Last Chance--A Novel Read online

  Rocky clawed his way out. “What just happened?”

  Already JoJo was walking over to an abandoned Smart Car. “This one looks about our size.”

  Rocky trudged behind, still gazing at the quiet city all around. “Wait. What? I’ve never driven.”

  JoJo yanked open the door, eyed the dangling keys. “How hard could it be?”

  * * *

  Rocky white-knuckled the steering wheel as they careened through a trash can, banged off a streetlight, and sailed up an alley, clattering against its brick walls. JoJo was on the floor of the Smart Car, working the pedals with her hands, one foot waving up and bonking him on the cheek. They’d been lucky enough to get through the city center without seeing a single Harvester, but if they Wile E. Coyote–ed themselves into a wall now, that wouldn’t count for much.

  “Gas!” Rocky cried. “Gas!”

  They flew out of the alley, accelerating toward the edge of an overpass. Rocky’s eyes bulged as he looked ahead to where the ground fell away past a flimsy guardrail, a four-story drop to the crumbled freeway.

  “Brakes!” Rocky screamed, and the brake discs screeched. The giant drop zoomed up on them, filling the windshield.

  The car slowed, slowed, knocking into the guardrail and sending the metal strip plummeting down into the wreckage. Rocky braced himself for the fall, but the car miraculously halted right at the brink.

  Rocky opened one eye. Then the other.

  The front tires lost their purchase and bumped over the lip, the car collapsing another two feet onto the chassis. Rocky shrieked, and JoJo’s legs flailed. She kicked him in the jaw.

  “Don’t move,” Rocky said. “Just … don’t move.”

  They stayed that way, perfectly still, the drop teetering before them. JoJo’s sneaker smooshed Rocky’s nose to one side.

  Moving excruciatingly slowly, he reached for the door handle. Clicked it open. Pushed the door wide.

  “Ready?” he said.

  JoJo’s voice came back muffled against the floor mat. “What? No, I’m not ready. I can’t even see what’s—”

  “One … two … three!”

  Rocky seized JoJo’s ankle and rolled out the open door, dragging his sister with him. She was still half in the Smart Car when it tilted forward over the edge. She covered her head, swinging upside down as the car fell away, slipping off her curled body like a shucked shell. It plummeted down and smashed into the wrecked freeway below.

  Rocky hauled her up by her ankle, and they lay at the brink of the overpass, panting. A moment later they heard movement below. They flattened against the ground.

  Clattering. Footsteps. Heavy breathing rode the wind up to them.

  At last JoJo risked a peek over the edge.

  A band of Hatchlings surrounded the Smart Car, sticking their heads through the shattered back windows. One shoved his face against the cracked windshield. They sniffed and clawed their way around the crumpled metal.

  JoJo drew back and lay down out of sight, her cheek pressed to the asphalt.

  She and her brother stared at each other, their noses inches apart. Her breath ruffled his curls.

  After a while they heard the Hatchlings move on up the freeway. They waited until there wasn’t the faintest sound below. Then they hauled themselves to their feet.

  Across the freeway the cables of a gondola traced a bumpy course over several hills and up a cliff face, showing them the route they’d need to follow.

  JoJo pointed a half mile to their side where a concrete staircase zigzagged down from the back of some housing projects.

  “We can get down there,” she said.

  ENTRY 54

  The jets pelted me, intense enough that I thought they might leave bruises. I rinsed away the antibacterial soap, turned the lever, and took a moment to make sure my skin was still intact. As I toweled off, I realized why the water pressure was so insane—it was a decontamination shower.

  They’d laid out cargo scrubs for me in various sizes. I dressed in a pair that fit, pulled on my boots, and emerged from the bathroom. One of the scientists—a lanky guy who didn’t talk much—waited for me outside. Moving through the contained facility was a pain, because every room was airlocked—the door behind you had to shut before the one ahead of you opened. The guy guided us through, tapping a digital key card to various panels. I felt like a rat in a trick maze.

  Alex and Patrick were waiting with all the scientists in a big central lab that had cloudy glass walls on all sides. Because they could fit some of the scientists’ clothes, they had better wardrobe options. Patrick wore jeans, a white T-shirt, and, of course, his Stetson. Alex was in workout gear—yoga pants, a T-shirt whose sides she’d torn down under the arms like one of her hockey practice shirts, and some kind of jog-bra thing.

  Distracting.

  They were in mid-conversation, and I gleaned they’d already told the scientists some of our story.

  Though Laura was the boss, Dr. Brewer was pretty animated. She watched him with amusement as he waved his hands around.

  “You have to understand,” he was saying. “As a Biosafety Level 4 lab, we work with some crazy sh—some crazy stuff in here. You see all these vents?” He stood, gesturing with excitement. “They’re HEPA filters to kill any atomized biohazard before it’s released to the outside world. And the blowers over the doorways? They ensure negative pressure—a constant inward flow designed to keep any airborne pathogens from leaking.”

  He sat down at one of the specimen tables. “So when we got word of what was happening out there…” He leaned forward, stabbing a chubby finger into the top of the lab bench. “We reversed the system. Airflow, filters, blowers, vents—all of it. Instead of keeping air from leaking out, we keep it from leaking in.”

  The chair cocked back so far under his weight that it looked like it might give way. He crossed his arms and nodded proudly. Blocky red lettering across his stretched-out T-shirt proclaimed, TRUST ME, I’M A SCIENTIST!

  I was struggling to adjust to being in a room with adults. Aside from Dr. Chatterjee, we hadn’t interacted with grown-ups for months, and it felt weird now.

  “But how did you get word of the infection before it was too late?” Alex asked.

  “It took a while for the spore concentration to reach us up here,” Laura said. “And Zach—Dr. Brewer—turned the front office into a comms station. We watched the infection spread on TV, studied the pathogen-dispersal patterns, and figured out in a hurry that we were in trouble. I made the call to lock down the facility. We’re equipped for such contingencies in the event that an internal leak forces us to quarantine scientists in here. We have food stores, bathrooms, even an exercise room.”

  She toyed with a locket around her neck, noticed she was doing it, and quickly lowered her hand. I wondered whose pictures the locket held. Her children? Husband? She wasn’t wearing a ring. One thing seemed certain: Whoever her loved ones were out there, they were already dead.

  She cleared her throat. “Zach got a broadcast signal up pretty quickly. We’ve been sending out occasional alerts directing survivors here.”

  “How many have come?” Alex asked.

  Laura pursed out her lips. Rolled them over her teeth. Bit down. “Just you.”

  “But we have caught a few staticky incoming signals,” Zach said. “More survivors out there. San Francisco. London. Hong Kong. All kids, of course.”

  I felt an uptick in my heartbeat, a flare of hope. Survivors. More kids on various continents. Did I dare to dream about a change in fortune? A rebellion? The young shall inherit the Earth?

  Not yet I didn’t. I beat down the thoughts. Focused on what was before us.

  “You’re lucky the Drones haven’t tuned in,” I said. “And followed the signal here.”

  Zach said, “I don’t think they know to scan for our wavelengths.”

  “So you’re a virologist?” Alex asked.

  “Nah.” Zach shook his head, his long, wavy hair bouncing. “That’s Dr.
Messing.” He beamed at her. “Chief of Viral Special Pathogens Branch. Ain’t that right, boss?”

  Laura gave an awkward thumbs-up. Her wrists were so thin that the cuffs of her white coat gaped around them like the sleeves of a wizard’s robe. She had a few light freckles on her nose. She was probably one of those adults who looked way younger than she was.

  “I worked at the Institute of Parasitology,” Zach said. “So technically I’m a parasitologist. But that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?”

  “What do you prefer to be called?” Alex asked.

  He grinned. “Awesome.”

  “How do you know so much about what’s going on out there from up here?” Patrick said.

  “Are you kidding me? We’ve got the best view imaginable! Right down into Stark Peak.”

  Laura said, “We have airtight suits that allow us to leave the compound. We’ve run several missions to the observatory over in the astrology building.”

  “We’ve been watching the Second Gens,” Zach said. A glance at Alex. “You call ’em Hatchlings, yeah?”

  She nodded.

  “They seem to have a susceptibility to—”

  Patrick, Alex, and I all spoke at the same time: “Salt.”

  He stared at us in surprise. Then nodded. “Right on.”

  One of the male scientists piped up from the end of the table. “We retrofitted the outdoor misters from the university cafeteria—you know, the ones they use for air-conditioning? They’re a defense contingency.”

  “We were just testing the lines when you guys showed up.” Zach turned to Laura. “We got a blockage on the east wall, by the way. I’ll fix it after dinner.” Swiveling back to us, barely taking a breath. “If those Hatchers get near, we’ll turn ’em into orange goo.”

  Alex smiled. “Hatchlings.”

  “Them, too.” Zach sprang up and walked over to the nearest glass wall. It was opaque, a smoky gray. “Speaking of that, check out what we have inside Hot Suite C.”

  When he tapped the glass with his fingertips, it turned from smoky to clear.

  I barely had time to marvel at the effect when the sight beyond took away my breath.

  In the hot suite lay a dead Hatchling on a gurney, much of his flesh eaten away.

  Alex, Patrick, and I stared through the giant pane into the cell-like room. It was shocking to see a Hatchling like that. I knew it was dead, but I couldn’t quell the drumbeat of fear starting up in my chest.

  “When we recalled the gondola, this guy was in it,” Zach said. “A nasty little jack-in-the-box surprise. He’d trapped himself in there, you see.”

  “How’d you kill him?” Patrick asked.

  “A chiller-unit vapor-compression pipe to the head. As you do.” Zach flexed his biceps like a strongman. “He started to heal the wound with alien kung fu magic so I had to take the head clear off. I gotta say, it was pretty badass.”

  Laura grinned and rolled her eyes. “The act of heroism might have been accompanied by some girlish shrieking.”

  “There exists no evidence of girlish shrieking,” Zach said. “But there is evidence of said badass kill.” He gave a game-show assistant’s wave through the glass. “We dragged his body back here where we could experiment on it.”

  One of the other scientists cleared her throat. “It took a lot of trial and error before we got to a saline solution. Ate through their flesh like acid.”

  “Yeah,” Patrick said impatiently. “We know. You said you have some cure or something? Immunity from the spores?”

  Laura shook her head. “I’m afraid we don’t have anything like that.”

  Alex stood up so fast the lab stool toppled behind her. “But the transmission. It said you had a solution.”

  The scientists stared at her, caught off guard by the sudden show of emotion.

  “Alex turns eighteen the day after tomorrow,” I said. “We only have two days.”

  Laura nodded solemnly. “Well. She’ll be safe in here at least.”

  “Safe?” Patrick said. “For how long?”

  “For as long as we are, I suppose. If we take one sip of outside air, we die.” Laura looked at Patrick. “Now, you mentioned you’re eighteen already. So why aren’t you—”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute,” Patrick said. “We went through hell and high water to get here. If you don’t have immunity, then what solution do you have?”

  Laura deflated. Even Zach’s energy sapped. Reading their expressions, I felt a familiar chasm open up in my gut.

  “It’s a solution we had, I’m afraid,” Zach said. “Past tense.”

  Hopelessness swept through me. Alex righted her chair and sat down, her shoulders sagging. To have come this far to find nothing seemed unimaginable.

  Patrick took off his cowboy hat. Ran a hand through his hair. Seated the Stetson back on his head. “Explain,” he said.

  “Well, the plan we did have,” Laura said, “came from reverse engineering. We took the spores from air samples we’d collected and made our own version. We used their weaponized pathogens, stripped them down, and retrofitted them for our own purposes.”

  “Kind of like viral vectors,” I said.

  All the scientists looked at me funny.

  “No, Chance,” Laura said. “Exactly like a viral vector. That’s what we made. We used a lentivirus because—”

  “It’s a nice roomy virus,” I said. “Like smallpox.”

  “How is he this smart?” Zach asked. He looked at me. “How are you this smart?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’ve just had this conversation before. Go on.”

  Laura took off her horn-rimmed glasses and folded them in a slender fist. “So just as the spores acted on adult humans, our viral vector would act on the Hatchlings, wiping them out.”

  “How does it kill them?” I asked.

  “Given Second Gen’s susceptibility to salt,” Zach said, “it’d be great if we could dump all the Hatchlings in the ocean, right? But most of our population centers are nowhere near the ocean. So the question we asked ourselves was, what commodity exists wherever people are threatened?”

  Alex leaned forward and shoved her fists into her cheeks, clearly in no mood for an academic exercise. “I give up.”

  “The average human body is point-four percent salt.” Zach’s bright little eyes glittered with excitement. “Roughly equivalent to the salt levels in the ocean. So I’ll ask you again: What commodity exists wherever people are threatened?”

  It dawned on me. “People,” I said.

  Zach’s fingers hovered over the table between us. “You, Chance, like me, have two hundred grams of sodium chloride running through your veins. That’s forty teaspoons of common table salt. And so we created an airborne pathogen that weaponized that salt. We’d inject it into an infected human—”

  “A Host,” Alex said.

  “A Host, and then that Host would disintegrate, turn into a saline aerosol the way the first wave of adult humans did when they released the spores. The infection would spread from Host to Host until the air was full of seawater mist.”

  “Wiping out the Hatchlings,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Zach said. “We’d use the invaders’ own slaves to destroy them!”

  The idea excited me so much that I’d forgotten what he’d said about its not being viable anymore. But now I came crashing back to reality. And it hit me why it couldn’t work, not anymore.

  “They’re all dead,” I said. “The Hosts. So they can’t spread anything.”

  “As far as we can see,” Laura said, “over the past few weeks the entire population of Hosts has dropped dead.” Again she fingered the locket around her neck. “It took us weeks and weeks of around-the-clock work to come up with the solution. A few days too late.”

  She walked over to the south-facing wall and placed her palm against it. The smoky glass turned clear. The adjoining room looked to be some kind of high-containment storage facility with gauges and dials, swirling freezer mist, an
d a dozen or so metal canisters. An embedded window in each canister showed a suspended syringe loaded with a cloudy white fluid.

  Laura stared wistfully at her creation. “A gorgeously engineered weaponized pathogen, and we have no means to disperse it.”

  I felt it first along my spine, like an electrical charge. It prickled my skin, lifted the thin hair on my arms. I looked over at Patrick and found him staring back at me, already on the same page.

  “What if I told you Patrick and I had the perfect dispersal weapons?” I said.

  Zach tugged at his beard. Laura blinked at us rapidly. “What?” she asked.

  “Us.”

  ENTRY 55

  The cafeteria, cramped and dim, felt like a cave. We’d eaten military MREs—mushy beef Stroganoff, squeezy cheese on crackers, and apple jelly from tubes. Zach had fired up a trio of Bunsen burners, and we clustered around them now, roasting marshmallows on sterilized test-tube cleaners. I gripped the bristle end, letting the marshmallow impaled on the handle catch fire. I like mine charred.

  It was early-morning late. I’d already explained the basics of my and Patrick’s crazy genetic freakishness to the scientists, who’d listened with a mix of skepticism and wonder. Zach and Laura had peppered us with questions all the way through.

  Yes, our DNA is designed to replicate a viral vector on a massive scale and release it.

  Yes, the virus we release is engineered to reproduce inside the Hatchlings, triggering them to pass it from one to the next until there’s a sufficient concentration to reach around the globe.

  Yes, a secondary benefit of this dispersal is that it will wipe the Harvester pollen from the air, making the planet safe for humans.

  And, of course:

  No, we can’t guarantee that your viral vector will work precisely the same way.

  “But this is seriously advanced biotechnology,” I said. “Think about it. The Rebels set up the dispersal mechanism in our DNA years before even knowing what specific viral vector they’d have to inject into us. I’m guessing it’s a pretty plug-and-play setup.”

  Laura said, “We can’t stake two children’s lives on ‘plug-and-play.’”