A Small Spark

Stephen

The alarms blared around them. In anger and immense panic, Stephen tore his mask off of his face. He was glaring at Mason for this. “I thought you said this was foolproof!” he shouted. Mason shrugged in an uncaring manner.

“Yeah, I lied,” he answered from across the room. “There was only ever a two percent chance of us getting out of here.” Stephen wondered briefly why he had thought Mason’s plan was perfect. The man watched a lot of heist movies, Stephen had just assumed his best friend knew everything.

Stephen kicked the nearest filing cabinet, which quickly proved to be a mistake. Instead of creating any sort of dent in the filing cabinet, Stephen was pretty sure he had just created a dent in his own foot. He grabbed his injured foot and rubbed it as though that would make it feel better.

“If you two are done,” yelled Julie, “can we please work on a way out of here?” While Julie appeared to be calm, Stephen knew for a fact that she was not. She always had an eerie calm around her when she was panicking.

Stephen glanced around the room. When they had entered the room, the lights were off. Now, all the lights were on and the alarm flashed red lights around them. He knew it was his own fault for setting off the alarm. But how was he supposed to know that there would be a motion detector in the room? They had clearly not planned enough for this job.

The police were probably already on their way. They were doomed.

Stephen decided to blame Mason. It was his idea in the first place.

Stephen’s heart pounded against his rib cage. This was why they had told him all his life not to steal. They were going to caught and sent to prison. For a moment, Stephen wondered how he was going to explain this to his parents. “Oh thanks for raising me right, Mom and Dad, by the way, I stole classified information and now I’m going to prison. So, how was your day?”

Stephen tried to think, a feat that seemed to have grown now that he had to try and think over the loud pounding of his heart. His eyes fell once more on the filing cabinets. It always worked in the movies. “I have an idea,” he told his friends, “but it’s crazy and we’ll probably be going to jail.”

“Well, too late to back out now,” murmured Julie, taking off her the piece of cloth that covered her face. Her face had gone pale, exhibiting the immense terror that was growing inside of her. Stephen had told her not to come for this specific reason. Her conscience was catching up to her. But she had insisted that she come.

Mason, on the other hand, looked like he was having the time of his life. Stephen lowered his eyes and mentally blamed him even more for this. When the police got there, Stephen decided, he was going to tell them it was all Mason’s fault.

“Do you think you can fit in the cabinets?” Stephen asked Mason.

Mason glanced down at himself then back at the cabinets. There was a very strong chance that he wasn’t going to be able to fit in any of the cabinets surrounding them. Mason was well over six-feet tall and had a habit of working-out multiple times a day. He shrugged his broad shoulders before forcing his way into the tallest cabinet there.

Of all the places they had to rob, Stephen was glad it was the catacombs of Anderson Laboratories. The place had about a thousand cabinets holding various information. And, for some reason, it was all on paper. It was as if dinosaurs had begun roaming around them again.

While Mason was shoving his gigantic body into the cabinet, Julie and Stephen threw all of the contents of the many, many cabinets onto the ground. Stephen wanted to make it look like whoever was here got what they needed and left.

He closed the doors to the cabinets nearest the door, silently thanking whoever had gifted Mason with the ability to hack security cameras. They would have been completely out of luck otherwise.

Just as Stephen and Julie were tipping the cabinets on their side, they heard the thundering of footsteps above them. That would be the security guards and police officers. “Go!” Stephen shouted to Julie.

Julie raced to the cabinet in the furthest corner of the room. The cabinet was titled on its side with the door ajar and facing the opposite wall. Hopefully, any officers who saw this would assume their thieves were wise enough to leave the room rather than stick around in an open cabinet.

Stephen was the last to hide, he was waiting to ensure that Julie was perfectly situated in the cabinet before taking the cabinet closest to Julie. He wasn’t sure if this was a wise decision, but he wanted Julie to be safe and, truly, it was getting hard to think with the loud echoes of the alarm bell.

Stephen only had to wait a minute before the officers entered the room. As they looked around the room, knocking on the sides of the cabinets, opening a few of them, and moving them around to look diligently, Stephen could hear, more than feel, his heart pounding. It reminded him absentmindedly of reading the Tale Tell Heart in school.

He could see them coming closer, through the crack in the cabinet door. There were about ten of them, all different sizes, but all equally terrifying. This was it. They were going to find Stephen, Julie, and Mason. They’d be sent to prison for this. One of the officers, a woman, spoke up, “Clear. There’s no one here.”

“Casey,” barked another, “go to security. There’s a security camera up there. See what’s on it.” One of them ran out of the room. “Let’s go. They couldn’t have gotten far.”

Even though they had flooded out of the room, Stephen, Julie, and Mason waited several minutes before extracting themselves form their spots. After appearing from the cabinet, Mason stretched his arms and legs. Stephen was surprised Mason had even managed to fit into the cabinet.

“Now, how are we supposed to get out of here?” Julie questioned.

“Haven’t you seen any movies, Julie?” Mason returned, an outraged and disappointed tone creeping into his speeches. “It’s easy. We just make the police look like idiots while we walk away free.”

“Life is not a movie, Mason!” exclaimed Julie. “How do you expect we do that, anyway?”

“Look, I’ve had karate lessons since I was seven years old. And I’ve seen every Bruce Lee movie ever made. I’ve got this.” Mason sauntered out of the room, confidence flowing off of him in waves.

“He’s going to get us arrested,” Stephen observed to Julie.

“And that’s different from our current situation, how?” There was anger in her voice.

“I toldyou not to come,” Stephen muttered.

Before Julie had the time to voice the apparent rage that had climbed onto her face, Mason returned. He was holding three police uniforms. And no matter how many times they’d asked then or later when looking back on this day, Mason would not explain how he managed to acquire three police uniforms.

Really, the whole situation made Stephen question everything he knew about cops. Especially when they strode out of the building with not one person stopping them.

Once out of the building, Mason handed Stephen the crinkled piece of paper for safe keeping. They each climbed into different cars and fled the scene.

Mason fled to downtown Denver. Julie raced to a hotel in Colorado Springs. And Stephen went to Boulder.

Upon arriving at the hotel that night, Stephen dropped his black gloves and mask to the floor. He collapsed with extremely exhaustion onto the king-sized bed.

And there he stayed for a week.

He would leave periodically throughout the day, mostly to find food and allow the maids to clean to room. He spent much of his time at a mall across the street. He’d eat fast food, people watch, and wait for the time he was to meet Julie and Mason at Denver International Airport.

Stephen thought about Rosie a lot during that time. He had lied to her about his trip. But he knew he could never tell her the truth. She would demand to accompany them. Stephen didn’t know for himself how this little exhibition of theirs was going to end, there was no possible way he would include his little sister into this.

People used to say that Rosie and Stephen looked alike, which they both found hilarious because Stephen was adopted. And really, they did not look that similar. Stephen had brown hair to Rosie’s long blonde strands. Stephen had a large forehead and she had a large nose. Truly, the only similarity between them was their blue eyes. Deep, blue eyes like the ocean.

Seven days finally passed. Stephen took an Uber to the airport.

As he waited in line at security, he spotted Julie exiting the area towards the Concord. Her long brown hair fell past her shoulders as she grabbed her things. She scanned the area, probably looking for him and Mason. “You’re drooling,” observed a familiar voice from behind him.

“I’m allowed to,” Stephen returned, “she’s my girlfriend.”

“Yes,” Mason answered, sarcasm dripping from his words, “nothing says, ‘Love me’ quite like, ‘help me rob a lab in Denver.’”

“Come on,” Stephen muttered, blatantly ignoring his friend’s statement. Together, the friends made their way through the security check point towards the plane. Julie was sitting and waiting for the time to board the plane. She smiled when they walked over to her.

“You still have it? The paper, I mean?” she inquired. She had probably been worrying for days over whether or not Stephen had lost the piece of paper they’d stolen from Anderson Laboratories. Stephen would have resented her for that line of thinking if it had not been extremely plausible.

“Yeah, I got it.” Stephen looked over at his two best friends in the world. “We’re all in this together, right?” They nodded in reply.

Stephen extracted the small, crinkled paper from his pocket and showed it to them. Their eyes caught the numbers at the bottom of the page. 36°north, 21°east. Excitement surged through Stephen as he stared at the numbers. They were on their way. Finally, they were on their way to the Lost City of Atlantis.