Last Chance--A Novel Page 6

  I got.

  They scooted aside to make room for me, and I finally had my first good look at the mountain.

  At first I didn’t believe what I was seeing. I squeezed my eyes shut, hard, and then forced them open again.

  A column of Harvesters poured over the brink of the pass from the Hatch site. The procession was made up mostly of Hatchlings, but there were plenty of Drones and a few Hosts. The Hatchlings’ camo flesh morphed to match the terrain, creating a weird optical illusion. The ribbon of movement spilled down the folds of the mountain, headed, it seemed, directly for us. It disappeared from sight just beyond the bulge of trees fronting the house.

  In spite of the Benadryl, I felt suddenly quite awake.

  I stared at the swell of forest before us, waiting for the vanguard to emerge. But Alex smacked me again with an elbow and pointed to the north.

  It seemed the Harvesters had changed course in that dip of land before the A-frame. We couldn’t see this, only where the war parade emerged a half mile to our left on the side of the mountain. Down in the foothills, it was joined by two other streams of Harvesters, one presumably coming from the tractor plant at Culverside and another from the hay-pressing factory in Pinedale.

  Their ranks swelled, but they held the marching formation. They cut north, moving toward Stark Peak. Incredulous, I let my eyes rise to the cluster of buildings at the horizon. Every few miles another tributary poured in from another town, the living yield of another Hatch site. Drones. Hatchlings, mostly male, some female. The occasional Queen bobbing into view higher than the rest, like a lord riding one of those fancy chairs slaves used to carry them around in.

  In the flats by Lakewood and Springfield, cattle trucks joined the parade. Were Hatchlings driving them? Hosts? The Harvesters were moving everyone and everything to Stark Peak, a long column stretched out across the highway like a war supply line.

  Closer to us, right at the base of the foothills, a commotion broke out. A cluster of Hatchlings bulged from the heavy traffic of the march and spread through a trailer park. From here they looked like angry insects, monsters in a video game. They swarmed the dirty little compound, kicking through doors and windows and emerging from the double-wides dragging kids in their wake.

  The kids bucked and kicked, their mouths spread wide in terror. Over the thousands of marching feet, we couldn’t hear their cries. Their heels gouged trails through the dirt.

  The Hatchlings hauled the kids toward the cattle trucks. Through the slats I could see movement. My stomach burned, all acid and stress.

  A gate swung open, and we saw inside.

  Bodies mashed together into a block of life. Squirming, sobbing, screaming. One girl’s thin arm rose above the fray.

  Alex had pressed her knuckles to her mouth. She wasn’t making a sound, but I could feel the energy pouring off her like heat.

  The Hatchlings herded the new kids up the ramp, packing them in with the others. Except the last kid. They tossed him back to two female Hatchlings instead.

  I had to look away.

  When I looked again, the kid was gone, the truck gate was closed, and the procession continued.

  “We gotta clear out of here and get back to the school,” Patrick said. He wasn’t whispering, but his voice was low, as if the Harvesters could hear us huddled here in the dormer. “Or that’s gonna be us.”

  It would have been impossible for them to spot us, but Alex and I had drawn away from the window.

  Another wave of grogginess swept through me, and I yawned, my eyes watering. I wanted to curl up and sleep for a hundred years. I wanted to scream and run. I wanted to give up. I wanted to fight.

  A violet light spilled through the feathered clouds, illuminating Stark Peak from the west—the pale buildings shimmering with the sunset’s last gasp. I lifted my hand, blocking out the Harvesters and their war march, leaving only the cityscape and the wide-open sky. Alex glanced over at me and then did the same, peering over the tops of her fingers.

  She said, “This would’ve been beautiful once.”

  Patrick was up and ready, crouching, a dark silhouette in the darkness of the room. “Let’s go. We got work to do.”

  He wasn’t big on sunset gazing.

  Alex stood. I told my limbs to move, but they didn’t listen. I stared at them blearily. Yawned again.

  Patrick slapped me across the face hard enough to force my head to the side. “C’mon, Chance,” he said. “We need you to snap to.”

  I found my feet.

  ENTRY 12

  We tiptoed down the stairs, my cheek still stinging from Patrick’s hand. The sound of the army outside seemed even louder, antlike skittering on a massive scale. The cacophony swelled, footsteps jarring the ground, rolling through the earth in waves. I watched a coaster slide across the kitchen counter a millimeter at a time.

  Though the swell of trees shielded the house from view, we shied away from the big windows. Patrick led us to the rear door. He wore the backpack, Alex carried the Rebel helmet, and they’d split up the weapons. They didn’t trust me to carry anything. I didn’t trust myself either. I was swaying on my feet like a drunk hobo.

  Alex turned the deadbolt quietly. There was no point taking any chances, and besides, fear makes you do dumb things.

  We crept out the back, and the smell hit, a gust on the chill breeze that made me want to retch. The earth vibrated, tickling my feet through the soles of my boots. Pine needles trembled all around us.

  Patrick knifed his hand and pointed straight downhill. Alex nodded. I tried to nod through my Benadryl haze, but the sludge in my head seemed to be growing thicker. I’d never been terrified and exhausted at the same time.

  We picked our way through the trees, sliding downslope, sometimes on our feet, sometimes on our butts. The rumbling of the Harvester army grew fainter until it was barely audible, the hum of an insect. Night came on faster than seemed possible.

  I leaned against a tree, nodding off.

  I sensed a shift in the air and jolted awake, holding up my hands. Sure enough, Patrick was there, his arm drawn back for another slap.

  “I’mbawake,” I slurred.

  “Stay that way.”

  We cut back and found the main road winding down the pass. We let it guide us but kept to the side in the foliage. We hadn’t gone far before we spotted a pair of Hosts on the asphalt—a female and a male, Chaser and Mapper. We hunched behind a boulder and spied on them.

  The woman wore a yellow housecoat split down the back, no pants, and one slipper. Tatters of the man’s suit pants swung above his bloody ankles, but his jacket, shirt, and tie were perfectly in place. He had his head bent, his eyeholes aimed at the ground, and he walked in an expanding spiral pattern of right-angle turns. Like all male Hosts, he was a Mapper, vacuuming up the terrain and beaming it back to the Harvesters.

  The Hosts, I noticed, were getting more ragged every day, their bodies starting to give out. Their muscles couldn’t handle the abuse their hijacked brains were putting them through. Hosts didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t rest. The Mappers mapped and the Chasers chased. I couldn’t imagine that they’d be around much longer.

  While one threat diminished, a greater one grew.

  As if to remind us, the shifting wind brought a faint murmur of the distant Harvester force.

  We waited until the Hosts’ backs were turned, and then we slipped away. For a time we walked through the darkness in silence, our footsteps soothing and rhythmic.

  Soon enough the motion lulled me to sleep. My heel jarred against the hard dirt, snapping me awake. I fought my head up, my eyes open.

  “We’re gonna be walking all night,” Alex said.

  She was right. It was a long way down to the barricade of fallen pines and our car parked off the highway beyond. Reaching up with my thumbs and forefingers, I pinned my eyelids open. Patrick looked back at me and shook his head. I brushed a spiderweb from my neck and kept stumbling along.

  The rumble of th
e Hatchlings had faded away entirely at some point, but I didn’t know when. The relative silence felt so reassuring. I could taste the pine at the back of my throat, a fresh, earthy tang.

  A whinny carried out of the darkness, freezing us where we stood. A moment later a distinctive clopping echoed between the tree trunks.

  Alex spun around to face me, that wide smile springing up on her face. I was grinning, too. Patrick was looking at us.

  He wasn’t grinning.

  The clopping grew louder, and then it burst through the trees and reared up before us. An Andalusian stallion, seventeen hands high, with a white star gleaming on the side of his chest.

  The horse galloping beneath us, a churning machine. Reins threaded through my fist. Alex behind me, one arm looped around my waist, her body sealed to mine, the heat of her cheek pressed between my shoulder blades.

  Patrick’s head was slightly cocked, the Stetson tilted just enough to trickle dew from the brim.

  Alex cleared her throat. “We … um, rode him down the pass after Chance got me.”

  Patrick said, “You guys rode a horse together?”

  Alex nodded. “Yeah. We found him in a stall. It was like…” She clamped her lips, as if wishing to take back the sentence. “Magic.”

  Magic. Heat crept up my neck, flooded my face.

  Between my exhaustion, the stallion’s materializing out of the gloom, and the suffocating guilt filling my chest, I felt like I’d tumbled into some weird dreamscape.

  I fought off a yawn.

  Patrick took a half step back into a roadside culvert, one boot toeing the lip. He rested an arm across his raised knee and studied us. “Okay,” he said. “Get your horse.”

  Alex hesitated a moment. Then she walked over to the stallion. He reared up again, his silky black coat shimmering in the moonlight. She lifted a hand to his nose.

  The horse turned and cantered off down the road.

  Alex and I stood there paralyzed, feeling ridiculous. I debated running after him, but that would’ve been even more ridiculous. His horseshoes sounded like clanging pots against the asphalt. His majestic tail swished back and forth, and then he was gone around a bend. The yellow wash of the moon reflected up from puddles in the street.

  Patrick said, “Guess we can scratch ‘magical horse rescue’ off the list of options.” He turned and faced something behind him in the culvert, a shadowy mass covered with branches. “But I have a better idea.”

  * * *

  Patrick straddled the off-road motorcycle, Alex sitting on the seat behind him.

  I was in the sidecar, my knees up around my chin.

  They’d pulled the bike up out of the culvert and onto the main road while I’d sat on the edge of the asphalt and fought to keep my head upright.

  Patrick glanced down at me. I felt like an elephant on a tricycle. I wasn’t certain, but I thought I could detect a smirk on his face.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  The Rebel helmet was wedged in my lap. I adjusted my weight awkwardly in the cramped sidecar. A far cry from galloping down the pass on a black stallion with Alex at my back.

  I nodded miserably.

  At least I had my weapons of choice again. The wooden handles of the baling hooks felt reassuring inside my fists. But not as reassuring as the metal curves protruding about a foot from between the knuckles of either hand.

  If we were gonna blaze down the pass on a motorcycle (and sidecar), I had to be armed.

  Patrick rose up even higher, kick-starting the dirt bike. As we veered out into the middle of the road, I felt the Benadryl surge into high gear. I suppose “low gear” might’ve been a better term.

  It was like a blackout, punctuated with gunshot flashes.

  —the black sky scanning overhead until the stars went dark and—

  —Alex smacked my head. I came to just in time to register a Host fly out of the woods at us. My hand whipped a baling hook at his head, slashing through the throat when—

  —I bucked in the seat, cracking my nose on my knee, and then—

  —another smack knocked my head, also courtesy of Alex. I started violently out of my drugged slumber, flailing instinctively with the hooks, one tip sinking into meat inches from my face. Empty jack-o’-lantern eyes peered at me. I’d impaled the head through both cheeks. The body scraped along next to the sidecar, sandpapered by the road, and Alex was screaming and—

  —the wind riffled my hair. I tilted my head back drowsily. The moon, a bulb shining through the heavens. It blurred, and—

  —the motorcycle’s beam illuminated a decaying Chaser ahead, muscle and bone showing through her pale skin like an X-ray. Patrick didn’t slow. A smack of tire meeting rotting flesh, and I saw her arms fly up over her head, and—

  —my head was bumping along the metal edge of the sidecar, painful and yet somehow peaceful, and then—

  —Patrick prodded me out of the seat. My hand slipped on the curved metal side, which was coated with spilled guts. As I toppled over, I caught sight of the motorcycle’s red-spattered fender. The hard ground rolled beneath me, bringing into view—

  —the stupid stallion chewing a bush at the side of the barricade. As we passed, Alex gave him a smack on the hindquarters and sneered, “Thanks a lot.” The horse tossed his mane, and I blinked and saw—

  —my boots slipping on the mossy logs of the barricade. A fallen pine banged into my chest, and I realized I was sprawled flat, a dollop of sap poking my cheek. I thought about how nice it would be to just close my eyes and—

  —float above the highway past the barricade. For some reason Patrick’s butt was below my head, upside down. I felt his words rumble through his body and into mine: “I got it from here, little brother.” His voice was as steady and comforting as ever, but a rush of heat hit my face as I realized that—humiliation of humiliations—he was carrying me. I caught a sideways glimpse of Alex looking at me—

  —jouncing up and down, the ball of Patrick’s shoulder jolting into my gut. Still upside down. Marshy reeds sucked at my brother’s boots. I managed to lift my wet-sand head to look behind us and immediately wished I hadn’t. A mass of Hosts closed in, arms raised, eyeholes like bullets through their skulls showing—

  —Alex breathing hard, her chest heaving. At her feet were the sprawled remains of a half dozen Hosts. Patrick shucked his shotgun, a shell spinning free in the night air, glinting until it fell with a plink onto the moist earth. A hard surface dug into my back, and I rolled my head to see that I was lying on the roof of the Mustang where Patrick probably hurled me so he could turn and fight—

  —clear of the reeds, tires spinning before catching the rocks we’d laid down as tracks to get us out of the marsh and onto—

  —the highway unspooling before us. I tilted forward in the backseat and leaned heavily against the front headrests.

  Patrick stared forward, one hand on the wheel, his Stetson low over his eyes.

  Alex gave a half turn, the glow from the high beams casting her smooth cheek in a pale yellow light.

  She said, “Welcome back, Little Rain.”

  ENTRY 13

  We made it across the valley without major incident. Minor incidents were of course unavoidable. Once we reached the outskirts of town, we snaked off the highway up a bumpy dirt road into the forest. We left the Mustang with the hood steaming and its grille dripping remains. Then we threaded back through the trees toward town and the school—our base camp—beyond.

  Darkness folded around us, the treetops blotting out the stars. Beneath the oatmeal bandage, my forearm pulsed with heat. I tightened my grip on the baling hooks. And then I remembered.

  I dropped my hooks, letting them dangle from my wrists on their nylon loops. Putting my fingers in my mouth, I gave a piercing whistle.

  I faced the dark woods. Patrick and Alex stopped behind me. Alex had a gun in one hand, the Rebel helmet in the other. We waited and waited some more.

  And then we heard them coming, darting through the
underbrush, paws scrabbling across the hard ground. The Rhodesian ridgebacks I’d raised burst into the clearing, panting and wagging and bumping us with their noses like playful dolphins.

  My giant puppy, Cassius, jumped up on me, resting his muddy paws on my shoulders and slurping my face. Smiling, I pushed him off. He rammed his side into my knees until I scratched his back. He was a black-mask ridgie—the band of dark fur covering his nose and eyes contrasting with the rest of his honey-tan coat. Like the others, he had a narrow band of reversed fur running down his spine, a wicked-looking racing stripe. He’d put on another ten or so pounds since I’d seen him last, his powerful chest widening with muscle. He was the second-biggest now, behind Tanner—and that was plenty big. These guys were bred to hunt lions, so imagine what they did to Hosts.

  Deja, Princess, Thor, and Grace bumped Cassius aside, competing for my attention. I took a knee and greeted them all. Atticus sat aloofly until they were done and then trotted over. I noticed he was limping. When he drew near, I lifted his front paw. The pad beneath was badly torn. Dread hit me like a dropped stone, rippling through my insides. How long would he make it out here injured? He nuzzled my palm and then backed away.

  They were feral now.

  I called Cassius and Tanner back over and said, “You look out for your brother, you hear?”

  They cocked their heads, furrowed their brows, wagged their tails. Silly human making silly human noises.

  The others were sitting in a semicircle around me. “Release,” I said, and started walking.

  They surrounded us as we moved through the woods, keeping us inside the pack. This forest was their home now; here they ruled over all things living and not.

  As we reached the edge of town, they started to fall away. Patrick, Alex, and I halted and looked across the unfenced backyards. It took a moment for our eyes to focus through the darkness. Something had knocked over the Woodrows’ barbecue grill. But there was no movement.

  Cassius whimpered at my heel, and I turned back to the pack, scratching him behind the ears. I snapped my fingers, and Atticus hobbled forward.

  I gestured toward town, but he backed up, whining.