by A N Sandra
“We should probably invite Ray and Lourdes over for dinner,” Helena said, more out of sympathy for her father than Ray and Lourdes. “Tawna isn’t feeling very good, she probably can’t make dinner at their house.”
“Do you think she ever does?” Peter queried.
“No, I don’t think she’s been making dinner,” Helena said. “I don’t think she’s been feeling good for a long time.”
Tawna wasn’t feeling well enough to do much for several days. Joel Harris took care of her and Ray and Lourdes did a large chunk of their studies with Christina every day. Helena and Peter were more than a little relieved to have their mother focus on other students for a change. Ray and Lourdes were bright, but in Christina’s eyes they were far behind where she felt their math and science knowledge should be. She sat with them for long hours and they were good sports about it.
“It’s great,” Helena gloated to Peter. “I haven’t had to feel stupid once today. Ray does it for me.”
“Lourdes is really good at math,” Peter said. “It makes Mom excited when Lourdes understands complicated stuff.”
“It’s better for everyone when Mom is happy,” Helena agreed, without realizing that she had spoken of Christina as “Mom.”
“Dad says that he’s going to snowshoe to Fairbanks when Tawna gets better,” Peter said. “I wish I could go with him, but he says we can’t be seen together.”
“Not to be seen together in the middle of nowhere seems extreme,” Helena said. “But paranoid is the new normal around here.”
“No kidding,” Peter shook his head. “Mom locked up all the medicine in boxes under her bed. I guess she thought we were going to start stealing Imodium.”
“When you really need Imodium, you’re probably desperate enough to steal it,” Helena said, smiling at the idea of stealing diarrhea medication.
She didn’t know why she had protected Tawna by not telling Peter about the accidental overdose. No doubt her father and mother had shared the whole incident with the Wilsons, but Ray and Lourdes seemed under the impression that their mother had an unmerciful virus, never questioning how anyone could catch a virus in the middle of such an isolated region when no one else was even a little sick.
“Why would Mom lock Imodium away from someone desperate enough to steal it?” Peter asked, perplexed.
“She’s a fiend.” Helena shook her head with a grin. “I’ve tried to tell you a hundred times.”
“More than that, probably.” Peter laughed slightly.
“Let’s get Duane and go sledding,” Helena suggested. “I need to go outside.”
Racing down the hill with the wind in her face helped Helena feel alive. She and Peter had developed a complicated game of bumper cars where they left at almost the same time, trying to “wreck” the other sledder as they progressed down the hill. It wasn’t safe, but it wasn’t that dangerous since packed snow was all they ran into when they flipped each other out of the sled run. Duane didn’t exactly approve of the game, but his presence kept it from getting out of hand.
“We could dig another sled run,” Peter suggested at the bottom. “This one is good, but if all of us work together, we could really make a great one…”
“Two jumps?” Helena suggested.
“Why not four jumps?” Duane grinned.
“If Ray and Lourdes help, we could have it done pretty soon.” Peter was getting excited. “Four jumps!”
Ray and Peter designed the new sled run to induce the maximum amount of adrenaline while going down it. The two of them drew a map of how they wanted the run to work and then they marked it going down the hill.
“I’ve never seen those two get along that well,” Helena told Duane as they stood at the foot of the hill watching Ray and Peter packing snow fervently.
“It probably helps that Tawna’s been in bed for five days.”
“Ray has been really respectful to my mom when they do school. Back in our old school Ray was always getting in trouble for being rude to teachers.”
“Why was he rude?”
“Oh, you know… teachers expect you to pay attention and learn things. Tawna was always explaining how misunderstood he was… “
“Do you miss your school?” Duane was curious.
“No, not really. I didn’t have any really good friends. There were girls I hung out with sometimes, but they weren’t important to me. I had a couple of teachers I really liked. I miss them a little, but I’m probably learning more at home than I would have at school.”
“I’m working on studying by myself too,” Duane said. “But I miss college. I miss the energy that you get from group projects and group discussion.”
“Oh, Peter and Mom and I have group discussion,” Helena laughed. “Mostly we make fun of the preachy stuff in the religious books we have to read. I read the Bible every day for my curriculum and I can’t figure out what it has to do with some of the moralizing in that curriculum.”
“I think parts of the Bible are very interesting,” Duane said. “But I don’t see how it became modern Christianity.”
“That’s what I can’t figure out either. But we’re just starting to learn. Maybe it’ll be crystal clear later. Maybe I’ll become a true believer.”
“Our parents were true believers,” Duane said seriously. “They were Humanist true believers, and they may have helped bring on the end of the world.”
“They’re thinking about how to fix it all the time.” Helena frowned. “Sometimes I catch Mom talking to herself and she’s still trying to fix everything. She has pages and pages of equations and a big whiteboard in her room with stuff on it no one can understand.”
“I think they were dreamers to think that they could eradicate major disease throughout the whole world. But they were so close. The thing that’s crazy is that they believed they could use the Hollister Foundation to fund their dream, and that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.”
“I can’t wait to find out what Dad will learn when he goes to Fairbanks,” Helena said. She wondered if Duane knew that her father intended to buy a large amount of marijuana to keep Tawna happy while he was there. “I’m dying to know if the world is really going to end.”
“A bang or a whimper?” Duane’s voice was light but serious, impossible to interpret as he looked up the hill at Peter and Ray.
“First the whimper, then the bang.”
Chapter 15
November 3rd, Kern County, CA
“Joshua, I need you to come with me,” Brooke tapped Joshua on the back as he leaned over a Hummer transmission in the motor pool. Paul, the head mechanic was working on it and he had come to the understanding that Joshua made helpful observations on tricky projects, so he had begun keeping him close by. Loud grunge music played from tiny speakers to cover the racket of the motor pool.
“Now?” Paul sounded annoyed. He barely looked up though, keeping his focus on what he was doing.
“Yep.” Brooke raised her eyebrow a little and Joshua followed her, leaving Paul to his job.
“Take your coveralls off here,” Brooke warned him at the door as they left. “Court keeps her office clean.”
Joshua had been with Curtis’s group of rebels for weeks and hadn’t even realized that Court had an office. The underground hangars were immense and hard to navigate. Joshua spent half of his time in the desert on a work crew, so he really only knew how to get to the most basic places on his own. Court’s office turned out to be fairly close to Curtis’s. It was clean and bright, painted yellow, and Court sat behind a grey desk with sleek lines. There was a couch with fluffy throw pillows and a large mirror over it against the entrance wall. Joshua wondered if Court slept there.
“Let’s get to it,” Court bit her lip and looked at Brooke and Joshua with intensity. “Curtis has been asking for this medicine for months. I can’t put it off any longer. Time’s up and I need to deliver. Both of you said you were in, so here we are, lucky duckies. I’m going to go over the plan, you are going to
help me think it through, and then we’ll execute it as soon as possible.”
“All right!” Joshua sat in a wooden chair across from Court’s desk. Brooke sank into another wooden chair, but she turned it around so that she looked at Court over the back of the chair. “Dazzle us with your plan.”
“We’re going to break into my father’s house. Well, hopefully we can use the security code, and I’m going to change my father’s passcode to get into the pharmaceutical warehouse by the Global Forces base hospital. Joshua, you are going to be our driver. In fact, we are going to drive this route over and over for the next few days until you could do it in your sleep—”
“I’m sorry to cut in,” Joshua started. “But we broke into the intake center in Redding through the back door because you don’t just punch in some code to get in the normal way. They have a retinal scan, fingerprint matching—”
“My father, the medical director for the whole Global Forces LA hospital, doesn’t need to do that,” Court explained. “He shows up with a car and a driver and the driver punches in a code at the hospital gate and my father goes in through the employee entrance with his own code. He has almost no fingerprint recognition and he suffers from mild seizures so he doesn’t have to do a retinal scan.”
“But at some point, it’ll be obvious he isn’t with us.” Brooke pointed out.
“I have a plan for that,” Court answered crisply.
Joshua thought that just maybe he could hear her heart pounding from his chair. This plan was even more dangerous than the one Twilight had devised with his family to rescue Brock. That plan hadn’t been in the middle of a Global Forces base. BJ and Bryan had laughed about how easy it was to set the security into a Tom and Jerry sort of chase on the back roads outside Redding. There had been two ivory boxes to give Twilight focus to scheme with and she had been able to crash the computer system.
“When we get to the base hospital we’re going to be in my dad’s car—”
“This is sounding better all the time,” Brooke quipped.
“I love driving dad cars,” Joshua told her.
“Can I talk?” Court looked at both of them the way an exasperated mother looks at a toddler who has just unfolded a stack of laundry. “I am the boss.”
“Carry on,” Joshua told her with a shrug as though she were only going to refold some clean clothes instead of recapping a dangerous, far-fetched plan. It’s only our lives.
The best thing about Joshua’s special project with Court was that they went to a five-star hotel in Beverly Hills four days before they were to execute the plan. On the way to the hotel they dropped off the Jeep they had left the compound in and got a sporty rental car to drive around LA as they set up their job. They also stopped at a mall and purchased clothes that were not camouflage. Court and Brooke both got their hair and makeup done. They looked like Amazon women, strong, confident, wearing designer clothes with cheekbones that could cut glass. They looked like money.
“We’ll use the valet parking,” Court insisted so that Joshua had to pull up right in front of the entrance of the hotel through a semicircle of palm trees and sculpted shrubbery.
“This place is amazing!” Joshua had rarely stayed anywhere more upscale than a Best Western whenever he had out of town gigs with Back Pasture. The lobby bar was full of enormous vegetation and employees who could win Top Model. Joshua’s eyes were as big as if he was on safari. He looked at a table tent as they sauntered through the bar. “They have thirty-dollar cocktails—”
“They have three hundred-dollar massages,” Court told him. “And we’re all getting one before our caper.”
“We’re calling this a caper?” Brooke questioned. They continued past the lobby bar to the guest elevator, surrounded by gleaming mirrors and more Jurassic plants.
“How can we afford this?” Joshua wanted to know. He had no idea what it cost, just that it would have been completely out of his normal range. For a few seconds he was sorry that he’d never gotten to come to a place like this with Back Pasture. He wished he could have explored it with them, all of them experiencing it together.
“We keep all the money the Hollister Youth Foundation pays the work crews,” Court said. “We steal and grow all our own food. We don’t buy much of anything. All our vehicles and fuel came from the Youth Foundation motor pool. We have store rooms of things you can’t imagine.”
“We could afford all the medicine we’re stealing,” Brooke clarified for Joshua’s benefit. “The only reason we have to go to this much trouble is because it’s too guarded. If we could just buy it on the open market, we would have.”
“We can take anything the Hollister Youth Foundation has whenever we want it,” Court said. “We’ve got people high up in IT there.”
They stepped into a spacious elevator and Brooke pressed the button for the seventeenth floor. Joshua was slightly jealous. I’ll push the button when we come down. The funny thought that he needed to step up and become a hardened criminal mastermind instead of indulging his inner five-year-old crossed his mind. Court was still talking to him.
“Global Forces has the best of everything, but those things are off limits to us. They get the good medicine. They are expected to put the world back together for the Hollisters when everything goes down. Hollister Youth Foundation workers die at a terrible rate. My dad used to joke that the Hollister Youth Foundation doesn’t even give their employees real vitamins.”
“Really?” Joshua couldn’t remember any of them dying in Shasta or Lassen County. That didn’t mean anything though, because he had seen the Hollister Mental Health Intake Center and that was enough for him.
“It gets swept under the rug,” Brooke told him. “Bridge and dam removal teams are the worst. They let anybody use explosives and…”
Joshua’s inner five-year-old rebounded from being annoyed that he had not gotten to push elevator buttons to imagining Shasta Dam exploding under the direction of someone like his cousin BJ. He wondered if Shasta Dam was scheduled to be demolished. He hoped BJ wouldn’t be anywhere close when it happened.
“Naps, then some room service, then we’re going to my dad’s once it’s after eleven or so.” Court disappeared into her room, leaving Josh standing in the posh hallway with a brand new six-hundred-dollar suitcase and a key card in his hand.
The room might as well have been on a different planet from the modest hotels Joshua had stayed in on various school trips and family vacations. He wasn’t twenty-one, but the mini bar was full of booze and there was bottled water that came from the Swiss Alps. Briefly, Joshua thought about mixing Goldschläger with it. He thought about going back downstairs to push the elevator buttons. He thought about how much fun it would have been to share this room with Michael and Caleb and Bryan and BJ and even Brock. There was a chair in the corner that would have been perfect for Brock to read in. The room was big enough for all of them.
“I can’t start thinking about stuff like family,” Joshua muttered to himself.
Court had bought phones for herself, Brooke, and Joshua for their “caper.” Joshua had brought them from the car and set them on a chair by the door of his room. He got the phones out to start setting them up. He turned the television on for some background noise. It didn’t take long to set up all three phones and he programmed each of them with the numbers of the others. He thought of his phone that was in the apartment in Sac that Bryan and his mother were checking and answering texts as if he was there. Maybe Susan had already figured out that they weren’t living there. Holding the phone in his hand Joshua fought the compulsion to call his mother-
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Joshua answered the door. Court was standing in the hall.
“I can’t sleep,” Court said. “I’m tired as hell, but I can’t sleep. Somehow, I always feel better around you. Can I come in?”
Joshua smiled, nodded, and stepped back to give her space to enter the room.
“Are you comfy?” Court asked before sitting cross-legg
ed on the edge of the huge bed. The seafoam green comforter wrinkled a little around her. She was still intimidating because of her muscular presence, even in the street clothes she was wearing. “Brooke must be. I knocked on her door, but she didn’t answer. Want some?”
Court pulled a huge blunt out of her shirt pocket.
“Yes, please.” Joshua smiled. The memory of the amazing high from the desert work camp still lingered. “Better be careful… the smoke alarm might go off.”
“Not these places,” Court smiled. “It’s one reason I don’t mind spending the money. I packed ten pounds of our premium stuff to smooth the way with the security guards at the base hospital.”
“Will that really work?” Joshua took a hit and questioned a part of the plan he had never been sure about.
“The security guards aren’t Global Forces troops. Global Forces troops are highly trained. They don’t waste those kinds of resources on security guards. They hire a regular security company that any other hospital would have. So, my guess is that ten pounds of our really good stuff will go a long way with them. I’ll give them a little sample tomorrow… they can see what they think… and I bet they’ll be willing to pretend they thought you were my dad’s driver when you turn up in his vehicle with working codes. I’m going to offer them money instead of pot if they want it. My guess is that the hardest part will be convincing them I’m for real and not some kind of sting operation.”
“Okay,” Joshua sat on the bed too, but he leaned back against the pillows and headboard. He felt as light as a cloud after one hit of the blunt. It was easy to imagine that after trying it someone would risk a lot for more. “It’s all okay.”
“Not really, but we’re trying,” Court said, leaning back on the bed to stare at the ceiling.
“I’m glad you came,” Joshua confessed. “I was tired of being alone. I was thinking about calling my mom.”
“I’d love to call my mom,” Court said. “But she’s gone.”
