Free Criminal Destiny by Gordon Korman Page A

make a run for it.”
    The McHenry’s truck makes several turns, but never actually halts. At last, we feel the momentary sense of braking, and emerge from our hiding place, ready to leap for it. All at once, we’re backing up, our vehicle emitting a series of warning beeps.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” demands Amber.
    Finally, we stop. That is to say, the truck does. The bed is tilting, so we are too. Behind us—quickly becoming below us—a loud electric grinding begins, the kind of noise where you feel the vibration in your teeth below the gum line. Eventually, the bed rises so high that the contents—and that includes us—begin to slide. The back flap lifts on a hydraulic motor, and the branches start to pour out. The grinding becomes a whole lot louder, and a cloud of dust is thrown back at us, stinging our eyes and making breathingdifficult. Through it, we can see a huge metal hopper and, inside it, the whirling cutting blades of a wood chipper.
    â€œGet out! Get out! Now!” I scream.
    We try to move in the opposite direction, but it’s like trying to run straight up. We’re part of the load, and the load is being drawn inexorably into the maw of the machine.
    I crawl to the side of the truck bed, and clamp both arms over the top. Eli tries to do the same, but the slope is pulling him down too quickly.
    I throw out a leg, accidentally kicking him in the stomach. “Grab hold!”
    He latches onto my foot, locking it into his armpit. Tori comes up behind me and throws her arms around my neck. That’s three of us accounted for. Where’s Laska?
    I spot her. She’s clenching a thick branch sliding down the center of the payload, screaming in terror. In desperation, Eli reaches out for her with his free hand. He misses Amber, but gets just enough of the branch to stop its descent. God only knows how he stays attached to me and still hangs onto the branch and Amber. But the bed is close to full vertical at this point, and the choice has become starkly simple: we hold on, or we get sliced and diced.
    I’m yelling my head off in agony and exertion. My grip on the side of the truck is what’s keeping everybody fromfalling. Amber’s howling, Tori’s weeping. You can barely hear any of it over the shriek of the cutting blades.
    I don’t know how it happens. One minute, I’m clamped to the side; the next, I’m not. We’re skidding along the dumper, still attached to one another, but heading down toward the lethal blades. We’re going to die and all I can think is it’s my fault.
    In the noise and chaos, we never hear the hydraulic motor that closes the truck’s back flap. The next thing I know, Amber yelps in pain, as the three of us fall on top of her, crushing her against the metal barrier that has just saved our lives.
    The bed is coming down again, lowering to horizontal. My heartbeat, though, is anything but normal. We were so close to being dead. If the back flap had stayed open a split second longer . . .
    We’re clones who came from nothing and no one, and we would have been gone as if we’d never existed.
    Somehow, we manage to climb over the side and jump to the ground and roll. When I try to get up again, my legs have turned to rubber.
    Eli is the first to make it to his feet. “Move!” he hisses. “Before we get run over by our own escape truck!”
    We manage to get up and stagger clear. That’s when thedriver of the truck spots us for the first time.
    â€œHey, what are you kids doing here? This is a restricted area!”
    â€œSorry,” Tori calls, during a pretty good job of sounding off-hand, considering what we’ve just been through. “We were looking for a place to play soccer.”
    â€œWhat—here? One of these machines could take your arm off and chop it into hamburger!”
    â€œYeah, right,” I say bitterly. “Like that could ever