘Lift you up, nice and slow.’

‘It hurts so bad!’

Harry kept filming, his breathing tense and drips hitting his back as a second ambulance team arrived.

‘Gimme another shot for the pain,’ Deion groaned as four medics circled.

‘Lift on three, two …’

Deion’s scream burst like a grenade as two medics lifted his arms and another raised his feet for a short lift on to a stretcher.

‘You did real good, QB,’ one medic said. ‘That was the bad part. Now we gonna put your stretcher on to the trolley.’

‘Your mama’s already on her way to hospital, buddy,’ a cop standing behind soothed. ‘She’ll be there waiting.’

‘I can beat this!’ Deion shouted, grasping the side of the stretcher with a slippery, bloodied hand.

‘Again on three.’

As two medics raised Deion’s stretcher up to the wheeled trolley, the one at the back felt his heel slip on the foamy floor.

It wouldn’t have mattered with a normal-sized patient, but Deion’s bulk hung off all sides. As the guy holding the foot end swung the stretcher towards the trolley, the medic who’d slipped didn’t follow. The lift was supposed to be smooth and pain free, but the jolt left strips of Deion’s burnt skin stuck to the stretcher and his spasm of pain tilted it sideways.

Cops cursed and charged in, as Deion rolled off, crashing the side of the trolley and slapping the wet floor. Harry knew he’d filmed something big as Deion howled in agony, lashing furiously and sprawling the guy who was trying to pick him up off the floor.

‘Can’t you be careful?’ Deion boomed as he stopped flailing and let the medic close in with a respirator mask. ‘I’ll be suing all your asses!’

‘We’re doing our best, son,’ someone said.

‘Deep breaths,’ the medic soothed as she held the mask over Deion’s face. ‘Slow, deep, breaths.’

3 A THOUSAND BUCKS

The dining hall smelled of lunch that would never get eaten as Harry cut between tables, wet Nikes squeaking the glossy floor and phone clutched like a bar of precious metal.

‘Why you ain’t evacuated?’ a chef shouted from deep in the kitchen.

‘On my way, sir,’ Harry said obediently.

But instead of going out he pushed through double doors into the main part of the school and bounded stairs two at a time. The upper floor hallway was dim and empty and the second door he tried came open. It was a science room, with no sign that anyone had bailed in a hurry.

‘OK,’ Harry muttered as he took a deep breath. ‘Think.’

He knew what he wanted to achieve, but there were a lot of steps and he needed to get them straight in his head. After kicking the door shut, he strode to the back of the room. If he sat at a desk he might be seen through the classroom door, or from outside. So Harry crouched in a space between a desk and storage unit. If anyone came in, he’d act scared and say he’d been hiding.

Harry rested his back against the wall below a window, tilted his phone to cut reflections and started flicking through photos. The first shots with the rainbow looked cool, but lacked drama. The abandoned classroom pics were poignant, but again not the wow factor that would excite the webmaster of a news website, or a local TV channel.

His best shots were a pair taken after they’d carried Deion out: a grim pic of the bloody floor where Deion had been lying, and another of the locker with what looked like …

Harry zoomed in. Fearing that the cops would return and bust him, he’d snapped rapidly. Luckily the shot on his screen was perfect: Deion’s football helmet, dented and bloody, in front of a buckled locker door sprayed with his name.

He cropped the image, used a filter to up the contrast and give the shot more kick, then saved the result. Next he watched the video. The audio was poor and the picture full of long shadows cast by harsh light through the torn roof, but you could tell what was going on, including a clear view of Deion tilting off the trolley.

When the clip ended, Harry opened a video-editing app. He’d played around with making videos for years so his fingers dabbed and swiped artfully. Harry brought up the brightness, and applied an anti-shake algorithm to his footage.

Sound was more of a battle, but he managed to damp the hallway echo and tinker with the frequency balance, so that voices were clearer and you could hear the eerie drips of water close to the microphone. To avoid getting ripped off, he added a semi-opaque graphic in the top right corner of the footage that read © Harry Smirnov.

Harry popped his head above the desks when he heard footsteps out in the hall, but nobody stepped in. Back at the screen, he watched his three minutes of enhanced, shake-free, footage. It was good, but few folks had the patience to watch three minutes of anything, so he cut two edited versions.

The first was a thirty-second highlight reel, showing Deion screaming as he got lifted off the ground, him being dropped and then ending on his threat to sue. The second was a zoomed eight-second clip of Deion being tipped off the stretcher, then kicking the medic with his giant leg. Zooming meant the footage was blurry, but the light glistening off Deion’s burnt body gave it serious impact.

Harry rendered the videos before pushing the two shorter clips to YouTube. The local phone masts were swamped and the upload bar crept, even though he had a solid 5G signal. Once they were online, he made a short entry on his Rock Spring Neighbourhood News website: Amazing footage of the aftermath. More later! Then he posted the video clips to Reddit, Facebook and a few other spots where he thought they’d get attention.

The clips instantly clocked a dozen views and Harry trembled less and smiled more as he surfed websites, grabbing email addresses for the news desks of Las Vegas’s three local TV stations, plus a couple of prominent Vegas news and tourist websites. He opened voice and quietly dictated an email.

I have posted video footage of the aftermath of the Rock Spring High explosion online. You are welcome to use these clips if you credit me and do not blur my name in the clip. I also have high-resolution photographs of the aftermath and a full three-minute clip. These are available exclusively to the first organisation to contact me and agree to pay $1,000 …

Harry stared at the $1,000 figure. He’d never done stuff like this before and wondered if he was asking for too much, or too little. He edited it to $1,500, stared at the number and then put it back to $1,000 before pressing send.

Refreshing the YouTube page showed that his thirty-second clip already had a hundred and fifty hits and seven comments.

Obvs FAKE!!!!

You can see it’s Deion by his legs! How could someone fake this when it just happened?

Harry Smirnov made this? Isn’t that the Brit kid who looks like Harry Potter?

Yes.

Medics getting ass sued! LOLs

Where’s your QB now Rock Spring homos?

JJ Janssen is better anyways! Still gonna kick Mountain Creek on Friday.

The video neared two hundred views as Harry pocketed his phone. Rendering videos had worked the CPU hard and the phone felt toasty as he pushed it down the mesh pocket of his shorts, then grabbed his pack and headed for the classroom door.

‘Tits,’ Harry moaned as he peered through the door. The hallway was gloomy, but he could make out a cop by the stairs and a woman in bright orange Fire Department overalls.

Harry went back to the main windows. There wasn’t a soul amidst the wooden picnic tables on the paved courtyard below. It was only one storey up and there was a solid box gutter he could use to dangle and drop. But this idea crashed when Harry dragged at the sliding window and realised it didn’t open fully like the ones at ground level.

He thought about waiting it out, but now the video was online and backed up to his Google account, Harry was less worried about some teacher or cop forcing him to surrender the footage as evidence.

‘Why in the name are you up here?’ Harry heard, the instant he opened the classroom door.

It was a teacher in overstretched brown leggings. She’d just reached the top of the stairs, behind the cop and fire officer.

‘I needed my bag,’ Harry explained as he reached behind and tapped it.

‘And you waltzed back into a crime scene to fetch it?’ the teacher wailed, placing hands on hips. ‘What if there was another explosive? Where’s your common sense?’

The cop seemed more suspicious. It was the lieutenant Harry had overheard by the gate and he noticed the cop now had blood smeared on his shirt sleeve. Most likely Deion’s.

‘What’s your name, son?’

‘Harry Smirnov.’

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