Chapter 22 :The Second Night

Chapter 22: Chapter 22 :The Second Night

Behind the headlights was a dusty old Corolla.

It rolled slowly into the middle of the lot, stopped beside the BMW, and the engine cut off. The door opened, and out climbed Bob in a rumpled flannel shirt, his hair blown every which way, chewing gum as always.

He came around to the hood, slapped the Corolla’s roof twice, and bellowed, "Wake up! Everybody up!"

Half of the twenty-four were still groggy. Heads poked out of sleeping bags. People rubbed their eyes, hands still glued to the doors.

Ethan came out of the editing room at a run, one arm in his jacket. He took one look at the Corolla, then at Bob. Bob raised an eyebrow at him.

Noah wasn’t fully awake and was holding the A camera backward. Ethan turned it around for him, waited for the red light, and stepped in front of the lens.

"Folks, it’s one-seventeen in the morning." He kept his voice low. "Thought tonight was over? Think again." He turned so the camera could catch the Corolla behind him. "Late-night bonus round. Big Bob just drove this out of the back lot. Full tank, and the keys are in his hand. The rules are simple. Ten-second countdown. First person to let go drives it home."

He paused, then added, "One key. First one only. Anybody slower than that let go for nothing."

Twenty-four pairs of eyes snapped wide open.

Hendricks checked his watch and raised a hand. "Ten!"

The handful of dorm guys outside the tape joined in, louder than the few hundred people had been all day. "Nine! Eight! Seven!"

At six, a guy let go. He couldn’t even wait for the count to finish. He rolled out of his sleeping bag and lunged for the Corolla’s driver’s door. At four, another one went. At one, a girl practically launched herself off the ground, slapped both hands on the Corolla’s door, and gasped, "Me! Me!"

Bob shook his head and tossed the keys to the first guy. The other two just stood there, one with her face in her hands, the other staring down at his own empty palm, at a loss for words.

The sidelines whooped and groaned. Ethan’s eyes, though, swept the ring of hands still on the BMW and stopped on the smallest of them.

Owen’s fingers had lifted off the door, just barely, the tips gone white, hovering. He was looking at the Corolla, and his throat moved. It lasted one second. Then he pressed his hand back down so hard his knuckles stood out.

The Corolla’s taillights rolled out through the front gate with two honks of the horn. Twenty-four people. Twenty-one left.

Nobody slept easy after that.

The next to go was a guy lying on his side in his sleeping bag started to slip, his raised arm sinking by degrees. The girl next to him opened her mouth to wake him, then shut it again. His hand slid past the door handle and came to rest on his sleeping bag, and he kept right on snoring.

Hendricks came over and tapped him gently on the shoulder. The guy opened his eyes, looked at his hand, then up at Hendricks, and couldn’t seem to put it together. Before dawn, one more would get that same tap.

Ethan walked over to a girl with short hair, a sticky note and a hundred-dollar bill in his hand. She’d been on her feet since yesterday morning, going on twenty hours, and hadn’t dared lie down all night. Her eyelids kept sagging, but her hand was still planted on the car.

He stuck the bill and the note to the window beside her hand, said nothing, and walked away.

The girl blinked, then leaned in to read it. The sticky note said just one thing:

Thanks for still being here.

She clapped a hand over her mouth, and her eyes went red. Noah’s A camera was right on her face.

Kevin updated the whiteboard as the sun came up. Nineteen.

?

Not long after, a white news van pulled into the parking lot, its mast rising one section at a time, KTLA 5 painted down the side.

The reporter who climbed out was in her early thirties, blond, her heels clicking across the dealership’s concrete. She was the same one who’d held the mic out to Ethan on the lawn at school. Her name was Amber Collins.

"Last time, on the lawn, you told me you hadn’t made a cent from YouTube." She held out her hand. "How about this time?"

"Still not a cent." Ethan shook it. "But this time there’s a BMW."

Amber laughed, then lowered her voice. "The station wants to run your footage on the evening news. Not just what we shoot. Your night-vision stuff, too. They’re willing to pay for it."

Ethan thought about it. "Keep the money. Every time you use our footage, put our web address in the corner of the screen and have the anchor read it out."

Amber raised an eyebrow. "Do you know how many people watch the evening news?"

"I do," Ethan said. "That’s why I don’t want the money."

Vince Caruso showed up right around lunch, hair gelled to a shine as ever, the Bluetooth earpiece blinking on his ear. He was carrying a plastic bag. He planted himself in front of the car, pulled out a pink RAZR, and flipped it open with a snap.

"Latest model, pink, the hardest phone in America to get your hands on this year," he told the camera, rattling it off. "Caruso Wireless on Western Avenue, your authorized Cingular dealer. I’ve got five of these. Five! First to let go gets first pick."

He went down the line dangling the phone in front of each girl, chanting as he went. "Western Avenue, Caruso Wireless. Western Avenue, Caruso Wireless." By the fourth round, Sierra couldn’t take it. "We got it. We really, really got it."

Two girls cracked anyway. One of them was still explaining herself to the person next to her as she let go. "My Nokia’s a hand-me-down from my mom..."

Vince handed over two RAZRs, gave the camera a thumbs-up, and said the store name one more time.

By midday, there wasn’t a scrap of shade on the lot. The roof was hot enough to sting, and some people pulled their sleeves down over their palms. Sierra’s sunscreen had run in streaks with the sweat. Her face had gone pale, and her lips were dry and cracking. The EMTs came by twice to ask if she wanted to drop out. Both times she shook her head.

Ethan walked up to the car with the bullhorn. "New rule," he said. "Whoever lets go right now gets to pick anyone still in, and that person gets a fifteen-minute break. Fifteen minutes with their hands off the car, in the tent, water, air conditioning. Then they come back and keep going."

The lot went quiet for a moment.

Dylan was the first to take his hand off. He didn’t even hesitate. He pointed at Sierra beside him. "Her."

Sierra stared at him. "What are you doing? Are you crazy? That’s a BMW!"

"I know it’s a BMW." Dylan pressed her water bottle into her hand. "That bucket of water in the first video. I owed you. Now we’re even."

Sierra opened her mouth, and nothing came out. An EMT helped her toward the tent. Two steps in, she looked back at Dylan and had to blink a couple of times.

That afternoon, the name that kept scrolling past in the site’s comments was Dylan’s.

Two more went after that, one to heat exhaustion, one to a phone call from home. By dusk, there were fourteen names left on the whiteboard.

KTLA’s six o’clock news gave it two and a half minutes. MrPelican’s web address sat in the lower right corner of the screen, and the anchor read it out once at the top and again at the end.

In the editing room, Maya was watching the back end. The number of people online tripled in half an hour, and the server fan was roaring. She turned to call Ethan over, got as far as opening her mouth, then closed it again. In the end, she just saved the screenshot.

The showroom got busy, too. Bob’s two salesmen were on their feet from dusk until well past midnight. One married couple who’d seen the news drove over at three in the morning just to point at a used Camry and ask about financing.

Kyle sat at his little desk writing up the paperwork. With every slip he wrote, he had to stop himself from humming.

These kids couldn’t hold out much longer, he thought. When the last hand came off that car, it was payday.