by Tracy Deebs
My stomach ties itself into knots, and I know Eli must feel the same way. All he says is, “Dude,” but then he straightens up until every one of his seventy-eight inches is on full display. He towers over the van, and the blank look on his face as he glances around the station is completely intimidating. More than one man drops his eyes.
Convinced that Eli and the van are safe—or as safe as they can be, Theo grabs my elbow and starts propelling me toward the front door of the convenience store. “Should we tell him to get the knife out?” I whisper hoarsely. “To protect himself?”
Theo shakes his head as he pulls the door open for me. “If he does that, they’ll know there’s something in the van we want to hold on to.”
“But he’s alone out there!”
“And we’re alone in here,” Theo snarls, stopping dead. I crane my head around his massive body to see a man guarding the inside of the door, a huge shotgun slung over his shoulder. I freeze in place, don’t even dare to breathe as he shifts the gun down to rest on the palms of his hands.
“The store is closed, except to paying customers,” he says, the twang of his North Texas accent sounding absurdly threatening.
“We have money.” Theo reaches into his pocket, pulls out the cash he’d put there a little while before. “I need to buy gas and some water.”
The man eyes the money greedily. “How much gas you need?”
“Enough to fill up my van out there, and a few extra containers.”
The man nods. “The water’s down at the end of the first aisle.”
Theo nods back. “Where’s your restroom?”
“At the back of the store. It’s an extra five bucks if you want to use it.”
I gape at him, but Theo doesn’t say anything. Just puts his hand on the small of my back and walks me in the right direction. “Go in there and get it done,” he says. “Quickly.” He hands me his watch so I can time how long the dye’s on my hair.
“It’s going to take twenty minutes at least.”
“Then get started. I’ll be right out here if you need me.” There’s an underlying urgency in his voice that I’ve never heard before, not even when we were running toward the dock, the threat of discovery a spark in the very air we breathed.
The future doesn’t look good.
I rush into the women’s bathroom, which is one of those single-use kinds with no stalls, just a toilet and a sink. At least it’s clean, which is more than I had dared hope for. I tear into the box and mix the two containers quickly. Pop on the pair of gloves, rip off my hat, and start squirting the dye onto my hair. Some drops sprinkle onto my T-shirt as I’m rushing like a crazy person, but I barely notice.
My mind is on Theo, who is outside the door with a gun-toting man. And Eli, who’s alone at the car. Defenseless.
After I get the dye on, I glance impatiently at Theo’s watch. The countdown begins now. I clean up, toss everything in the trash can, then wash my face.
Go to the bathroom.
Wash my hands.
Count the cracks in the ceiling.
Glance at Theo’s watch again. Only five minutes have passed and I’m losing my mind. What’s going on out there? Is Theo okay? Eli? I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin.
The next fifteen minutes are probably the worst of my whole life. I imagine Eli being jumped, beaten. Theo getting shot. The two of them having to fight everyone outside the station, and I curse my father again and again.
How could he do this? How could the man I remember, the man from those pictures, voluntarily throw the world into such incredible chaos? What did he hope to gain? And how could he think whatever it was was worth it?
The twenty minutes are finally up, and I bend down into an excruciating position and begin to wash the dye from my hair. There’s a lot of it, and the water flow is not great, so it takes a lot longer than I want it to.
I’m almost done when there’s a loud banging at the door. “Girl, what are you doing in there? Other people need to use the bathroom, you know.”
It’s the old man with the gun. “I’m coming!” I shout. “One more minute. Please.”
I scrub my head hard, trying to wash out the last of the dye as quickly as possible. It’s only after I’m done that I realize I’ve screwed up again. My hair is soaking wet, dripping all over my face, my shirt, the floor, and I have no towel.
Way to think ahead, Pandora.
The knock comes again, so I grab a few paper towels from the dispenser on the wall and squeeze them over my hair. It’s not great, but it will have to do. I jam the cap back on my head and open the door. The old man is there, looking furious, and behind him are three women who seem just as pissed.
“Sorry,” I say, and then I run. Eli is waiting for me at the end of the aisle. “Theo’s with the car,” he says in response to my look of surprise. “Let’s go.” He wraps an arm around my shoulder as he hustles me to the front of the store.
“You got it done?” he asks as we all but run up the aisles.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
I’m in total agreement, as the suspicion I felt leveled at us when we first got out of the car has cemented into crackling resentment in the half hour I’ve been inside the store. I wonder if my hogging the bathroom is what set them off, and I feel awful. I knew this was a bad idea.
Theo’s pulled the van up to the front door, and he’s inside, motor running and doors locked. As soon as he sees us, he opens the locks and we literally hop in on the run.
I fasten my seat belt and look around the car. Theo has jammed water bottles everywhere he can find space. Under the seats, in the aisles. Enough to last us a week, maybe more, if we’re careful. I have a feeling we’re going to be very careful.
Suddenly, Eli shouts, “Holy shit! What happened to you?”
I’m in the backseat, so I can’t see anything but the right side of Theo’s face, which looks fine to me, bruised cheekbone and cuts from the accident notwithstanding. Scrambling out of my seat belt, I lean forward and finally see what Eli is talking about. There’s a jagged wound at Theo’s left temple, and blood is dripping from it, all the way down his face.
16
Theo Shrugs, barely bothered by a cut that looks intensely painful. “Nothing big. Just an altercation over the allocation of resources that we paid for.”
“What does that mean?” asks Eli.
“They jumped you for the water?” I say at the same time.
“They did.”
“Why didn’t you call me, man? I would have had your back.”
“And leave Pandora on her own? Or the van unattended? I don’t think so.”
Anger sweeps through me at the condescending answer. “I’m not the one who got his face bashed in,” I tell him. “They weren’t after me.”
“You’d be surprised at everything those guys were after,” Theo says, and there’s something in his voice. Something that tells me the fight was about more than water. The knots in my stomach twist a little tighter.
Eli must have figured out the same thing because his cheeks flush angrily. “It’s like Lord of the Flies out there. Any second I expect someone to jump out and scream, ‘Kill the pig!’”
“Pull over,” I urge Theo. “I want to look at your face.”
“In a little while. I want to put some distance between us and them.”
“But your cheek—”
“Will be in a lot worse shape if those bastards catch up with us. Keep driving, Theo,” Eli snarls. He’s furious and I don’t blame him. I want to go back to that stupid gas station and beat the hell out of the guys who messed with Theo. For him to look the way he does, there had to be more than one or two of them. He’s just too strong and too big for it to have been anything else.
I drop my gaze from his face—I can’t look at it anymore—and end up staring at his bruised and skinned knuckles instead. How much worse is this thing going to get?
I scoot to t
he back, pull some ice out of the cooler, and wrap it in one of the shirts they bought me earlier at Walmart. “Here, put this on your face,” I tell Theo.
He starts to argue, but I stare him down in the rearview mirror, and finally he gives in. “Fine. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
I pull out another shirt—a pale-pink ribbed tank top—along with the second of the two bras I packed in my backpack. I’m soaking wet from my awkward-in-the-extreme hair washing.
“Don’t look back here for a minute,” I tell them, even though I know it’s ridiculous. They saw me running around at the accident scene in nothing more than a bra, but this is different. More intimate.
I try to climb into the third seat, but the supplies are stacked so deep that it’s almost impossible. I give up, settle on facing backward as I shimmy out of my wet clothes and into the new ones.
I turn around just in time to catch Eli watching me from the mirror in his sun visor, and I smack him on the back of the head. “I think we need to establish some ground rules,” I growl.
Eli just laughs, his green eyes gleaming mischievously. “I think you have me confused with Theo. I’m not the rule-following kind.”
“You need to start. At least when it comes to seeing me naked.”
Theo’s eyes jump to the rearview mirror. “He saw you naked?”
He sounds so annoyed that I swat him, too, for good measure, before settling back against my seat. I’m exhausted, completely drained. It’s been over twenty-four hours since I’ve slept, and I know I should try to rest now, but I can’t. I’m way too hyped-up and nervous.
“Pandora, have you got any gum?” Eli asks about fifteen minutes later.
I toss him my backpack. “I think there’s some in the front pocket.”
“Thanks.” He opens it up, then pulls out an envelope. “Hey, what are these pictures of?”
Too late I remember shoving the pictures I downloaded from my father into my bag—back before I realized that he was the cause of all this.
“They’re the pictures my father sent me. The ones that uploaded the worm when I clicked on them.”
Theo swivels to face me. “You have copies of the photos?”
“Yeah. Why?”
After glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure that no one is following us, he pulls the van over. “Let me see them.”
“Why? They’re just stupid pictures of when I was little. Nothing else.”
“Still.” He all but rips the envelope out of Eli’s hands. He doesn’t say anything while he goes through the stack, and neither does Eli, who is also looking at them. They flip through all twelve, then start at the beginning again. “What are you looking for?” I demand.
“I don’t know. But I have a hard time believing these are just pictures. Your father seems too smart for that,” Theo says.
“They aren’t just pictures. They were the worm!”
“There’s got to be more. Otherwise, why have you launch the worm? Why not just do it himself?”
“Hey, isn’t that the Capitol building in Austin?” Eli asks, pointing to one of the pictures.
“Yeah, so?”
“So your dad reprogrammed Pandora’s Box to start out next to the Capitol. Don’t you think that’s strange?”
I start to tell him that this whole thing is strange, but then I remember my weird shock at being dropped into the game in the center of Austin. The strange feeling of déjà vu that overcame me. “What are you trying to say?” I ask, taking the picture from Eli.
“Get out your laptop,” Theo tells me. “You need to go back.”
“Go back where?”
“To the beginning of the game. There’s a clue hidden in the Capitol somewhere.”
“That’s ridiculous! A clue to what?” I’m totally confused.
“I don’t know. But it’s there.” He glances at Eli, and for once there’s no animosity in his voice when he asks, “How much do you want to bet?”
“Nothing else makes sense,” Eli agrees. “We knew you were missing something.”
“Why would he do that? Why would he go through all the trouble of bringing the world to a crashing halt, only to leave clues as to how to make it okay again?”
“Isn’t that what it said? ‘Beat the game. Save the world?’”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I think we have to believe it. Or what’s the point?” Theo interjects.
“There is no point! He’s crazy.”
“Look, just try, okay?” Eli says. “What’s it going to hurt?”
Me, I think. It’s going to hurt me even more than I already have been. I don’t want to get my hopes up, don’t want to pretend that my father is something more, or better, than he is. It’ll just hurt too much when this whole thing ends up being nothing but a wild-goose chase. I want to say all that, but I can’t. Not even to them. I don’t want anyone to see what’s inside me right now.
But they’re both looking at me, waiting for me to do what they want or give them a reason why I won’t. They’ve risked everything for me and this is all they’ve asked. How can I say no?
I take out my laptop and try to turn it on. “The battery’s dead.”
Theo reaches into the glove compartment, pulls out a charger, and hands it to me. “Did you think of everything?” I ask him, astonished.
“I tried.”
I plug one end of the charger into the 12-volt outlet and the other into my laptop.
The screen comes to life and it looks exactly the same as when I last left it. Except Eli’s right. The number in the countdown has changed. “Total annihilation in 9 days.”
I press a few buttons, but my avatar doesn’t appear. The screen doesn’t change. Nothing happens at all. “I’m locked out,” I tell them. “When the Internet crashed, it must have taken the game with it.”
“Let me see.” Eli grabs the laptop and messes with it for a few minutes, but I can tell by the frustrated expression on his face that nothing’s coming of it. I don’t know how I feel about that. Disappointed and worried, sure. But there’s also a sense of relief. If I can’t get in, can’t play the game, then I’m not responsible for fixing things. Which sounds really good right about now, if I’m completely honest. There’s something to be said for a father who is not just a psychopath but a screwup as well.
“Here.” Eli hands the computer to Theo, who’s been impatiently watching his every move. “You’re the hacker. You try.”
Theo pulls a wireless card out of his wallet and inserts it into my laptop.
“That won’t work,” I tell him. “It’s not that we don’t have wireless coverage out here. It’s that the Internet is down. Gone.”
“It’s not gone. It’s just that the pathways that let us access it have been shredded.” He spends a few seconds getting around my operating system, and after that, I’m not sure what he does. It’s all in code that makes no sense to me at all. But after about ten minutes, he hands the laptop back to me. The game is live and ready to play.
“What did you do?” I demand.
“It’s complicated.”
“I think we can follow along,” Eli snarls.
Theo doesn’t answer, just stares at him with that blank face he slides into place at will. But when I look at him pleadingly, he relents with a sigh. “After the Egyptian government took their whole country off-line, it got people in Congress and other government agencies here all interested in having that same kind of power in the United States. A bill authorizing a presidential kill-switch started circulating—not for the first time. And while it hasn’t gained enough support to be voted on, the idea of it interested me.”
“It interested you?” I ask incredulously.
“In a strictly academic and horrifying kind of way,” he clarifies. “So I started messing around, researching a bunch of stuff, hacking into other stuff, and I realized our government already has the capability to do that. I mean, it only makes sense, right? If a developing nation can
do it, of course we should be able to. Especially since our military is the one that laid the entire Internet foundation anyway.”
“You mean the president can just kill the whole Internet?”
“Not legally. At least not yet. But Homeland Security has the ability to do it. They also have the ability to safeguard a small section of the Internet, so that they can communicate with each other even in the middle of a massive disaster like this one.”
“How?”
“I would imagine the most hackproof safeguards out there and some massive generators to keep everything going electronically.”
“Which means what exactly? They have the Internet even when no one else does?”
“That’s my guess.”
“So what does that mean? That they do still have Internet and communications access? They actually can spread around pictures of me from city to city?” Panic tears at my throat. If I’m spotted with Eli and Theo, it’s not just my life on the line. It’s theirs, as well. I’ve never liked that idea, but at least when I thought the government was blacked out, I didn’t worry so much about us getting caught. About them getting arrested for cyberterrorism as well.
Theo shakes his head. “No, because only the highest levels of the government would have access to this. All the regular government agencies are screwed like everyone else.”
“So what does this mean in reference to the game?” Eli asks. “How did you get it going again?”
“It was just a theory I’ve been working on.” Theo shrugs. “It seems to me that this worm has to work on several different levels, taking over communications, electricity, et cetera. But to take over the Internet the way it has, I figure your dad has to have access to that kill-switch—and probably the safeguarded government area.”
“How?” Eli asks. He looks fascinated, which I don’t understand. The more Theo explains, the sicker I feel.
“That, I don’t know. I need the game matrix to have any hope of figuring that out.”
“So what did you do? Did you get into that area?” I ask, suddenly more afraid for him. For all of us.