Doomed (32 page)

As Theo drives through the winding streets of Albuquerque, I log back on to Pandora’s Box, praying that whatever it is I did at the end of level two was enough to bump me up. It turns out it was, because when I start looking around I realize I’m no longer in the middle of the West Texas desert.

“I’m in,” I tell them as I begin exploring.

Eli reaches for his iPad, logs in, and races into level three to meet me.

“Where are we?” he asks once he catches up.

“I’m not sure.”

I’m in the middle of a town square somewhere, standing next to a large fountain. I turn in a circle, look around. There are trees everywhere and huge buildings, all Spanish in flavor but each with a distinct character.

A couple of them look familiar, and I run up to them, look closer. Smile. “I’m in Balboa Park.”

“Where?” Eli asks.

“San Diego. It’s a huge park, with museums, the Old Globe Theatre, an amphitheater for outdoor concerts. My dad and I used to love …” My voice breaks. I clear my throat, try again. I’m not going to get upset over something that was but never will be again. “We used to love to come here. When I was young, he was working on some superimportant project at a think tank here, and my mom and I would visit him every month or so.”

“What kind of project?” Theo asks intently.

“I don’t know. I just remember it drove my mother nuts when he talked about it, especially since he became so critical of her day job, which in those days was as counsel for Anderson Natural Gas.”

Theo doesn’t say anything else, but I see that the name registers. Just as I can see him thinking, filing all the bits and pieces away.

“So, where did you like to go?” Eli asks.

“Everywhere. We spent a lot of time at the Reuben H. Fleet, though. It’s a science museum for kids.” I fumble for the pictures, pull them out. Search for one that jogs my memory of Balboa Park. I find it in the one of my parents and me standing in front of some kind of a decorative white arch, connected to a fancy gazebo.

My dad is holding me with one arm—I’m about five or six here—and his other is wrapped around my mom. He and I are smiling hugely, but my mom just looks like she wants to get away. I don’t remember that from this trip. I wonder how I missed it. Wonder if my dad missed it, too, or if this was the beginning of the end and I just didn’t realize it.

“I know where I need to go,” I tell the guys as I take off running toward the amphitheater. It’s a hike from where I started, so I keep my finger on the arrow key, making my avatar run as fast as possible, jumping over, spinning around, or fighting any obstacles that pop up in the way.

It’s close a couple of times—there are more NPCs to get through in this level, and some of them, like the Eryines, or Furies, are tough enough that Theo pulls the car over and hurtles into level three to help me for a few minutes. By the time he pulls back onto the road, I’m feeling pretty good about myself—especially as I approach the amphitheater. There’s nothing here I can’t handle. At least until a huge, meaty fist comes out of nowhere and latches on to my hair, pulling me right off my feet and dangling me high off the ground. I look up and up and up, right into the large center eye of a Cyclops.

“Oh, shit,” I say as he brings a club around, poised to strike me. “I think I’m screwed.”

“Not yet you aren’t.” Eli races toward me.

The club comes right at me, and I twist and turn, try every key I can to avoid the hit. It doesn’t work, and he hits me hard enough to rip some of the hair off my head, to send me spinning across the hard concrete ground.

I land with a
thud
, and it’s obvious I’m hurt. I’m limping and holding the side that still hasn’t recovered from the giants’ attack. Plus I have the mother of black eyes.

I don’t have time to think about it, though, as the Cyclops is coming after me again, his club hitting the ground inches from where I am. I scramble backward, crablike. I scoot
under a bench from the amphitheater and roll over, start to crawl from one to the next, trying to lose him.

He smashes at all of them, shattering one stone bench after another. But he’s always a second late, so that I’m not crushed beneath the rubble. I am, however, victim to flying stone pieces. Soon blood is dripping off me.

Other players get in the way, try to bring him down, but they end up being crushed beneath his powerful club. Old and young, male and female, rich and poor. People who won’t get another chance. My stomach hurts as a young girl meets a particularly gory end.

My shot at saving the world could be over as easily as hers. One wrong move and I’m gone.

My father really is insane. The fate of the world hanging on his teenage daughter and a video game. If I fail here, I let everyone down.

The Cyclops’s club slams into my back, knocks me to the ground. He lifts it again, starts to bring it down. But it doesn’t connect. Eli is there, blocking it, his huge strength pitted against the Cyclops.

“Run, Pandora!”

I do, ashamed of myself for leaving him, but this is too important. I have to get through this, have to find the next city coordinates.

Behind me, Eli and the Cyclops are locked in battle, the sounds terrible to hear. I glance back. Eli’s huge and strong, but he’s only a giant by reality’s standards. Here, in the game, the Cyclops towers above him—in height and muscle mass. He doesn’t stand a chance against him, not for long.

“Eli!” I scream as the club descends. “Look out!”

At that moment, Theo jerks the car to the right and drives halfway down a small alley before pulling over and turning it off.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Trying to be invisible. There are caravans of military trucks out there.” He reaches for his backpack.

“Caravans?” Eli and I echo at the same time, the game forgotten for long, crucial seconds.

“Yes. And soldiers with guns and riot gear. I think the National Guard’s been called in to restore order.”

We’re silent as we try to absorb what that means for us. How are we going to dodge the authorities and avoid popping up on the National Guard’s radar, too? And, since we’re attempting to figure out impossible problems, I add one more dilemma to the list. How are we going to get out of this alive?

As the question echoes in my head, I’m so mad, I’m shaking. How could my father do this to us?

The Cyclops roars, in duplicate and high definition, from both Eli’s and my computer screens. The noise startles us and we jump. But it drags our attention back to the game, where it needs to be right now.

“Just stay out of sight,” Theo says furiously, and we all slump down, trying to make the car appear empty. With my height, it’s hard for me, but I figure it’s impossible for Eli and Theo. “Get back here,” I tell Eli as I throw myself into the cargo hold of the Explorer.

He crawls under the bench seats and stretches out in an awkward bent-in-half manner. It looks uncomfortable, but
I figure cramped is better than dead. Theo kind of drapes himself across the backseat, and he looks even more squeezed than Eli.

Then we play the game.

I don’t know where to begin looking for the coordinates. This place is huge, and half the hiding places have already been destroyed by Rampaging Cyclops Guy. I can only hope the numbers weren’t under any of those benches.

I remember playing on the huge pipe organ at the front of the amphitheater and run to it, checking in and around it, but there’s nothing there. I check the stone podiums, jump up onstage and check out the actual pipes the music comes from. Nothing.

In the background, Eli and Theo are taking on the Cyclops. Theo has managed to scale his giant muscles and currently has his hands wrapped around the monster’s throat as Eli beats and pokes at his legs with a huge stick he’s found in the rubble.

As I watch them, I notice the ornate archway a little bit up the hill from the amphitheater. It leads to a gazebo—the same gazebo my family and I were standing in front of in the picture. I hightail it up the hill, through the arch, and into the gazebo. Look up at the ceiling, like the rotunda, but there’s nothing there.

I was wrong.

Behind me, the Cyclops falls with a huge roar and Theo is crushed underneath him. I run to help and as I do, I see the uneven stones on the path up here. One seems to be sticking out a little more than the rest.

I glance up. Eli has managed to get the Cyclops off Theo
and is currently clubbing it in the head—so things seem like they’re under control, or at least as under control as any of this can be. I drop to my knees and start to dig.

It takes a couple of minutes, but I finally manage to pry the stone out. Turn it over. And right there, written in glowing green, are these coordinates: N 38°50’2”, W 104°49’14”.

“I’ve got them!” I shout. “Give me the atlas.”

Eli tosses me my backpack, and it lands with a
thud
on the pile of laundry at my feet. For the first time, I look around the cargo area, where I’m lying.

There’s a big laundry basket with neatly folded clothes in it. A red backpack. A black guitar case. A ratty pair of tennis shoes that are obviously the source of the disgusting smell I’ve been trying to ignore since I crawled back here.

Whose car is this?
I wonder.
A college kid who came home to do laundry only to have the world blow up around him? Or a man stuck in one of the hospital rooms because his plan for getting out of town went somehow awry?

The guilt is nearly suffocating. How many lives are we ruining as we run from one section of town to another, taking things that don’t belong to us?

I don’t realize I’ve asked the question out loud until Theo says, “How many people are we going to save if we pull this off? Get your head back in the game, Pandora.”

I know he’s right, but I’ve just about had it with his brand of tough love. I shoot him a nasty look even as I flip open the atlas.

It takes me a few seconds—I still don’t have the hang of
this book yet—but I finally find the coordinates a little north of where we currently are. “We’re going to Colorado Springs.”

“What’s in Colorado Springs?” Eli asks.

“The air force,” Theo throws out.

“My dad’s not real big on military rank and file. What’s there besides the air force?”

“It looks like we’re going to find out.”

Six hours later, we’re closing in on the New Mexico–Colorado border—this time in a gray Chevy Malibu. The Explorer ran out of gas close to Santa Fe, and we ended up having to steal yet another car because every gas station we ran across was either dry or unable to pump the gas that they did have.

We’ve been listening to the radio forever, though it hasn’t been broadcasting much of anything new in the last few hours, just going over and over the same grim news we already know.

The cooling towers at the nuclear power plants are under the worm’s control, and though government hackers are working around the clock, so far they can’t find a way in. The cores keep getting hotter and hotter as the electricity generated has nowhere to go because of the grid shutdowns, and within days we’ll be dealing with leaks that, if unchecked, will have catastrophic effects.

Civil unrest has turned to anarchy, while transportation everywhere has ground to a halt—no planes, trains, buses, or boats are operating.

And the president has been evacuated to a nondisclosed location.

Theo reaches over and turns off the radio. “I can’t take it anymore.”

I understand what he’s saying. The bad news, coming in bits and pieces as news agencies raid museums to communicate with such antiquated devices as Morse telegraphs, has gotten to all of us. The earlier jubilation of finding the next coordinates has worn off, and now all I can think about is how tired I am. And how futile playing my father’s game really is.

The car in front of me hits its brakes, slows to a crawl. I do the same, impatience eating at me. We left the main road behind in favor of back roads a long time ago because it was congested, filled with people trying to evacuate to God knows where. But now the back roads are just as crowded, filled with people who just want to be somewhere else. Their comfort zone has failed them—the place they feel safest—so they’re looking for someplace better, someplace safer.

I want to tell them that there is no such place.

That this is it.

That things are only going to get worse, not better.

I don’t think anyone would believe me. They couldn’t, because then that would mean this is for real. That this
is
the point of no return, just like the game promises.

It’s crazy, really. I thought we would have lasted longer,
that the veneer of civility we wear would have taken longer than this to erode.

I read once in history class that all civilizations, all people, are just nine meals from total anarchy. I’d thought it was crazy at the time, had argued with my teacher about the absurdity of it, but my father has proven me wrong. The wholesale breakdown of everything we know has sent all of us plunging over the edge of civilization and into a yawning void, where there are no rules except survival.

I can’t help thinking about what happened earlier. About how Eli was ready to leave that man. How for a fleeting second, so was I. It makes me queasy to think of what we’re becoming. Sure, we’re working together now, but if things get really bad, will it be each of us for him- or herself? Will Eli abandon Theo and me as easily as he was going to abandon that man?

Will I?

The thought echoes inside me until I shut off my brain, refusing to go there right now. I’ll lose my mind if I keep thinking of all the what-ifs that are laid out in front of us.

We inch along in traffic for what feels like hours but is really more like fifteen or twenty minutes. I’m antsy as hell, my internal radar screaming that we’re missing something, but I don’t know what it is.

“How far are we from the Colorado border?” I ask. I’m starving, but I don’t want to eat any of our small stash of food. Not yet. Who knows when we’ll find more?