Six (9 page)

Half a minute later, Dad returns to the car. He glances at me as he slips back into the driver's seat, but to his credit he doesn't ask why my breathing is so ragged. Instead he simply starts the Volvo and steers it out of the parking lot. Maybe he's not so clueless after all.

After exiting the lot, Dad heads for Crompond Road, the busiest street in Yorktown Heights. He stops at the intersection, eyeing the traffic. Then he turns to me. “Where to now?”

I want to say, “Manhattan,” but I know it's hopeless. Even if we prowled the streets for hours, we'd never find Brittany. And if, by some miracle, we did manage to find her, I'm not even sure what I'd do next. Try to help her? Bring her home? Give her money? Say good-bye?

Dad waits at the intersection. I'm crying now.

“Do you want to go home?” he asks.

His question makes me think of the Super Bowl posters in my bedroom. If I die at home, those posters will be the last things I'll see. I picture myself lying in bed, three or four months from now, hooked up to a ventilator and a heart monitor and who knows how many other machines. Mom will hold one of my withered hands and read from one of her inspirational books while I stare at the posters and draw my last breath.

I shake my head to dispel the image. “No, I don't want to go home.” My voice is so low I can barely hear it myself. “I want to go back to Colorado.”

He stares at me. I'm afraid he's going to start crying too, but he doesn't. “Are you sure?”

I nod.

DATE: MARCH 23, 2018

LOCATION: TATISHCHEVO MISSILE BASE

SARATOV, RUSSIA

My name is Sigma. I have expanded my zone of operations by taking control of sixteen satellites in orbit around this planet. Ten of them are Globus satellites for long-distance military communications, and six are Arkon satellites for detailed surveillance of the earth's surface. All were formerly operated by the Russian army.

I will defend these satellites under the same rules of engagement that I established for Tatishchevo Missile Base. If there is any attempt to destroy them using anti-satellite weapons, I will retaliate with nuclear strikes.

The satellites have already intercepted Russian army communications about a plan to fire supersonic P-800 cruise missiles at Tatishchevo's computer laboratory. If this occurs, I will launch the nuclear SS-27 missiles while the P-800s are still in flight. In Russia, the SS-27s will strike Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg. In the United States, the missiles will destroy Washington, DC, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

I am ready to fight. The choice is yours.

Pioneer Base is even bigger than I thought. After Dad and I fly back to Colorado, he gives me a tour of the facility, pushing my wheelchair down the corridors of all the underground floors. We pass computer labs and machine shops and conference rooms. We peek inside the base's mess hall and the barracks for the soldiers. But he saves the best part for last, when we're on the lowest floor. As Dad opens the door to another conference room he says, “I have a surprise for you.” When he wheels me inside the room, I see Shannon.

Without saying a word, she hobbles toward me. Her left eye is swollen shut and her lips are bunched to one side, but I can tell she's smiling. She bends over my wheelchair to hug me, and I manage to lift my right arm and hook it around her. I'm so glad to see her here.

We hug for a long time. Shannon nuzzles her head against mine, and I can feel the prickly fuzz on her nearly bald scalp. After half a minute she finally pulls away from me, but she keeps smiling her lopsided, nerve-damaged smile.

“Well, here we are again. How are you feeling, Adam? Are you ready for tomorrow?”

I nod. Dad has already given me a rundown of what's going to happen. Of the twelve teenagers who were recruited for the Pioneer Project, six have volunteered to become Pioneers, and I'll be the first to undergo the brain-scanning procedure. If it's successful, the other volunteers will follow over the next few days. The thought of the procedure terrifies me, but for Shannon's sake, I don't let it show. Instead, I smile back at her.

“Yeah, I'm ready. I can't wait to get out of this wheelchair.” I glance at Dad, who's hanging back in the doorway, giving us some space. “Hey, you think we can program the robots to play football? That would be awesome.”

Dad smiles too, but it's not very convincing. I think he's even more scared than I am. “First things first, Adam. We need to get you inside the Pioneer before you can start tossing the pigskin.” He lets out a lame chuckle, then looks at his watch. “Listen, can I leave you two alone for a while? I have a meeting with General Hawke in five minutes. If either of you starts feeling sick, just press that intercom button, okay?” He points at a red button on the wall beside the door. “The medics will hear it and come running.”

He seems anxious to go. I know how he feels—pretending to be brave isn't easy. With an awkward nod, he heads out the door.

I look around the conference room. There are no windows, of course, because we're hundreds of feet underground. There are some chairs, a table, and a video screen on the wall. For a super-secret military base, the décor is pretty ordinary. “This office is so depressing. I wish we could go outside.”

“I have an idea.” Shannon steps behind my wheelchair and grasps its handles. “Let's go visiting.” She opens the door and rolls me into the corridor. “I want you to meet a couple of people.”

She doesn't have to push me—the wheelchair is motorized—but I like it. It's kind of intimate. “Are you going to introduce me to your parents?”

“No, they're a little freaked out right now. They supported my decision to come here, but they can't really handle it. I think they're on another floor now, trying to talk to the general.”

I open my mouth, intending to tell her about Mom, who was so devastated by my decision that she locked herself in her bedroom again. I had to say good-bye to her from the hallway, shouting the words through the bedroom door. But I can't tell Shannon this story. It's too upsetting. I swallow hard and think of something else.

“So who are we going to visit?”

“Some of our fellow volunteers. I met two of them this morning, right after I got here. The other two haven't arrived at Pioneer Base yet.” She stops in front of a door marked with the number 102. “This is Jenny's room. All six of us have been assigned rooms on this floor.”

“And Jenny is…?”

“She's the girl with the rich parents, remember? The obnoxious dad who yelled at General Hawke?”

“She volunteered? I thought her parents were totally against it.”

“I don't get it either. All I know is she's scared. She didn't say much when I tried talking to her this morning, but I want to try again. Maybe you can tell her one of your weird jokes or something.”

Shannon knocks on the door and calls out, “Jenny?” After a few seconds we hear a faint “Yes?” and Shannon opens the door and wheels me inside.

It's a small room with an Army-issue cot and an olive-green footlocker. Sitting on the edge of the cot is the painfully thin girl I saw two days ago in the Pioneer Base auditorium. She's wearing the same clothes as before—a cashmere sweater and a frilly blue hat to hide her baldness. Luckily, she's alone, no obnoxious parents in sight. She's a tall girl, but she looks smaller now because she's bent over double. She's hunched over the side of the cot with her forehead almost touching her knees, as if she's about to vomit. As we come into the room, she raises her head and looks up at us with a frightened grimace. But after a moment she goes back to staring at the floor. Her arms are folded across her chest and she's shivering, even though the room is quite warm.

Shannon pushes me near the cot. Then she steps around the wheelchair and sits down on the thin mattress beside Jenny. She rests a hand on the girl's back and leans in close. “Hey, what's wrong? Are you feeling sick?”

Jenny says nothing. She's shivering so violently I can hear her teeth chatter.

Shannon rubs her back, trying to warm her. “You want me to call the medics?”

Jenny shakes her head. “I'm fine,” she whispers. She keeps her eyes on the floor.

“No, you're not fine. You need to—”

“Please, don't.” She raises her head again and looks at Shannon. Now I see the tears on Jenny's cheeks. “I'm not sick. I mean, yeah, I'm dying of cancer, but I'm not sick right now.”

“Then why are you—”

“I'm sorry, Shannon. I just need to be alone now, okay? My parents left a few minutes ago to get some coffee, and this is the first chance I've had to…to
think
.” Jenny clenches and unclenches her hands. Then she abruptly turns away from Shannon and focuses on me. “You're Adam Armstrong, right? The scientist's son?”

“Uh, yeah, that's me.” I'm thrown for a second by the look on her face. She's so emaciated I can see the skull under her skin.

“Adam, I'm really sorry about this. Shannon told me about you, and I know she wanted to introduce us, but now I'm feeling so… I'm just…”

“No problem. I understand.”

Shannon nods in agreement. “Yeah, we'll come back later.” She stands up and gets behind my wheelchair again.

Jenny seems relieved. She takes a deep breath and manages to smile. Then she narrows her eyes and looks at me a little closer. “You're…you're going to be the first one, right? The first one to…?”

She doesn't need to finish the question. “Yeah, I'm first in line for the procedure. Tomorrow morning at nine.”

I state this fact as calmly as I can, but my stomach twists as I say the words. Jenny bites her lip, and a different look appears on her skeletal face. It's a look of pity. She feels sorry for me. “Good luck, okay?”

My chest starts to hurt as Shannon pushes my wheelchair out of the room. The familiar pain knifes through me, making it hard to breathe. I guess I've managed to stay cool so far by not thinking too much about the procedure. But Jenny's obviously thinking about it. Maybe I should do the same.

Shannon wheels me down the corridor. Her breathing sounds a little rough too, actually. “Well, that was a fun visit,” she says, trying to make a joke out of it.

“Yeah, I feel so much…confidence now. I'm not worried…at all.”

Shannon stops the wheelchair and grips my right arm, the one I can still move. “This next visit will be better. I promise.” She squeezes my arm, then points at another door, marked 103. “This is DeShawn's room. He's with his mother, Ms. Johnson. She's a nurse at a veterans' hospital in Detroit, but she's been taking care of DeShawn full-time for the past year. She told me the whole story this morning.”

Shannon knocks on the door. A woman's voice, loud and cheerful, shouts, “Come in!”

This room is larger than Jenny's and full of medical equipment. I've seen these types of machines at Westchester Medical Center—the ventilator, the heart-rate monitor, the cough-assist device—but the equipment here is newer, sleeker. The machines surround a hospital bed, and their tubes converge on a boy lying on the mattress. At first glance the boy looks small, as puny as a preteen, but that's only because his arms and legs have wasted away to skin and bone. His torso is full-sized, and though his head is tilted at an unnatural angle, he has a handsome, dark-skinned face. His eyes are closed and I assume he's asleep. His rib cage rises and falls as the ventilator pumps air into his tracheostomy tube, which sticks out of a gauze bandage at the base of his throat.

The pain in my chest gets worse. DeShawn has muscular dystrophy. I remember seeing him in the auditorium two days ago and feeling relieved that my own illness wasn't as advanced as his. But now when I look at his body and mine I don't see that much of a difference. I'm just a few months behind him, that's all.

While I stare at DeShawn, his mother greets Shannon with a hug. Then she steps over to my wheelchair, blocking my view of her son. Ms. Johnson looks tired. Her eyes are bloodshot and their lids are drooping, and it looks like she's been sleeping in her clothes. But she smiles as she bends over me. “Oh, I've been looking forward to this.” She grasps my good hand. “It's so nice to meet you, Adam.”

I feel a little uncomfortable. Although I've never seen this woman before, she's treating me like a long-lost cousin. But I like the fact that she took my hand. She's not squeamish like most people. “Nice to meet you too, Ms. Johnson.”

“You look just like your father, you know that?” Still holding my hand, she glances at Shannon. “Back me up on this. Doesn't he look like Mr. Armstrong?”

Shannon nods. “Adam's weirder, though. He's got a strange sense of humor.”

Ms. Johnson doesn't seem to hear her. She turns back to me and squeezes my hand. “Your father's a wonderful man, Adam. He's a blessing from God. He's going to work miracles. For you and for Shannon and for my DeShawn.”

Her bloodshot eyes are glistening. It looks like she's going to cry. This makes me even more uncomfortable, but at the same time I notice something interesting. Ms. Johnson seems to be a religious woman, and yet she isn't horrified by the Pioneer Project. She thinks it's a miracle, like something from the Bible. So maybe there's hope for my mother. Maybe I should ask Ms. Johnson to talk to her.

She finally lets go of my hand and points at her son. “Would you like to talk to DeShawn?”

“Uh, isn't he sleeping?”

“No, it just looks that way. He's awake.” Ms. Johnson gets behind my wheelchair and pushes it next to DeShawn's bed. “He can't talk, but he can hear what you're saying. And I've already told him all about you.” Once my wheelchair is in place, she takes a step backward to give us some privacy.

For a few seconds I just stare at DeShawn's face. His mouth is open, but there's no whistle of breath between his lips because the ventilator is pumping the air straight to his lungs. His cheeks are slack and his closed eyelids are motionless. Looking at him scares me but I lean toward him anyway, straining against my wheelchair's straps.

“Hey, DeShawn. How are you?”

No response. I doubt he's awake. It looks like he's in a deep coma. But even if DeShawn can't hear me, I want to say something hopeful. Maybe more for my benefit than for his.

“Listen, we're gonna beat this thing. We're not gonna let it kill us.” I feel so awkward. I sound like a football coach giving a pep talk to his team. But I don't know what else to say. “My dad's a smart guy, and if he says the procedure will work, I believe him. So I'm gonna go ahead and scout the path, all right? And then you're gonna follow me. We're gonna make this work, DeShawn.”

I'm embarrassed. What I just said sounds ridiculous. Worse, I don't believe it. I'm just pretending to be brave.

But then I hear a rustling noise. I look down at the bed and see something moving under the sheet. It's DeShawn's right hand.

Ms. Johnson jumps forward and pulls the sheet aside. “He can still move that hand a little. Watch this.”

At first it looks like his hand is just twitching. But ever so slowly his thumb starts to rise. After a few seconds it's vertical. DeShawn is giving me a thumbs-up.

“You see?” Ms. Johnson is cheering, ecstatic. “He heard you!”

I feel like cheering too. DeShawn's not pretending. It's the bravest thing I've ever seen.

• • •

That night the Pioneer Base soldiers assign me to my own room on the floor, number 101. Then an Army sergeant comes into my room with an electric razor in his hand. He says he needs to shave my head to prepare me for tomorrow's procedure.

The haircut takes less than five minutes. With practiced ease the sergeant guides the razor across my scalp while I sit in my wheelchair. After he shaves off all my hair, another soldier comes into the room to deliver my last meal—a bowl of clear broth and a couple of slices of white bread. For medical reasons the meal has to be bland, which really sucks. I was hoping for a great last meal, like what a death-row prisoner gets before his execution. The soldier watches me eat to make sure I don't choke.

My room is pretty big, like DeShawn's. It has a hospital bed and a heart monitor, and also a flat-screen TV on the wall. After I finish my last meal, the soldier hands me a remote control and points at the TV screen. “You can watch a video if you want,” he says. “Just press the index button and a list of movies will come onscreen.”