Last Chance by Gregg Hurwitz

Author:Gregg Hurwitz [Hurwitz, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

ENTRY 33

Over the next few days, Dezi and Mikey stalked me. Dezi had to wrap his knee in an Ace bandage, and his limp was pretty pronounced. But he deserved it. I tried to make sure I stayed within eyeshot of Patrick, and he tried to make sure he stayed in eyeshot of me.

Twice a day like clockwork, Alex checked the crappy little TV. She’d kneel at the base of the bleachers, plug it into that twelve-volt battery, and spin her way through a sea of static. She’d click to every last channel, giving the old-fashioned dial a full turn, and then she’d wiggle the rabbit ears and do it again.

Night after night Patrick, Alex, and Eve would gather with Dr. Chatterjee in his classroom and watch me put on the Rebel helmet to see if the coordinates for our next meet had been beamed to me. Night after night the helmet held no new information.

I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for.

No message meant we couldn’t save the world. Or Alex.

A message meant the serum was ready and Patrick and I would go to our highly unpleasant deaths.

We trusted Eve and told her we were waiting to meet with the Rebels again. But we left out the specifics of the serum and how Patrick and I were due to, you know, explode. It was my choice, and I’m not sure why I made it. I just felt like that was something private for me, Patrick, and Alex. It had been the three of us for as long as I could remember, and even if Eve was my not-really-girlfriend, something felt wrong about including her. We didn’t tell Chatterjee either, mostly not to worry him. We would tell them in due time, once we had the serum in hand. Maybe it was selfish, but dealing with their concern on top of my own mounting dread felt like too much. Plus, the more people who knew, the bigger the risk of Ben finding out. And Ben finding out would change everything.

We went through our routines numbly, the three of us locked inside our secret. JoJo took to carrying Bunny around by the ears, the stuffed-animal head swinging at her side like a kettlebell. The food supplies got lower, the necessity of a grocery-store run growing more urgent. We were down to wilted iceberg lettuce, browning apples, and open-faced lunch-meat sandwiches made on bread with holes where we’d picked out the mold.

Given all the lookout shifts and stress, exhaustion settled into me, bone-deep. I found myself nodding off one day while I was supposed to be mopping the hallways. When I finally got back to the gym, Alex was busy with her futile TV ritual, on her knees before the tiny screen.

The desperation of it struck me differently, maybe because I was so tired. I walked over and rested a hand on her shoulder.

“Alex,” I said. “Maybe it’s time to stop.”

She kept on twisting the dial through fields of static. “It’s my form of praying,” she said.

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