The Terminals Read online

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  This novel is dedicated to my steadfast beta reader and thirteen-year-old son, Aspen Buckingham, who is very nearly the target audience for The Terminals. Thanks, bud, for all the advice.

  Thank you also to my incredible wife, Cara, and to Aiden, my intuitive nine-year-old, who brainstorms concepts with us at the kitchen table.

  Shout out to Kaylee, Katelyn, Captain Eric, Dr. Dave, and the many others who read portions of the book and subjected themselves to vigorous cross-examination during the writing process.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Cam’s Playlist #1: “Hello Mister Grimm” by The Fallen Angels

  Cam’s Playlist #2: “Roadkill” by Suicide Squirrel

  Cam’s Playlist #3: “Soul on a Stick” by Dog Breath

  Cam’s Playlist #4: “Welcome to the Zoo” by The Way Chunky Monkeys

  Cam’s Playlist #5: “Smells Like Monday” by Cheez Whiz

  Cam’s Playlist #6: “The Oath” by Slinky

  Cam’s Playlist #7: “Hey, I Know This Song” by The Nobodies

  Cam’s Playlist #8: “The Ice Firemen” by Blabbermouth

  Cam’s Playlist #9: “I Love Bacon” by The Foodies

  Cam’s Playlist #10: “Rustle and Whisper” by Okee Kenochee

  Cam’s Playlist #11: “Love Rhymes with Shove” by Lisa Ran Away

  Cam’s Playlist #12: “Boy Fever” by Wind Chimes and Grace

  Cam’s Playlist #13: “Sext Me” by Jackie Z

  Cam’s Playlist #14: “Meet and Greet” by Melody Who-Who

  Cam’s Playlist #15: “Chaos” by Demonkeeper

  Cam’s Playlist #16: “Backpack Full of Soul” by C. Aspen B.

  Cam’s Playlist #17: “Drift” by Slurpy

  Cam’s Playlist #18: “Can’t Beat Me” by Two-One-Two Zone

  Cam’s Playlist #19: “Broked Apart Heart” by The Shitkickers

  Cam’s Playlist #20: “Down Time” by Robo Dork

  Cam’s Playlist #21: “Performance Anxiety” by Crush

  Cam’s Playlist #22: “Hamster Wheel” by The Fluffy Bunnies

  Cam’s Playlist #23: “Revelation” by Breathe

  Cam’s Playlist #24: “Growth Spurt” by The Lucky Ones

  Cam’s Playlist #25: “My Heart or Yours” by Love-n-Stuff

  Cam’s Playlist #26: “Dice” by One Shoe Magoo

  Cam’s Playlist #27: “Oh Yeah, Make Me” by So It Begins

  Cam’s Playlist #28: “The Endless Nothing” by Necromoor

  Cam’s Playlist #29: “Hope and Change” by That Weird Girl

  Cam’s Playlist #30: “’Splosions” by WTF

  Cam’s Playlist #31: “No Way!” by Go Fish

  Cam’s Playlist #32: “Treading Water” by The Blind Leading the Blind

  Cam’s Playlist #33: “This Little Piggy” by Squeaky Wheel

  Cam’s Playlist #34: “Fly” by The Dread

  Cam’s Playlist #35: “Tell on You” by Drummer Boy

  Cam’s Playlist #36: “Mighty Mighty” by Hydroplane

  Cam’s Playlist #37: “Lace Up” by Game Day

  Cam’s Playlist #38: “Let You Go” by Raven Dark

  Cam’s Playlist #39: “Angry Young Woman” by Calli

  Cam’s Playlist #40: “Me on Steroids” by Addictionopolis

  Cam’s Playlist #41: “Incontinental” by The Steam Punks

  Cam’s Playlist #42: “We’re Alone Together” by The Flat Earth Society

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Royce Scott Buckingham

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  With her enhancements, she was faster and stronger than them, but she was also outnumbered and had no weapon.

  Siena broke cover and fled, hurdling rotten logs and dodging treacherous thickets. Even during the day it was dark beneath the lush, dripping tree canopy, which filtered out 80 percent of the sun, but her unnaturally wide pupils darted back and forth, spotting every root threatening to trip her up, every thorn waiting to tear her flesh. Her bare teenage feet danced around them, finding flat, spongy ground again and again.

  She glanced about for a loose stick she could use as a club, her long auburn hair flying right and left. There was no time to stop and break off a dead limb—she could hear the faint thump and rustle of their tennis shoes less than twenty yards back.

  She hit a thinner patch of forest and saw a hint of daylight above. Grabbing a low-hanging branch, she swung up into a tree and climbed for the sky. The ground was quickly obscured behind her, and, for a moment, she thought she was clever. But she surprised a small orange monkey and sent it screeching through the limbs. They’d know exactly where she was now—thirty feet in the air directly above them.

  Siena left the safety of the trunk and tiptoed out onto a thick branch. It bent under her weight as it thinned, but her balance was exquisite, not merely as good as a ballerina’s, but better. It wouldn’t be for long, though. Running away meant no more TS-8. Her extraordinary abilities would fade to normal, like those of her pursuers, who had only just begun the enhancement process. But it was a price she was willing to pay for even a slim chance to live.

  A dart whispered up from below and struck the thin branch inches from her foot, injecting the tree with an inky fluid she knew all too well. They were coming up, and they would almost certainly stick her with the next throw. The thin branch dipped like a precarious diving board. She pushed down with her legs, and when the limber branch rebounded upward, she jumped.

  Vertical orientation was crucial when canopy jumping—the way the monkeys did it. She flew toward the next tree. Its limbs overlapped those of the tree she’d left, but they were too thin at their tips to support her. She needed to break through to the thicker inner branches. It was a great distance to cover without a run, perhaps twenty-five feet, impossible for an unenhanced person. But she was enhanced. She crashed through the thinner branches. They drew long red lines down her forehead and cheeks as they bent against her face. The scratches might have horrified a normal girl her age—a girl going to formals or having her sorority photo taken—but Siena ignored them, bursting through the canopy toward the thicker wood near the trunk. She tilted her head to dodge the point of a branch that might have stabbed her right eye, and stayed focused, reaching for two different limbs. Her palms slapped wood, closed around it, and then she bobbed, suspended, as the branches groaned against her weight thirty feet above the earth.

  There was no time to celebrate the jump. She was still darting distance from her former tree. She yanked herself atop the limbs and climbed, bursting through the canopy’s upper leaves into the light. When she looked back, she saw two dark shapes rising in the tree behind her, silhouetted against the light. The evening sun hung low in the sky behind them. She turned and tiptoed along another branch away from it, hurrying east, and when she reached its springy end she jumped again.

  She flew through the tops of the trees, learning more with each leap, rapidly becoming adept. She was beating them. But helicopter blades thumped in the distance. Her heart sank. Her head start wouldn’t matter. As soon as the pilot spotted her, the chopper would come for her too, and it was faster, much faster. Siena frowned—it wasn’t any safer atop the canopy than on the ground.

  The ocean came into view ahead, a wrinkled blue
blanket thrown over the world beyond the lush carpet of forest. She made for it, climbing to a height that allowed her to see up and down the coast. The rocks of the fifty-foot seaside cliffs jutted beyond the tree line to the north. She skittered out on a branch and jumped down toward them, landing and jumping again, using her descent to add speed. A look back confirmed that the others were still following. They’d gone to the ground and were running. She had to lose them, she thought, or take them out. She preferred the second option, but her odds against multiple armed opponents were fifty-fifty at best. She could hear the helicopter approaching now. The pilot had seen her, or they’d radioed to the chopper. Now she was being tracked from the air.

  There were more than two behind her on the ground. The pair in the tree were merely the vanguard. Her mind clicked through her advantages. Speed, strength, dexterity. Too few against too many. Knowledge of the forest was an important one, however. She’d been here for nearly a year. The new recruits hadn’t. She hopped from branch to branch, fought down through leaves to the ground, and was running again. The helicopter wouldn’t be able to see her. The other kids would have to chase her down.

  Siena heard twigs snapping behind her. They were clumsy, but closing in. Her feet were bloody. If she’d had shoes, she might have simply outrun them. Instead, she made for the cliff. There was a place she knew, a secret spot she’d found during training.

  She could hear panting now. The two were close, one very close. She saw a familiar tree, and then recognized a patch of white-speckled shrubbery. And when the cliff edge suddenly appeared beyond it, she was ready.

  Her momentum carried her over, but she kept her legs beneath her and spun 180 degrees, hands darting out to grab foliage and arrest her descent just as she drew even with a small cave in the cliffside. She swung, and her momentum threw her inside, where she skidded hard across the cavern floor into the solid rock wall. It hurt, but she didn’t cry out. Instead, she bit her lip and waited, breathless.

  Footsteps rapidly approached above, followed by a cry of surprise.

  The boy who plummeted past Siena looked about nineteen, like her. Like boys she used to date in her other life, her life before. He clutched a dart in his fist as though it were a lifeline. It wasn’t. She saw a sudden, horrible realization in his eyes as they met hers for a split second on the way by, and then he continued down, his limbs flailing in the air. He abandoned the dart and grabbed at the cliffside foliage, but his hands slid past or yanked it loose without gaining purchase. He tried to get his feet beneath him, but his orientation remained horizontal. Falling sideways, his head slammed against a rock outcropping with the hollow cracking sound of a coconut bursting on pavement. Siena didn’t watch him fall the rest of the way. She didn’t need to. It was already over.

  The others would come and see, she realized. If they searched the area they would find her. She quickly removed her backpack and threw it down after the crumpled pile of male flesh on the beach that had been a teen boy only moments earlier.

  The next set of footsteps arrived above her as the waves began to wash her pack of supplies and the boy’s body out to sea. They were heavier, booted footsteps, according to her sharp ears. Adult footsteps. They stopped, and there was silence for a time, and then a radio crackled to life. The male voice that belonged to the footsteps reported the scene below.

  “This is personal trainer,” said the voice. “Siena’s term has finally expired. And I regret to report that Peter has graduated early.…”

  Siena hugged her knees in her hideaway as the ocean finished its indifferent cleanup work, leaving the beach empty.

  “Looks like we’re gonna need another kid.”

  CAM’S PLAYLIST

  1. HELLO MISTER GRIMM

  by The Fallen Angels

  2. ROADKILL

  by Suicide Squirrel

  3. SOUL ON A STICK

  by Dog Breath

  “Hello, I’ve got some news for you.

  It’s not all good, but it’s all true.”

  God just screwed me over, Cameron Cody thought.

  Cam lay in the adjustable hospital bed wearing earbuds with his music playing low and slow, like the tragic theme song of a nineteen-year-old who was supposed to be the Western Washington University soccer team’s starting right wing this year. “Wingman,” they called him.

  He rolled over and glanced at his heart-rate monitor. It beeped steadily. Still alive, he thought. For now.

  He felt wrong in the bed, like he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be heading out to parties on Garden Street in a few weeks, getting a tux for homecoming a month later, and making the dean’s list by the end of the quarter. More important, he was supposed to be renting the ultimate party house with Kristi Banks and five other friends this term. Kristi friggin’ Banks. Heck, he was just supposed to get a girlfriend at all. He was supposed to finish college, interview for jobs, and then make his own way in the world.

  He was not supposed to be dying.

  The stamped metal label on the molded plastic rail beside him read DURA-CARE PNEUMATIC BED. He’d named his bed Numo. Numo boasted 124 different positions—more than the kama sutra—all of which Cam had tried in the first hour via the touch screen controls. He found Numo disturbingly comfortable.

  No wonder people come here to expire, he thought. They make it easy. They give a guy a few months to live, this killer bed, all you can eat, Covert Ops with a wireless controller, some medication to take the edge off, then bingo! Next contestant, please.

  Corridor 3C outside his door, on the other hand, felt sterile. The blank white walls made it seem freakishly wide, and it echoed like a canyon. It smelled like bleach every morning too. When he left his room, he felt like he was entering a whitewashed institutional version of the afterlife. Corridor 3C was the hospital’s “death wing,” a name the staff used when they didn’t think patients were listening.

  The noise outside of his door was his mom and dad crying. They also thought he couldn’t hear them. But he could. It was embarrassing. Like his buttless gown. With flowers on it.

  Cam groaned. Somebody please tell me I don’t have to die in this.

  The sad thing was, when he thought about it, he was already dead. Get good grades? To prepare for what? Improve his dribbling? It’s not like he’d be perky come playoff time. And women? He’d spent his younger years being everyone’s nonthreatening, nice-guy buddy, and helping his more aggressive friends get the girls. And now that he’d finally put on twenty pounds and figured out how to wear his wispy blond hair so he didn’t look like a bowl-cut dork—the secret was spray gel—some freaky disease nobody had ever heard of was going to kill him.

  But there’s Kristi, he thought. She was perhaps the one upside to the whole dying deal. When he’d first told her, she’d felt sorry for him, and she’d lain on the couch and hugged him for the entire late show. Now maybe they’d kiss. A lot.

  Just then there was a polite, almost apologetic knock on his door. Kristi. Right on time. He pulled the covers up over his drafty flowered gown.

  “Yo!” Cam answered. It was too loud, he decided, and obnoxious. “I mean, come in, please,” he tried instead.

  The door opened, and Kristi Banks peeked her blond head in. “Is this a good time?” she asked.

  Unless you want to come back when I’m dead, Cam thought.

  Kristi slid inside, but clung to the door. She wore a snug Western T-shirt and jeans with heels. Her fluffy, golden hair cascaded over her shoulders and flowed around her curves like a happy river winding through the hills. Cam couldn’t help but stare. He heard a rapid beeping and quickly threw a blanket over his tattletale heart-rate monitor.

  “Sure,” Cam replied. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Becky said I should,” Kristi explained. “I mean, I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure if it was okay.”

  “It’s A-okay.”

  She hesitated, cringing at the sight of all the medical apparatus. Tubes and wires were strung around him l
ike Christmas lights.

  “I know I look like a marionette,” Cam said. “But I’m not contagious.”

  Kristi managed a weak smile. “Of course not.” She walked to the edge of the bed, where she did not kiss him a lot, or even a little. She was so close that Cam could smell the artificially scented apple shampoo she used on her amazing hair.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Strangely fine. Even my regular doctor thought I was healthy. Then this specialist did a CAT scan and found a tumor in my head. But honestly, I feel like riding out to the Whatcom Falls Park and going for a swim in my underwear. Can you drive?”

  “You’re not too sick?”

  “Well, I am going to die, if that’s what you mean. But my symptoms won’t get bad for a while. I’m just here for more testing today with the tumor doc. I should be up and around tomorrow.”

  Kristi nodded carefully. “Will you be up and around the entire term?”

  It seemed an odd question. Then Cam realized what she was getting at. Kristi stood waiting, tapping her long, fake fingernails on Numo’s metal rail. Cam felt the skinny nice guy awaken inside him. He tried to fight it, but couldn’t.

  “If you need to find another roommate, I understand,” he said finally.

  Kristi looked mildly surprised, but didn’t argue. “Really? Because Ben Richards needs a place.”

  Cam saw her eyes dance when she mentioned Ben’s name. He winced. “It’s totally okay,” Cam added, “seriously.”

  “You’re so nice.” She almost hugged him, but wires hung between them. She just patted his shoulder instead. There were a few more uncomfortable questions from her, a few more awkward jokes from him, but still no kisses.

  “Well, I should go and let you rest,” Kristi said. She patted him on the elbow this time, another completely uninteresting location. Then she edged toward the door, fingering her pink cell phone in her pants.

  “I’ve been lying in bed all morning. I’m not tired.”

  “But you probably need some time to think.”

  Cam thought Kristi probably needed some time to think about who she could call that wouldn’t be dying in a hospital bed on homecoming night. Ben Richards, perhaps.