Last Chance--A Novel

by Gregg Hurwitz

  The mucusy skin absorbed the pellets, but still the blast was enough to halt his momentum. He twisted in midair and crashed through the glass table.

  I swung the baling hook at his head. He turned, mouth open, and the tip sailed through his spread lips and embedded inside his cheek. The hook slowed down as if it had hit mud, my arm continuing the swing in slow motion. My biceps strained. The metal burrowed through the moist orange flesh even as the wound healed up along its wake. At last the baling hook popped out the other side. The cheek sutured itself closed as the Hatchling pulled himself from the glass table.

  “Crap,” I said.

  The Hatchling rose, his camouflage skin flickering, different patches changing to match the carpet, the couch, the wall behind him. Glass stuck out of him everywhere—a dagger in his side, a triangle in his cheek beside his nostril holes, a series of shards rising like quills from his thigh.

  And then his skin healed, pushing out the glass. The shards fell to the floor, clinking against the wreckage.

  Hopelessness descended on me, a blanket of despair.

  He jumped at me, and I closed my eyes, remembering the burn I’d felt when the Hatchling had grabbed my forearm in the woods near the cannery. What would it feel like to have the thing land on top of my entire body?

  I felt it clamp down on the nape of my neck, and I yelled. When I opened my eyes, I was flying backward.

  Patrick had seized me and hurled me out of the way. In his other arm, the shotgun swung up. He shoved the muzzle into the Hatchling’s neck and fired.

  Most of the neck flew away, spattering the back wall. The head hinged to one side. I prayed it would topple off.

  But no. It stopped.

  Then, slowly, tendrils of skin constricted and pulled the head into place again, seating it again on the stump of the neck. As the flesh knit itself together, Patrick backed up, bumping into me.

  “We can’t kill it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We bolted for the kitchen. Alex was in the lead.

  Behind us the Hatchling heaved himself forward. The Rebel, on his feet once more, tackled him. The acid flesh seemed to have no effect on the armor. But the Hatchling overpowered him quickly, backhanding him. The Rebel spun around and fell into the heap of glass. I prayed his suit wouldn’t crack.

  Alex hip-checked the kitchen counter on her way to the side door that let out onto the cattle enclosure. Patrick slid over the counter, and I followed him. At the kitchen door, we piled into one another like dominoes.

  We heard a series of thumps as the Hatchling bounded across the living room toward the kitchen. He leapt so high he struck the ceiling. Chunks of drywall crumbled down behind him. His claws pounded the floor when he landed.

  Alex yanked the knob, but the dead bolt was thrown. She reached for it, but there wouldn’t be time.

  I turned. At first I couldn’t see the Hatchling, but I smelled that he was close, felt the air from his movement brushing against my face. I sensed a ripple of motion fly up off the counter and realized that he was up there above us, camouflaged against the ceiling. He ghosted overhead, hurtling toward us. His hunched shoulders smashed the light fixtures, the contact making his flesh resume its natural orange hue. Sparks cascaded down. He led his descent with his claws, a bird of prey swooping in for the kill.

  Patrick grabbed Alex around the waist at the last second and yanked her away from the door, hurling her across the floor tile like a bowling ball. Then he shoved me away, diving on top of me. We skidded painfully into the refrigerator.

  The Hatchling hit the side door like a wrecking ball, blowing it out of the wall, frame and all.

  Sliding beneath the table, Alex racked up two chairs, her hockey stick spinning off toward the living room. The plates and silverware jumped. The big wooden salt mill fell over and rolled off the edge of the table. One of the candles toppled, igniting the lace tablecloth.

  Patrick and I stood up, our backs to the hard metal of the fridge. The overhead lights fizzled. The Hatchling turned, framed by the jagged mouth he’d knocked into the side of the kitchen wall.

  We had nowhere to go.

  He dipped down and hopped once, landing right before us. The claws of his feet tapped the tile. He leaned toward us slowly. His stink wafted into our faces. A foot away. Now two inches.

  I clutched for Patrick’s hand, found it.

  A salamander-orange lip wrinkled back from a set of fangs. Pearly-white incisors gleamed. The smaller teeth were just as sharp.

  This was it.

  Then there was a clunk.

  The Hatchling stiffened.

  Then he shrieked.

  He twisted onto his heels. His face lit with agony. The screams continued, loud enough to hurt my ears. He was clutching at his back, his spine twisting. He dropped onto his knees, and as he fell away, we saw Alex standing behind him.

  She held the wooden salt mill in one hand. It had snapped in half from the force of the blow.

  A trickle of salt spilled out of the splintered core, dribbling down onto the Hatchling.

  He writhed and screeched.

  The salt ate into his skin, shriveling him up like a slug. His body was pocked with holes, his damaged guts and organs exposed. His limbs stopped rasping against the floor.

  And then there was only the stench, hanging heavier than a cloud of car exhaust.

  Behind Alex on the table, the lace crackled, a neatly contained garden of flame. The fire fluttered across her features, and I thought it might be the most romantic lighting I’d ever seen.

  She poured a mound of white crystals from the broken shaker into her palm. Then she lifted it up and smiled that smile.

  “Kryptonite,” she said.

  She walked over to the sink, plugged the drain with the stopper, and dumped the rest of the salt in. Then she turned on the hot water.

  Patrick and I remained frozen against the refrigerator.

  Alex shot us a look. “You can move now,” she said. “Go check on the Rebel. Tell him Unnamed Girl just kicked some Hatchling ass.”

  For once Patrick was speechless. He straightened his black cowboy hat. Nodded at the sink.

  “What are you doing?” Patrick asked.

  Alex walked a quick circuit of the kitchen, retrieving her hockey stick, picking up my baling hooks where they’d fallen. Then she stuck them in the salt water in the sink, dunking the blade of her stick and the ends of my hooks beneath the surface.

  “Preparing,” she said.

  Shaken, I walked over to the living room.

  The Rebel rose unevenly. His armor now sported a few more scratches, but the suit had held. He looked at where the Hatchling lay puddled on the kitchen floor. “Amazing,” he said.

  “The salt?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “And Girl.”

  “I agree. On both counts.”

  “We need to evacuate immediately,” he said. “The noise will draw more.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  When I turned around, Patrick was coming back up the hall from Uncle Jim’s old study, cradling a dozen boxes of shotgun shells in his arms. “Rock salt,” he said.

  Uncle Jim had used them to scare wolves away from our livestock.

  The Rebel said, “I must leave now to track down my compatriot and the serum.” He stepped across the melted mess of the Hatchling without bothering to look down. “You, too, should leave as quickly as possible.”

  “We will,” I said.

  The Rebel slipped through the gash in the kitchen wall and vanished into the night.

  Alex pulled my dripping baling hooks from their saltwater bath and tossed them to me. Then she whipped her hockey stick clear of the sink. The blade gleamed wetly.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  I looked at my brother, and I could tell he could read my mind, like always. He gave me a nod.

  I walked over to the hedge of flame rising from the dining-room table. I stabbed the edge of the lace tableclo
th with the tip of my baling hook and yanked it, flame and all, off the table and onto the carpet of the living room.

  Orange and yellow spread, a billowing second carpet on top of the first one. It caught the wallpaper and climbed to the ceiling, tendrils wrapping around the doorway into the hall. The curtains went up all at once with a sound like a rush of wind.

  We kept our eyes on the flame, watching the fire devour our old house as we moved backward out through the hole in the kitchen wall and into the cool night.

  We gave it some distance. When we got to the barn, we paused.

  The big barn door was still rolled back from when we’d left in a hurry that awful night two months and a lifetime ago when it had all begun. I’d been out here baling hay, and Patrick had come to fetch me.

  I could see the metal catch inside where the baling hooks were supposed to hang.

  Back when they were still used for hay.

  I turned my attention again to Jim and Sue-Anne’s ranch house. I thought about my aunt and uncle up there on the second floor, resting on the bed where they’d slept for so many decades. I didn’t want to leave them to the flies and maggots. Flame licked at the downstairs windows. Black smoke poured from the chimney and then started leaking through the shingles.

  The last piece of our old life, up in flames.

  Maybe it would burn itself out. Maybe it would catch and take down the whole house.

  I found myself hoping for the latter.

  ENTRY 26

  JoJo sat with her back to the base of the slumbering band saw in shop class. She let Bunny hop down one of her legs and then up the other. A dirty stuffed animal with one half-chewed ear making her way along JoJo’s filthy jeans.

  This is what passed for fun now.

  Rocky stood over by the window. Stained with grease and powdered with sawdust, it was dirtier than any of the other windows at the school. He’d scrubbed a scuba-mask viewing circle in the pane with his sleeve, and he peered through it now.

  JoJo thought back to when she first got Bunny. Mom had given Bunny to her when she’d visited Mom in the hospital. Mom had needles in her arms and all kinds of crazy tubes going everywhere, and JoJo had been scared to go into the room to see her. Rocky had held her hand really firm and said, “You’ll make Mom feel bad.” And so in JoJo went.

  Mom hadn’t looked much like Mom. Her hair was pasted to her face. Her curls dark with dried sweat. Her skin looked like paper. Her lips were chapped, and they had sores on them.

  And Rocky had hugged Mom, and JoJo remembered thinking how brave he was to just march right up there and do that. The last thing she wanted to do was cuddle with Mom right now, which made no sense, because she loved her mother more than anything. When Dad took Rocky to get ice-cream cups from the cafeteria, JoJo had been left alone with Mom.

  Mom said, “I have something for you, my sweet, sweet girl.” And she’d reached an arm trailing tubes over to the nightstand and pulled open a drawer. JoJo remembered thinking how much it must have hurt to move that arm with all the needles stuck in it, pulling beneath the tape. Mom must’ve really wanted to give her whatever she was reaching for.

  And out from the drawer she came.

  Bunny.

  The best stuffed animal JoJo had ever seen.

  She was yellow, Bunny, since it was around Easter and that’s when stuffed-animal bunnies were different colors.

  JoJo remembered feeling something beneath her face, warm and bright. Something like joy. But sad, too. And she could see it in Mom’s face as well. And Mom said, “Sweet girl, I know how much you love me.”

  And JoJo thought, How? How do you know? Ever since you got sick, I haven’t figured out how to say it, not once, not ever.

  Maybe because it felt too scary to say it.

  So she nodded.

  And Mom said, “I’m hard to hug right now with all these pokes in me and cords everywhere. So I thought I could give you this little bunny. And you could hug her instead, since I’m so hard to reach.”

  She handed Bunny to JoJo.

  And JoJo squeezed that rabbit as tight as she’d ever squeezed anything in her life. She put all of her love and fear and guilt into Bunny, and Bunny took it all and turned it yellow, the color of the sun, the color of sunflowers, the color of forgiveness.

  When JoJo opened her eyes, Mom smiled at her and her eyes crinkled at the edges, and Mom said, “I felt that. I felt every last drop of it.”

  And JoJo had never let go of Bunny since.

  Bunny hopped down her left leg now, leaping over the hole in the knee of her jeans. Hopped back up her right leg.

  It was getting boring.

  Rocky had barely moved from that window.

  It was his third time on lookout duty, and he wasn’t gonna screw it up. JoJo stood next to him and let her eyes scan the front of the school. No movement on the lawn.

  No Mappers, no Chasers, none of those crazy creepy Hatchling things Chance had told them about.

  “Do you ever wish you were older?” JoJo asked.

  It was the biggest classroom at Creek’s Cause High, crammed with machines and workbenches. Her voice echoed off the hardware.

  Rocky spun around and shushed her. “You gotta stay quiet, JoJo. I’m working. You’re not even supposed to be here.”

  She walked away and sat down by the belt sander.

  “And no,” he said. “I don’t wish I was older. If we were older, we’d be closer to eighteen, and you know what happens when you turn eighteen.”

  “But imagine if you were fifteen instead of ten,” she said. “Like Chance. Or if I was seventeen and tough like Alex. Or eighteen like Patrick.”

  “Nobody’s like Patrick.”

  “Fine. But I still hate being eight. It’s useless being eight. Especially right now. Eight’s just the age of the kid who gets eaten.”

  Rocky whirled away from the window to glare at her. “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true, though.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke. She looked at Bunny instead. You could talk about this stuff to Bunny. She didn’t get mad like the others. “The only thing that’s useful anymore is being big. And no matter what I do, I’m not gonna grow fast enough to go up against any of those things. And you aren’t either.”

  “I’m on lookout, aren’t I?”

  He turned back to the window for a while. Then he looked back over his shoulder. JoJo was hugging her knees to her chest. She wasn’t mad. She was upset.

  She was chewing on Bunny’s ear, the one that looked less like an ear and more like a nub every day.

  He said, “Quit chewing on Bunny.”

  “Bunny likes it when I chew on her.”

  “Just…” He swung back to his scuba-mask spot in the window for a peek. “Another half hour and we’re done. Then we can play cards.”

  “I’m sick of cards.

  “Or hide-and-seek.”

  She was great at hide-and-seek. She’d found nooks and crannies all over the school, the best ones to squeeze into and disappear.

  Since Rocky was too busy being a big-shot lookout to play with her, she made Bunny jump across the sawdusty floor and up the side of the machine and—

  With a blare the belt sander fired up. The old machine rattled, the gritty paper whirring by. It scared her so badly that she fell back, Bunny skittering away out of her grip.

  “Shut it off,” Rocky hissed. “Shut it off!”

  But she was too terrified to move.

  He bounded away from the window and clicked off the belt sander. He was breathing so hard she could see his chest heaving beneath his T-shirt.

  Already she heard footsteps pounding up the corridor. Ben swung through the doorway, Dezi and Mikey at his heels.

  “The hell was that?” Ben said.

  “I’m really sorry,” Rocky said. “I accidentally—”

  “I did it.” JoJo stood up, smacking sawdust off her legs. “I was playing with Bunny, and she hopped over the power button. I thought the power was
off.”

  “We were testing the generator,” Dezi said.

  “Bad luck,” Rocky said.

  “For you,” Mikey said.

  Ben pointed at JoJo. “She’s not supposed to be in here.”

  “I was just letting her keep me company,” Rocky said. “She gets scared when she’s alone.”

  “We don’t got room for ‘scared,’” Ben said. “Not anymore.”

  “It didn’t distract me,” Rocky said. “I swear. I’ve been on lookout every second.”

  Dezi was over at the scrubbed circle on the window. He pulled away from the pane quickly. “Then I suppose you spotted the Host standing on the sidewalk staring right at the school.”

  Rocky’s chin dipped. “No. I had to run over to shut off the machine.”

  “Then you were distracted,” Ben said.

  “I guess so. Yeah.” Rocky was studying his shoes. “I’m sorry.”

  Ben walked over and picked up Bunny where she’d slid.

  JoJo felt her lips start to wobble, and she willed her tears not to fall. She managed a single word, and it sounded squeaky and strangled: “Don’t.”

  Ben tore off Bunny’s head.

  Her insides, the cottony stuffing, stuck up out of her neck.

  JoJo’s face got hot, and then she felt the wet on her cheeks, splotching the floor and said, “Don’t,” again, even though he already had.

  Ben looked at her, his head canted. The burned skin at his hairline was shiny and stretched tight. The shadows were severe here in the room, darkening his other scars from the car crash. His face looked like a jigsaw puzzle.

  He tossed her Bunny’s head.

  It skidded across the floor and bumped into her leg.

  She picked it up and squeezed it to her chest. Even if it was just Bunny’s head, it was still Bunny.

  Ripping Bunny’s body into pieces, Ben crossed the room, dropping bits of stuffing and patches of fabric on the floor. When he reached the window, he stayed a few feet back and peered through the rubbed-clear circle. Everyone was quiet. JoJo tried not to sniffle too loud.

  Then Ben’s shoulders relaxed. “It’s gone,” he said.