Badd Read Free Page A

big and clumsy, and for someone who tries hard to look scary, she gets toonervous to drag along on a mission like this. Anyway, she’s the worst paintballer in town.
    That’s the plan—to wreak paintball devastation all over Casa Crazy. Gillis is an okay paintballer, but Tillman and I are heroes. Not that we have an official paintball field in Knowles, but that’s all right. It’s probably better in the woods anyway. We play a couple of times a month with two teams of five. Our team is me, Gillis, Tillman, Brianna, and either Charles Lyman or Kelli Sundy, depending on what day it is. Tillman keeps trying to get me to kick Brianna off our team because she always gets tagged in about thirty seconds, but I say no way. She’s a friend and we’re sticking. Besides, I’m good enough for two people.
    At dusk, all decked out in our camo, we load our gear into Gillis’s car and head off on our mission. On the way to the edge of town, I lay down the strategy. We already know the basic layout of Captain Crazy’s place, a crumbly old ex-farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Just about everybody within fifty miles stops by there now and then so they can look at the sculptures the captain makes out of junk—the fat boy, the giant robot, the two-headed lady, the twenty-foot-tall winged giraffe, all constructed of old tires, washers and dryers, car fenders, rusted farm equipment, aluminum guardrails, paint cans, and warped shingles. They’re not bad for something made by a lunatic.
    “First,” I explain, “we’ll park in the woods on the other side of the captain’s place, about a hundred yards away. Then we’ll split up and each take a different line of attack. Wait till I give a whistle, then we’ll come screaming in from three sides.”
    “We gonna light this dude up?” asks Tillman, grinning maliciously.
    “No,” I tell him. “No body shots, just property. Hit the house hard. And that old lime-green pickup.”
    “How about the sculptures?” asks Gillis.
    “Hit as many of them as you can.”
    “Hell, Ceejay,” says Tillman. “We need to put some bruises on this dude. What good’s marking his property gonna do? He’ll just wash that off.”
    I’m like, “That’s the point. While he’s washing up, he’ll have plenty of time to think about things.”
    Once we get parked in the woods, we pull out our rifles and helmets and put on our fingerless gloves. Since real Spider rifles are too expensive, we have semiautomatic Spider clones with ported barrels for quieter firing. You might think we wouldn’t really need the helmets since we’re not shooting at each other, but they’re important for getting into the warrior spirit.
    Gillis heads for the right flank, and Tillman takes the left. Me, I want to come roaring straight down the middle of the yard, just like Bobby would do if he was here. The sky is mostly dark by now, but the stars are coming out and the moon hangs over the trees. It’s eerie. I’ve never looked at the captain’s sculptures at night, but as I sneak up to the far edge of his yard, they seem like dark, intergalactic demons standing guard.
    Off to the right, something crashes in the brush and then Gillis lets out a
goddamn
. I freeze. Stupid Gillis, tripping around and making noise. He’s sure to give us away. Silence is key. We need to get a lot closer before letting the hellhounds loose.
    I study the dark windows, checking for any sign of movement, but everything remains still. Lucky for Gillis. I’ll blast him in the butt if he screws up this mission.
    The captain’s weathered old lime-green truck sits about thirty yards from his front porch. I crouch behind it and check my rifle to make sure it’s ready to shoot. Captain Crazy deserves our fiery wrath. I have no doubt of that. He sinned against us.And really, we’re doing it for Bobby, who’s halfway around the world and can’t do it for himself. Still, I hesitate. I can’t help wondering if maybe I should try to talk to the