Last Chance--A Novel

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “C’mere,” I said. “Don’t be stubborn.”

  I tried to examine his paw again, but he darted away, slinking among the trees, his eyes glinting out at me. I thought of Zeus, my biggest boy, who’d died protecting me. Something cracked in my chest, threatened to break.

  I looked back at the pack. “You guys better protect him,” I said. “That’s your most important job. He’s your big brother, and he took care of you all these years. Now’s your turn.”

  Patrick rested a hand on my shoulder. “Sun’s gonna rise soon,” he said gently—or at least as gently as Patrick said anything. “We gotta move.”

  Atticus kept his distance. He didn’t want to go with us. It’s not like we had that much to offer anymore. If I were him, I’d have preferred the woods, too. I went to him slowly, holding out my hand. He licked it. I kissed his head—musk, dirt, and cinnamon.

  “Release,” I told the dogs, and they trotted off, Atticus limping behind them.

  We stepped out from the tree line and hustled along the side of the Woodrows’ house, stepping over the fallen barbecue. Then we peeked up the street. The neighborhood here was little more than a cluster of single-story houses hugging the high school.

  Most of the action (and I use the term loosely) in Creek’s Cause used to take place in town square, a mile or so south. Not that there was much to the square—a few blocks rimmed with restaurants and shops, a supermarket, two traffic lights, a big church perched at the edge of a grassy sprawl. It had been reduced mostly to blood smears and shattered windows, a ghost town haunted by the grown-ups who hadn’t left to help at the Hatch site.

  Now Patrick, Alex, and I picked our way up the residential street, hiding behind hedges and abandoned cars. We made slow but steady progress toward the tall chain-link fence guarding the school’s perimeter. As the first light of morning filtered over Ponderosa Pass in the distance, we snuck across the school parking lot and flattened ourselves to the ground in front of a gate.

  Patrick reached up, his hands working the combination lock securing the chain. He spun the dial back and forth and then tugged. Nothing happened.

  I sensed movement on the streets behind us. Grandpa Donovan emerged from the Swishers’ old house and plodded onto the sidewalk, his head canted forward. Across the street from him, a worker I recognized from the Piggly Wiggly supermarket stepped out onto the porch of the Rose residence.

  They were mapping the interiors of buildings now?

  Grandpa Donovan shuffled toward the next house in the row. One of his coverall straps had come unhooked, and it swayed in front of his stooped form. If he lifted his head three inches, those eyeholes would register us here. That would bring Hosts scurrying from all directions. And that would likely reveal the high school as a hideout—the last bastion of safety for the kids and teenagers of Creek’s Cause.

  “Move it,” Alex said to Patrick.

  Patrick’s hands stayed steady. He rolled the dial through its combination once more and tugged. Again there was no give.

  The sun inched higher above the horizon, exposing us even more on the strip of lawn lining the fence. I’d been holding my breath. I tried not to move anything but my eyes, which tracked the Hosts on the sidewalk.

  Grandpa Donovan finally disappeared into the neighboring house, but the supermarket stocker continued heading down the street directly toward us.

  I grabbed Patrick’s arm. “We have to split,” I said. “We gotta find somewhere to hide.”

  We’d just started to rise when we heard a rattle overhead.

  Eve Jenkins’s slender hands reached through the chain-link, working the lock. It released with a dry click, and she swung the gate open.

  We scrambled inside on all fours and then ran for cover, diving into the shadows in front of the school. The supermarket worker kept on toward us. For a moment I thought he’d spotted us, but then he turned crisply on his heel and padded up the steps to another house. We exhaled together, a chorus of relief.

  “Ben changed the locks after you left,” Eve whispered.

  Patrick nodded, his mouth a grim line. “Of course he did.”

  “He said it was for safety.” She shook her head. “But I’ve been keeping an eye out for you.” She reached over and squeezed my forearm. “I’m happy to see you.”

  To my side I sensed Alex’s face swivel to face me. I could practically feel her told-ya-so smirk.

  Eve’s eyes moved to the Rebel helmet. Only then did I realize how futuristic it looked.

  Patrick grabbed the helmet and shoved it into the backpack. “Nothing Ben needs to see,” he said.

  We kept close to the side of the school until we reached the broad stone steps. Sure enough, Ben Braaten, the self-appointed head of security, waited behind the front doors. His hand rested on the bolt gun tucked into the front of his jeans.

  When fired, the compressed-air gun shot a steel rod several inches forward. It was designed to whack the thick skulls of cattle. It worked even better on Hosts.

  Ben’s face, scarred from the car crash that had killed his brothers, stared at us blankly. He was as tall as Patrick but beefier, the only kid I’d known to go head-to-head with my brother in a fight. I waited for Ben to remove his hand from the stun gun. It took a moment longer than I would’ve thought.

  His eyes picked over us, catching on the conspicuous bulge in the backpack. “You’re alive,” he said.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Alex said.

  A scar gnarled Ben’s upper lip, so it was hard to tell whether he was sneering. Sweat glistened in his crew cut. A fingerprint of shiny crimped flesh marred his forehead at the hairline.

  “Alex,” he said, “you know I’m happy you made it.”

  Patrick walked past him, brushing his shoulder. Alex and I followed my brother down the hall to the gym.

  Rows of cots lined the basketball court, and on one side the bleachers had been pulled out from the wall. The morning sun shone brightly through high-set windows. Pennants for Creek’s Cause High’s various sport championships hung from metal beams way up in the ceiling, a reminder of how much that stuff used to mean—school records and rivalries and who was going to state. How dumb it all seemed now.

  The surviving kids and teenagers—about a hundred in all—were just stirring.

  JoJo spotted us first. Her eight-year-old face lit up with happiness, and then—instantly—her eyes filled with tears. She ran over, her yellow stuffed animal flapping under her arm. She jumped up, arms and legs koala-clamping around me, her stuffed animal mashed against my cheek. One of Bunny’s ears was wet from chewing.

  JoJo’s tears were hot against the side of my neck. She squeezed me harder, and I patted her back. I could feel the ridge of her spine through her skin—it never ceased to surprise me how little she was. And how fragile.

  Her brother, Rocky, came in her wake, flicking his head to clear the black curls from his eyes. We bumped fists. He was two years older than JoJo and playing it cool, but I could see how relieved he was that we’d returned.

  We were the closest thing to family they had anymore.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  Rocky averted his eyes and gave a single-shoulder shrug.

  JoJo whispered into my neck, “It was awful without you.”

  I rubbed her back some more. “It’s okay now, Junebug.”

  She pulled away and looked at me through uneven brown bangs. She’d cut her hair herself, and you could tell. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Ben tries to take over when you guys are gone, and he’s sucky and totally unfair.”

  I set her down. A murmur rolled around the gym as the others noticed us and started hopping off the cots.

  “Doesn’t Dr. Chatterjee keep him under control?” Alex asked.

  “He tries,” she said. “But you know Ben.”

  As if on cue, Dr. Chatterjee entered the gym, moving jerkily on his leg braces.

  Our biology teacher—and former family doctor—was the one adult we
knew who’d made it through the Dusting. He’d helped us close in on a working theory of what had happened to the adults in our town. We believed that the spores attacked the white brain matter of people over the age of eighteen, spreading through the myelin wrapping the nerve cells of their frontal lobe. Once the frontal lobe was under control, so was the rest of the Host organism. That’s why kids and most teenagers were protected—our white matter was still coming in. Since Dr. Chatterjee had multiple sclerosis, his white matter already had missing patches. The spores couldn’t gain a foothold, not in his brain. So he was still him.

  We’d voted him the leader of the survivors, not that Ben had been too pleased about that one.

  Chatterjee gave us a smile that rivaled JoJo’s and started for us. Before he could get across the basketball court, the other kids crowded in on us, thumping our backs and asking us a million questions. The returning heroes.

  I had to confess, after everything we’d been through, it felt pretty good.

  Only Ben and his lackeys, Dezi Siegler and Mikey Durango, didn’t join in. They stayed in a tight huddle over by the bleachers, whispering to one another out of the sides of their mouths, their eyes pinned on us.

  Eve took our weapons back to the storage room so we weren’t standing there in the mob with guns and steel hooks. As the kids quieted down and started their morning routines, Chatterjee finally shouldered through. He gave me and Alex a hug, an unusual show of affection. And then he shook Patrick’s hand. Patrick inspired a kind of formality.

  Dr. Chatterjee said, “I’d imagine there’s quite a bit you need to fill me in on.”

  Alex said, “You have no friggin’ idea.”

  ENTRY 14

  Being in Dr. Chatterjee’s biology classroom made me sad now. Maybe because of how much I’d loved it back when things were normal. Once his MS progressed, forcing him to hang up the stethoscope and take up a dry-erase marker, he’d needed a helper in his classroom. Someone to input grades, erase the board, sharpen pencils—all the fine-motor-coordination stuff that was increasingly tricky for him. He usually chose me.

  I never took to math or history—but biology? It was one of my favorite classes, right there with English. Darwinism, meiosis and mitosis, parasites and hosts—I ate all that up. Maybe that made me a nerd, but I didn’t really care. Patrick had once told me that I seemed more at home inside books than outside of them. Until recently I hadn’t understood that he’d meant it as a compliment. It was useful now, what I’d learned. But for some reason that made it less beautiful to me.

  When I was contemplating spores eating their way through my aunt’s and uncle’s brains or how my chromosomal base pairs had been altered or the fact that a whole race of aliens wanted to kill me … well, it took the fun out of all that old-fashioned learning.

  Dr. Chatterjee sat behind his desk now. A thin film of dust covered the blotter, the rubber DNA model, the out-box still filled with the last round of graded papers. Janie Woodrow, who used to sit next to me, had gotten an A-minus on her report about Cartesian divers. Janie’s overbearing single mother, who didn’t countenance imperfection, would have had a stern talk with her about that minus.

  I used to give Janie a hard time about her Japanese pens and her impeccable flash-card system. Even the rubber bands around the index cards had been color-coded. The last time I’d seen her had been the night of the Dusting. Don Braaten had pinned her to the middle of the road in town square. His knee in her back, his hands winding duct tape around her wrists. He’d been wearing overalls still stained with blood from the slaughterhouse, and I could see straight through his eyeholes. Her cheek had been mashed into the yellow dotted line. I was too far away to see if she’d been crying, but I’d known Janie Woodrow to cry at a lot less.

  It’s probably not such a mystery why I didn’t like being in Dr. Chatterjee’s classroom anymore.

  “How ’bout you, Chance?” Chatterjee said.

  I’d zoned out.

  “Huh?” I said.

  Chatterjee glanced at me through his round wire-frame glasses. He’d been sitting cocked back with the Rebel’s helmet in his hand, contemplating it like Hamlet with the skull. Or had that been the other guy, the gravedigger?

  Patrick, Alex, Eve, and I sat in the front row.

  Back in the auditorium, we’d filled in the others on the big-picture stuff, from the Hatchlings to the march to Stark Peak. The news had drawn the usual reactions. Disbelief, tears, a few nervous breakdowns. But when it came to all that business about me and Patrick saving the world, we’d decided to heed the Rebel’s advice and keep it to ourselves. This discussion was only for behind a closed and locked door.

  “I said, what do you think the Drones are beneath the armor?” Chatterjee was a few days unshaven, his beard coming in salt and pepper. “Just swirling DNA?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “In a gas state.”

  He hefted the helmet and stared in the face mask. “So the suit must replicate gravity conditions on their home planet. If, say, they evolved to live in metallic hydrogen as on Jupiter or Saturn, then in the massively lower gravity field of Earth, they’d be unable to maintain a solid state.” His faint singsong accent gave his voice a pleasing ring. “It’s a very clever system, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one word for it,” Alex said.

  But Chatterjee was undeterred. “First they send spores that make the indigenous life-forms do the heavy lifting and pave the way for their arrival. They design their suits to mimic the dominant life-form here. Us. Then they use the nourishing, healthy tissue and hormones of our young to grow their own next generation. Their offspring come out adapted to the host atmosphere.” He removed his spectacles and polished them on the lapel of his shirt. “Which means they don’t need us anymore.”

  “Except for food,” I added.

  Eve blanched.

  “These Hatchlings,” Chatterjee said. “They’re tridactyl humanoids?”

  “What they are,” Alex said, “is horrifying.”

  “We have to understand them to beat them,” Chatterjee said.

  “We saw these things, Dr. Chatterjee,” Patrick said. “And with all due respect, we’re not gonna beat them with understanding.”

  “How, then? All you have to go on are a Rebel’s dying words. He said his compatriots will contact you about this … mission you’re required for. But they have no way to do so.”

  “That’s why we have to contact them,” I said.

  Patrick and Alex looked over at me. Only then did I realize that I hadn’t discussed this plan with them. I’d thought it was self-evident. That was the problem when you were as close as we three were; I sometimes forgot that Patrick and Alex weren’t inside my stream of consciousness.

  “Chance,” Chatterjee said, in a gentle, let’s-not-rile-up-the-mental-patient tone. “You have no way to contact them either.”

  “Why do you think I risked my life to go back for this?” I reached across the desk and plucked the helmet from his hands.

  “Wait,” Patrick said. “Sit down a second. This isn’t safe.”

  “As opposed to what, Patrick?” I said.

  For that he had no answer. I knew I was being cocky, but I liked the way it made Alex look at me.

  “You heard Dr. Chatterjee,” Alex said. “The suit is designed to replicate their home planet’s gravitational conditions. Heavy gravity means massive pressure. That thing could pop your skull like a grape.”

  “That’s just a theory,” I said, waving her off. “Besides, I saw a bunch of their screens back at the Hatch site. There are controls and stuff.”

  “Labeled in English?”

  “The mask translates to English, Alex. That means it probably understands it, too.”

  “This is crazy, Chance,” Eve said.

  “Like I said, compared to what? Marching into Stark Peak and confronting ten thousand Hatchlings? Give me an option that’s safe and sane and I’ll shut up.” I stared at them, daring anyone to speak. I shook the helmet.
“Whatever answers we’re gonna get are in here.”

  Before anyone could stop me, I tugged the helmet over my head. The rubbery insulation gave with a faint pop and sealed around my neck. It felt airtight in here, an underwater quiet. At first nothing happened. I stood there like an idiot with a giant Rebel helmet on my head.

  I pictured what I looked like to the others. To Alex.

  Major fail.

  I cleared my throat. “Okay, then. I was wrong.”

  At the sound of my voice, the helmet lit up. No—not the helmet. The entire world.

  A vivid metallic blue that was impossible to describe because it was a shade I’d never encountered before. Everything I looked at was outlined with hundreds of lines that mapped every shape and contour—the writing on the dry-erase board, Patrick’s mouth shouting at me, a rotting apple core in the trash can. The lines sparked and fizzled, and I remembered that the software or whatever it was had been damaged in the Rebel’s crash.

  I staggered around, knocking into Eve’s chair. Between the lines, the static, and the actual environment, it was hard to keep my bearings. Chatterjee’s face swept by. I felt Patrick grabbing my shoulders.

  Then there was a foomp sound like a vacuum cleaner trying to suck up a baseball. The insulation around my neck tightened. The air cramped around my temples. I felt my sinuses caving in. All the bravery and confidence I’d felt moments ago evaporated.

  “Controls,” I croaked.

  A thousand symbols I couldn’t understand blinked to life, scrolling across my visual field. Confused, I batted at them. The clamp grew stronger. My head was going to cave in because I’d decided to show off. My vision dotted. I pictured what I would look like when they unscrewed the helmet. I’d have one of those tiny shrunken heads, the kind that witch doctors made in cartoons.

  Patrick grabbed me around the waist, and Alex pulled at the helmet, her foot buried in my gut.

  We fell over. Patrick took out two desks and Eve. I rolled to my knees. A roar—my surging blood—filled my head. My hands scrabbled across the face mask. My vision swam. I fought for focus.