“Amber!” Tori is frantic. “Are you okay?”
“I—I think so.” Amber sits up in the trash, moving all her limbs, taking stock of herself.
“I’m alive,” croaks Malik. “No thanks to Laska.”
“Kid?” comes an anxious voice from above. It’s the cop, and he’s more worried than mad.
It’s a good news/bad news kind of thing. It’s good that nobody’s hurt. But then he disappears, which can only mean one thing.
He’s coming after us.
7
MALIK BRUDER
I should kill Amber for putting us through this.
But right now I’m too busy running for my life.
One by one, we climb out of the Dumpster and drop to the pavement. We’re covered in coffee grounds and pizza grease, and my nose is bleeding. But under the circumstances, we’re lucky.
We dash down the alley to the next street, and find an even narrower alley off of there. We hug the wall, peering out just in time to see the police cruiser pass by on the main road, our cop hunched over the wheel, looking from side to side.
Thanks so much, Laska. We don’t have enough trouble with Project Osiris on the hunt for us. We need the law breathing down our necks. If that cop catches us, it won’t be just Amber who’s in trouble. He’ll arrest all four of us this time. I wonder if there’s such a crime as aiding and abetting a moron.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Amber says urgently.
“You think?” I ask sarcastically.
Eli’s not so sure. “Maybe it makes more sense to lie low.”
Laska shakes her head. “His car has a police radio in it. I heard it while we were driving to the medical building—all these cops telling each other what to watch for. He could have every officer in Denver on the lookout for four kids.”
It’s not good. If the Purples hear about four runaways, it’s not going to take them long to put two and two together. Either they’ll find us first, or the cops will, and we’ll be sitting ducks in a cell when Serenity’s goon squad comes to drag us back to Happy Valley. We can try to explain what’s happened. But Laska’s already proven how believable our clone story is out here in the real world.
“We could separate, and meet back when the heat’s off,” Tori suggests.
“No way!” I exclaim. “Two stupids don’t make a smart. We almost got ourselves killed getting Laska back. We’re not going to break up on purpose.”
“We need to stick together,” Eli agrees. “But we also need to be miles away from where they’re going to be searching for us. How do people get around a city?”
“We had the Purples’ car,” I remind him, “but that wasn’t good enough for you.”
“We had to ditch it,” Eli defends the decision. “The Purples were following us by air.”
“People take buses,” Tori reasons, “and trains—”
“Those things are full of passengers,” Eli cuts in. “Someone is bound to remember four kids and where they got off.”
“What about a taxi?” Amber suggests.
“Even worse,” Eli replies seriously. “The driver could be listening to the radio and hear about the search. At best he’d know exactly where he dropped us. At worst, we could be still in the car when it happens.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do?” I ask belligerently. “Flap our arms and fly?”
While we stand there, looking helplessly at each other, a police car cruises by on the street at the opposite end of our alley. I can tell we’re all wondering the same thing—is that the same cop, or has he sounded the alarm, and we’re already being surrounded?
“What we need,” Tori muses, “is a ride from someone who doesn’t know he’s giving us a ride.”
“Oh, right!” I explode. “Like there’s somebody that blind or that stupid!”
We hear a loud grinding sound as a truck gears down to come to a halt. For a moment, it fills the opening at the end of the lane before stopping just past it. The driver jumps out, and disappears into a small luncheonette.
Suddenly, as if drawn by some invisible magnet, Tori is scampering toward it.
“What are you doing?” I hiss. One girl trying to get me killed per day is my limit.
Urgently, she motions us over to join her. It’s a medium-size dump truck with a cherry-picker attachment on the back. The sign on the cab door reads: McHenry’s Tree Service, LLC. The bed is overflowing with leafy branches and twigs.
“So what?” I challenge in a whisper.
“Don’t you get it?” Tori insists. “In Serenity, that company from Taos used to come to trim the branches away from roofs and power lines. Did they dump the cuttings in the center of town? No. They took them somewhere else.” She regards us meaningfully. “We want to go somewhere else.”
“You mean we stow away in there?” Eli asks.
My jaw must be stuck out at least three inches. “I refuse.”
“What’s the matter?” Amber challenges. “Are you afraid of a few sticks?”
“Not the sticks.” My face feels hot. “The bugs.”
She’s thunderstruck. “Wait—you’re afraid of bugs? You?”
“Not afraid. I just don’t like them. The Dumpster was bad enough with those flies. Who knows what’s living in all these trees!”
“Listen, Malik,” Eli begins. “We’re all doing stuff we don’t like—”
A police siren cuts the air. I scramble up the side of that truck so fast I probably leave a smoke trail. I vault over the edge of the bed and disappear into the leafy branches. I hear the rustling and snapping of the others piling in beside me.
As I burrow lower into the dense green cuttings, twigs scratch at my face and arms. There are thicker branches too, and I roll onto one, nearly skewering myself, shish-kebab style. My head collides with something hard.
“Ow!” Amber’s voice.
I hope it hurts.
“Is everybody here?” Tori asks.
“Do you mean us, or the caterpillars?” I reply. They’re everywhere—worms with fur coats. The garbage was miserable, but at least it wasn’t alive. My skin is crawling.
The sirens are all around us now; no one is disputing whether or not we did the right thing. We lie low, not that we have a lot of choice. It feels like forever, but it’s probably only ten more minutes.
The door of the cab slams, and the truck starts up again. And then we’re away. Every motion of the heavy vehicle inflicts more bruises, more scratches, and more itchy discomfort. It’s stop and start for a while, and then we accelerate to a steady speed.
“I think we’re on a highway,” Amber calls.
With great effort, I crawl/swim/climb to the “surface” and peer over the side of the truck. Tori guessed right. The tall buildings of Denver’s core are behind us; we’re leaving town, not exactly safe, but at least we’re putting some distance between ourselves and the police search.
I burrow back down and report to the others.
“How do we know when to get off?” Amber asks.
“That’s easy,” says Tori. “When we stop.”
“Let’s hope this isn’t an express to Massachusetts,” I grumble.
Tori laughs. “I don’t know much about Massachusetts, but I’m pretty sure they’ve got their own branches. They don’t need to truck them in from Colorado.”
It’s an uncomfortable ride, but no one is complaining, not even me. The farther we get from downtown Denver, the greater our sense of hope that we might have avoided the disaster that very nearly put an end to our brief shot at freedom.
After several more minutes, the truck slows, and we can tell we’re off the highway.
“Get ready,” Tori advises. “The next time we stop, we should make a run for it.”
The McHenry’s truck makes several turns, but never actually halts. At last, we feel the momentary sense of braking, and emerge from our hiding place, ready to leap for it. All at once, we’re backing up, our vehicle emitting a series of warning beeps.
“What’s going on?” demands Amber.
Finally, we stop. That is to say, the truck does. The bed is tilting, so we are too. Behind us—quickly becoming below us—a loud electric grinding begins, the kind of noise where you feel the vibration in your teeth below the gum line. Eventually, the bed rises so high that the contents—and that includes us—begin to slide. The back flap lifts on a hydraulic motor, and the branches start to pour out. The grinding becomes a whole lot louder, and a cloud of dust is thrown back at us, stinging our eyes and making breathing difficult. Through it, we can see a huge metal hopper and, inside it, the whirling cutting blades of a wood chipper.
“Get out! Get out! Now!” I scream.
We try to move in the opposite direction, but it’s like trying to run straight up. We’re part of the load, and the load is being drawn inexorably into the maw of the machine.
I crawl to the side of the truck bed, and clamp both arms over the top. Eli tries to do the same, but the slope is pulling him down too quickly.
I throw out a leg, accidentally kicking him in the stomach. “Grab hold!”
He latches onto my foot, locking it into his armpit. Tori comes up behind me and throws her arms around my neck. That’s three of us accounted for. Where’s Laska?
I spot her. She’s clenching a thick branch sliding down the center of the payload, screaming in terror. In desperation, Eli reaches out for her with his free hand. He misses Amber, but gets just enough of the branch to stop its descent. God only knows how he stays attached to me and still hangs onto the branch and Amber. But the bed is close to full vertical at this point, and the choice has become starkly simple: we hold on, or we get sliced and diced.
I’m yelling my head off in agony and exertion. My grip on the side of the truck is what’s keeping everybody from falling. Amber’s howling, Tori’s weeping. You can barely hear any of it over the shriek of the cutting blades.
I don’t know how it happens. One minute, I’m clamped to the side; the next, I’m not. We’re skidding along the dumper, still attached to one another, but heading down toward the lethal blades. We’re going to die and all I can think is it’s my fault.
In the noise and chaos, we never hear the hydraulic motor that closes the truck’s back flap. The next thing I know, Amber yelps in pain, as the three of us fall on top of her, crushing her against the metal barrier that has just saved our lives.
The bed is coming down again, lowering to horizontal. My heartbeat, though, is anything but normal. We were so close to being dead. If the back flap had stayed open a split second longer . . .
We’re clones who came from nothing and no one, and we would have been gone as if we’d never existed.
Somehow, we manage to climb over the side and jump to the ground and roll. When I try to get up again, my legs have turned to rubber.
Eli is the first to make it to his feet. “Move!” he hisses. “Before we get run over by our own escape truck!”
We manage to get up and stagger clear. That’s when the driver of the truck spots us for the first time.
“Hey, what are you kids doing here? This is a restricted area!”
“Sorry,” Tori calls, during a pretty good job of sounding off-hand, considering what we’ve just been through. “We were looking for a place to play soccer.”
“What—here? One of these machines could take your arm off and chop it into hamburger!”
“Yeah, right,” I say bitterly. “Like that could ever happen.”
There’s a gate in the barbed-wire fence where trucks come and go. Newly energized, we sprint for it.
I don’t want to kill Laska anymore. When you’re on the run, there are enough ways to die.
And we just narrowly escaped one of the worst.
8
TORI PRITEL
Malik proves that a point can be interesting and gross at the same time.
“If we went into that wood chipper, what would have happened when the cops tried to take DNA samples of the goo that was left of us? We’d be a perfect match for four criminals who are supposed to be locked up in jail.”
Amber rolls her eyes. “At least the caterpillars didn’t get you.”
He glares at her. “Big talk from the person who got us into this mess. You’d better hurry, Laska. There are still a few people in Denver who don’t know that we’re clones.”
Amber’s tight-lipped. “Okay, that was a mistake. But it was a chance worth taking. If it had worked, Osiris would be out of business, and we wouldn’t be sneaking around and looking over our shoulders.”
I’m not so sure how I feel about putting Osiris “out of business.” That would mean my parents would end up in jail for being a part of it. I obviously hate what they did to me, but I can’t bring myself to hate them. I know they loved me. They would have cried if I’d gone into that chopping machine—and not just because their experiment was down the drain.
We’ve been walking about twenty minutes, watching the dusk creep over the open fields.
Eli says what we’ve all been thinking, but haven’t had the guts to say out loud: “It’s getting dark. We’re going to have to find a place to sleep.”
“Oh, no problem,” Malik says sarcastically. “We’ll just check into one of these five-star hotels and order up room service.”
“It doesn’t have to be a hotel,” Eli persists. “We just need shelter and a place to rest.”
Amber squints and points. “I see some lights over there.”
After another few minutes, we come to a neighborhood. There are tree-lined streets, and neat brick and adobe homes. It’s the closest thing to Serenity we’ve seen since leaving, with a couple of major differences. First, all of Serenity would fit into a few blocks here, minus the plastics factory, of course. And second, in Serenity, every home had a tree house, and a pool. These houses are smaller, and not quite as well kept. When poor Hector dented his garage door trying to teach himself to ride a bike, the damage was fixed by nightfall. Things aren’t as perfect in the real world. Here every house has something at least a little bit wrong with it—a missing bulb, a loose curbstone, uncut grass, an oil-stained driveway, or a pile of folded newspapers on the front stoop.
Amber notices that too, despite the fading light. “What kind of person orders newspapers and just leaves them on the porch?”
Eli looks thoughtful. “Maybe they got really busy, so they haven’t had time to read.”
Malik is doubtful. “Too busy to see them? They probably trip over them every time they go in and out of the house.”
“No, then the papers would be all ripped up,” I muse. “It’s almost like there’s nobody living here.” I know it must sound crazy that it takes so long to dawn on me. But we’re four kids who never left Serenity, even overnight. “Vacation!” I exclaim.
Malik looks mildly interested. “What about it?”
“That’s why the papers are piling up! The people are on vacation! This house is empty!”
Amber is getting excited. “So we can find a way in, and hole up while we figure out what we should do next.”
Malik breaks into a big grin. “First dibs on the TV.”
“First dibs on the shower,” I chime in.
Eli looks worried. “I’d really love to avoid breaking and entering.”
“I admire you for that,” says Malik with a smile. “Tell you what—you sleep on the street. I’m looking forward to a nice warm bed.”
“Come on, Malik. This is somebody’s home. How about respect for other people’s property?”
“How about respect for DNA?” he shoots back. “The guy I’m cloned from—you think he’d have a problem with breaking into this house? He’d probably steal everything that wasn’t nailed down too. But I’m not going to do that because I’m too nice. You’re welcome.”
Amber rolls her eyes. “Shut up, Malik. I’m not thrilled about breaking in either. But sometimes you have to balance the bad thing you do for the good result you need. We need to get out of
the open where we can be spotted. We need a real night’s sleep. We need to eat something. Everything we need is inside that door.”
Eli is unconvinced. “I can just imagine the people we’re cloned from using excuses like that to justify what they do.”
Sometimes it’s easier to picture Eli as an exact genetic copy of a Good Samaritan than a criminal.
“We’re not them,” I soothe. “We’re us. And we’re just trying to survive. If people see four kids sleeping outside in some park, what do you think they’ll do? Call the cops.”
Eli nods reluctantly. “Fine. How do we get in?”
“Let’s wait for it to get a little darker,” I advise. “If this place is anything like Serenity, everybody minds everyone else’s business. We’ll wait till nobody can see what we’re doing, and go in from the back.”
We slip through the gate into the yard, and into a metal tool shed. The floor practically crawls with ants and beetles, and I hear a whimper from Malik. (For a big, tough guy, he’s such a wimp about insects.) I pick up four flashlights. We can’t use the lights of the house because we don’t want the neighbors to know anybody’s in there.
Once the sun is down, it gets dark pretty fast. It’s time to make our move.
“So what happens now?” asked Malik. “Heave a rock through the back slider?”
I don’t even answer him. I’m concentrating on the house, searching for a way in. I notice the upstairs windows first. It must be an artist thing—something about those windows is vaguely unbalanced. The sash sits a tiny bit higher in the one on the left. It’s barely a quarter-inch difference, but to me it’s glaringly obvious.
The window isn’t open—there’s no gap. But I’m willing to bet—if Serenity kids bet, which, of course, we don’t—that it’s closed but not locked. That’s why it’s slightly higher; there’s no latch forcing it down.
So if I can get up there . . .
All at once, I see the path. It’s as clear as if someone marked it in chaser lights: shinny up the drainpipe, sidestep to the roof of the screen porch, and then it should be handhold one, handhold two, handhold three—and you’re in.
Criminal Destiny Page 6