Doomed (41 page)

I look on in horror, knowing what Theo is going to say even before he gives voice to his thoughts. “We can’t,” I tell him.

“We have to,” he says, trying to start the van. “Eli’s right. We’re sitting ducks out here.”

“I thought the hail was done,” Eli says.

“It is. But the lightning’s just beginning.” The engine won’t catch, making a high-pitched whiny noise every time Theo tries to turn over the ignition. It wasn’t in the best shape to begin with, and the storm must have damaged something.

Theo says as much, and Eli responds with, “Who cares? We’ll wait for the storm to blow past, and then we’ll search the plant. Surely they have some kind of truck we can take.”

Theo’s hands clench around the steering wheel, while the nerves jangling through my system coalesce into a cold ball of fear in the pit of my stomach. “We’re not going to be able to wait. We’ve got to get out of here,” he tells us.

“Are you nuts?” Eli demands. “It’s lightning out there.”

Theo glances at me. “You know I’m right.”

I nod because I can’t speak. All the saliva in my mouth has suddenly dried up. Still, I reach for my boots and slide my feet into them, ignoring the pain from the blisters on my heels. The boots are rubber soled, which gives me a better shot at surviving this latest twist.

“I
don’t
know you’re right!” Eli shakes his head in disbelief as another flash of lightning slams into the ground a few yards from us.

“This van is the only metal thing out here,” I tell him. “It’s going to get hit by lightning.”

“
We’ll
get hit if we go out there. Besides, I thought the tires made the car safe.”

“Maybe so, but I’m not willing to take that risk. Especially with those holes.” Theo points to the destroyed windshield. “If the storm gets worse, the last place we want to be
is in a truck that doesn’t work and can’t block out the elements or flying debris.”

“I’m not going out there—”

“Yes, you are.” Theo’s tone leaves no room for disagreement. He points to the closest building. “That’s where we’re going. You ready, Pandora?”

No. Not even close. But as lightning electrifies the sky around us, I know we’re out of time. “Let’s go.”

I slip my backpack over my shoulders, grab the door handle, slide it open. “In case lightning struck the van or the ground near us, when you jump out make sure you land on both feet,” I tell Eli. He nods, grim faced. I give him a reassuring smile that I’m far from feeling, and then I jump.

The frigid rain hits me, followed immediately by the sharp slap of the wind that nearly knocks me to the ground. But then Theo and Eli are there, on either side of me, grabbing my elbows and bolstering me up. “Let’s go!” Theo shouts.

Bent low, we take off running, dodging around or leaping over debris every few steps. I look at the ground, fighting the wind and doing my best not to trip as I trust Theo to guide us in the right direction. Putting one foot in front of the other is hard enough right now without having to worry about direction, too.

Still, with the wind pushing powerfully against us, it seems to take forever to get where we’re going. I’m exhausted, terrified, barely able to catch my breath in the electrified air all around us.

I stumble, go down onto one knee.

Get back up.

Run a few more feet.

Stumble again.

This time I hit the ground hard. Before I can push myself up, Theo lifts me against him, throws me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and takes off even faster toward the building.

I don’t fight him, though my face flames with embarrassment as his breathing grows heavier. I’m not overweight, but at almost six feet tall, I’m not a hundred pounds, either.

We finally make it to the building, just as lightning explodes around us. I hear a loud
pop
, see the van light up for a second. Theo and Eli don’t notice as they’re busy trying to find a way inside, but my heart nearly stops. We could have been in there.

Before I can wrap my mind around what I’ve just seen, Theo slides me to the ground. He tries the door right in front of us while Eli tries one about fifteen yards away. Neither one opens. At that moment, lightning hits the ground a few feet from us.

“Screw this,” I hear Theo mutter, and then he kicks the door as hard as he can. Eli runs over, joins him. A few seconds later, the door rips away from its hinges. We’re in.

We rush across the room, not stopping until we get to the center, well away from the open door. Then we collapse on the floor in a heap. We watch the storm raging through the windows that line the right side of the room.

I don’t know how long we sit there. Long enough for my heart to stop racing and my clothes to grow clammy. More than long enough for my body to start registering the new aches and pains that falling twice has given me.

I stretch a little, groan as my muscles protest.

Theo looks at me with a frown. “Are you okay?”

“Just peachy.” I smile a little to soften the sarcasm of my answer.

He clears his throat. “I guess trying to beat the storm out here wasn’t such a good idea, after all.”

Eli and I just sit and stare at him in amazement. And then we start to laugh.

It takes me longer to stop laughing than it does Eli. When I finally wind down, he and Theo are staring at me with bemused expressions on their faces. I want to reassure them that our mad dash through the storm isn’t the thing that’s finally pushed me around the bend, but since I can still feel a bubble of hysteria deep inside me, I’m not sure it’s the truth.

“So?” I ask when I catch my breath. “Any bright ideas?”

Eli shakes his head. Theo says, “Not a one.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” I push to my feet. “I guess we should probably start looking for the clue. Whatever it is.”

“We don’t know that it’s in this building,” Eli says as he, too, stands.

“Yeah, but we don’t know that it isn’t, either.” I pull my flashlight out of my backpack. It’s dark outside, and any small amount of light cast by the moon and stars has pretty much been obliterated by the storm clouds.

I shine the light around, try to figure out what kind of building we’re in.

This room is huge and cavernous, with large stainless-steel tables running the length of the back wall, covered in chemistry supplies. There are a number of what look like lab stations set up in the center of the room—that’s what Eli, Theo, and I had been leaning against when we first got in here—and a chemical shower in the front corner. I know what it is because it looks just like the one in my AP Chem classroom.

When I shine the light up, I realize I can’t see the ceiling. The second and third floors are built so that they ring the edges of the building and look down on this central lab. I’m not sure what’s up there, but I do know one thing. This is a huge building with a million places to search. And it’s just one of the buildings at this plant. If we don’t get lucky here, God only knows how long we’re going to be at this.

With the way things have been going, I think our only hope is to keep moving. Staying around here for too long is just asking for trouble.

Theo comes up behind me, places his hands on my shoulders and starts to rub exactly where it hurts. I almost ask him how he knows, but I’m afraid he’ll stop—and the absence of pain feels so good that I want it to go on forever.

“You want to search down here?” he asks softly. “Eli can take the second floor, and I’ll do the third.”

“The faster we get started, the faster we’ll be done,” Eli says, coming to stand next to us.

“Sure.” Reluctantly, I pull away from Theo. “I just wish I knew what we were looking for.”

“You can’t remember anything about this place?” Theo asks.

“Nothing.”

“Piece of cake,” Eli tells me with a wink.

“Yeah. Right.”

I move away from him, start looking over the stainless-steel tables against the wall. As I look, I hear Eli and Theo head toward the metal stairs in the corner. They start to climb, and I bend down, look under the tables. Nothing. Big surprise.

As I get to the end of the wall, the noise from the storm suddenly seems much louder. There’s also a banging sound I can’t identify, at least not until I turn the corner and see a dull slice of light. It’s incongruous here, where the only light should be coming from our flashlights. The banging is getting louder, though, so I follow it—and the odd beam of light. That’s when I realize it’s a weak flashlight, pointing at a wide-open back door. The door is banging against the wall, and I rush to close it. As I do, I can’t help wondering who the flashlight belongs to. The not knowing makes me nervous. Still, I keep going until I stumble over some debris from the storm. I nearly fall, but slap my hand against the wall to steady myself. As I do, I look down and realize what I’ve tripped over. It’s the thing that’s holding the door open. Not debris, but a human hand.

I’m too tired, too inoculated to horror, to stage a fullblown, center-stage meltdown. I do, however, turn my head and call for the guys. Just because I can cope doesn’t mean I have to do so on my own, after all.

Eli comes running, Theo at his heels, and together the
three of us pull the man inside. He’s dressed in a blue T-shirt with the words “Liquid Gold” on it and a pair of jeans, steel-toed boots on his feet. And he’s dead. Not injured, not unconscious like I first thought, but dead. We’re too late to do any good, which seems to be the story of our lives lately.

Still, we can’t just leave him here to rot, can’t pretend he doesn’t exist. The guys carry him into an empty room down the hall, and I find a blanket, drape it over him the same way I did the woman in the convenience store yesterday morning.

They say everything gets easier if you do it enough, but as I stand over this man, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to dealing with death. I hope I won’t, because if I do, I’m afraid that’s when I’ll lose the last kernel of hope I carry inside me. When I’ll let the evil win.

I can’t stand it anymore, so I turn. Walk away. Try to focus on what I was doing before I saw him. But I can’t. There’s something about that man. Something about—

I run to where Eli dropped our backpacks earlier, rip mine open, and pull out my laptop. I look back at where the man lies under the blanket, and I know what the code words are. I remember standing there, in that cornfield, staring at the ear of corn in my father’s hand and listening as he spoke about ethanol and biomass and the future.

I type in the words on the man’s shirt—“liquid gold”—which is how my father always referred to ethanol. The game beeps, and I’m back in Louisiana, standing in front of an oil-drenched Gulf of Mexico.

Theo and Eli see what I’m doing and come running. “Did you—”

“Yes.”

“Awesome,” Eli crows, picking me up and swinging me around. “That’s my girl.”

Theo’s more subdued, but his grin looks just as real. When he smiles at me like this, it feels like I’ve won the lottery—it’s so different from the cold, blank face I used to get from him, and sometimes still do.

“So where are you now?” he asks.

“The Gulf. I think we’re supposed to clean up the mess from the latest oil spill.”

“Really?” Theo cocks an eyebrow. “And how are we supposed to do that when the experts haven’t been able to figure out how?”

“I have no idea.” The guys settle down next to me with their iPads, and together we race to beat the ten-minute time limit. I press a bunch of buttons, trying to figure out what my new power is. Eli and Theo are doing the same, but nothing happens. At least not until a shimmery gold glow appears in the distance.

We have to get to it—I’m not sure how I know this, but I do. And I’m not the only one. A couple of the other players who followed us through the AR gate have noticed the glow as well and rush toward it, dodging around various obstacles the game has laid in our path.

I get tripped up attempting to scale the edges of a bridge that spans the mouth of the Mississippi and plummet into the disgusting oil-and-pollutant-rich water below. Eli and Theo try to catch me, but they’re too far away.

“Keep going,” I tell them as I search for a way out of the filthy river. It isn’t easy. Ships keep cruising by, churning
up the river and knocking me into currents that try to pull me deeper and deeper underwater. I struggle back to the surface time and again, but I’m getting weaker. I can feel it, even before I see that my life and power points are spiraling downward.

“Are you out?” Theo demands as he continues to hurtle through obstacles.

“No. Damn it.”

“I’m coming back for you.”

“Don’t.” Already the glow in the distance is diminishing. “You need to get to that glow quickly.”

Above us there’s another huge crack of lightning, followed almost immediately by a loud rumble of thunder. Seconds later, a deafening screech rips through the air.

“What
is
that?” I ask.

“I’ll go check.” Eli leaps to his feet.

“We only have four minutes left to beat this level! We don’t have time for this.”

“It’s not going to do us any good to level up if we end up dying for real,” Theo tells me as he follows his brother.

He’s barely done speaking before another series of high-pitched shrieks nearly rupture my eardrums. I duck my head and cover my ears, even as I start gathering up my stuff. I finally recognize the sound—a heavy-duty battery-operated fire alarm is going off. Which can only mean the lightning has finally gotten lucky and hit something flammable.

I run to the window behind Eli and watch as the world lights up all around us, fire streaking along the ground as it follows what I can only assume is an ethanol trail. One of
the big tanks must have gotten damaged and this fire—beautiful, hypnotizing, terrifying—is the result.

“We’ve got to go!” Eli shouts, shoving his iPad beneath his shirt.

“Isn’t it safer to stay in here?” I scream above the alarm.

“The fire’s already in here,” Theo yells. “Why do you think the alarm’s going off.” He, too, protects his iPad under his shirt, and, numbly, I do the same to my laptop. Then we grab our backpacks and rush for the open door, flying through the central laboratory, and back out into the night. There is lightning outside, but somehow risking a lightning strike sounds better than sealing ourselves in a building and burning alive.