Day One

by Kelly deVos

  Of all the victims of Carver’s weapons of destruction.

  My anger is enough.

  I find my footing on one of the rock sculptures and use it as leverage, kicking my leg over my head and into Jo’s face. She stumbles back, crashing into the wide fake tree.

  “Leave me alone!” I force the words out of my throbbing throat and roll to a standing position.

  Jo jumps up too. “God. Why can’t you die already?”

  She walks calmly in the direction of the gun on the floor.

  I need to do something. I can hear Jinx’s voice in my ears. Disable with a strike to the nose. Then immobilize with a hit to the lower body. Maybe I can crack a kneecap.

  But Jo is an experienced soldier and I am...

  Me.

  I let out a scream. A high, shrill scream. The kind of scream that would be really embarrassing in another time. I charge at Jo again, this time like a linebacker going after a quarterback at a football game. With minimal effort, she puts one arm out and pushes me away. I fall down.

  On my butt.

  Again.

  A baby doll pops out of the cabbage patch and onto my lap. It has dimples and red yarn hair and smiley brown eyes. This is a pretty damn embarrassing way to go out.

  I can almost read my obituary.

  MacKenna Novak, killed in the cabbage patch.

  Where in the actual hell is Terminus? Did he run out and manage to steal that craptastic car in the parking lot?

  I’m gonna cry.

  LEAD: MacKenna Novak is pathetic.

  I crawl over and slump down against Mother Cabbage, the weirdo plastic tree that will be serving as my headstone, and I wait for Jo to return to shoot me.

  I close my eyes.

  “Stand back...and...and...” It’s Terminus’s voice. Scared. Uncertain.

  Opening my eyes, I see Terminus over by the cribs. He has the shotgun, and Jo is about five feet in front of him. She’s halfway between me and Terminus. She isn’t about to take orders from him.

  Jo steps forward.

  A loud, low bang erupts in the quiet night.

  The shot sails by, missing both Jo and me. A cloud of white stuffing and exploding doll faces rises from the cabbage patch. A piece of plastic doll face lands at my feet, and there’s something horrifying about the half of a green eye that stares up at me. Some of the doll’s forehead is attached, along with a few pieces of black yarn.

  “You know you can’t shoot me, Partridge.”

  It’s Jo’s voice, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from now.

  The thing is, she may be right. Like, Terminus might not be able to aim the damn gun. I scramble around the plastic tree trunk and hug my knees in tight as a bunch more shots crack out. Four or five.

  The other thing is, I didn’t pay any attention whatsoever back in the bunker when Navarro made big charts of guns and talked and talked and talked about how much ammo each could hold.

  Click. Click. Click. Click.

  “You’re out of ammo, idiot,” Jo calls out, confirming my fears.

  Then it’s like everyone and everything is in motion.

  In hopes of finding something to use as a weapon, I make a break for the twisting staircase, using the wrought iron railing for support. Jo darts up from under the birth certificate computers. Terminus isn’t too far behind us. One of the white cribs shimmies and falls forward as Terminus makes a break for it.

  I glance over my shoulder to see him skid to a stop by the cabbage patch. He tosses the dolls from the patch at Jo as she chases me up the stairs.

  I take a right at the landing and make my way up to the second floor. From where I am, I can see the legs of a sofa. When I’m nearing the top of the stairs, Jo gets hit by a preemie swathed in a blue blanket with an “It’s a Boy” tag attached. She grunts as it bounces off her and falls near my foot. The fake boy had a name.

  Connor Dean.

  He’ll never be wrapped up and put under the Christmas tree.

  Terminus launches more dolls into the air. They mostly hit stair railings, making weird bong sounds, like the ringing of a large bell, as they hit the iron railing.

  I arrive at the top of the stairs at what looks like a waiting area with velvet couches and a few walnut-finished, round-back chairs. It’s a loft lit by low emergency night-lights, and it has more of the fancy wrought iron railing on the side that overlooks the fake baby hospital below. A coffee table is covered in doll catalogs and magazines. Mostly in Spanish.

  More footsteps stomp on the stairs.

  Terminus must be on the way up.

  Then. All three of us are upstairs.

  Jo goes for me. She grabs the tail of my T-shirt, pulls me toward her and then pushes me back against the railing.

  Hard.

  A section of the wrought iron railing gives out as I crash into it. I struggle for my footing, managing to grab the remaining railing, but my balance falters and I fall back and wind up dangling over the side, hovering in the space over Mother Cabbage. The edges of the metal cut into my fingers, and the railing creaks where it was attached to the staircase bannister. I scream again as a few drops of blood trickle down my fingers.

  It won’t support my weight for long.

  The dark tile floor is a dark void beneath me.

  Jo kneels in front of me. For a second, she watches me uncertainly. Sweat beads on the skin above her upper lip. Maybe she’s gonna toss me off, but even if she doesn’t, my arms are aching and are about to give out.

  I should have done more upper body workouts.

  I could let go. It would be so easy.

  Jo smiles and leans forward.

  Before she can pry my bleeding fingers from the bar of the iron railing, there’s a crack, a gurgling grunt, and Jo’s eyes roll back in her head. I’m barely able to swing myself to the side before she falls through the hole created by the missing rail bars.

  Even still, Jo almost takes me down with her.

  Something wet drags along my leg.

  There’s a smack, almost like the way eggs sounded when my mother broke them on her stainless-steel mixing bowl to make fritule.

  Terminus grabs my forearms in the nick of time.

  He’s flopped down on his stomach and has one hand around each of my arms. Since neither of us will be winning any weight lifting prizes, it takes a couple minutes to drag me up. Terminus keeps his feet dug into the green carpet and scoots back as he yanks me back onto the landing. I groan as I scrape my arms on the jagged wooden edges of the landing as he pulls. But we do it.

  Terminus falls back, sitting cross-legged. The empty shotgun rests next to his legs. The part that I know as the butt is all bloody. Terminus must have whacked Jo over the head.

  It takes me a minute to catch my breath. It’s Jo’s dark red blood. I swat at it and make a gagging sound. “Ah...oh...ugh...yuck...” I have her blood on my hands.

  I’ve helped kill someone and her blood is on my hands.

  I have, like, literal blood on my hands.

  Terminus stays as frozen as one of the dolls.

  I dig my fingernails into my own palms to stop a growing panic.

  “Okay. Okay. Okay.” I’m pretty sure I spend a whole minute muttering to myself. I want to scream and run and scream some more and go hide somewhere. But. “We need to get out of here.” Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention when Navarro talked, but I do remember that you can’t run all over the place firing your gun. Sound like that carries. For miles. “We don’t know who might show up to investigate.”

  Terminus says nothing. His blue eyes are huge marbles, wide with shock. His face has turned greenish gray. Like a Halloween mask.

  “Hey!” I say grateful for the annoyance that floods through me. “Let’s go.”

  “Go?” he repeats. “Where are we gonna go?”r />
  Perfect.

  I was the one who was dangling off the side of a balcony, swinging back and forth like a pendulum, about to crack my damn head on that checkerboard tile floor. It was me Jo tried to choke to death. It ought to be me sitting there panicking.

  “And Christ. I just killed someone.” His voice is stuffy. I think he’s crying. Or about to cry.

  Oh yeah. There’s that.

  I hold out my hand to help him up. He doesn’t immediately take it. I actually feel kinda bad. For Terminus. And even for Jo. “You saved my life. You had to do something. You had no choice. We didn’t have a choice.”

  He finally takes my hand. The nonbloody one.

  The warmth of his palm is a relief.

  Once he’s up, I try to clean my other hand on my pants, but all that happens is that I smear blood on my only clean pant leg. I look like roadkill.

  “I don’t suppose you passed a bathroom?” I ask.

  He runs his hand though his cropped hair. I don’t think he’s gotten used to his new cut. “Uh. Yeah. Actually. And I found the office supply room.” Terminus motions for me to follow him. I notice he has a flashlight and a bag of stuff. Supplies like bottled water, candy bars, more flashlights and batteries poke out of the top of the unzipped green canvas bag.

  I feel even worse. He wasn’t hiding like I thought. He was searching for supplies.

  I trail behind the path of Terminus’s light. He opens a door a few feet from where Jo fell off the landing. The charming, Southern-style loft gives way to a generic gray office. We pass cubicles and desks loaded with cheap computers, family photos, toy boxes and dolls in various states of undress. I can’t read any of the paperwork, but it looks like order forms.

  “From the looks of it, people still work up here,” I say.

  Terminus nods. “Until recently anyway. When I was looking around, I found a memo in English. They stopped the tours at the beginning of the year. But they were shipping dolls until two weeks ago, when the border closed.”

  We arrive at a small room full of Post-it notes, pens, regular paper, extra staplers and spare computer parts. There’s even a stack of e-tablets.

  “Somebody left their gym bag in the supply room,” he tells me.

  Terminus picks up a black duffel bag and tosses it to me. He notices me staring at the e-tablets. “I put a few of those in the bag. But I need to inspect them before we turn them on. I don’t know if they have network cards or what.”

  He leads me to the bathroom, gives me the flashlight, and I go in there, hoping that there’s something in the bag that fits. The bathroom has three toilet stalls and a long steel sink. I open the bag. Inside, there’s a green shirt with an illustration of a sleeping doll and the words DOLLAPALOOZA DREAMS in script letters, a purple headband and some black leggings. The shirt and leggings are too short and too tight, but they’re better than wearing the bloody pants. I change and put my old clothes in the trash can.

  I leave the bathroom, and out in the main office area, Terminus seems a bit more stable. “I checked all the desks. I found a jar of coins and an envelope that must be petty cash or something. To be honest, I’m not sure how much money it is.”

  Checking out the container of gold and silver coins, I can’t tell either, but at least it’s something.

  Okay. Good.

  “So, what now?” Terminus asks.

  I sigh. “All we have to do is make it to that dusty car. Hope The Opposition or Jo’s friends or whoever else might hate us isn’t out there. Hope we can start the car. Hope we can make it to the border and hope Antone will help us.”

  I’ve got the flashlight, so I lead us toward the stairs.

  Terminus follows. “Who’s Antone?”

  “Dr. Doomsday’s friend at the border.”

  After a minute, we’re back in the loft. It’s quiet out there. Which should be reassuring.

  But somehow, Terminus hesitates near the velvet sofa.

  Truth is, I don’t want to go down there either.

  LEAD: Journalist and hacker hide in doll factory forever.

  I creep to the edge of the loft, along the part that has the railing intact. We’re gonna have to go down there. But some part of me needs to know what we’ll be facing. It’s probably a mess. I grip the iron railing, expecting to see Jo’s body contorted in the shape of a chalk outline like in one of those crime TV shows.

  Oh. My. God.

  I wave the flashlight all around.

  “What?” Terminus asks. And then with more urgency. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing,” I whisper.

  Josephine Pletcher is gone.

  Visceral violence is an essential spectacle to motivate a crowd.

  —AMELIA AOKI

  Report: The Image of the Second Civil War

  Stamped: Top Secret

  JINX

  There she is.

  That killer.

  That murderer.

  That same face I see in the mirror each morning.

  We’re driving at full speed across the bridge. In similar vehicles.

  Are we the same? Do we have the same stuff inside?

  “Where is Charles?” I scream into the fading daylight, even though I know where he is. And anyway. It’s not like Mom will help me get my brother back.

  Mom leans out her window. A guy who’s basically Tork 2.0 is in the driver’s seat next to her. “Last chance. Pull over now,” she yells. She adds this little carrot. “I’ll let your friends go. You won’t get a better offer.”

  The same offer Tork made the night that Mom let him push us out of the back of the truck. Mom, who made up a song to help me memorize the quadratic formula. Who brought me breakfast in bed every birthday. That same person wants me to bargain for my life.

  “Should we stop?” Annika asks.

  “Why do you always want to surrender?” I snap.

  Toby kneels in the space between the seats. “Not helping, Jinx.” He’s got a small first aid kit, but it’s no match for the giant piece of glass sticking out of Navarro’s eye.

  “Gus! Tilt your chin to minimize the blood loss,” I say. Apparently, Toby’s brief induction into the Provisional Army of the New United States didn’t include first aid. “We have to get him to a doctor.” I’m not sure who I’m even talking to. Who the we even is.

  Navarro moans.

  Annika mutters, “What are we going to do?” over and over.

  “I don’t suppose your team can help us out here?” Toby calls to Amelia.

  She remains in the backseat, wordlessly filming.

  “Give me the gun,” I say to Toby. When he hesitates, “The rail gun. Now. And get ready to drive.”

  He activates the small silver weapon and then passes it to me. “It’s only got four projectiles.”

  Okay.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the backseat window of the other SUV open. Mom is going to give the order for them to take us out. I slam on the brakes, letting Mom’s car go sailing past us. We skid to a sharp stop in the middle of the bridge. Up ahead, a small green car is traveling in the opposite direction. It’s still about a mile away but is flashing its lights at Mom’s SUV.

  Hoping to avoid getting shredded by broken glass, I take off my jacket and do my best to cover the bottom window with it. But I don’t have time to be slow or careful as I hoist myself out the window and onto the car’s roof. Jagged shards drag along my arms and rip my new pants.

  “Susan... Susan...what are you doing?” Navarro says with another moan.

  Using the handles of a luggage rack mounted to the roof, I hoist myself up. I poke my head back through the window. “Count to five and then drive,” I say to Toby.

  I climb into the center of the roof, take off my belt, loop it around the steel bar of the part of the rack nearest to the back bump
er. After I loop the belt back around my waist, I’m barely secure when Toby hits the gas and we resume traveling toward the Oregon side of the bridge.

  Rifle fire breaks out as we speed toward the other SUV. I keep myself as low as possible. Annika is screaming again. It would help us if she would just shut up. But her reactions are the only part of this situation that feel normal.

  I’m doing my best to contain my terror, to hold in the part of me that would like to jump off the roof of the car and into the ocean. I have to save Charles...and now Navarro.

  The rail gun feels cold in my palm.

  I’ve never fired a gun like this before, but the design mirrors that of a more conventional weapon. It looks remarkably like a Colt 1911. And I do know how to use that.

  Bracing my feet on the front bar of the roof rack, I squeeze the trigger.

  Dad never told me much about rail guns. They were illegal. Supposedly giant and only for the military. But I vaguely recall him saying that they use an electromagnetic system to fire projectiles at a superfast velocity. Faster than a speeding bullet.

  Literally.

  The projectile explodes from the gun, creating an unusual, bright spark, almost like a firework. I’m unprepared for the recoil and I don’t hold my arms nearly still enough. I miss Mom’s car by at least five feet. The projectile dart hits the metal concrete and rebounds into the metal railing on the other side of the bridge. It bounces back and forth like a pinball.

  If it doesn’t stop, we’re going to drive right into it.

  A huge wave crests over the side of the bridge, covering our SUV for a minute and soaking my clothes. I’m totally wet again. Toby swerves uncertainly.

  Okay. Okay. I force myself to take three quick breaths. The sharp wind pushes my hair into my face. My teeth chatter and I fight to keep my eyes open even as they burn from the salt water. I have to hit the tires of Mom’s SUV. I have to immobilize them.

  Keeping my arms as straight and as stiff as I can, I aim for the rear passenger side tire. I squeeze the trigger again, keeping my knees tense and firm and my feet stiff against the bar of the roof rail. I suck in a breath.