Last Chance--A Novel Page 14

  “Okay, good,” Rocky said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Take off your shirt,” Ben said.

  Rocky blinked at him a few times. He rolled one of his sneakers over onto its side, then back again. “What?”

  Ben reached onto one of the workstations and picked up a bundle of rubber clamping bands for holding stuff together when you glued it. He flopped them into the palm of his other hand a few times like a cat-o’-nine-tails from a pirate movie.

  “Take. Off. Your. Shirt.”

  Dezi and Mikey sidled up on Rocky, one on each side. Trembling, he pulled his shirt off over his head. His arms looked so thin. He balled up the shirt and held it in front of him like a shield. Even so, he looked pretty scrawny.

  “Turn around,” Ben said.

  JoJo stifled a cry in her chest.

  Rocky hesitated, so Dezi spun him around and shoved him over the workbench. Rocky made a noise that wasn’t quite a cry.

  Ben walked over and stood behind him. “You put the group at risk.”

  “No.” JoJo heard herself talking as if from afar. “I did.”

  Ben looked over at her. “Then this is your fault.”

  He whipped Rocky, the bands slapping his bare flesh. Rocky grunted through gritted teeth.

  Ben whipped him again. Already welts were rising on Rocky’s back.

  JoJo squeezed Bunny’s head. She thought about what she’d just said, about how the only useful thing anymore was being big and how she wasn’t gonna grow up fast enough to be any use. She’d never felt more useless than now.

  There was nothing she could do but watch her big brother get whipped.

  Ben hit him another time. Then he drew back his arm again, the bands flicking overhead.

  “Stop!”

  Dr. Chatterjee entered the room, his leg braces clinking across the tiles.

  “Put those down immediately, Mr. Braaten.”

  “Or what? You’re gonna stop me?”

  “No,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “But they are.”

  Kids came pouring through the doorway behind him. Eve and the Mendez twins, and then a trio of guys from the football team, and then pretty much everyone else. They filled the shop class, crowding around Ben, Dezi, and Mikey.

  Dr. Chatterjee held out his hand. It had a slight tremor from his disease. “Give me those bands.”

  Ben stared at him, his jaw shifting. Then he looked across the other faces. “None of you understand what it’ll take to keep you safe,” he said. “Rocky abandoned his post. We could’ve had Chasers through our front doors without any warning.”

  “The bands, Mr. Braaten,” Chatterjee said again.

  Ben whipped them into Chatterjee’s palm harder than was necessary. It sounded like it hurt, but Chatterjee didn’t make a noise. He tore them out of Ben’s grip.

  “Eve, please check on Rocky,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

  Rocky kept his back turned to everyone. He pulled on his shirt, wiped his cheeks. “I’m fine,” he said.

  Eve glared at Ben. “Patrick would never do this.”

  “Patrick’s got two things going against him,” Ben said. “He’s not here. And he’s not in charge.”

  “Right,” Chatterjee said. “But I am.”

  “According to who?”

  Eve raised her hand. Chatterjee turned to the others. One by one, all the hands rose.

  Dr. Chatterjee said, “One more episode like this and you will be dismissed from your position as head of security. You won’t be allowed to carry a weapon, patrol, or take shifts as a lookout.”

  “You need me,” Ben said. “When trouble comes—and it will—I’ll be your best bet. You won’t dare to sideline me.”

  Chatterjee wobbled forward another step. Firmed his balance. Stared Ben dead in the eye. “Don’t doubt it for a second,” he said.

  Ben stared back at him, but he must not have liked what he saw, because he brushed by Dr. Chatterjee. Dezi and Mikey followed him, the others parting to make way. Then everyone filtered out the door.

  Dr. Chatterjee walked over to Rocky. “You’re all right?”

  Rocky nodded.

  Dr. Chatterjee rested a hand on Rocky’s shoulder, and Rocky stiffened. He didn’t want to be touched. JoJo knew how he felt.

  Chatterjee said, “I promise I won’t let that happen to you again.”

  His leg braces clanked on his way out, and then it was just JoJo and Rocky again. Rocky stayed turned away. His head was bent, and his shoulders were shaking.

  But he wasn’t making a noise.

  Sitting on the floor, clutching the Head of Bunny, she stared at her brother, feeling even more helpless than before. What could she do?

  Rocky made little noises, still trying to hold it in.

  JoJo remembered how Mom had given her Bunny to squeeze at the hospital so JoJo could feel what she needed to, but in a way that didn’t make it too scary. She thought for a moment.

  “Rocky?” she said. “I’m scared. Will you hold my hand?”

  At first Rocky didn’t respond. Then he straightened up a little. One hand lifted and wiped his cheeks. When he turned around, his face was red, but the tears were gone.

  She stood as he approached and took his hand on their way out.

  ENTRY 27

  We walked through the woods, our boots packing down dead leaves. Though Patrick and Alex were close, I could barely see them through the mist. It floated between the trunks like a slow-moving river, eddying around the branches. The leaves turned the moonlight into a mosaic on the forest floor. It smelled of mulch and pine.

  We walked in silence. There wasn’t much to say after what the Rebel had told us.

  Patrick and I, we’d get to save humanity. We’d get to save Alex.

  But we’d have to die to do it.

  A wall of vertical bars emerged from the mist ahead. Wrought iron.

  Patrick and Alex slowed, but I walked forward, set my hands on the bars, and peered through at the rows of gravestones. I’d nearly lost my life in here a month back. I’d wandered inside through the thick mist, not noticing that the place was filled with Hosts. Thankfully, I’d tucked in behind a Mapper, and Mappers don’t look up unless something catches their sight. I’d walked slowly and silently behind him, matching his footsteps as he charted his course through all the other Hosts. If any of them had raised their heads a few inches, it would’ve been the end of me. But none had.

  It had taken me hours to get out.

  Patrick came up on one side of me and Alex on the other. We looked like three jailbirds there gripping the bars.

  “We don’t even get to wind up in there,” I said to Patrick. “We’ll be exploded all over the place like Mr. McCafferty.”

  “Beats turning into a Host,” Alex said. “Or getting eaten by a Hatchling.”

  “Look at Unnamed Girl, all upbeat,” I said.

  She bumped me with her hip. “I’m not Unnamed Girl,” she said with a Clint Eastwood squint. “I’m the Girl with No Name.”

  We stared at the ghostly headstones, morphing in and out of the fog. Patrick put his arm around Alex.

  I looked at my brother. “We’re not human. We’re not Rebels. There’s no one like us. Except us.”

  “And me,” Alex said. She pushed off from Patrick and walked up the fence line, trailing her hand along the bars, her fingertips making the faintest dings against the metal. “I consider myself an honorary whatever-you-are.”

  She moved a ways off, giving us space. I guess she figured we needed some brother-to-brother time. Especially right now. Alex was good like that.

  Patrick squinted out from beneath his black cowboy hat. “So what exactly are we?”

  “We’re time bombs,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “We could save the entire planet,” Patrick said. “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Great,” I said. “So they’ll build a statue of us in town square.”

  Patrick made his half grin. “’Member how boring you used to say it wa
s living here? Ranching and farming? Two restaurants in town? The same faces day in, day out? That would’ve been us till we died. We would’ve worked and married and maybe had kids and wound up in there”—he aimed a finger through the bars—“like everyone before us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We would’ve.”

  “I could’ve been happy having that life,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “But not you.”

  I didn’t answer. I knew he was trying to make me feel better about being a hero. But I wasn’t a hero. He was. He saw the big picture, how everything added up. I just didn’t want to die. Not like that, not ever.

  Patrick said, “You used to talk about how there was a whole big world out there.”

  I finally nodded.

  “Well, maybe this is the price of playing in that big world,” he said. “We get to now, whether we want to or not. We get to do this for Rocky and JoJo and Chatterjee and Eve.”

  “And Alex.”

  He looked at me. “And Alex.”

  “Thirty-seven days,” I said.

  “I know when Alex’s birthday is, Chance.”

  A flash of a memory hit me: Patrick sprawled on top of a carport, his oxygen mask knocked off his face. He’d just inhaled air. Infected air. We’d both thought he was gonna die. “I know how you feel about her,” he’d told me. “Take care of her. And make sure she takes care of you.”

  “We never talked about it,” I said. “What you told me on top of that carport.”

  “What’s to talk about?”

  I stared at him.

  He stared at me.

  “We’re both gonna be dead soon, Chance,” he said. “Does it really matter anymore?”

  Before I could reply, I noticed that Alex was backing up toward us, her knuckles dinging the bars in reverse. She didn’t stop until her shoulder blades bumped into Patrick.

  “There’s something out there,” she said.

  We heard the crunch of a footfall. Twigs snapping. Underbrush giving way. The mist mushroomed around us. We couldn’t see farther than a few feet.

  We went back-to-back-to-back, our weapons raised.

  Then a sound issued out of the fog.

  A rumble.

  I relaxed. “Don’t worry. It’s the dogs.” I lowered my baling hooks and gave a whistle.

  The noises that answered me didn’t sound like my Rhodesian ridgebacks at all. Had the pack gone rabid?

  “Chance?” Alex said. “Wanna tell your doggies to chill the hell out?”

  A face emerged from the swirling mist.

  It barely registered as human. The missing eyes were the least of it.

  The lower jaw had fallen off. Rot holes in the flesh showed the larynx pulsing with every breath, making a terrible ragged noise that called to mind a snarl.

  More upright forms appeared behind it.

  Wheezes and wet rumbles issued from damaged faces.

  They weren’t ridgebacks.

  They were Hosts.

  ENTRY 28

  The Hosts blended into the dense fog so we couldn’t get a handle on how many there were.

  Patrick raised his shotgun, but I grabbed the barrel. “Hang on,” I said. “We need the rock-salt shells for the Hatchlings.”

  The front Host lunged forward, and Patrick cracked him with the butt of the shotgun.

  He said, “It’s not a waste if it keeps us alive.”

  A few more Hosts melted from the mist. Five now.

  No—six.

  Male and female. Mappers and Chasers.

  When the first one went to lunge again, Alex swung at him with her hockey stick. She made good contact. The blade sank into the Host’s neck and stuck. Alex yanked it free, and the body collapsed.

  We retreated.

  The Hosts followed us through the mist. I could hear more feet shuffling on the hard earth, just out of sight.

  Even though it was freezing, my shirt was matted to me with sweat. “How many are there?”

  No one bothered to answer.

  “Keep the fence at our backs,” Patrick said, “so they can’t surround us.”

  And that’s what we did, making clumsy, awkward headway. The Hosts stalked us through the mist, stumbling between tree trunks, disappearing and then easing back into sight. All the while that ragged breathing filled the air, seemingly everywhere around us.

  “I’m shooting the next one that gets close,” Patrick said.

  “You’ll get off one shot,” Alex said. “That leaves a bunch more.”

  “You’ve got a hockey stick. Chance has his hooks.”

  “That leaves a bunch more minus two,” she said.

  “It’s a fight, not a math class,” Patrick said. “The equations don’t always add up.”

  “All I’m saying is, if this breaks down into a free-for-all, we’re gonna come out on the losing end.”

  “It’s not just that,” I said. “A gunshot could draw any Hatchlings in the area. Then we’d wish we were just dealing with Hosts.”

  The wrought iron ticked across my shoulder. We were moving along the north wall of the cemetery. Which was all well and good.

  Except it ended in about ten feet.

  The Hosts seemed to sense this. They drew nearer, saliva drooling from the holes in their throats, matting their shirts. Alex swung at one, knocking him back.

  We reached the corner. The intersecting fence line ran back toward the heart of the woods. But town lay ahead, through the open forest.

  “We gotta keep moving toward town,” Patrick said. “Tree to tree. Don’t get caught in the open.”

  With his shotgun leveled, he led the way off the fence to the nearest tree. Sure enough, a bunch of Hosts materialized from the fog to circle us. We swung our weapons, carving out a bubble of space as we advanced. Our steps moved in concert as we held a tight formation. In situations like this, Patrick, Alex, and I didn’t have to talk to stay on the same page.

  We reached the trunk and put our shoulder blades to it so we faced outward. The Hosts thrust in at us. I whacked one on the head with the side of a baling hook, and he stumbled to the side, his ankle snapping. He hopped back up on one foot, the other leg twisting loosely beneath his knee.

  The weak link.

  They faded back again. We couldn’t see them in the fog.

  We could hear them.

  That was even worse.

  “When we move,” I said, “we push past the injured one.”

  A breeze whipped through, clearing the mist momentarily, the Hosts appearing at the edge of visibility. We charged for the Host with the broken ankle, knocking him aside, swinging our weapons and sprinting for the next tree. We repositioned ourselves with the trunk to our backs.

  More horrible ragged breathing. More ropes of saliva.

  It was gonna be slow going.

  And yet we didn’t have a choice.

  We progressed that way, moving from tree to tree. The mist turned to snowfall, so light you could barely feel it. The flakes spun around us, frosting our hair, like something from a fairy tale.

  A scary-ass fairy tale.

  The Hosts grew impatient. As we bolted for the next tree, one of the females dove, got a hold of the cuff of my jeans, and nearly pulled me off my feet. Patrick dealt her a jab with the shotgun, and she released me just as my other boot slipped on a patch of ice. Alex caught me under the arm, hauled me to my feet, and we scrambled to the next pine.

  Two others took advantage of the opening and charged Alex. She raised the hockey stick just in time, their gnashing mouths slamming into it, pinning her to the tree. Pulling her head back, she thrust the stick handle into their open maws, gagging them. The wood shoved through the hinges of their jaws with a crackling noise. Still the voice boxes lurched visibly in their throats, making gargling noises.

  They kept driving into her, their legs scraping up snow.

  I jabbed at them with my baling hooks, ripping them off Alex. They drifted back into the mist, quick as cats. Wh
en they reappeared, I noticed a new one now. And then another.

  How many were out there, hiding in the mist?

  “We’re not gonna make it the whole way to town,” Alex said. “One slip. That’s all it’ll take.”

  “Not a good way to go,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Plus, then we couldn’t save humanity.”

  She managed a weak smile.

  Patrick wasn’t amused. “We didn’t come this far to get taken by a few rotting Hosts.”

  “Tell them that,” I said.

  We made a break over the next crest. At the peak a gnarled whitebark pine thrust up like a giant bonsai tree. As we made for it, the Hosts slanted in at us. We regrouped at the whitebark, flailing at them, driving them back. Our shoulders scraped the trunk, bark powdering down over us.

  We were panting now. It took effort for me not to double over to catch my breath.

  Above the rush of the wind, we could hear the babbling of Hogan’s Creek. I squinted into the flurry of snow. There it was way below, frigid gray water snaking through sheets of ice. The ground on either side was sloped and free of brush—free of cover of any kind.

  We’d never make it across.

  There was no point in saying it. It was clear as day.

  I tilted my head back to the trunk, my breath still firing in my lungs. “Okay,” I said. “Do we start shooting now?”

  “And draw the Hatchlings?” Alex said.

  “I think we’re out of options.”

  “No.” Patrick pointed. “There.”

  At first I couldn’t see what he was pointing at. But then I noticed the faint glow through the pines.

  A farmhouse.

  The Widow Latrell’s.

  Those lights had been burning for weeks and weeks.

  “We make it to the house,” Patrick said. “Regroup there.”

  We steeled ourselves, gathered our strength. Then we fought and kicked our way to the next tree. And the next. And the next.

  The farmhouse came clearer through the thickening snow. A mile away. Now a half. At last it was only about a hundred yards off.

  But we were tired. Too tired.

  One of us was bound to make a mistake.

  I’m sorry to say it was me.

  As we ran for the last trees before the cleared space that passed for a front yard, my boot hit a slick of ice.