Doomed (28 page)

“Check those two trucks,” Theo says as he opens the door of the one closest to him.

“For what?”

“Keys. Most of the time on ranches, they just leave the keys in the working vehicles.”

I do what he asks, searching the glove compartment, the visor, and under the mat for a key. I don’t find one in the first truck, and neither does Theo, but we get lucky in the last two, each holding up a key.

“Which one do you want to take?” he asks.

“Does it matter?”

“Not really.”

“Then I pick the blue one. It’s less noticeable than the red one. Plus it’s a little smaller—maybe it’ll get better gas mileage.”

“Good point.” Theo climbs into the cab, inserts the key in the ignition, and cranks it. The engine turns over smoothly.

“Awesome,” I say. “It starts.” We work quickly, unloading the full gas cans from the other trucks and putting them in the back of ours.
Ours
. I try not to linger on the
irony of that word as I climb into the passenger side of the truck.

“Get your seat belt on,” says Theo as he puts the truck in drive. “And if anyone comes after us—”

“If anyone comes after us, we give them the truck back!” I tell him.

He grins. “That’s not quite what I was going to say—”

“Yeah, well, it’s what we’re going to do.”

“I guess we’d better make sure no one comes after us, then.” He opens the window and throws the key for the other truck as far away from the vehicles as he can. And then he’s pulling out from behind the barn, driving leisurely so as not to draw attention to ourselves.

We get to the gate and I start to climb out, to pull it open, but Theo reaches up to the visor and pulls down what looks like a garage-door opener. He hits the big center button and the gate swings open.

I settle back, more relaxed than the situation calls for. Theo won’t let anything happen to me—strange how I know that now, when only three days ago I worried that he might strangle me. I guess perspective really is everything.

We hit the main road and Theo floors it. The engine rumbles and the truck takes off, responding a lot faster than the Odyssey ever did. I smile, glance over, and realize Theo’s doing the same.

“How many laws do you think we’ve broken since this thing began?” I ask.

“Seventeen. I’ve been counting.”

My mouth drops open. “Seriously?”

“No, not seriously!” he says, laughing. “How anal do you think I am?” Suddenly he doesn’t look so amused, and though he’s concentrating on the road, I can tell my answer matters to him. His knuckles are white where he clutches the steering wheel.

“Not anal. Just amazingly prepared. I like it.”

At first he doesn’t respond, but his fingers relax a little and I know it’s going to be okay. Still, I’m racking my brain for something to say to fill the silence when Theo finally speaks. His voice is so low I have to strain to hear it.

“My dad was big on being prepared. For anything.”

I’m not sure what to say to that, not sure what Theo
wants
me to say. I just know that whatever comes out of my mouth, it can’t be the wrong thing or he’ll clam up forever. I don’t want that to happen, not now that he’s finally sharing something about himself.

I settle on the truth. “Kind of like my dad seems to be. Except my dad’s psychotic, of course.”

Theo’s lips twist in the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “I don’t know. I loved him, but sometimes I thought he was pretty psychotic. He was Special Forces, which meant that when I was young, he was in and out of town a lot, depending on what shape the rest of the world was in. Then the war started and he was gone more than he was around. And when he was around … I don’t know. He was different. He had a short fuse and a bad temper—everything used to set him off. It got so that my mom and I were walking on eggshells whenever he was home. It didn’t matter. The only time he was happy was when he was teaching me something new.”

“Like geocaching.”

“Yeah. Or how to build a plane. How to skydive. Shoot a gun. Build a fire. It didn’t matter. There was always something else to learn.”

“Bet you didn’t know how much all that was going to come in handy, did you?”

“I didn’t have a clue.” He shrugs. “I used to hate all his lessons—except the plane. The plane was cool. But I just wanted to do something normal, you know? Play basketball with him. Go to the movies. Hell, my first driving lesson was all about evasive tactics. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps.”

“And you don’t want to?”

He laughs bitterly. “Not at all. He disappeared somewhere in the Middle East about two and a half years ago. It was a classified mission, so the government couldn’t even tell us where he was, just that they were declaring him dead. That there was no chance he could have survived whatever it was that had happened.”

“I’m sorry.” It’s not enough. I know it isn’t, but I don’t know what else to say.

“I’m not.” He shakes his head for a second and looks completely devastated. “I think that’s the hardest part. I mean, I miss the dad he
used
to be. The dad I caught glimpses of every once in a while when things were going well. But I don’t miss the man he
was
most of the time. I don’t miss how afraid my mom looked or how I used to have to get between them to keep him from beating on her when he was lost in whatever black mood grabbed him.”

He stops at a red light, keeps his gaze focused on the road in front of us. He looks so tense, so miserable, so
ashamed
,
that I can’t help it. I reach out, start to stroke my hand down his hair. I mean it to be comforting, but he turns his head at the last second and my hand grazes a nasty bump. He winces.

“I’m sorry.” I apologize again, for a lot more than touching his head.

His eyes meet mine, and a shiver works its way down my spine. For a second I wonder what caused it—the look in his sapphire eyes when he glances at me or the knowledge that there’s a lot more to Theo than meets the eye.

“No. I just … wasn’t expecting it.”

“Oh.” I put my hand back, trace my fingers lightly over the bruise on his high cheekbone, down his strong jaw to the cut on his chin, over the small slices from running through the trees at the farm yesterday. So many different injuries. So many different times he didn’t back down, didn’t back away, when another guy would have.

“Pandora.” His voice is hoarse, but he doesn’t move to escape my touch. In fact, he moves toward it, turning his head just a little so that his lips are pressed against my fingertips in the lightest of kisses.

Our eyes lock, at least until the driver behind us leans on his horn. Theo jerks his gaze back to the road—and the light that has obviously been green for a while.

We ride the rest of the way in silence, but my fingers still tingle from where his lips brushed so softly against them. I don’t know how I feel about what happened, how I feel about him. And I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. Not when I’m on the run in a stolen truck and the world is about to come crashing down around me.

Theo pulls around the back of the motel, and as we climb
out of the truck I tell him, “I know you’re mad at Eli, but we can’t afford to fight. Not right now.”

His shoulders are tense, his spine so straight that I fear he’ll break in half, but eventually Theo nods. “I know. I’ll apologize.” He says the last like he’s choking on the word.

“I don’t think you need to go that far. Just don’t slam him against any more walls. Sound fair?”

“Sounds fair. Provided he didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep.”

The first thing I notice when we open the door is that Eli hasn’t been sleeping. Everything we brought into the hotel room is packed and resting in a line next to the door, ready to go. Eli has set a few granola bars and some bottles of water on the table for breakfast, and he’s sitting on the bed, hunched over the radio like it’s his last friend in the world.

“Hey, thanks,” I say, gesturing to the food, but he shushes me, his green eyes wide and wild in his very pale face.

We’re across the room in the space of a heartbeat, differences forgotten. “What’s wrong?” Theo demands.

“I think we just found out what Pandora’s dad means by total annihilation. The worm has worked its way into the control systems of every nuclear plant in the world. If someone doesn’t find a solution to this in the next couple of days, it’s going to be too late.”

“Too late?” I echo weakly, my knees turning to Jell-O beneath me.

“To stop the leaks. To shore the plants back up. In seven days, we’ll be in the middle of a nuclear holocaust. Game over.”

For long seconds, what Eli has said is simply too horrible for my brain to comprehend. It can’t be possible. It just
can’t
be possible. “No one would do that. You’d have to be insane to even contemplate it.”

“Well, there
was
Stuxnet,” Theo says, sounding like a professor. “It attacked a nuclear power plant.”

“
One
,” I tell Theo. “We read about it in history last year. It attacked
one
nuclear program, and it didn’t even cause that much damage.”

“Because the program wasn’t fully operational. Not like the places this thing attacked.”

“That’s the point. Stuxnet didn’t come close to doing this.”

“No. It just proved this could be done. Which is the problem with cyberwarfare. Once you open the box—excuse the metaphor—you can’t ever close it again. Things
spiral out of control until we end up exactly where we are right now.”

“No offense, but can we talk ethics later?” Eli asks, getting up from the bed and tossing each of us a granola bar. “I think the urgency level on this just shot through the stratosphere, so if you don’t mind …”

He’s right. Suddenly, his falling asleep last night and losing the van doesn’t seem so terrible. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyway. Yeah, we’re going to be hurt without those supplies, but if nothing else, it’s only seven days until the whole world blows up and we no longer have to worry about anything. Especially trying to save it.

We climb into the truck and pull out onto the main streets. I’m driving and I switch on the radio as we try to figure out which way to go. According to the phone book, Orinoco is located on Los Alamos Boulevard, but we don’t have a clue where that is. And with no GPS, no MapQuest, nothing, we could be wandering around for hours unless we find a map.

“Pull over here,” Eli tells me when we get to a corner with a convenience store.

The place looks like it’s been ransacked—shattered windows, broken bottles, ripped-up magazines, and newspapers litter the sidewalk in front of the store. “You don’t actually think they’re open, do you?” I ask.

“It’s worth a shot, even if they aren’t.”

Of course. What does stealing one more thing matter? I close my eyes for a second, try not to be a baby.

When Eli climbs out of the truck, I go with him. Theo
looks like he’s going to protest, but I shoot him a look that basically says to stay out of it. Things are still rough and disjointed with us—someone needs to start patching things up, and I’m smart enough to know it isn’t going to be either of the guys.

“Stay behind me,” Eli says as we approach the door. As we get closer, I realize it’s hanging off-kilter, having been almost ripped off the hinges.

“Why? Are you bulletproof?”

He grins. “I might be.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll take my chances.” I take a deep breath and then push through the door, Eli right at my heels.

I stop dead as soon as I see what a wreck the store really is. It hasn’t just been looted. It’s been systematically destroyed. Everything that couldn’t be stolen has been smashed or ripped, as if stealing wasn’t enough for whoever did this. It looks like they wanted to rip the store apart at the seams.

If so, they succeeded.

As I stand there, tears threaten, but I beat them back using sheer will this time. The same will that got me through all those days with my mother, when I wanted to beg for her attention. To plead with her to tell me why she didn’t love me, so that I could fix it. Fix me.

A wave of longing rushes over me, so overwhelming, so intense, that I feel it deep inside myself in that place I never even acknowledge exists. I want a do-over. Me, the queen of owning your actions, of moving forward, of never looking back. I want to go back to three days ago, when I was fumbling into my dirty clothes, super late for school.

I want to go back to the Amnesty International meeting at lunch, when I didn’t have a clue just how important the rights I was fighting for were suddenly going to be to me.

I want to go back to my conversation with my mother, to the moment I saw the e-mail from my father, to the click of the mouse as I went to that stupid blog.

I just want to go back, to get as far from here—as far from the fugitive me that I’ve become—as I can get.

But I don’t own a time machine, and while this stupid worm can do a lot of things, I don’t think it can completely reset the clock, reset me. Even if I’d kind of like it to try.

“Go back to the truck, Pandora.” Eli’s low, serious voice breaks into my reverie, as does his grip on my elbow as he shoves me behind him.

“Stop it, Eli! I’m not going anywhere. Now you take that side and I’ll take this one,” I say pointing to the register. “Look for a map and see if there’s any stuff left we can use. They probably took everything, but you never know. They might have missed something.”

I head for the magazine rack at the front of the store. There’s nothing there, though, so I continue on along the front corner. I pocket a few packs of gum that are lying, discarded, on the floor. Grab a couple of cigarette lighters, as well—in case we need to start a fire—then move down the counter, looking for a map.

I’m almost at the end when I see her. A young woman, not much older than I am. She’s flat on her back behind the counter, eyes wide open, cheeks stained with tears. And a shotgun-bullet-size hole where her heart used to be.

I scream and Eli comes bounding up the aisle. I scream
and scream and scream. He sees her, too, and pulls me against him, burying my head in his chest. “It’s okay, Pandora. It’s okay.”