Last Chance--A Novel Read online

  My brother turned and started scaling the metal rungs.

  At the same time, the access door burst.

  My sorrow turned to rage.

  I charged the Hatchlings as they spilled onto the roof. I swiped and gashed them with my baling hooks, Alex at my side with her hockey stick. She was screaming, veins standing up in her neck.

  Acid flecks splattered over us, but we didn’t care. The Hatchlings fell away. We kicked and hacked them back through the access door. Alex toppled a huge air-conditioner unit down the mouth of the stairs. It wedged up against a clot of fallen bodies, blocking the narrow passageway.

  For now.

  We turned back to Patrick.

  He was two-thirds up the spire. He was wearing the climbing safety belt, though he hadn’t used it.

  Not until now.

  Breathless, Alex and I watched him clip it to the rung. He let his weight sag back.

  He pulled the syringe from his boot. Looked down. The brim of his hat dipped as he gave us a final nod.

  Fighting away tears, I nodded back.

  And then he slammed the needle into his thigh.

  He leaned away from the spire, the cowboy hat falling from his head. The wind riffled his hair.

  He didn’t explode.

  He turned to mist from the top down, like an image pixelating, a mosaic drifting away bit by bit, a dandelion with millions of seeds. He floated apart until his body was no more.

  If it weren’t so gut-wrenching, it might’ve been beautiful.

  Patrick, turned to glorious rain.

  ENTRY 64

  The Hatchlings hurled the air-conditioner unit from the access hatch and blasted onto the roof as if sprayed from a fire nozzle.

  Alex and I turned to face them.

  But as the breeze swirled down at us, they puddled instantly where they stood. As they fell away, only one remained standing.

  The sole female in the group.

  She stiffened. And then walked to the edge of the building. She lay down on her back. As Alex and I watched with amazement, her stomach pulsed and then burst open, releasing a stream of orange mist.

  Alex and I looked out across the city.

  Dozens of females scaled to various high points—billboards, rooftops, streetlights—and burst open.

  A New Year’s fireworks display.

  The orange mist spread across the blocks, a growing cloud, eating through the male Hatchlings below. The streets filled with the sounds of screeches, the anguish of the dying.

  As we watched with astonishment, the mist coated the armor of the Drones and Queens. The acid seemed to gnaw through the suits, because they burst from their armor, one after another, bleeding out into the air.

  I heard an echo of the Rebel’s words when I’d asked about the Drones and Queens: They’ve been accounted for as well.

  No matter how much we’d hypothesized that the dispersal mechanism built into my and Patrick’s cells was plug-and-play, there’d been no way to know for certain that the weaponized pathogen would act the same as the Rebel’s serum.

  Not until now.

  All over the city peaks, female Hatchlings continued to burst. The wind whipped the orange mist toward Ponderosa Pass, Creek’s Cause, and beyond. I don’t know how long Alex and I stood there watching the concentration of mist thicken and sweep away to cities and states unseen. It was near impossible to tear our eyes from the sight before us. After a time we noticed something on the virtual monitors in the hollowed-out bank building.

  Hatchlings were disintegrating by the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Females climbed to high points across the city and exploded, laying waste to Drones, Queens, and male Hatchlings.

  Like the great Dusting, but in reverse.

  I recalled another piece of the Rebel’s speech about the serum: It is engineered to spread at a massively accelerated rate.

  Once the trend spread to Chicago and caught the lip of the East Coast, Alex and I shuffled toward the access roof. We had to wade through bodies of Hatchlings all the way down through City Hall. The building was lined with decomposing flesh, the stench nearly unbearable.

  At last we stepped out into the vast courtyard.

  All around us a landscape of destruction.

  But then we heard a cry of joy.

  JoJo and Rocky sprinting up the main thoroughfare, flapping their arms and hollering at us.

  I lifted a hand in greeting. Alex and I hadn’t spoken, not since Patrick’s death. There was too much grief and wonder.

  We watched the kids approach, whooping and screaming. JoJo waved Bunny’s head by the ears. At last she slammed into me.

  We stood there for a moment, the four of us in the wide expanse of the courtyard. Orange mist spun all around us, like we were inside a snow globe.

  “Patrick,” JoJo said, looking around frantically. “Where’s Patrick?”

  My chest felt bricked in, my lungs tight. “He’s gone,” I said, and saying it made it real and permanent.

  JoJo squeezed me harder, and I felt those bricks falling away, all the emotion opening up. It was hard to breathe, but I managed.

  Rocky’s forehead was shiny with sweat. “How?” he asked.

  “Saving us,” Alex said. “Saving everyone.”

  The mist settled over the surrounding high-rises, texturing the asphalt and abandoned cars, and I thought about how it wasn’t just mist. It was Patrick. He was the air, and he was life, and he was the reason it would be safe here for the next twenty-four thousand years.

  In that safety was freedom. And yet with freedom came a new kind of fear. All my life I’d always thought it was what I wanted. Freedom. But I realized now it was a kind of void, too. There were no Harvesters to fight against. No parents to look after us. No aunts and uncles.

  No big brother.

  It was down to just me to shape myself and the world however I wanted. I could strive. I could fail. And at the end of the day, who I would become—what my world would become—would rest on my shoulders.

  Next to me Alex held her hand to her mouth, and I could tell that the same kinds of thoughts were flooding through her. No matter what we faced, at least I had her at my side. And she’d have me at hers.

  Far in the distance, I thought I heard the confused cries of kids locked away in holding pens somewhere. Then the wind shifted, and there was a sound unlike any I’d heard in over two months’ time.

  Quiet.

  I thought of those incoming signals Zach had told us about. Survivors out there for us to find.

  Something tumbled toward us from above, riding the wind. A black cowboy hat.

  Patrick’s.

  I watched the hat twirl in the air. It landed at my feet. I crouched. Picked it up. Stared at it, feeling a lifetime of emotion gather at the back of my throat.

  I put it on.

  Taking Alex’s hand, I turned to face the faintest gleam of light to the west.

  The first rising sun of the New Year.

  “Come on,” I said. “We got work to do.”

  It ended in sacrifice. I suppose we always knew it would. That we couldn’t possibly make it through unscathed. But I never dreamed it would turn out the way it did. The way the world went upside down and our lives with it. Now that it’s over, I hope you take something away from what happened to us. Two brothers and a girl from Creek’s Cause—who would’ve ever thought we’d make a difference?

  The world changed.

  We changed it back.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank:

  —Melissa Frain, Kathleen Doherty, Linda Quinton, Amy Stapp, and Alexis Saarela of Tor Teen, for giving me a YA home

  —Lisa Erbach Vance of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency, Stephen F. Breimer, Marc H. Glick, and my team at CAA

  —Maureen Sugden, Philip Eisner, Missy Hurwitz, Dana Kaye, expert readers

  —Librarians, who fired my imagination from the start

  —Booksellers, for decades of support

  �
�My wife. My daughters. My Rhodesian ridgebacks, Simba and Cairo

  BY GREGG HURWITZ

  TOR TEEN BOOKS

  Last Chance

  THE ORPHAN X NOVELS

  Orphan X

  The Nowhere Man

  OTHER NOVELS

  The Tower

  Minutes to Burn

  Do No Harm

  The Kill Clause

  The Program

  Troubleshooter

  Last Shot

  The Crime Writer

  Trust No One

  They’re Watching

  You’re Next

  The Survivor

  Tell No Lies

  Don’t Look Back

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GREGG HURWITZ is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous thrillers, including You’re Next and Orphan X. Critically acclaimed, Hurwitz is a two-time finalist for ITW’s Best Novel prize and a finalist for CWA’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. In addition to his novels, Hurwitz is a screenwriter, TV producer, and comic book author. The first book in the Evan Smoak series, Orphan X, has been sold in twenty-one countries. Hurwitz, who lives in Los Angeles, is writing the screenplay adaption of Orphan X for Warner Brothers and Bradley Cooper. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Entry 1

  Entry 2

  Entry 3

  Entry 4

  Entry 5

  Entry 6

  Entry 7

  Entry 8

  Entry 9

  Entry 10

  Entry 11

  Entry 12

  Entry 13

  Entry 14

  Entry 15

  Entry 16

  Entry 17

  Entry 18

  Entry 19

  Entry 20

  Entry 21

  Entry 22

  Entry 23

  Entry 24

  Entry 25

  Entry 26

  Entry 27

  Entry 28

  Entry 29

  Entry 30

  Entry 31

  Entry 32

  Entry 33

  Entry 34

  Entry 35

  Entry 36

  Entry 37

  Entry 38

  Entry 39

  Entry 40

  Entry 41

  Entry 42

  Entry 43

  Entry 44

  Entry 45

  Entry 46

  Entry 47

  Entry 48

  Entry 49

  Entry 50

  Entry 51

  Entry 52

  Entry 53

  Entry 54

  Entry 55

  Entry 56

  Entry 57

  Entry 58

  Entry 59

  Entry 60

  Entry 61

  Entry 62

  Entry 63

  Entry 64

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Gregg Hurwitz

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  LAST CHANCE

  Copyright © 2017 by Gregg Hurwitz

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Russell Trakhtenberg

  Cover photographs: background © Patrizio Martorana/FreeImages; figure © leolintang/Shutterstock.com

  A Tor Teen Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8269-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-8852-4 (ebook)

  eISBN 9781466888524

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  First Edition: October 2017