Doomed

by Tracy Deebs

“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.”

  32

  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?

  “The sign we passed a few minutes ago said five miles,” Theo says. He doesn’t turn from looking out the window. Eli’s in the backseat, asleep, after finding the level-three AR gate in Pandora’s Box, so we can plug the code in when we find it. “Five miles? So why this holdup, all of a sudden? It doesn’t make sense.” More concerned than I want to admit, I concentrate on drumming my hands in a complicated rhythm on the steering wheel in an effort to get rid of the restless energy building inside me.

  Theo grins.

  “What?” I demand.

  “You’re playing my favorite song.” He drums along on the dashboard.

  “You like the Chili Peppers?” I ask, amazed.

  “Why do you look so surprised?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s all the Ralph Lauren polo shirts you wear, Harvard boy.”

  He snorts. “Yeah, well, we can’t all look good in Social Distortion tank tops. And going to Harvard does not preclude a love of good music.”

  “Like you even know who Social D is.”

  “Excuse me. I’ve got all of their albums, thank you very much.”

  “Oh, yeah? How many are there?”

  “Nine, including the two live albums. Just because I don’t wear my music preference on T-shirts like you and Eli doesn’t mean I’m all about chamber orchestras, you know.”

  We grin at each other for a second, and it’s the first time I can remember being happy since this thing began. Then Theo’s eyes darken, turn more intense, and things get awkward. Suddenly, sitting here with him in the quiet—dusk falling around us—feels strange. There’s power in this silence, and I feel everything inside me, all my thoughts and hopes and fears, straining toward him.

  It’s wrong, the last thing I need to be thinking about when my feelings for Eli are so unsettled. He tried to talk to me before he fell asleep, wanted to put his arms around me. But I can’t forget how he grabbed on to me, how he told me to shut up and tried to force me to do something I knew was wrong.

  “So, how long do you think it’s going to take us to cross?” I ask, desperate to fill up the silence.

  Theo doesn’t answer right away, and I get the feeling that he’s waiting for me to look at him. But I can’t. I won’t.

  Finally he says, “Seeing as how we’ve been in the same place for five minutes, it could be a while.”

  For whatever reason—my subconscious working overtime or my brain finally puzzling things out—at that moment, the answer becomes clear to me. The strange delay, the long line of cars that started too close to the border, the feeling that I’m missing something that’s been plaguing me since we first slowed down.

  “They’re doing border checks!”

  “What?” Theo looks at me like I’m crazy.

  “How much do you want to bet that’s what this is? They’ve put up a roadblock at the border.”

  “Colorado?” Eli asks, proving that he isn’t asleep in the back, after all. Now I’m more glad than ever that I looked away earlier, before Theo could say anything.

  “Homeland Security.” Theo’s voice is grim. “They’re looking for us.”

  “How do they know what we’re doing?” I ask. “I mean, how did they even know to look for us at Orinoco?”

  “I think that was accidental,” Theo says. “They probably traced the game from you to your father—no offense, Pandora, you just don’t have the vibe of a computer mastermind.”

  “And somehow I’m totally okay with that.”

  “According to the wall we saw, your father is a big investor in Orinoco and probably other places as well. It stands to reason that they’re checking him out, trying to find him.”

  “And when they found us there, it was like hitting the jackpot. More proof that I’m in cahoots with him.”

  “Cahoots?” I can hear the smile in Eli’s voice.

  “What? It’s a word.”

  “Not a very good one.”

  “Whatever. I don’t think my vocabulary choices are the point right now, do you?”

  �
�We need to figure out a way to get out of this,” Eli says, calmly packing up his backpack and mine.

  “Should I leave the road?” I start to turn the wheel, more than ready to make a run for it. What’s one more Homeland Security chase in the grand scheme of things, after all?

  “No! Don’t do that!” Eli and Theo answer at the same time.

  “You’ll draw too much attention,” Theo continues. “If they see you head out into the desert, they’ll know something is up.”

  “What if I hide in the trunk while the two of you cross over?”

  I think it’s a good idea, but Theo shakes his head as he reaches into his backpack, pulls out the CB radio he’s been toting around for two days now. He tunes it into a frequency that has some chatter, then says, “Hey, I’m on back road forty-six looking to cross into Colorado. Anyone out there right now looking to do the same?”

  The CB crackles emptily for a minute, two. As Theo gets ready to try again, someone says, “I just crossed. It’s a mess. Government types are everywhere, all over the road and fanning into the desert. They’re looking for something big.”

  All three of us meet eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Oh yeah?” Theo continues. “They got dogs out there? My wife is terrified of dogs.”

  “Oh yeah, man,” someone else chimes in. “They got dogs and heat-seeking technology. And they’re going through every car like the answer to this disaster is inside it. Took them fifteen minutes to clear my family.”

  “Thanks. Guess I’ll settle in for a long wait.” Theo turns off the radio, then says, “Trunk is definitely out.”

  “Yeah, I got that. If we turn around, we can try a back road into Oklahoma and then go up to Colorado from there,” Eli suggests.

  I shake my head. “If they’re being thorough, they’ll have all the roads out of New Mexico covered. And even if they don’t, we have nowhere near enough gas for that. And we can’t keep stealing cars—eventually we’ll get caught.”

  “So, what are we going to do, then? Anybody got an idea?” Eli asks.

  I don’t say anything, because my ideas pretty much end with “Run for our lives!” I guess Theo feels the same way, because he doesn’t speak, either. We crawl forward a little more, and I steer around a car that has run out of gas.

  Its owners are pushing it the last few feet onto the shoulder. And that’s when it hits me. I drive a little farther, then pull over and shut off the engine.

  “What are you doing?” Theo asks.

  “We just ran out of gas.”

  “But we had half a tank,” Eli counters.

  Theo catches on right away. “Nice, Pandora. I like it.” Then, to Eli, “Make sure we’ve got all the important stuff in the backpacks. And drink some water. We’re walking from here.”

  Though it pains me, I put on the pair of heavy socks from my father, and then step into my Docs. They hurt my blisters with every step I take, but this is the desert, and there is no way I’m traipsing around it at night in nothing but a pair of flip-flops. Blisters are one thing. Snake bites and scorpion stings are something else entirely.

  It takes only a few minutes for us to clean out the car—we’ve packed up so many times that we’re pretty much experts by now—and then we’re walking. But instead of keeping close to the road, like most of the people who have started forward on foot when their cars ran out of gas, we strike out into the desert.

  Four miles doesn’t seem like that long a walk. We run that much in PE a couple of times a week, not to mention having done much longer hikes since this thing began just a few days ago. But we’re tired now, and hungry. Breakfast, such as it was, was a long time ago, and the granola bars we ate for lunch were burned up almost as soon as we finished them.

  Every step takes more effort than I’ve got, and when I allow myself to scan the long stretch of desert in front of us, crossing it seems like an insurmountable task. So I don’t let myself check. Instead, I look at the ground a little bit in front of my feet and tell myself to go just a few more steps. Again and again and again.

  We’ve been walking maybe half an hour or so when Theo reaches into my bag, yanks out the two packs of M&M’s. “You need to eat,” he tells me, opening one of the bags and shoving it into my hand. “The sugar will give you something to burn, at least for a little while.”

  He tosses the other pack to Eli, who catches it on the fly.

  “So do you,” I say, pouring out a handful of candy and then passing the bag to him.

  “I’m fine.”

  I snort. “Who’s being a martyr now? Eat the stupid candy. It’s not much farther to Colorado, right?”

  “Two miles. Maybe a little less.”

  “Cool. Will we even be able to recognize when we pass?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. If we keep up this pace for another hour or so, it should guarantee that we’re a couple of miles in. Then we can head back to the road. We’ll have missed the roadblock, and hopefully we’ll be far enough away that no one will notice us.”

  “What do we do after we get to the road? We don’t have a car. We have money, but I’m not sure how much good it’s going to do us.”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  “Speak for yourself. I am completely out of ideas.”

  “That’s ’cause your last one was so good.” Eli winks at me.

  “Oh, yeah. Right. This is a fabulous idea.”

  “Better than going to jail as cyberterrorists.”

  I shrug. “At least it would only be for six days.”

  Theo laughs. “Wow, from despair to cynicism. You’ve come a long way in eight hours.”

  “What can I say? Nothing lasts forever. Obviously.”

  “You’re a real laugh riot today,” Eli says.

  I look down my nose at him. “Sarcasm is so unbecoming.”

  “So’s fatalism. So get over it already, will you?” He points at some nebulous area in front of us. “Bet I can beat you to that cactus.”

  “We’re in the desert. There are eight million cacti out here. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “That huge forked one way up ahead. You see it, over—”

  I’m off and running before he finishes the sentence. Am I cheating? Absolutely. Do I feel bad about it? Not at all. But I figure if I’m going up against the two of them, it’s only fair that I get some kind of advantage.

  I hear them pounding the sand behind me. They’re getting closer, so I put on an extra burst of speed and cross the finish line a split second before Theo. Eli finishes about a second later.

  “You are such a cheater,” Eli tells me breathlessly, then tugs at one of the locks of hair that have fallen across my eye. “I’m going to remember to watch my back around you.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you’re dangerous,” Theo says, opening a water bottle and handing it to me, along with yet another granola bar. This one’s apple-cinnamon flavor. Lucky me.

  33

  A few hours later we make it to a small apartment complex on the outskirts of Trinidad, Colorado. We’re dirty and exhausted and dying of thirst. But at least we’re back in civilization. If I had to spend much more time in the desert, I would have lost it.

  The first thing I do is lean against a car, pull off my boots, and slide into my flip-flops. My feet are a bleeding mess, and I’m totally miserable. It hurts to breathe.

  “You all right?” Theo asks me, crouching down to get a better look, his flashlight aimed at my heels.

  “I’m fine,” I say, shrugging off his concern. “So, what’s next?”

  They both just look at me. As if there’s any doubt about what we’re going to do now.

  “Okay, then. Let me be more specific.” I turn toward the parking lot and open my arms wide. “What kind of car do you want this time?”

  • • •

  We end up in a forest-green Bronco with 170,000 miles, Oklahoma license plates, and an almost-full tank of gas. It also has a f
airly detailed map of Colorado Springs in its center console.

  Eli and Theo sit in the back looking at the map, trying to figure out where the best bet for farmland is in the area. So far, they aren’t having much luck.

  “I guess we could ask somebody,” I say, stopping at a major intersection and looking both ways. I swear, of all the things we’ve lost, I miss traffic lights the most. This stopping at every corner is more obnoxious than I can say.

  Not as obnoxious, of course, as having another accident would be, so I stop again two hundred feet later and wait as the huge truck to my left starts through the intersection.

  Only, it’s not a regular truck. It’s a military one, and there are armed soldiers on every side of it. National Guard? I wonder. Or air force?

  I’m concentrating on Eli and Theo’s conversation in the back, so after my initial thought, I don’t pay much attention to the truck one way or another. Until it stops in the middle of the street and two soldiers with very large guns come straight toward us.

  “Theo?”

  “Yeah?” He’s distracted and not looking, I can tell.

  “Theo!” I say again, this time making sure my voice reflects my urgency. But by then it’s too late—one of the men is knocking on my window. I roll it down slowly as I search desperately for some explanation as to how little old fugitive me has ended up in Colorado Springs.

  Except he doesn’t ask for any ID as he shines a flashlight in my face. He just asks, “Where are you coming from tonight?”

  I start to say New Mexico, but at the last second remember the Oklahoma license plates we’re sporting. “Tulsa,” I tell him. Behind me, Eli and Theo are hyperalert. I can feel them willing me not to screw up.

  “You know there’s a curfew here, don’t you? It goes into effect as soon as the sun goes down.” He shines a light in the backseat, his mouth growing grim when he takes in Eli and Theo.

  “I didn’t, no. We just got into town, and we’re coming from St. Mark’s.” I name a hospital I saw a couple of blocks earlier.

  “What happened?” His eyes jerk back to mine.