Doomed (11 page)

I glance down the street, pray for a car to stop. For a policeman to see us. For a miracle—something, anything, but it’s no use. Traffic has slowed down even more in the time we’ve been out here, which is typical of life around here. By nine o’clock things are quiet, and by nine thirty, people are usually tucked into their houses.

Still, we’re not completely alone. It just feels like we are.

Minutes tick by as Eli continues to work, and even in the glow of the streetlamps I can see the sweat pouring off him. Josh has stopped crying, so the only sound that splits the silence of the night is Eli’s harsh breathing and the hammer striking the screwdriver again and again.

“Hurry,” I whisper, even though I know Eli’s doing the best he can.

Suddenly Emily screams. I jump, try to peer through the window. Before I can even get a good look, Eli’s crawled out of the car, Emily in his arms.

“Oh, thank God!”

“Theo!” he bellows, as he deposits her on the ground
under a streetlamp that’s a good thirty feet away from the crash site. “Get your ass over here.”

Theo comes running, as if he’s just been waiting for Eli’s shout.

I crouch next to Emily, check to see how badly she’s injured.

“I think I’m okay,” she tells me, but I ignore her as I poke and prod at her right leg. Her thigh is black and blue, her knee swollen, but there’s no blood, and she can move everything fairly well. I think she’s probably right, that nothing’s broken, but then, what do I know?

“Just sit there,” I tell her when she tries to stand, and after a couple of false starts, she listens to me. Which is surefire proof that she’s feeling worse than she’s letting on.

Just then a car pulls up to the crash site, its headlights focused directly on the two SUVs. I blink, try to get my eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness. Two men jump out of the car and run around to our side.

“How can we help?” one asks.

I’m a little shocked that someone has finally stopped to help, but I finally point at Anthony, who is listing to the side, his face completely white. He doesn’t look good, and I know if he doesn’t get treated soon, he’ll die.

“Can you take him to the hospital?” I ask. “There are no ambulances—”

“Of course. Let’s get the two of them into the back of my car.”

It takes a few minutes of maneuvering, but we finally manage to get Anthony stretched out in the back, his head in Josh’s lap. Then the two men slide into the car and drive
off a lot faster than the forty-five miles an hour the area calls for. Seconds later, the truck that hit us roars to life and careens unsteadily down the street, barely missing Theo where he’s standing on the side of the road.

Emily hobbles over to me, and the four of us stare after the truck for long seconds. I’m sure my mouth is open, but I can’t summon the will or the control to close it. But then, neither can any of my friends.

A car drives by—a BMW—and the driver honks at us, not even bothering to slow down. He tosses us the bird, yelling out the window at us for blocking the road.

As one, we scoot back. Seconds later, lightning flashes across the sky and it begins to rain.

That’s when Eli starts to laugh.

Emily and Theo look at him like he’s crazy, and maybe he is, but I understand the emotions ripping through him.

The surreal shock of our present situation.

The horrified amazement at the utter callousness of other human beings.

And, most of all, the sheer relief that the four of us are alive and relatively unharmed, despite the scrapes and bruises that currently decorate every inch of us.

Though now that the adrenaline has stopped pumping quite so fast, the aches and pains I felt before have grown a hundred times worse. Judging from the way the others are moving, the same thing is happening to them. I reach up, gingerly feel the cut at my hairline. There’s a bump there, but at least it’s stopped bleeding.

“So,” Emily says, turning to me once Eli finally quiets down. “What do we do now?”

Time ticks by, and I don’t answer her question, largely because I don’t have a clue what to say. Eli does, though.

He strides over to where what’s left of the Range Rover sits, lopsided and destroyed, on the pavement. Then he reaches in through the windshield and grabs my backpack and Emily’s purse, along with the massive flashlight from the tool kit. After tossing me a shirt from the front pocket of my backpack he slings both bags over his massive shoulder and says, simply, “We walk.”

So that’s what we do, heading north along Heatherwilde toward my house, which is closer than Emily’s. We’re a bedraggled group—bloodstained and injured, tattered and weary—walking in pairs, side by side. A song I haven’t heard since childhood starts to beat fragile wings against the corners of my bruised and battered mind.

The ants go marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching two by two,
The little one stops to tie his shoe
And they all go marching down to the ground
To get out of the rain.

I wonder if that’s what we look like, and more, if that’s what we are to the person who designed this nightmare, who did this to all of us. Just ants scuttling along the earth, annoying and unimportant, as we try to save our useless little existence.

I think we must be, because how else could he do this? How else could he ruin so many lives so easily?

Does he know? Wherever he is, does he see what he’s done to us? Is this what he planned all along, or has it taken on a life of its own? Are things worse than even
he
imagined?

A car drives by too quickly for the conditions, and its tires kick up water from the puddles forming near the curb. It sprays all over us, and Emily curses, slips. Theo’s right there to grab her, his hand on her elbow, lending support. But the near fall hurts her already-damaged knee, and when she tries to walk again, her limp is much more pronounced.

“I need to rest for a second,” she says, and I can hear the pain in her voice. I want to tell her it’s okay, that we can stay here as long as she wants, but the storm is getting worse. And what was a fifteen-minute drive is going to be closer to a three-hour walk, especially at the rate she’s able to move.

In the end, I don’t say anything at all, just start to help her over to the retaining wall that edges the sidewalk. Before we get there, though, Theo and Eli stop us. “Grab on
to my shoulders and wrap your legs around my waist,” Theo tells her. When she can’t pull herself up, Eli gives her a boost onto Theo’s back.

“You can’t—”

“Just do it,” I say. “We need to get going.”

She finally does, reluctantly, but asks, “When did you turn into a Nike commercial?”

“Right around the time the world went insane. You got a problem with that?”

“No.” She grins at me. “Just checking.”

Now that he doesn’t have to worry about Emily’s leg, Theo sets a brutal pace that has me scrambling to keep up. Which amazes me, considering he’s got Emily on his back plus his own injuries from the car accident. She doesn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, but still. Sometimes he and Eli seem almost superhuman.

We walk for miles in the dark, for hours that seem to stretch on forever even with the steady beam of Eli’s flashlight to lead the way. Though the storm finally lets up when we’re about halfway home, by the time we make the turn onto my street, I’m ready to weep with joy, and from exhaustion. It’s after midnight, and while I’m a night owl, I swear this has been the longest day of my life. I want nothing more than to take a hot shower, crawl into bed. And wake up tomorrow with everything back to normal.

Not that that’s going to happen, but a girl can hope.

Suddenly, Emily starts struggling against Theo’s hold. “Let me down,” she says.

He casts a surprised look over his shoulder. “Just let me get you to Pandora’s—”

“No, it’s fine. My mom’s probably waiting at Pandora’s house ready to rip me a new one. We were supposed to be back at my place hours ago.”

“And that has
what
to do with my carrying you?”

Emily doesn’t answer, but then she doesn’t have to. I’ve known Emily’s mom for more than a decade, and while she’s great, and everything my mom isn’t, she also tends to overreact. If she sees her youngest child being carried home by a half-naked giant, there will be a scene like no other. And Emily will end up spending the night in the emergency room, whether she needs to or not.

“Just let her down,” I tell him. “It’ll make everything easier.”

He starts to argue, but something changes his mind. I’m not sure what it is, though he casts a wary glance down the street to my house. The look is gone almost as soon as it appears—before I can decipher it—and after a second he squats down so I can help Emily off his massive back. When he stands, the streetlight catches his face just right and I realize the other reason Emily is making such a fuss.

Theo looks tired, weary, all the way to his bones. It seems strange to see him like this—all night, he’s been so strong, and now, suddenly, he looks amazingly, vulnerably human. But then, he did perform miracles at the crash site before carrying Emily ten miles, all while injured himself.

She must sense that it’s caught up with him.

The last little bit seems to take forever. Emily’s knee is a lot better and she’s barely limping, but the rest of us aren’t doing so well. My feet are on fire, and I have blisters on both of my heels.

We finally get to Theo and Eli’s house, and I raise my hand in an exhausted good-bye, but Eli says, “You’re not getting rid of us that easily. We’ll walk you to your front door.” If possible, he looks even more tired than Theo, like putting one foot in front of the other requires a gigantic effort.

“I’m not going to my front door,” I tell him. “We’re going around that curve up there and getting into Emily’s car. Everything else will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m done.”

“Okay. Then we’ll walk you to the car,” Eli says stubbornly.

“Seriously?” I roll my eyes, give him a little shove toward his driveway. “Go get some sleep.”

“Yeah.” Theo puts a hand on Eli’s shoulder, steers him toward their house. “We’ll see you tomorrow.” The gesture, and the words, are totally out of character for him, but I’m too tired to examine his motives.

Eli looks like he’s going to protest as Emily reaches into her purse, pulls out paper and a pen, scribbles something on it, and holds it out to them. “That’s my address. I live behind the huge H-E-B on Market. Come over whenever you wake up, and maybe my dad can help with the whole accident thing.”

Theo takes the paper, nods. “Thanks.” Then he turns to Eli. “Come on.” His voice is hard, determined.

We leave them there, watching us, though it seems strange. This morning I’d been worried by Theo and disdainful of Eli, and now I don’t want to leave them. I know it’s stupid, but every instinct I have is screaming that I am safe with them in a way I’m not anywhere else right now.

Still, I let them go—what else can I do? But the moment
we walk around the second bend separating my house and Eli’s, I know I should have followed those instincts.

Something is wrong. Really wrong.

Pandora’s Box wrong.

The whole back section of the street, which is normally dark and quiet by eight o’clock every night, is lit up like Rockefeller Center two days before Christmas.

My stomach tightens and I freeze.
Please don’t let it be for me, please don’t let it be for me.
The words run through my head—my own personal mantra against this strange hell my life has turned into.

Emily grabs my hand, whispers, “Let’s go back and get the guys. They probably have another car—they can drive us to my house.”

“What if your mom’s here?”

“She’s not,” Emily tells me. “Let’s go.”

“I can’t just run away from this.”

We move a little closer, scan the front of my house and the cars parked in my driveway. Besides Emily’s, there are two white cars with red and blue flashing lights. A black car with ominously shaded windows. And perhaps most frightening is the huge SUV with gun racks visible in the back. For the first time in a very long time, I wish for my mother in more than the abstract. She’s a lawyer, and it sucks, just completely sucks, that she is thousands of miles away when I need her most.

“Going for help isn’t running away. My dad knows FBI people, works with them. He can help us.”

That sounds good. I need all the help I can get.

“I just don’t understand why the government is here,” she
continues. “They can’t be going to every house that plays Pandora’s Box. Otherwise we would have seen them when we passed Theo and Eli’s, right?”

I don’t answer. There’s a sick feeling in my stomach as I think back to the birthday present on my laptop screen, the one I hadn’t wanted to open. Was I the only one to get that message? The only one in the world picked to unleash this disaster? It doesn’t make sense.

I take a deep breath, try to calm down. But the one thought that manages to get through the haze only makes it harder to function.
Did I do this? Did I somehow do
all
of
this
?

I think of the chaos at Little Nicky’s, of Josh screaming for his daddy, of his father so badly injured. I think of all the panicked people on the street outside the restaurants.

Is all of that somehow my fault?

How can that be possible? The Internet failed before I ever touched that gift. So did the phones and the TV. Pandora’s Box might have caused this, but it isn’t my fault.
It isn’t my fault.

I repeat it again and again, trying to convince myself.

But then why are the police and God only knows who else in my driveway? In my house? It’s not like they have nothing better to do tonight—the accident we were involved in proves that they do.

Emily and I hold on to each other tightly as we take a few steps backward. I don’t have much of a plan, short of getting around the bend before they stop us and then running like hell back to Eli and Theo. Everything inside me screams that Theo will know what to do.