by Kelly deVos
Navarro is tugging me toward the lighthouse.
“They’re gonna kill him!” I try to wrestle my arm away.
“They’re not going to kill Rosenthal,” Navarro tells me in a tone of exasperation. Like I’m missing something of critical importance. “That would be like the Yankees killing the Red Sox. You need two teams to have the game.”
“This isn’t a game,” I say.
“Yes, it is,” he snaps back. “One with the ultimate stakes.”
I don’t know if that’s true, but I don’t want to play.
“If we’re going to have any hope of getting Charles out of AIRSTA, we need to go now. Now, Susan!” Navarro says.
Charles.
He’s right. I let Navarro continue to hold my hand, but I begin to run toward the truck without him dragging me.
We creep up the edge of the cliff, staying as low as we can. As we come closer to the vehicle, I can see it’s a new SUV, very similar to the one Jay used to have back before all this mess. That means it has features like autodrive. I can probably override the computerized ignition. But it also has GPS. Whoever owns this thing can track us.
Also, the windows have thick, dark tint.
Someone could be in there.
“We have to risk it,” Navarro says, as if sensing these thoughts.
There’s really no other choice. We have to get away. That was our plan all along and, honestly, all this pandemonium is a good distraction.
We approach from the passenger side. Navarro gets ready with his rifle. As slowly and quietly as I can, I pull on the door handle.
It’s unlocked.
Navarro nods.
Tension fills my body.
I throw the door open and Navarro jumps forward with his weapon.
And.
The truck is empty.
It’s almost anticlimactic.
I slide in and climb over into the driver’s seat. The car’s fob is in a cup holder in the center of the vehicle, and the ignition has been left in ready mode. Meaning we can start the thing without even hacking the car’s computer.
Navarro gets into the passenger seat. “This is a little too easy.”
“Maybe they wanted to be ready for a hasty retreat?” I say.
My finger is hovering over the power button when the back door opens and a gorgeous blonde girl is pushed into the backseat.
My mouth falls open.
It’s Annika Carver.
She’s carrying a large army green duffel bag and tries to remove the tension from her face as she gives me a friendly wave.
Toby squeezes in next to her.
He played us.
Absolutely played us.
I wish Mac were here.
I wish that I could say whatever she would have said, instead of, “You...you...you...”
“You were going to leave without me,” Toby says.
“Why would we leave without you, Captain?” Navarro mutters.
I stare at Toby in the rearview mirror. “Mac was right! All along you only wanted to—”
To help Annika Carver.
“That’s not true!” Toby interrupts. There are more shots, and it sounds like the gunfire is getting closer. “We can discuss this later.”
Navarro pulls the charging handle of his rifle and turns around in his seat, brandishing the weapon. “Or we could toss you from the car right now.”
Annika clasps her hands under her chin in a perfect damsel-in-distress gesture.
I hadn’t seen her since that day in the Arizona desert when she’d all but left us for dead. Her grandmother, Ramona Healy, had talked my dad into taking Annika with us when we left for Mexico. We were supposed to keep her safe. Instead, Mac and I had had to keep us safe from Ammon Carver’s daughter. Annika had betrayed us and, if push comes to shove, she’ll probably do it again. Now, she is in the backseat with Toby.
“You’re really going to shoot me, Navarro?” he says with an eye roll.
There’s a brief pause.
No. No, Navarro is not going to shoot Toby.
We have to move.
I press the power button. Before I can put the car in Drive, the rear door opens again. Another thin figure forces its way into the backseat.
Annika screams.
I gasp.
It’s Amelia Aoki. She’s pointing a camera with a light mounted to it in our direction. She turns her camera toward Annika.
“Well, well. Plot twist,” she says.
It seemed like everyone knew how to start a war. But no one knew how to end one.
—MacKENNA NOVAK,
Letters from the Second Civil War
MacKENNA
“We can’t just stay here forever,” I say.
Terminus is the anti-Jinx. She’s all instinct and nerve and prepared for anything and he’s, like, the guy whoe needs a supercomputer to figure out if he has to go to the bathroom. Honestly, I can’t really believe they were ever friends.
He makes us camp out about a half mile away from Dollapalooza underneath a billboard for chewing gum. Terminus insists that we stay there overnight, using our sweatshirts as blankets and backpacks as pillows.
Reconnaissance, according to him.
We take turns watching the building for hours. All morning and into the afternoon. Until we’re covered in dust. Until we’ve played a zillion games of tic-tac-toe in the dirt. Until we’ve gone through all the water and food. We don’t see anything or anyone.
I think Terminus would be happy to stay out here until the world ends.
It’s getting cooler and late in the afternoon. “I’m going,” I say, leaving him with no choice but to stumble along behind me toward the sign that says “DOLLAPALOOZA General Hospital: Your new best friend is almost here.”
The closer we get, the more it seems like no one has been here for a long time. Wherever here is.
“What is this place, anyway?” I ask.
Terminus has the binoculars. “I think it’s a tourist attraction. Like a doll factory. And they give tours.”
That makes sense. My mom took me to a place like this when I was little. I spent hours designing my own doll and then begging my mom to buy a doll camping set that cost more than four hundred dollars. That didn’t work but, like, Mom did let us have high tea in the factory’s fancy pink café.
There’s only one car in the parking lot. An inexpensive red compact.
“Maybe the security guard,” Terminus says.
I take the binoculars. The car looks...abandoned. “Not unless the guard lives here. We haven’t seen anyone come or go. And that car is covered with dust. Like it’s been out here for a while.”
Terminus shrugs. “I think the place might be closed.”
“Maybe it’s the weekend.”
This thought hits me like a lightning bolt. I’m a journalist, and I don’t even know what day it is. I don’t know, and I don’t have a way to find out.
I force myself to breathe normally.
“Okay, let’s go inside,” I say.
“We’re going inside? Why?” he asks. “Let’s steal that car and get out of here.”
I shake my head. “There might be supplies in there. Maybe a computer. Maybe money. We won’t get very far in that car if we can’t get gas.”
“Okay,” Terminus says.
We creep into the parking lot. This is the setup from a horror movie. Like, I’m way sure that someone in a mask is following us.
LEAD: Student journalist murdered by creepy dolls.
I bet that would get a ton of clicks.
We snake around the empty parking lot and go toward what, from a distance, looks like a gray boulder in front of a large building. As we come within a few feet of the thing, I realize it’s really a metal statue, all in white, of several le
aves of cabbage with a big creepy baby’s face poking out. The scalloped edges of the leaves cast ghastly shadows across the infant, giving it black vacant eyes. An oversize pacifier shrouds the baby’s chin.
Even though I don’t want to be that girl.
I’m that girl.
I grab Terminus’s hand.
It’s kinda sweaty and gummy, to be honest. Plus, he was the one hiding in the car. So really.
I’m gonna have to save us.
Yay.
Slowly, we approach the front of the building. It’s a basic, boring factory around three stories tall made mostly of gray concrete. But the entrance has been designed to look like an old-timey Southern mansion, with fake white columns on either side of the wide oak doors. There are signs taped all over the place. Some have been created on a printer and some are scribbled in hasty script in black marker. Most of them are in Spanish. In English, one sign says Closed until Further Notice in handwritten script. A printed one reads “Adopt your new best friend at Carl’s Toys in Puerto Peñasco.”
Terminus eyes the signs. “Probably not much point in keeping a tourist attraction open with no tourists around.” He tries to peek in the window made of a stained glass, which is probably quite attractive when it’s not so dusty. “Let’s try the back.”
I’m not sure why the back will be any better than the front, but there also doesn’t seem to be much point in arguing.
The rear of the Dollapalooza building must have functioned as a break area for employees. There are a couple of picnic tables. A coffee can full of cigarette ashes. A small orange plastic playset for toddlers.
Also, the back is muddy.
Some kind of liquid leaks from a pipe that runs off the roof and empties near the back door. My boots make squeaky squeals as I walk through the muddy grass. I pass a couple of large buckets full of doll parts. Little dirty legs and arms, and a few heads without hair.
Gross.
Two steps lead to a narrow door. There’s a sign with blue block letters. ADVISO Solo Empleados. Employees Only. There’s a steel keypad above the doorknob, but Terminus looks around for something else.
He points at a greenish-beige rectangle on a short post to the right of the door. “Perfect,” he says. “That’s the main PBX box. Give me the knife.”
I dig around in the pack until I find the Swiss Army knife.
He hesitates. “What if someone is inside?”
“Just do it,” I tell him. What choice do we really have?
Terminus jimmies the box open and uses the knife to cut through the wires inside. “Okay. It seems like they’ve got a pretty basic setup here. But if their burglar alarm sends data to a monitoring company, this should cut off that access. So once the alarm goes off, nobody will show up to turn it off.”
“Once the alarm goes off?” I repeat. “Like, shouldn’t we stop the alarm from going off?”
He shakes his head. “There isn’t a way to do that from out here. We’ll have to silence the audible device once we get inside. But that should be easy. We need to find it. Fast.” He stares at me.
Clearly, I’m expected to deal with the door. Wow. I’m the supersoldier in this relationship. But also...
What do I do now?
Jinx would kick in the door.
Okay. Okay. Go for it, Mac!
It’s harder than it looks.
The first time I kick the door, nothing really happens other than I call out, “Ow!” as Terminus snickers.
Believe it or not, kicking in a door was one of Navarro’s drills. First, I aim for the strike zone. This is the weak point right around the doorknob. I try to remember one of the ten thousand lectures on three-quarter-inch screws and structural weak points. But all I can really remember is kick the area around the knob.
On the fourth kick, the door bursts open.
Whoa. I. Am Too. Cool.
A siren blares as we enter the building into a break room with a refrigerator and a few wooden tables with chairs. Crock-Pots line the counter. From the looks of it, the Dollapalooza people loved nothing so much as a good potluck.
Terminus locates the alarm master control next to the employee time clock. He rips the panel off the wall and cuts through the wires that attach it to the wall. The building falls silent. Poor little dolls. They had bad security.
We make our way through the inside of the building. There are a few lights on here and there, probably for emergencies. The place is decorated like a cutesy hospital. I have no idea what Dollapalooza was like during its heyday, but now, with everyone long gone, in the nighttime half-light, the smiling dolls lean out of white cribs to whisper warnings. Floppy, dimpled arms hang from the windows of miniature school buses, like they’re reaching out to grab me.
It’s totally silent in the place, and I seriously doubt anyone else is inside or they would have come running at the sound of the alarm. We walk past a large, plastic version of a tree surrounded by a modeled rock surface where more doll heads pop out from openings every few feet. A plaque reads “Please don’t climb on Mother Cabbage.” Some of the fake cribs are decorated with red velvet bows and Christmas wreaths. I get the feeling it was always Christmas in the cabbage patch.
Past the giant tree, there’s a series of child-size desks. Each one has a cheerful sign describing how to print a birth certificate for “your new special delivery.”
My pulse quickens.
It’s just a big, empty office building. Chill out, Mac.
We keep walking and walking and walking and we’re finally in the center of the building, in front of a dramatic split staircase straight out of Absalom, Absalom!
“I bet the offices are upstairs,” Terminus says.
It’s dark up there, but he heads up anyway, taking the stairs at a fairly fast clip. They’re covered with a super-gross green shag carpet.
I cast one more glance at Mother Cabbage. A row of empty baby swings beyond the bank of birth certificate computers sways and creaks. There’s something odd about the way they move. Swinging out of sequence and out of time. Like someone pushed them. “You think we’re alone in here, right?”
Terminus freezes. “How would I know? It was your bright idea to come in.”
Even though no one can see, I roll my eyes. I have to pull it together. I mean, someone around here has to be brave.
“Hang on,” I tell him. “I’m coming.”
As I take my first step onto the staircase, there’s a loud bang, and something whizzes past my right ear and makes a huge hole in the drywall ahead of me.
My heart seems to freeze as I immediately drop to my knees, just like we practiced so many times in Navarro’s drills. Heavy, booted footsteps echo through the large, empty building, coming from the direction of Mother Cabbage. The instant a shadow forms in front of the staircase, I gather up all the courage I’ve ever had. The power of every time Mom kissed my head and told me to be brave, of every time Dad wiped away my tears, every smile from Toby. All the times I’ve believed in myself even when no one else did.
You got this, MacKenna.
I lunge at whoever or whatever is coming our way.
My shoulder slams hard against something cool and metal as I knock into a solid, slim figure. I grunt in pain.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
A shotgun slides across the floor, and I watch as it gets wedged under a doll hand. It’s the kind of gun Dr. Doomsday would love. An old shotgun. Probably some kind of Winchester. The part that I always call the butt is made of wood.
Jinx always corrects me.
It’s the stock.
Someone yanks me back sharply by my hair.
The intruder releases me, and I land flat on my back with a familiar face upside down in my field of view.
Josephine Pletcher.
“Girl,” she says. “You aren’t quite as smart as yo
u think you are.”
Here she is. Her straight, military posture. Her neatly coiled bun at the base of her neck. Jo’s standing over me in the hollowed-out area in front of Mother Cabbage where Dollapalooza workers probably greeted visitors. Of course, she was able to find us. It probably didn’t take them long to figure out what happened.
For a second, I’m relieved. Dad’s people found us. They’ll drag us back to Fort Marshall, and it will suck. Dad will yell, and eventually Jinx will catch up with me and she’ll yell. In a few hours, I’ll be in that bizarro mansion getting another lecture. It’s better than being killed by The Opposition.
Except that Jo Pletcher seemed to be shooting...at me.
In the low light, I can’t read her expression, but she makes an impatient noise. “The colonel left for Los Alamos an hour ago. They’re maintaining radio silence and as far as he knows, you’re on your way to Fort Marshall.” She grabs another fistful of my hair.
I grit my teeth, first to work through the sharp, burning pain in my scalp and my throbbing shoulder, and second to stop myself from screaming as Jo drags me along the tile floor. Trying to work my way free, I dig my fingernails into the hand wrapped around my hair.
Jo grunts in frustration and slams me against the fake plastic rocks. She crouches down next to me, and two smooth, capable hands grab my neck.
I choke and gasp for breath.
LEAD: Rogue soldier strangles student journalist as creepy dolls watch.
Crap. No. That statement totally lacked objectivity. And it contained unneeded info. Like, who cares about the dolls? I’m gonna get my ass kicked, and I can’t even come up with a good headline for the story.
I gasp for breath. As I thrash from side to side, trying to pry her fingers off my throat, I manage to choke out the words, “What...the hell...are you doing?”
Jo smiles. “Solving a problem. Permanently.”
It hits me.
IMPORTANT FACTS:
-They don’t need us.
-My father will soon be dead.
-Jinx doesn’t know where we are.
We are expendable.
Jo came in here with a shotgun.
To kill us.