The Survival Code, page 30
Like Terminus said, Tork is a true believer and not a soldier of fortune.
Tork sighs. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do...”
Before Tork starts to reveal his little plan, I realize I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to kick him as hard as I can in the nuts. Then I’m going to pound on the truck’s window as hard as I can. This should attract Dad’s attention. Hopefully, he can do something before Tork can shoot us with my bag full of guns.
Get ready.
Okay.
Go.
Pumping the muscles in my hands a couple of times, I force my body into a crab position, flex the muscle in my foot and kick Tork.
At least I try to kick him. He catches my foot midswing.
“Like father like daughter. Stubborn. Fine. We’ll do this the hard way,” he says.
But he’s given me an important piece of intel. He’s not supposed to shoot me.
I suck in a deep breath and ready my most bloodcurdling scream. Before I can make a sound, Tork scrambles forward and clamps a thick hand over my mouth. I bite down hard.
He tastes like salt, gasoline and menthol cigarettes.
I gag. Tork doesn’t let go.
But it’s enough of an opening.
MacKenna pushes herself off the sidewall of the truck bed.
She’s got a fierce expression on her face.
Tork pushes me back as MacKenna takes a swing at him. My head hits the sidewall of the truck with a bong. Throbbing pain bursts through my temples and bright spots flicker in my peripheral vision. The wind is knocked out of me but the duffel bag is within my reach. I grip it tightly even as I struggle to breathe. I hear a thud.
As I sit up, my gaze falls on Mom. She is hugging her chest and breathing hard. She hasn’t drilled in a long time, and she must be having some kind of panic attack.
MacKenna has fallen down too. Tork hit her. Blood oozes from her forehead. She stumbles up, intent on taking another swing at Tork. I can’t let her do this alone, so I crawl forward and charge his knees.
Tork blocks us both, crowding us to the side of the truck. He shoves me hard, and I knock into MacKenna. At that moment, Jay takes a dip in the dirt road without slowing. The weight of the horse trailer acts almost like a catapult, sending us bouncing into the air.
I make a grab for Tork’s jacket collar to stabilize us. That doesn’t go the way I hope.
Instead of keeping us in the back of the truck, I take Tork with us as we fall from the bed and skid into the dirt.
The truck is probably only doing fifteen or twenty miles an hour, but the landing still hurts like hell. MacKenna grunts as we roll along the rocky earth. I’m able to keep the bag of guns with me and come to a stop in some kind of prickly bush.
I sit up.
If there’s any consolation, it’s that the horse trailer clips Tork as it passes. He screams and is sent flying farther ahead, falling into the center of the dirt road before crawling into the bushes on the other side.
I’m about to force myself up when I realize.
No brake lights.
They aren’t stopping.
I see Mom on all fours in the back of the truck, trying to get a look at what’s happened.
She knows we aren’t back there.
She doesn’t do anything at all to try to get them to stop.
The truck gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
They aren’t stopping.
DR. DOOMSDAY SAYS:
WE OFTEN GIVE OUR ENEMY THE MEANS OF OUR OWN DESTRUCTION.
Well, this is it.
Dust to dust, I suppose.
I release the bag of guns. My hair is tangled up in what smells like creosote, but since Charles isn’t here, I can’t be sure.
There’s nothing left to do but sit here and wait for the inevitable. The Opposition will find us. According to Tork, they won’t kill us.
Some things are worse than death.
I want to cry but I can’t.
I feel dead. I understand Collins now. That look he had on his face. When you know your fate, the only thing you can do is to accept it. Wait for it. Embrace it.
Somewhere behind me, MacKenna shuffles around, the tiny rocks sliding and crunching under the soles of her Cons. Coming closer, she whispers over my shoulder, “Okay. Okay. What do we do?”
What do we do?
When I don’t answer, she crawls even closer and nudges me on the arm. “Come on. What’s the plan? Jinx? Jinx?”
“There is no plan,” I say. I fight off a cold shiver.
“What? They’re coming back, right?” She stands and faces the direction the truck went. Like she might spot them out there somewhere. “Did they see that we fell out?”
“My mom saw.” And she didn’t do anything.
I try to reason with myself. Tell myself that Mom panicked and that there was probably nothing she could do. Tork really seemed to scare the hell out of her. She probably hasn’t seen him since he came to the house. But...however it had happened, we were out here.
Alone.
“Okay, okay.” MacKenna’s breathing heavy. On the verge of a panic attack. “What about those famous drills? Maybe—”
“No, we didn’t practice what to do if we were ever out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by lunatics with guns and our whole family drove off with Ammon Carver’s daughter.” I want to face MacKenna, but I can’t muster up the energy to get my hair out of the bush.
MacKenna sinks into a cross-legged position next to me and pulls strands of my hair from the bush. She sighs. “Well, we have to do something, Jinx. We can’t just sit here and wait for The Opposition to come pick us up.”
I’m able to turn my head, so she must’ve gotten my hair out of the creosote. “We have no car. No food. No water. No supplies. My dad is gone.” For a minute, I think I’ve managed to make MacKenna as dejected as I am.
Instead her face fixes into a hard resolve. “We got out of Phoenix and halfway to Mexico by ourselves. We escaped from Goldwater Airfield. We can do this.”
I blink hard to stop the tears.
“Come on. What are we gonna do?” MacKenna asks.
Before I can answer, there’s a low moan from across the dirt trail.
Oh my god.
It’s Tork.
He’s not dead.
I’m on my feet in a second. “It’s impossible to kill that guy,” I whisper.
“He’s like the walking dead,” MacKenna answers.
“Come on,” I say, taking her arm.
I come alive the way I do when I’m groggy in the morning and take that first sip of coffee. “We have to get out of here. We’ll go back to the barn. Maybe we can find Healy. Or maybe there will be something in there we can use. If not, we’ll get to the stables.”
“Okay. Let’s go,” MacKenna agrees. “Don’t forget the guns.”
It takes about twenty minutes at a pretty fast jog to get back to the barn.
When we get inside, I throw open each door of the supply cabinets, but we don’t find much. They’ve been picked clean. There’s two really old cans of Mexican beer and a box of 9mm ammo, but not much else. “We’ll have to go to the house,” I say.
I jump at the sound of more gunfire coming from the direction of the house.
We are so totally screwed.
“I don’t want to go back in there,” MacKenna whispers.
Neither do I. But traveling without supplies is risky. “If we go without food and water...and we don’t catch up with my dad...we’ll have to ride all the way to Ajo...”
“If we go back into the house, we could get our heads blown off,” she says.
“Can you use a gun?” I ask.
MacKenna shakes her head.
I hand her one of the Glocks and do a quick demonstration. “Hold it with both hands. Fire it at anything that moves. Anything that isn’t me,” I add. I keep the other Glock ready for myself.
We’re about to take off for the house when we hear boots scrape against the rocks.
MacKenna and I both freeze and duck behind the barn doors.
I raise my gun and put my finger on the cold trigger, stabilizing it against the metal door.
Whatever’s left of my heart barely beats.
A figure emerges.
It’s Bob Healy.
MacKenna gasps and I don’t blame her.
Healy takes the corner slow, almost dragging one of his legs as he shuffles like he’s doing a bad impersonation of Frankenstein’s monster at Halloween. He’s covered in blood, probably wounded.
His shoulders slump when he spots us.
“What the hell happened?” MacKenna asks.
“Let me get the first-aid kit,” I say, watching the blood soak the legs of his jeans.
We hear some indistinct shouts coming from behind the house. I jump as a few engines roar to life.
“I don’t want no first aid,” Healy says gruffly. “And what happened is that the damn patrol from Goldwater stormed in here, looking for the lot of you, of course.”
“You fought off a whole patrol?” I ask. That’s typically a couple of Humvees with four to six soldiers in each.
He takes a deep breath. His gruff mask slips away. “I woulda. I gave a couple of those young guys a bit of hell. In the end though, it was Ramona. She went out and surrendered herself. Exactly the way we’d agreed she wasn’t gonna do and...” He stops hobbling for a second and braces himself against the barn door. “Once they had her, that settled it. They had their prize. Ammon Carver’s missing mother apparently trumps the hunt for Max Marshall.” He looks at me. “You...you...didn’t make it?” he asks.
“My dad did. And Annika. So I guess it wasn’t totally for nothing.” I’m unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
He huffs and resumes his slow pace up the trail. “Of course it’s for nothing. It’s all for nothing.”
“Then why did you help us?” I ask.
“Ramona,” Healy says, through clenched teeth. “She’s always felt guilty. Always felt like she musta done something wrong. She wanted to atone. Maybe now she has.”
“Well, then...” I don’t really know what to say.
He catches my eye. “The ranch is clear. But they’ll be back. If you’re making a run for it, you better get on it. I keep a couple emergency packs in the stable.”
I take a breath of relief that we won’t need to go into the house.
We leave him on the trail and go faster than before, jogging as fast as we can without slipping in the dirt. Other than the sounds of our shoes, it’s dead quiet.
The lights are on inside the stables. I file that under thank God for small favors. Freckles and Ramona’s horse are in their stalls, but they’re uneasy. I bet all the screaming and gunfire has gotten to them too.
I pull one of the saddles off its hook on the wall and try to remember what Ramona did to get these things on the horses.
“Oh here. Let me,” MacKenna says, snatching the saddle from my grip. “Whoa, Cuddles. Whoa.” Cuddles. According to a nameplate on the stall door, the golden horse answers to Cuddles. My stepsister saddles up both horses almost as quickly as Ramona did.
While she does that, I find the supply packs Healy talked about in a plastic bin. I relax a bit at the sight of several bottles of water, a bunch of granola bars, a compass, flashlights, emergency flares and a couple of Swiss army knives.
When the horses are ready, I do my best to climb back up onto Freckles, who’s even more jittery than before. The bag of guns makes me clumsier than usual, but I figure we have to take them. I position the bag in front of me and wrap the handle around the saddle horn.
The ranch itself stays quiet, but as we ride from the stable I can start to make out the dull rumble of car engines echoing across the desert. Maybe The Opposition leaving.
Or coming back.
To avoid Tork, I use the compass to steer us east for a half mile or so, circling around the ranch, cutting a path through cows that are milling around, unconcerned by our affairs. After about thirty minutes, we end up back on the trail in the spot where we last saw the truck.
We’re lucky that the moon is nice and bright.
“Well. Here we go,” MacKenna says.
“See that hill over there,” I say, pointing at a darkish blob in front of us. “We should ride that way. If I know my dad, he’ll take cover behind it.”
“That seems a ways off,” she answers. “You really think they’d go that far without waiting for us?”
My pulse drops. “My dad would want to wait in the safest spot.”
Plus. We don’t know when they found out we’re missing.
I decide I don’t like horseback riding. It makes me nervous. My pulse flutters and I sort of suspect that Freckles would like nothing better than to be rid of me.
“I think I really am a jinx,” I mutter.
“I don’t believe in stuff like that,” MacKenna says. “Luck. Chance. Whatever.”
“Why?” I ask. “Don’t you sort of wish that your dad had never run into my mom at that golf tournament? You could be back in Boulder right now eating sarma.”
“That’s what I mean. Dad probably would have gotten that job at the bank anyway. They were really going out of their way to recruit vets.” There’s a pause filled by the clip-clop of the horses. “And...and I’ve always thought that Stephanie meeting my dad was no accident.”
She’s got her face turned to the moon, so I can’t read her. “What do you mean? They literally ran into each other in the line to rent golf carts.”
MacKenna snorts. “Your mom doesn’t even like golf. And she just happened to be there? A high school teacher at this fancy VIP event? She’s hot and single and here comes a whole parade of rich men? Husband hunting is a thing, Jinx.”
I want to roll my eyes but nobody would see. “My mom’s not like that. And if she was, she’s way too disorganized to pull a plan like that together. It’s a minor miracle when she shows up to her classes with the right set of papers graded.”
She sighs again. “It just always seemed to me that Stephanie was out for him. From the very beginning. She’s exactly his type. Like almost deliberately. From the long, shiny hair to that uniform of designer jeans and fancy sweaters. You remember that first day we met?”
“Sure,” I say, although I’m not really sure where this conversation is headed. “They took us to brunch over at the Phoenician.”
“Yep. Your mom’s there arranging shrimp on her tiny plate. It was like, perfect for my dad. Like he could have ordered her from his dream catalog of uppity suburban women who make ideal wives for snobby executives.”
I bite down on my lip and try not to sound defensive. “My mom is not uppity.”
Not uppity at all.
Part of me wishes MacKenna would stop talking. There’s so much happening. The whole world is so messed up. I know life is full of shades of gray. That Mom can be a good person and an imperfect stepparent. But not now. Right now, I need to believe in her.
MacKenna keeps going. “And then they’re running marathons together. Watching old movies on TV. Golfing every Saturday. I find out that she never used to do those things. Ever. Like, she’d been playing Survivor Sue in the desert with Dr. Doomsday and then, all of a sudden, she meets my dad and she’s the top student at the Rancho Mesa Country Club.”
My heart flutters with unease, but I try hard not to let it show. I shrug. “My mom’s got one of those personality types. She goes with the flow. Plus, people will do anything for love.”
“They’ll also do anything for power. And money.”
Even though some part of me knows what her point is, I can’t allow myself to think about it. I know that my mom was a schoolteacher who was spending hours staring at her laptop, trying to figure out how to keep making mortgage payments after she and Dad divorced. Still, I find myself asking, “MacKenna. What is your point?”
“My point is that there’s no such thing as luck,” she says. “We’re here because of a series of choices. We can’t get out of it by pretending it’s all up to chance.”
“I didn’t make a choice to be here,” I tell her. All I wanted was to finish my video game.
“We’re always making choices. Even when we choose to do nothing.”
I hug myself. This reminds me of what I told Navarro.
There’s always a choice.
The two of us ride in silence for a while. When we can’t stand the thirst any longer, we crack the bottled water.
As we approach the dark mound, MacKenna brings Cuddles to a halt. “Do you hear that?”
I strain to listen, but’s she right. There are voices just around the corner of the hulking rocks ahead. Someone is on the other side of the hill. I try to be quiet as I dismount from Freckles. “Stay here,” I tell her.
I toss her Freckles’s reins, but she throws them right back. “No way!” she whispers. “I am not staying back here by myself.”
I guess we’ll have to hope that the horses stay put, because there’s nothing to tie them to. I sling the bag of guns over my shoulder and get my Glock ready. MacKenna gingerly holds hers out. I pray she doesn’t need to use it.
Together, we stick as close as possible to the rocky hill, coming to a point where it’s possible to peer around. I can make out my dad’s tall figure and my brother’s much shorter one. Toby is standing off to one side. The horses are tied to one of the truck’s side mirrors.
“It’s them,” MacKenna says.
We grin at each other, and a sense of relief washes over me.
Our excitement is short-lived. We’ve clearly stumbled upon some kind of confrontation. A beige Humvee is parked in front of Healy’s truck and trailer. My dad stands with his hands up, facing Annika’s statuesque form. She’s flanked by two soldiers with AKs.
