Pandora's Gun Read Online Free Page B

heavy pockets and a hammer stuck in a loop, came out of the janitor’s room. Was that a janitor that Peter had seen before? He couldn’t remember. What better way to scope out the students than posing as a janitor. If Peter wanted to wander through a school without being noticed, pretending to be a janitor would be perfect.
    Or maybe the gun’s owner was camped in a van in the parking lot filled with electronic monitoring equipment. Peter glanced uneasily at the school’s security cameras. It wouldn’t be that hard to hack into their feeds.
    I’m just being paranoid, he thought, but when he turned to go to class, he ran right into Christy Sanders.
    “Did you do the reading in Of Mice and Men ? If you did, could I borrow your notes?” She smiled, and Peter couldn’t speak. Suddenly it was last night again, except this time she was right here , physical, immediate. He could smell jasmine—maybe it was her shampoo—and she was paying attention to him. He’d never felt so much like a bug under a magnifying glass in his whole life.
    “I . . . umm . . . Mice and Men . . . I . . .”
    She looked at him quizzically. “Are you okay? You’re flushed. Do you have a fever? I tried to do the reading, but someone told me how the book ends, and I don’t want to get there.”
    Peter held up his hand. “Yeah . . . notes.” He dug desperately through his backpack, came up triumphantly with the spiral notebook, and almost flung it at her.
    “Don’t you need them?” she said. “I can give them back at lunch.”
    “I’m good,” Peter gasped out. He could feel the blood in his face. With a force of will, he looked her in the eyes, convinced that if he looked down he’d reveal that he’d seen her, really seen her.
    “Okay,” she said. “Thanks, I think.”
    As she walked away, he tried to control his breathing. He imagined his adrenal gland inside his chest—where is the adrenal gland?—pumping all its flight or fight hormones into his system at the same time. His heart hadn’t pounded this hard since they timed a mile in P.E.
    It occurred to him that today might be a long one.
    Until lunch, Peter alternated between studying every strange adult he saw (there were a lot more unfamiliar adults in the school than he would have ever guessed), and hoping that he wouldn’t run into Christy Sanders again.
    I need to get a grip, he thought. It wasn’t like he’d never seen a naked woman. How could he not? He had a computer and access to the Internet. A few months ago he’d wanted some ideas about what to do with the last school vacation, so he searched for “spring break.” His screen filled with underdressed bodies.
    The Internet gave him an idea, though, so he dashed to the library during lunch to search for information. He looked for images under “guns,” “strange guns,” —he found multi-barrel muskets from the 19 th Century to be fascinating— “multiuse weapons,” “unusual landfills,” “strange trash,” and “unexplained junk yards.” No luck. Normally he was pretty good at finding information on the Internet, but today’s search was a bust. It didn’t help that the school’s filtering software blocked half the sites. It didn’t like most searches with “gun” in the title. The program was stupid that way. He’d have the same problem if he searched for “breast,” even if he was working on a paper on breast cancer, or if he wanted to learn more about breastworks, or if he wanted a recipe for making a dish out of a chicken breast. Half of the human race has them, he thought, but the school administration wants to pretend they don’t exist. He shook his head in disbelief.
    He could take a picture of the gun, and then use an image-search program to see if there would be a match, but, he thought, if someone was tech savvy and was missing the gun, wouldn’t they be on the lookout for a search for the thing they’d lost? His hands froze over the keyboard. Had he already revealed himself by