Sam Wheatley

Amy Meets the Team

     Amy closed her locker with a loud BANG! but no one noticed. She wasn't surprised. No one at school ever noticed her. She liked it. This meant she could do whatever she wanted, often without getting into trouble. The high school freshman picked up her backpack and followed the stream of students rushing out of the school. All of these kids would go to their homes with their families and would be happy. Amy wouldn't though. She would go to the group home she had lived in since she was eight-years-old where kids barely noticed her and where the adults saw her as just another orphan. She wasn't anything extraordinary to them or to anyone in her town.
     If only they knew the truth, Amy thought as she walked through the streets of Orono, Maine. She had lived here her whole life yet no one really knew her, at least, not any more. Back when her mother was alive they did, but not any more. Feeling the familiar sadness when she thought of her mother, Amy kept walking but was now fidgeting with her black, curly hair tied into a ponytail and her purple glasses, something she did when she was nervous. She walked past the houses and small businesses in her town and was soon at the large group home. She went up the stairs and pushed open the door and headed up the stairs case on the right side of the entry room in the group home. She went straight down a large hallway to another hallway where the bedrooms were, then went to her room. She threw her backpack onto her bed and pulled out a pair of jeans and blue t-shirt from her closet and changed out of her school clothes.
      "Homework or no homework?" Amy asked herself out loud. This was the question she asked herself every time she came back from school. The difference was that now she was in high school. So far everything was normal, she understood everything she learned and didn't struggle at all. So, that meant she didn't have to study now, right? She could do, other stuff. She sat at her desk and turned on her laptop and took out her phone. She pulled up Google Maps on her laptop and opened her police scanner app on her phone. She did this all the time to track criminals who the police wouldn't be able to get to. That's when she pulled on her dark blue hoodie and black pants, took out her bow and arrows, and went to catch the criminals herself. Technically, this was illegal, but since she started crime in her town had dropped dramatically, so the police let her do this without question. At least, that's what the police told the rest of the town when they asked about who the vigilante was. Amy knew the truth though. As she listened to the scanner she heard footsteps from outside her door. The door opened and Mrs. Robin, the woman who ran the group home, was standing there with a strange look on her face. She looked, confused to say the least. Amy swung her chair around to face her.
      "Amy?" Mrs. Robin asked, "there are some people here to see you." Amy turned off the scanner app and stared in confusion. She didn't have any friends at school and she hadn't social services didn't allow anyone from her mother's old precinct to see her without a social worker there to monitor visitation. So, who would be here to see her and how did they find out where she lived? Actually, that last part wouldn't be hard. When her mother died, her whole life was plastered all over the news for weeks. Still, nobody really knew her as a friend. Amy could tell from the look on Mrs. Robin's face that she was equally confused by this strange situation.
      "Who are they?" Amy asked, "what do they want?" She felt confused and honestly tempted to take the small knife she had in her backpack out in case these people were kidnappers or something evil like that, but she knew it was just an overreaction to a strange situation.
     "I don't know," the woman answered, "they just said that they needed to talk to you. They said that it was an emergency." She added this with a note of worry in her voice
      Amy got up and went to her backpack making it look like she was grabbing her phone charger and earbuds, but in reality she was slipping her blue knife into her pocket. It was the kind used to open packages and she had taught herself how to use it in self-defense. She probably didn't need it, but with what she did, it was better to be prepared in case someone she stopped found out who she was and tried to hurt her.
      "Alright, I'm going," Amy said. She went past Mrs. Robin, through the now crowded hallway, and down the stairs. At the doorway stood four people; two men and two women, all between the ages of 32 and 40. Amy stared in pure confusion. She had never seen these people in her life, and yet they were looking at her like they had been searching for her and known her since she was a kid. Amy slid her hand into the pocket of her jeans so that to them, she just had her hand in her pocket but in reality, she was holding her knife.
      "Who are you people?" Amy asked in a guarded voice. She stayed a little away from them just in case someone tried to grab her.
      "Are you Amy Parker?" one of the women asked her. She had blonde hair and was probably 35. She wore black leggings and a light blue shirt.
      "Yes," Amy answered the grip on her knife getting tighter, "who are you? Why are you here?"
      "My name's Bex Henderson," the woman said, "I work for the FBI. This is my team, Shane Florence, Jacob Hassani, and Jennifer Morales. We need to talk to you, is there somewhere we can go where no one will bother us?" Her voice was gentle when she spoke.
       Amy stared at the group her eyes bouncing from one person to the next. Shane had short, black hair and was probably Bex's age, Hassani was a little older and had a look of both concern and curiosity in his eyes, and Morales was the youngest of them and had her hair in a bun. Amy didn't recognize them from anywhere, but she knew she didn't have a choice but to talk to them.
      "Um, my room I guess?" Amy said still confused, "it's this way." She reluctantly let go of her knife and led the group up to her bedroom. The kids in the hallway stared as they walked by. Amy hated the feeling of them all staring at her but pushed through it. She opened her bedroom door and led the group in. Mrs. Robin was gone, so it was just the five of them.
        "So what does the FBI want with me?" Amy asked. Her voice was calm but on the inside she was a little nervous. She only stopped small time criminals the police missed, and a of couple others that were, different to say the least, so why was the FBI looking for her? What did she do?
       "Is that your computer?" Shane suddenly asked pointing at her open laptop.
      "Yeah," Amy said, "this is my room after all."
      "Why's Google Maps open?" he asked.
      Amy immediately bolted to the computer and shut it closed. True, being on Google Maps didn't mean anything, but if someone from the FBI was asking about what she was doing on Google Maps, she knew she needed to be careful.
       "I was just looking for different routes to school," she said, "in case I'm running late and need to get there quicker than normal."
       "Makes sense," Bex said looking around the room, "I wish I had done something like that when I was your age. I was late to school a lot."
       Amy watched as the group looked at her room. She thought it looked normal, not like a teenage vigilante lived here. Some of her clothes were on the ground, her books were spaced out in on her bed because she had been trying to decide what new book to start earlier that day before school. Everything looked normal to her, but maybe she had left something out that they were supposed to be looking for?
       I've got to take charge of this, she thought. She had learned the best way to get information was to make sure everyone else knew you were in charge and asking the questions.
       "You didn't answer my question," Amy said to Bex, who seemed to be the one in charge, "why are four FBI agents looking for me? Do you think I witnessed some federal crime or something?"
       "No," Bex said now facing her, "but we do have questions about some other stuff that happened here. We think you can help."
       "Okay," Amy said cautiously, "how?"
       "Well, a few months ago," Bex said, "there was a kidnapping spree right here in Orono. Four girls your age disappeared on their way home from school, and the police couldn't find them. They were so worried they issued a shelter in place order for the town. Then by some miracle, they got an anonymous call saying the girls were in an abandoned office building on the edge of town. They thought the kidnapper wanted to lure them there, but when they got there, the man who took the girls was tied up and the girls were safe. They all said the same thing, that a girl their age in a blue hoodie had shot the man with two arrows, and then he was unconscious. She untied them, called 911, and then left two minutes before the police showed up."
       Amy shrugged at them as though this meant nothing to her, even though it did.
       "Okay," she said, "well, I wasn't one of the girls who were kidnapped, so why are you asking me questions about this?"
      "Well, something similar happened about two months later," Bex said, "two men were attacked and they said that a woman had attacked them with a machete in the woods and that their friend was still out there. There was large search and rescue operation, and they found the man, but he was with the woman who had attacked them. She was also tied and unconscious and the man gave the same description that the girls two months before had given. A masked girl saved his life."
      "What's your point?" Amy asked getting nervous, "I wasn't there for that either."
      "To sum it all up," Bex said, "two situations similar to this happened over the summer. Another kidnapping and attack both of which were stopped by a girl in a hoodie with arrows, and we're trying to find the girl who stopped them, because we need to ask her some questions about the people she stopped."
       "You could have just looked at a newspaper to find out about what this girl did," Amy said, " or go to the local police station to ask questions about her. She's been here for a year. She's the local vigilante. The police let her stay because she does good work. So, what's the real reason you're talking to me? And don't say you think I might know her because everyone here knows that I don't have any friends, let alone know a vigilante. So, that lie isn't going to work for me."
      "You don't have any friends?" Morales said suddenly, "like, any?"
       "It's not a big deal," Amy said avoiding eye contact, "it's pretty much always been like this. And once again I'm asking, why are you talking to me about this vigilante girl?"
      "We know it was you," Hassani said bluntly, "we know you're the vigilante girl in this town, but you don't know who you've really been stopping for the past few months."
      "I don't know what you're talking about," Amy said quickly, "I'm not a vigilante."
      "But your mom was a cop," Bex said quickly, "she was the captain, wasn't she?"
      "You don't get to talk about her,"Amy said getting angry, "if you're not going to clearly and directly tell me what's going on, get out."
      "Look, we know you're the vigilante," Bex said, "and we know that the four people that you stopped over the last four months, weren't normal criminals. They were serial killers."
      This caught Amy off guard. She couldn't answer right away. She stared at these four people unable to say anything.
       "Serial killers?" Amy finally said.
       "Yes," Bex said "very dangerous serial killers."
      "That's crazy," Amy said, "those people are locked up right now and they're-"
      "They're not here anymore," Hassani said, "some other agents took them to a government prison not long after they were arrested."
       "I'm sorry, you did what?" Amy asked.
      "They were transported back to a secret prison," Bex explained, " because the one that they escaped from blew up. It's in Cheyanne Wyoming and it's called the Pit. It was a secret underground government prison where the world's most dangerous serial killers were being kept for years and years."
"What do you mean was a secret underground prison and that the prisoners were being kept there? What happened?" Amy asked.
"There was an explosion," Morales said, "it caused the prison to collapse and while a lot of prisoners died, a lot more got out into the world, including the ones that you stopped."
Amy couldn't answer them. She could still see the faces of the people she had stopped in her mind. When she looked at them she saw bad people, but not to that level. The world's most dangerous serial killers, she kept repeating in her head, and then finally answered.
"Okay," she said, "I was not expecting that to be what you told me, but it still doesn't answer part of my question: why are you talking to me about this? Especially if there's more people like that out there hurting people."
"Because we came here to get you," Bex said, "we think you might be able to help us."
      Amy stared in shock and honestly thought they were kidding, but when it became obvious they weren't, she finally spoke.
"You want me," Amy said, "a teenage girl, to help you, the freaking FBI, to help you catch the world's worst serial killers? Why? I mean, yes you know I stopped the ones that were here, but that was luck or something."
"I would agree if you had stopped one serial killer," Hassani said, "but you didn't, you stopped four all by yourself. We couldn't even do that."
"How did you guys even find me?" Amy asked.
"It wasn't hard," Morales said, "some other agents brought in the killers you caught and then a small investigation was opened to find out who you were or if you knew about the Pit."
"But how did you know it was me?" Amy asked still feeling beyond confused.
"That was all Bex," Shane said.
"What's that mean?" Amy asked.
"She's got this gift for profiling people," Shane said, "it didn't take long to figure out it was you."
Amy looked at Bex to ask what that meant but had to suppress a smirk first. The way Bex was looking at Shane when he said this about her reminded her of how the girls at her school looked at the boys they liked. Bex looked like a nervous schoolgirl when Shane talked about her. Amy thought it was kind of cute.
      "What exactly made you realize that I was the vigilante here?" Amy finally asked.
      "Well for starters," Bex said, "whoever the vigilante was had to have a lot of free time to track, find, and catch these people, so that most likely meant they were an orphan. This town is small so it wasn't hard to find out which girls around your age were orphans through social media. Then we saw that your mother was the police captain, and that you had uploaded pictures on social media of yourself at an archery range on multiple occasions, the same weapon the vigilante was using. That gave you the motive and ability to do this kind of stuff. After that we just had to find out where you lived, which with Morales's help didn't take long."
There's silence for a little bit after this. Amy looked between the four people standing in front of her and tried to figure out if there was a possible underlying motive they had for talking to her. Did they really want her help or would they lock her up in federal prison if she didn't go with them? Were they innocent or manipulating her?
"Are you guys making this decision?" Amy asked, "or is someone else forcing you to?" In the movies people like this were usually forced to do things they didn't want to do, but she wasn't sure how accurate that was and wanted to know.
"Not exactly," Bex said, "someone else we met recently told us about you, and the investigation that was opened after you caught these four serial killers, or rather he told us about the vigilante and then we figured out it was you. He said that while he couldn't tell us what to do, he strongly believed that you could be a crucial part of this recovery mission. You could save lives."
      Amy didn't answer. She thought this over. These people seemed to be telling the truth. They weren't telling her things that were clearly lies and were pretty determined to bring her with them since they kept mentioning her mom. Even the most emotionally insensitive person wouldn't do that, so they must be pretty desperate to have her go with them. Before she was able to come up with an answer though, Morales's phone buzzed.
      "What is it?" Bex asked as her friend looked at her phone, her eyes growing wide.
      "Just got a hit off facial recognition from a traffic camera in a town in Vermont," Morales answered, "a man was seen dragging a girl into a car at a gas station. Facial recognition matched him as Pit escapee Sam Wheatley."
That name sounds familiar, Amy thought, and then walked up to the group to see the footage. Morales turned the phone towards them and Amy had to stifle a gasp. She recognized that man. She knew exactly who he was.
      The footage showed a girl probably in her late twenties who was filling her car up with gas. A man stood at the other gas pump watching her. He was tall and his arms hung at his sides. He had brown hair, a beard, and wore a faded black baseball cap, a gray t-shirt, and jeans. He would have looked like any random guy on the street if he hadn't been staring at the girl with a strange look in his eyes. As the girl was about to get back into her car, the man lunged at her. He grabbed her by her shoulders and slammed her into the gas pump and then put a needle into her neck. The girl almost immediately collapsed to the ground. The man then tied her hands and leges together and dragged her unconscious body into his car. He then quickly spend away from the gas station. There was no one there to stop him from taking this girl and escaping.
"When was this?" Bex asked while Amy just stood there processing what she had seen.
"Only twenty minutes ago," Morales said, "the gas station was just outside Newport."
"We should go now," Hassani said, "get there before the police bag most of the evidence."
"Wait," Amy said. She had finally returned to her surroundings and was confused.
"We're in Main," she pointed out, "how are you guys planning on getting to Vermont quick enough to beat the police to the crime scene?"
"We take the plane," Shane said simply.
"You guys have a plane?" Amy asked.
"The CIA does," Hassani said, "before the Pit blew up I used to work for them. They let us use their plane because these killers have made their way to so many places in this country."
"Plane's at a nearby airport," Bex said as Morales showed her the location on her phone.
"We have to leave now," she said looking right at Amy, "so decision time: are you helping us or are you staying to be your town's vigilante?"
Amy looked at the four people standing in front of her. They had been recruited for this task force, most likely from other government departments. Most likely their lives had become ten times more dangerous and chaotic after they were recruited, but they got to do what they wanted to do. They got to help and protect people, something she had wanted to do her whole life, just like her mother did.
What would you want me to do? Amy thought, her hand going to the necklace she always wore. The one her mom had given her for her eighth birthday. It was a key. A small key painted gold with two small teeth on one side. Whenever she had to make a tough decision like this, she held the necklace as if it let her still talk to her mother. It always helped her.
She always taught me to help people, she thought, she always taught me to use my skills to help people. That's what I've been doing and I can still do it now by going with these people.
Amy looked at Bex, went to her backpack, put her phone, knife, laptop, phone and laptop chargers and earbuds into it and then slung her bow and arrows on her back. She picked up the backpack, looked at the four people in front of her and said in a calm voice, "Let's get going then."
Bex smiled as though proud of her. For just a second Amy let herself smile too. She felt the way she had when she was little and her mom would tell her how proud she was of her because she did well on a test or made her a drawing.
"Let's go then," Hassani said.
As Amy followed them back through the hallway and down the stairs, she made a promise to herself. As Bex told Mrs. Robin that Amy would need to come with them for the day she told herself this: I can't tell them. I won't. They wouldn't understand it. They don't know what my life has been like. I have to keep this a secret. For mom, for me, and for everyone else.
She just hoped that these people hadn't dug into her life too much. Otherwise she wouldn't be able to protect the people in her life who had mattered to the most to her mom and to herself.