One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney Read Free Book Online

them.
    Man, you are really flying sideways.
    I may be flying sideways, but I know a demon when I see one and that boy is one of them. He was sent here like bait, like the cheese in a mousetrap. He was sent here to clean out the nest, to kill of guys like Lester, and he can get away with it because the Devil protects him, and the Devil is in league with the goddamn innacawsing principal.

    He quickly placed the goggles back on his face, and then he looked, knowing full well what had happened.
    Lester, the boy who had demanded he take the goggles off, was on the floor, dead, his eyes wide open, an expression of pure terror chiseled into his face. The two other boys directly involved in the assault were down on all fours, slowly crawling away, one of them crying and mumbling incoherently, the other one praying just as incoherently. The floor itself was a filthy checkerboard linoleum tile. Several chairs lay on their sides. One of the boys stopped crawling, turned around, and sat, his face so turned inside-out with the harshest dead-fish-in-the-butchershop look of extreme physical disconnection, and he simply bellowed out loud with a despairing sound Hieronymus never thought possible from any human being. The other students piled themselves against the wall, terrified beyond belief — and, for the first time, silent.
    He looked down at the dead kid. This kind of thing had happened before — getting picked on by bullies, getting the goggles torn off, and the result was always similar to this. Except no one had ever died before.
    The principal, two policemen, a detective, and a forensics expert arrived at the scene. Shortly afterward, they were joined by another figure — a completely silver mechanical man. A rescue robot. He moved into the classroom as gracefully as a ballet dancer. He pointed his featureless face at the huddled students and a humming sound vibrated upward and out of him as he quickly scanned the assembled group, measuring their heart rates and nervous systems, making sure none of the human beings were experiencing trauma or shock from witnessing the untimely death of a classmate. He was so shiny that all the students saw their own reflections in his body and in his blank visage. The forensic expert took blood samples from Hieronymus, the dead boy, and the other two, one of whom had discovered a corner in the shabby room. The blood samples were placed into a small handheld machine for immediate analysis. The detective stared at Hieronymus, then turned to the principal.
    “You let creatures like this take classes with regular students?”
    “It’s the law. We have to integrate them into the student body.”
    “This is the first time anyone’s ever died from this.”
    “Died from what?”
    “You know what I’m talking about.”
    “Oh, the color that doesn’t exist.”
    The detective glared again over at Hieronymus. Hieronymus glared back. This was a very strange-looking man. His face appeared to be made from sweat-dripping plastic, as if it were a mask molded to look as real as possible, but failing because it was so hot and uncomfortable. The result was a sad fakeness, a department store mannequin’s face with a moving mouth and a sad, angry eye behind the covering. An odor of lanolin hung in the air. A portrait of unpleasantness. Nobody liked this man. The other cops couldn’t stand him. But he was an expert in these cases, and Lieutenant Dogumanhed Schmet was perturbed that this dangerous, inhuman creature with those eyes was not in handcuffs. One of the police officers had already recorded Hieronymus’ statement. The other students were interviewed, but they, being who they were, gave twenty-five drastically different versions of what had happened.
    No one cared what those psychopaths thought anyway. The whole scene had been captured by the classroom surveillance system, and it was clear Hieronymus had been hassled, then assaulted. The dead boy, Lester, had grabbed the Schmilliazano lenses while