Cobra Strike by Sigmund Brouwer

Author:Sigmund Brouwer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV000000
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2007-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

chapter twelve

I walked back to my truck, head down and face burning red with anger.

What did he mean, there was no story?

I had seen the dead birds. I knew there was something in the water. My tests in the chem lab had proven that. I wished I was able to pinpoint what was in the water. The high school chem lab didn’t have what I needed to do that.

The county health inspector had told me there was nothing wrong with the water. But I knew he’d either done a bad job of testing it, or he had lied to me.

And now the Journal’s reporter was doing his best to ignore what I had to say too.

Something strange was happening. This was a story.

The trouble for me was I didn’t know where else to go. If the county health inspector wasn’t interested, and the Johnstown Journal wasn’t interested, who could I get to help me find out what was going on?

By the time I got back to my truck, I was mad enough to know the answer.

Who could find out what was going on?

I could.

The next day, I had a study period just before lunch. That meant I could leave school early if I needed to, which I did.

Again, the sky was a perfect blue; the leaves had just started to turn colors. A small breeze pushed at my hair as I walked across the parking lot to my truck.

It was a good day to go for a drive in the hills and visit Gram, a good day to spend some peaceful time at her cabin.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t. Because if I didn’t do something about her poisoned water, her small part of the world would no longer be as beautiful.

Halfway across the parking lot, I heard someone call my name.

I stopped and turned to see Waymen Whitley running toward me, tall and lean and graceful like the star quarterback that he was. Because most kids were still in class, he was the only other person in the parking lot.

I waited for him.

“Hey,” he said, when he caught up with me, “where you going?”

If anyone else had asked me, I might have shrugged to try to get out of answering. But Waymen seemed to really care about people, including me.

“J-j-johns C-c-corporation.”

“No kidding,” he said. “That’s where my dad works. Yours too?”

I shook my head. “My p-p-parents d-died when I was th-three.”

“Sorry to hear it, man. That must have been pretty awful.”

“Y-yeah.” But he wouldn’t want to hear how I cried myself to sleep all those nights when I was little.

For a moment it was awkward, with neither of us knowing what to say.

“So,” he finally said, “you want company? I don’t have another class until two.”

Usually I kept to myself. I preferred the quiet conversations in my head to the stumbling conversations I had with other people. But there was no way to say no without looking like a jerk. And I remembered how much I’d liked it when he called me a friend in front of Powell and Jones at his first practice.

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