Crisis Zero by Chris Rylander Read Free Book Online Page A

Dillon still had no idea that we were working with the Agency, with codenames and everything. Even with all of his crazy conspiracy theories, he still hadn’t guessed that one.
    But meeting up without him later that night ended up being easier than expected.
    â€œHe’s distracted by this new master theory of his,” Danielle explained, as I closed the door to my room behind her. “It has something to do with all of the fungus growing around town. He’s convinced that nuclear missile silos surrounding Minnow have created radioactive mushrooms that will one day sprout legs and go on some sort of nationwide rampage, inducing black-and-white, slow-motion hallucinations that will involve talking buildings and pickled chicken feet falling from the sky.”
    â€œWait, the radioactive . . . What?”
    Danielle grinned and shook her head.
    â€œCarson, I have no idea. He didn’t give me much of an explanation. But he’s really into this one; I’ve never seen him so preoccupied before. Right now, he’s spending the night out in the coulee behind our house, extracting and carefully cataloging fungus samples.”
    I laughed. “That sounds like Dillon.”
    â€œSo what happened this afternoon?”
    I explained how I’d managed to get away with the evidence, and how Agent Chum Bucket had taken the fall for the success of the mission. I told her about how I’d met up with Director Isadoris and how eerie and deserted Agency headquarters had been. She wasshocked, horrified, relieved all in one. Then I told her about our new mission.
    â€œPretty straightforward,” I said. “Find the enemy agent and figure out why they framed Gomez. Of course, this is assuming they let me back into school tomorrow. I mean, I did ditch out on seventh period. And I’m sure someone is going to want to punish me for the goats, even if it’s not Mr. Gomez. And that’s not even mentioning what Ms. Pullman will do once she arrives and reads the files Gomez kept on my pranks. And , that’s all aside from the possible scenario in which she is in fact an enemy secret agent sent to eliminate the Agency’s people inside the school.”
    â€œWait a second,” Danielle said, stemming my nervous rambling. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œYou can’t control any of that stuff,” she said calmly. “Let’s just focus on our mission. If you get expelled, or whatever, then we’ll deal with it. But we’d be wasting time and energy worrying about it now.”
    This was why Danielle was the perfect partner. She was way more logical and reasonable. After all, she’d figured out how to get inside the secret Mount Rushmore base to save Agent Nineteen and me all by herself. I guessif you really stepped back and looked at it, she was probably a better secret agent than I was. All I had going for me was being stupid enough to attempt the impossible and lucky enough to have succeeded a few times.
    But all that is beside the point. What mattered was that Danielle was right; we needed to break down and make a plan for how to complete our two-pronged mission.
    And so that’s what we did for the next hour.
    We started by making a list of teachers and students who could have possibly been enemy spies. Here’s what we came up with:
    1.  Mr. Lepsing : seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher. He made the list simply by being a straight-up supersecretive weirdo. Mr. Lepsing had something strange hidden away in his supply closet. Everybody knew it. Rumors had swirled ever since I’d started school here about what it was that he kept in there. Some of the best theories were:
    Â Â Â Â Â  •       A leopard that he was secretly feeding a mixture of steroids and school lunches, which was creating a master race of muscular leopard mutants (courtesy of