Fear (42 page)

Out of the corner of her eye Connie saw Abana pull back. A cold distance opened between them for the first time since the anomaly had begun. Connie had lied to her. All this time, as they had suffered together, Connie Temple had been holding something back.

And now, Connie knew, Abana was wondering if somehow her friend could have kept this from happening.

“I can’t give you his name,” Connie said.

“Then I can’t run the story.”

Abana stood up abruptly. She banged the table hard and rattled the cups. “I’m stopping this. I’m calling the parents, the families. I’m going to get around that roadblock, and if they want to blow up my child, they’ll have to blow me up, too.”

Connie watched her go.

“What do you want me to do?” the reporter asked Connie, angry and frustrated. “You won’t tell me who gave you this information; what am I supposed to do?”

“I promised.”

“Your son—”

“Darius Ashton!” Connie said through gritted teeth. Then, quieter, more calmly, but hating herself, she repeated, “Sergeant Darius Ashton. I have his number. But if you leak his name he’ll end up in prison.”

“If I don’t get this out, and right now, it sounds like all those kids inside may die. What’s your choice?”

“Sergeant Ashton? Sergeant Darius Ashton?”

He froze. The voice, coming from behind him, was unfamiliar. But the tone, the repetition of his name, that told him all he needed to know.

He forced a pleasant smile and turned to see a man and a woman, neither smiling, both holding badges so he could read them.

His cell phone rang.

“I’m Ashton,” he said. Then, “Excuse me.” He held the phone to his ear.

The FBI agents seemed momentarily uncertain as to whether they should or could stop him taking the call.

Darius held up a finger to signal
just a minute
. He listened for a while.

He was, he knew, destroying himself. With two FBI agents watching he was going to commit what might as well be suicide.

“Yes,” he said into the phone. “What she told you is one hundred percent true.”

The FBI agents took his phone then.

DIANA CRAWLED
AND
fell. She was cut and bruised in so many places she couldn’t even begin to keep track. Her palms, her knees, her shins, her ankles, the soles of her feet, all ripped and torn. And the cuts from Drake’s whip were on her back, shoulders, the back of her thighs, her bottom.

But she felt little of the pain now. That pain was something far away. Something that happened to a real person who was not her. Some shell she’d once inhabited, maybe, but not her, not this person, because this person, this Diana, felt something so much more awful.

It was inside her.

The baby. It was inside her and pushing and kicking.

And it was growing. She felt her belly grow each time she reached to hold it. Bigger and bigger, like someone was filling a water balloon from a hose and didn’t have the sense to stop, didn’t know that it would burst if you just kept making it—

A spasm went through her, seizing her insides, drawing on every ounce of her strength and concentrating it in that one spasm.

Contraction.

The word came to her from the depths of memory.

Contraction.

Was her stomach really growing? Was the impatience of the baby inside her real, or was it Penny playing some game with her reality?

She felt the gaiaphage’s dark mind. She felt the fear that squeezed the air from her lungs. And more horrible still, she felt that evil mind’s eagerness. It strained to hurry her on. It reached for her from the depths. Like a little kid impatient for the ice cream. Give me, give me!

But worse by far was the echo that came from the baby.

The baby felt the force of the gaiaphage’s will. She knew it. It would be his.

How long had she crawled like this? How many times had Drake grabbed her roughly with his whip hand and lowered her down some sheer drop to cling with torn fingernails to the rock wall?

And blind. Always blind. A darkness so total it reached into her memory and blotted the sun from the pictures there.

Then, at long last, a glow. At first it seemed like it must be a hallucination. She had accepted that light was gone forever, and now here was a faint, sickly glow.

“Go!” Drake urged her. “It’s straight and level now. Go!”

She stumbled forward. Her belly was impossibly big, the flesh stretched like a drum. And the next contraction now racked her, a vise inside her that tightened so hard it seemed it must break her very bones.

It was hot and airless. She was bathed in sweat, her hair sticking to her neck.

The glow brightened. It stuck to the floor and walls of the cave. It revealed the contours of rock, the stalagmites rising from the floor, the tumbled piles of broken stone like waterfalls rendered with a child’s blocks.

And then, beneath her bare feet, the electric zap of the barrier, forcing her to climb for safety up onto pieces of the gaiaphage itself.

She could feel the gaiaphage move under her, like stepping on a million ants all packed tight together; the cells of the monster seethed and vibrated.

Drake cavorted across the chamber, snapping the air with his whip, shouting, “I did it! I did it! I brought you Diana! I, Drake Merwin, I did it! Whip Hand! Whip! Hand!”

Justin. Where was he? Diana realized she hadn’t seen him in a long time.

Where was he? She looked around, frantic, amazed to have eyes to see with. Her vision blurred green. No Justin.

Penny caught the frantic look. Her face was grim. She, too, now realized they’d lost the little boy somewhere along the bloody miles leading them here.

Penny, too, had not fared well. She was almost as battered, bruised, and bloodied as Diana. The trip down a jet-black tunnel had not been good to her. At some point she must have hit her head very hard, because a gash in her scalp bled down into one eye.

But Penny had already lost interest in Justin. Now she looked with narrow, jealous eyes at Drake in all his joy. Drake was ignoring her. He hadn’t introduced her.
Gaiaphage, meet Penny. Penny, gaiaphage. I know you two will get along
.

The image would have made Diana laugh if not for a contraction that forced her to her knees.

It was in that position that Diana felt a sudden wetness. It was warm and ran down her inner thighs.

“Impossible.” She wept.

But she knew in her heart, and had known for some time, that this baby was no normal child. Already it was a three bar, an infant with powers not yet defined.

The child of an evil father and a mother who had tried, had wanted to … had tried to … but somehow had failed.

Repentance had not saved her. Burning tears had not been enough to wash away the stain.

The water that had gushed from inside her had not washed away the stain.

Diana Ladris, beaten and scourged and crying out to heaven for forgiveness, would still be the mother of a monster.

Brianna had a little roasted pigeon in her backpack. She had a more than healthy appetite, and she liked to always keep food handy. A history of starvation did that to people: made them nervous about food.

Now she tore a piece of the pigeon breast away from the bone, felt through the meat with dirty fingers for any fragment of bone or cartilage. Then she found the little boy’s hand and put the meat into it.

“Eat that. It’ll make you feel a little better.”

They were deep inside the mine shaft. She’d almost laid into Justin with her machete before realizing he was sniffling, not snarling.

Now what, though? She could walk him out to the mine shaft entrance, but what difference did it make? It was dark in here, and it was dark out there. Although at least out there that oppression of the soul that came with proximity to the gaiaphage might be lessened.

“What can you tell me, kid? Did you see the thing?”

“I can’t see anything.” He sniffed. But he was cried out. More like shell-shocked, that was how he sounded. Brianna felt an unaccustomed stab of sympathy. Poor kid. How was it right that this kind of stuff happened to a little kid? How was he ever going to forget it?

He’d forget when he was dead, Brianna thought harshly, and that wouldn’t be too long from now, most likely.

Then, surprisingly, Justin said, “There’s a really long drop.”

“Up ahead, you mean?”

“That’s where they forgot about me.”

“Yeah? Right on, kid, that helps me to know that.”

“Are you going to save Diana?”

“Kind of more thinking about killing Drake. But if that means I save Diana, I can live with that.” She tore off another piece of her precious pigeon meat and gave it to him. What did it matter? This was a suicide mission. She wasn’t coming back. She wouldn’t need much to eat.

Not a happy thought.

“The lady. Diana. I think her baby is going to come out.”

“Well, that would make everything just about perfect,” Brianna said with a sigh. “Kid. I have to keep going. You understand? You can keep heading back to the entrance. Or you can just sit tight right here and wait for me.”

“Are you coming back?”

Brianna gave a short laugh. “I doubt it. But that’s me, little dude. I’m the Breeze. And the Breeze doesn’t stop. If you get out of this somehow, and you get out of the whole FAYZ and get back home to your mom and dad and everyone out in the world, you tell people that, okay? Maybe find my family some—”

Her voice choked. She could feel tears in her eyes. Wow, where had that come from? She shook her head angrily, pushed her hair back, and said, “I’m just saying: you tell people the Breeze never wimped out. The Breeze never gave up. Will you do that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am,” Brianna echoed in an ironic tone. “Anyway. Later, okay?”

She began to make her way down the tunnel. She had worked out a way to move a little faster than a normal person might. She used her machete, twirling it ahead of her in a variety of different patterns to avoid getting too bored—figure eight, a five-pointed star, a six-way star. She could swing the machete maybe two, three times as fast as a regular person. Nowhere near her usual speed, but one had to adapt.

When the machete struck something, she slowed down until she found an open way. It was like a blind person using a cane, but so much more badass.

From time to time she would feel for a rock and throw it ahead, listening for something that might be, as Justin had called it, “a really long drop.”

She was very much against really long drops.

She tossed a pebble finally and did not hear it clatter on stone. “Ah. I believe we have the long drop.” She edged forward until, sure enough, she could sense a gap in the floor.

She crept to the edge of it on hands and knees. She positioned herself in a way to see straight downward. “Eyes open, don’t flinch,” she told herself.

She aimed the shotgun down into the hole and pulled the trigger.

Shotguns were never exactly quiet. But in the confines of the mine shaft it was like a bomb going off.

The muzzle flash stabbed thirty feet down, painting an indelible image of stone walls, a ledge perhaps twenty feet straight down.

The echo of the blast went on for some time. It sounded a bit like when a jet broke the sound barrier. Most likely Drake would hear, unless this shaft went down even farther than she imagined.

Brianna smiled. “That’s right, Drakey boy: I’m still coming.”

Two explosions. Two stabs of light.

No way to know how far away they were. The sound said a long way. The light seemed nearer. Impossible to tell.

It could be anyone. Brianna. Astrid. Or just any number of armed kids who might be lost in the darkness.

“Definitely a gun,” Sam said to no one. How weird that gunfire was almost reassuring.

He did not believe it had come from the same direction as the mine shaft. It was to the right. More like in a line to where he thought Perdido Beach might be. Which was not his objective. He wasn’t on a mission to find and rescue Astrid, if that was her. He was on a mission to—

“Too bad,” he snapped, again talking defiantly to no one.

If it was Astrid, and if she was in a fight, then having whoever she was fighting—maybe even Drake—see a line of Sammy suns approaching would give everything away. If it was Astrid—and he’d already convinced himself it was—he needed to move fast. He wouldn’t just have to walk tentatively into the dark, lighting his path back to home with a row of lights. He would have to run straight into darkness.

Sam fixed in his mind’s eye the direction the flashes had come from. He began to trot, lifting each step high to avoid tripping. He made it surprisingly far before something hard caught his foot and he slammed facedown into the dirt.

“That’s one,” he said. Stood up, and started running again.