When Wyatt gets framed for a friend's crime, he thinks his life is over. But then a mysterious stranger visits him in jail with an unusual proposal: Spend three months in a secret government camp and have a 10-year prison sentence wiped clean.
Wyatt agrees, and finds himself in a world beyond his wildest dreams, with teenagers like him flying drones, defusing bombs, and jumping out of helicopters. This is no ordinary camp. Camp Valor is a secret training ground for teenage government agents, filled with juvenile offenders-badasses who don't play by the rules — who desperately need a second chance. If they can prove themselves over their three month stay and survive Hell Week, they will enter the ranks of the most esteemed soldiers in the United States military.
But some enemies of the United States have gotten wind of Camp Valor, and they will do everything in their power to find out its secrets. Suddenly, Wyatt and his friends have to put their training into practice, and find the bravery to protect their country.
Release date:
July 10, 2018
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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With two days left before summer break, Wyatt was restless. Sleep evaded him. He had the window open, the fan aimed at his bed, churning at full speed. But the air coming in wasn’t all that much cooler than the boiling stuff going out. And it smelled of concrete, tar, and whatever sat cooking in the garbage can a few paces from the windowsill—remnants of whatever Wyatt’s aunt Narcissa had gobbled up and flung out the door with a well-practiced flick of her sausage fingers. A Styrofoam container slimed with sesame chicken, empty egg roll wrappers, a can of SpaghettiOs, a box of pigs in a blanket, BBQ short ribs sucked clean and bone white.
Aunt Narcy and her pile of bones hadn’t always been there. It wasn’t that long ago that Wyatt’s mom made pancakes shaped like superheroes for breakfast and brought lemonade to Wyatt and his little brother’s baseball games. She drove carpool, helped with math homework. But those days had ended eight months ago, when Wyatt’s dad packed a bag, climbed into his rig like he did every month, and pulled out. But this time he never came home. No word. No call. The days passed and holidays went by—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day. Wyatt tried every trick he knew to scour the Internet to find his dad, conducting Boolean searches, sourcing the deep Web. Not a trace. The Millersville police weren’t much help. They filed a missing persons report, of course, but they couldn’t even locate his truck. And since money kept appearing in his mother’s bank account every month, the police assumed they were not dealing with a homicide.
“Mrs. Brewer,” the lead investigator told his mother in the kitchen one afternoon, “you need to prepare yourself for the likely possibility that your husband is alive, but wanted to disappear.”
The idea of abandonment destroyed Wyatt’s mom. She took to her bed for days on end, no more pancakes, and eventually, no more cooking or cleaning at all. School became an afterthought. Her sister Narcy moved in, supposedly to help. But Narcy just made things suck even more. She talked trash about Wyatt’s dad and made his mom think the worst. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had another family,” Narcy whispered to his mother one afternoon.
Another family? Wyatt couldn’t stop thinking about it in his bed later that night. He was lying there, bathed in sweat and a fog of garbage stink, eyes wide open, when he noticed a little pool of light playing on the wall, glimmering at the end of the bunk bed he shared with Cody, his younger brother.
Wyatt leaned over and peered down at the bottom bunk to see if Cody was awake. His brother lay on a sweat-stained Star Wars bedsheet in his underwear, slick with perspiration, long hair stuck to his face, twitching a little. Likely having a nightmare, a regular occurrence these past eight months.
Wyatt snatched up the phone and hopped from the bunk. “Hello,” he whispered.
He could hear the smile in his friend Derrick’s voice. “Of all my boyz to answer my call in a pinch, you do. I’m glad we gonna get in a year at Maple.”
Maple was the local high school. Wyatt was going to be a freshman and Derrick a senior. The fact that Derrick was an all-state running back helped mask that he was also a complete degenerate. Wyatt himself had always been a little on the wild side, but his grades never showed it. Up until his dad disappeared, he’d finished each semester at the top of his class. Then, after his dad left, Wyatt turned punk with a vengeance. It didn’t take long for Wyatt to transition into the kind of kid you’d watch so he wouldn’t shoplift, the kind you’d walk on the other side of the street to avoid. You wouldn’t think that, as an eighth-grader, he tutored high-school kids in math and computer science, specifically coding in CSS, HTML, AJAX, and some of the other basic languages. Tutoring high schoolers was how he met Derrick in fact. The jock and the renegade with a hacker’s flare for math and rule-breaking. The bond was instant.
“And lemme tell you, homie,” Derrick went on, “I need a friend right now. I neeeeed a lil bad boy like you I can trust. I ain’t gonna lie, bro, I’m in some trouble, and I want you to help me get out. Can I count on you, homie?”
“’Til the end of time,” Wyatt said, noticing he’d begun pacing, a little thrill building inside him.
* * *
Wyatt cracked the door and saw Narcy sitting on the couch watching QVC, the back of her head silhouetted in the bluish light from the flat screen. Her frizzy, short hair glowed like a deep-fried halo, her hand dipping down to the bowl at her side and then rising up to her mouth. Crunch.
The TV volume was set low enough for Wyatt to hear the chewing and lip-smacking and a hum that sounded like a moan. The tube had sucked her into the vortex, all right, but still Wyatt had to be careful. Narcy might have been slow on her feet, but she had bat ears and a voice like a smoke alarm. Wyatt needed to move ninja quiet. He dropped to his knees, pushed the door open, and crawled out nice and slow.
The hallway carpet was dirty and completely worn down in some places. The bare spots creaked if you so much as breathed on them, so he crawled on the soft, cleaner edges of the carpet until he reached the vinyl kitchen floor. Wyatt rose to his feet and padded to the mug on the kitchen counter. Rather than fish the keys out, he took the mug with him and disappeared out the back door.
Narcy’s ride, an old Lincoln Town Car parked in the carport, had once been a car-service limo. Narcy had clocked over 150,000 miles on the odometer, her bulk flattening the springs in the driver side. Still, Wyatt was tall enough to physically drive the car and his father had let him tool around parking lots and back roads so that he wasn’t scared to drive. The problem was getting the beast out of the carport without making any noise. He’d have to push it.
Wyatt gingerly opened the door, slid in, and put the car in neutral. He hand-rolled the window down and, reaching in to hold the steering wheel, he pushed against the doorframe. It didn’t budge. He was getting ready to push again when he heard the kitchen door to the garage open behind him. Wyatt froze, bracing himself for Narcy’s yell.
“Wyatt,” a voice whispered. Cody. Whew. Cody stood in his tighty-whities scratching his stomach. “Had a dream. Daddy was in a deep pit and you were trying to get to him and you fell and landed on a bed of knives.” Cody rubbed his eyes, blinking awake.
“It’s okay, bud,” Wyatt said to his brother. “Just go back to bed. Put a story on if you have to.” Wyatt handed him the phone, queuing up an audiobook. “Try … Huck Finn.”
This was Wyatt’s old standby. When Wyatt was young, his dad would sometimes take Wyatt and Cody on short trips. They’d ride up high in the rig and to keep the boys from getting bored, he’d play Huck Finn, over and over. It was Wyatt’s favorite book now, and listening to it was how the brothers fell asleep many nights.
“Just make sure to plug the phone in or it’ll be dead when we go to school in the morning.”
“Okay.” Cody took the phone and rubbed his eyes. “But why are you out here? What are you doing with Narcy’s car?”
“Borrowing it for a quick spin.”
Cody looked confused. “But you can’t drive.”
“Clarification,” Wyatt said. “I’m not allowed to drive. That doesn’t mean I can’t. I need to help a friend. Come help push.”
Cody was only eleven and looked young and delicate with long hair like Wyatt, but his appearance was deceptive. He was tall and strong and shared some of Wyatt’s natural athletic gifts. But unlike Wyatt, the coaches always said Cody had the self-discipline of a true athlete. And so he gravitated to sports, which helped keep him out of trouble.
“C’mon and put your shoulder into it,” Wyatt said.
Cody stepped toward the car, still thinking, gears turning. He shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this. You were in my nightmare. You can’t go.” He crossed his arms, scowling, trying to swallow a bitter taste. “Nuh-uh. Not tonight.”
“I’ll be right back. C’mon, just give a push.”
Cody stood there staring, unmoving. Wyatt knew it was pointless to argue with him when he got this way. “Suit yourself,” he said, turning back to the car. Wyatt squatted down, leaned and pushed with every ounce of strength he had.
The Town Car inched forward, rolled a little bit, then started down the drive. Once it built up momentum, the car pretty much took off, silently slipping out into the night like a pirate ship. It moved so fast that as the car sailed down the short drive, it got ahead of Wyatt, who sprinted to catch up.
Cody ran down the sidewalk in his undies, hissing Wyatt’s name. “Wyatt, Narcy’s gonna kill you! Catch the dang car!” The back left bumper scraped across the rusty pickup parked on the opposite side of the street. The mash-up of the cars created a metal tearing scream.
Wyatt dove halfway into the front window, jerked the wheel hard to the right, and the tires squeaked, metal grinding against metal. He pulled himself the rest of the way through, scraping the hell out of his chest before scrambling up behind the wheel and steering the car into the center of the street. Wyatt hit the brakes and the car lurched to a stop a block from his house, a new, long scratch down the side of Narcy’s Town Car to add to the plethora of dents and dings. Cody ran up on the sidewalk, jaw hanging down. “Dude,” he said. “The car! Let’s get it back up the street.”
“No turning back now,” Wyatt said, putting the keys in the ignition. The Lincoln’s engine hummed.
“Wyatt, don’t leave me,” Cody begged. “Please. If something happens to you … I can’t lose you. Not you, too.”
Wyatt looked at his brother. “Everything’ll be fine. I’ll be right back. You can trust me,” Wyatt said. “I’ll never leave you for good.”
With that, Wyatt dropped the car into gear and peeled out. In the rearview, he saw Cody running on the sidewalk back up the hill toward their house, his undies glowing against the dark night.
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