Gone (20 page)

The walk back to the shack was a bit more leisurely Lana took a moment to gaze up at the night sky The moon was already descending toward the western horizon. The stars •-well, the stars looked odd. But she wasn't quite sure why she thought so.

She resumed the walk back to the cabin and froze. Between her and the front door stood a coyote. But this was like none of the coyotes her grandfather had pointed out to her. None of those had been even as big as Patrick. But this shaggy yellow animal was the size of a wolf

Patrick had not seen or heard the animal approach and now he seemed almost too shocked to react. Patrick, who had leaped to battle a mountain lion, now seemed cowed and uncertain,

Una's grandfather had lectured her on desert animals: the coyote that was to be respected but not feared; the lizards that would startle you with their sudden bursts of speed; the deer that were more like large rats than like Bambi; the wild burros so different from their domesticated brothers; and the rattlesnakes that were no threat so long as you wore boots and kept your eyes open.

"Shoo" Lana yelled, and waved her hands as her grandfather had taught her to do if she ever came too close to a coyote.

The covote didn't move.

Instead it made a sharp yipping sound that caused Lana to jump back. Out of the corner of her eye she saw dark shapes rushing toward her, three or four of them, swift shadows.

Now Patrick reacted. He growled menacingly, bared his teeth and raised his hackles, but the coyote didn't move and his companions were approaching fast.

Lana had been told that coyotes were not dangerous to humans, but there was no way :o believe that now. She dodged to the right, hoping to fake out the coyote, but the animal was tar too quick to be fooled.

"Patrick, get him," she urged helplessly.

But Patrick wasn't going any farther than growling and putting on a show and in seconds the other coyotes would arrive and then ... well, who knew what then?

Lana had no choice: She had to reach the cabin. She had to reach the cabin or die.

She yelled at the top of her voice and ran straight at the coyote in her path.

The animal recoiled in surprise.

There was a (lash of something small and dark and the coyote yelped in pain.

Lana was past him in a heartbeat. Ten steps to the cabin door. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ...

Patrick ran ahead of her, panicked, and shot inside.

Lana was on his heels, spun, and slammed ihe door shut without even slowing down. She skidded to a stop, turned, ran back to the door, and threw herself against it.

But the coyotes did not pursue. They had other problems. She heard wild yelping, canine cries of pain and rage.

After a while the yelping slowed, slurred, and finally stopped. A new coyote voice set up a wild howling, howling at the moon. Then silence-In the morning, with the sun bright and all the night's terrors banished, Lana found the coyote dead, a hundred feet from her door. Still attached to its muzzle was half a snake with a broad, diamond-shaped head. Its body had been chewed in half but not before the venom had flowed into the coyote's bloodstream.

She looked for a long time a: the snake's head. It was a snake without any doubt. And yet she was sure she had seen it fly.

Lana put that out of her mine. And along with it she dismissed the whisper she had heard because flying snakes and whispering coyotes the size of Great Danes, well, none of that was possible. There was a word for people who believed impossible things: crazy

"I guess Grandpa wasn't that big an expert on desert wildlife after all," she said to Patrick.

132 HOURS, 46 MINUTES

'YOU DON'T HAVE to like the dude, brah, but he's doing good stuff" Quinn was poised lo knock on ihe door of iheir third house that morning. It was Sam and Quinn and a Coates kid, a girl named Brooke. They were "search team threes

It was day eight ol the FAYZ. The tilth day since Caine had moved in and taken over.

The second day since Sam had kissed Astrid beside a freshly dug grave.

Caine had organized ten search teams to move through the town, each covering a square block to start. The idea was to go into each house on each of the four streets that formed the block. They were to make sure the stove was off, the air-conditioning was off, the TV was off, interior lights were off, and the porch lights lit. They were :o turn off automatic irrigation systems and turn off hot water heaters.

If they couldn't figure any of that out, they would add it to a list for Edilio to follow up on. Edilio always seemed able to figure out mechanical things. He was running around Perdido Beach with a tool belt and two Coates kids as

"helpers"

The search teams were also tc search for lost kids, babies who might have been abandonee, might be trapped in cribs. And pets, too.

In each house they made a list of anything useful, like computers, and anything dangerous, like guns or drugs. They were to note how much food there was and collect all the medicines so they could be sent to Dahra. Diapers and formula went to the dav care.

It was a good plan. It was a good idea.

Caine had some good ideas, no question, Caine had tasked Computer Jack to come up with an emergency communication system. Computer Jack had the idea of going old school: he'd set up short-wave radios in the town hall, the fire station, the day care, and the abandoned house Drake used for himself and some of his sheriffs.

Bui Caine had taken no action against Ore.

Sam had gone to him to demand action.

"What am I supposed to do?" Caine had asked reasonably "Bette was breaking the rules, and Ore is a sheriff. It was a tragedy for everyone involved. Ore feels very bad *

So Ore still prowled the stree:s of Perdido Beach. For all Sam knew, Bette's blood was still on the bully's bat. And now the fear of the so-called sheriffs was magnified ten times over.

"Let's just get this over with," Sam said. He wasn't going to get into a discussion of Caine in front of Brooke. He assumed ihe ten-year-old was a spy. In any case, he was in a foul mood because one of the houses they were to visit later was his own.

Quinn knocked. He rang the bell. "Nada" He tried the door. It was locked. "Bring on the hammer" Quinn said.

Each search team had a wagon, either taken from the hardware store or borrowed from someone's yard. They carried a heavy sledgehammer in the wagon.

It had taken them two hours to deal with the first two houses. It was going to be a while before every home in Perdido Beach had been searched and rendered safe.

"You want to do the hammer?" Sam asked, deferring to Quinn.

"I live for the hammer, brah"

Quinn helled the hammer and swung it against the door, just below the doorknob. The wood splintered, and Quinn pushed the door back.

The smell hit them hard.

"Oh, man, what died in here?" Quinn said, like it was a joke.

The joke tell flat.

Just inside the door, on the hardwood floor lay a baby's pacifier. The three of them stared at it.

"No, no, no. I can't do this," Brooke said.

The three of them stayed on the porch, no one willing to go in. But no one was willing to close the door and just walk away, either.

Brooke's hands were shaking so badly, Sam reached for them and held them in his. "It's okay" he said. "You don't have to go in?

She was chubby, freckled, with straw-dry reddish hair. She wore the Coates uniform and had seemed, up until this moment, almost a cipher. She never joked or played around-just did what she was supposed to do, following Sam's lead.

"It's just, after Coates.,.," Brooke said.

"What about Coates?" Sam asked.

Brooke flushed. "Nothing. Just, you know, all the adults disappearing." Then, feeling like she had to explain some more, she said. "It's, like, I don't want to see any more creepy stuff, okay?"

Sam shot a significant look at Quinn. but Quinn just shrugged and said. "There's, like.a dead little kid in there. We don't have to go inside to know that

Sam yelled."ls there anyone in there?" as loud as he could. Then to Quinn,"We can't just ignore this"

"Maybe we should just report it to Caine." Quinn said.

"I don't see him going house-to-house," Sam snapped. "He's sitting on his butt acting like he's the emperor of Perdido Beach"

When no one took the bait. Sam said, "Give me one of the big garbage bags."

Quinn peeled one off.

Ten minutes later Sam was done. He dragged the bag with its sad contents across the carpet to the front door. He hefted it by the drawstrings and carried it out to the wagon.

"Like taking out the trash." Sam said to no one. His hands were shaking. He felt so angry, he wanted to hurt someone. He felt angry enough that if he could have gotten his hands on whoever caused all this, he would have choked the life out of them.

Mostly Sam was angry at himself. He had never really known this family. It was a one-parent home, the mom and various boyfriends. And the little boy. The family weren't friends, or even acquaintances, but still, he should have thought to check on the baby. That should have been his first thought. He should have remembered, but he hadn't.

Without looking back at Quinn and Brooke, Sam said, "Open some windows. Let some air in there. We can come back wheii it's not so ... when the smell is gone."

"Brah, I'm not going in there," Quinn said.

Sam quickly closed the distance between them. Seeing his face, Quinn took a step back. "I picked the baby up and stuffed him in a trash bag, all right? So go in there and open the windows. Do it"

"Man, you really need to step off, Quinn said. "I don't take orders from you."

"No, you take them from Caine,' Sam said.

Quinn stuck his hand out, almost taunting."I'm sorry, am I annoying you? Why don't you just burn my hand oft, magic boy?"

Sam and Quinn had had many arguments over the years. But since the coming of the FAYZ. especially since Sam had told Quinn the truth about himself, simple disagreements had turned quickly poisonous.
They
were in each other's faces now like they might both start swinging. Sam was mad enough to.

Brooke said, Til do it, Sam"

Sam, his face still just inches from Quinn's, said, "I don't want it to be this way between us"

Quinn relaxed his muscles. He forced a grin, "No big thing, brah "

To Brooke, Sam said, "Open the windows. Then go tell Edilio to dig another hole. I'll go do my house. It would be nice if you could pull the wagon downtown. But if you can't, I'll understand."

Without another word to Quinn he stormed off but stopped short at the end of the walkway "Brooke, see if you can find a picture of him and h:s mom, okay? I don't want him to be buried alone. He should have ., ?

He couldn't say any more. Eyes half blinded by unexpected tears, he marched down the street and stumbled up the steps to his own home, the house he hated, and slammed the door behind him.

It took a while before he even noticed his mother's laptop computer was gone.

He went to the table. He touched the tabletop, right where the laptop had been, as though to reassure himself he wasn't imagining things.

Then he noticed the open drawers. The open cabinets. The food hadn't been taken, just tossed around, some of it ending up on the floor.

He bolted for his room. The light was still there. His weak attempt at camouflaging it had been lorn down.

Someone knew. Someone had seen.

But it didn't stop there. In his mother's bedroom the drawers and the closet had been ransacked.

His mother kept a locked> flat, gray metal box in her closet. Sam knew because she'd pointed it out to him on more than one occasion, "If anything ever happens to me, this is where my will is." She was very serious, but then she'd said, "You know, in case I get hit by a bus."

"We don't have any buses in Perdido Beach," he'd pointed out.

"Hmm. I guess that explains why they're never on time" she'd said, and then laughed and hooked him in for a hug.

Holding on to him she had whispered, "Sam, your birth certificate is in there, too."

"Okay."

"It's up to you whether you want to see it"

He had stiffened against her embrace. She was offering him a chance to know what it said on the birth certificate. There would be three names listed: his, his mother's, and his father's.

"Maybe. Maybe not," he had said.

She held him tightly, but he gently disengaged and stood apart from her. He wanted then to say something. To apologize for what had happened to Tom. To ask her whether he had also, somehow, scared off his true father.

But his was a life with secrets. And even though his mother had made the offer, Sam knew she didn't want him to violate the code of secrecy.

For months Sam had known about the box. Known where he could find the key-Now the box was gone.

He had very little doubt who had taken it, who had searched the house.

By now. Caine knew that Sam had the power.

He retrieved his bike. Right now he wanted desperately to be with Astrid. She would make sense of everything.

Most kids now got around on bikes—not always their own—or skateboards. Only the prees walked. And as he crossed through the plaza on his way to Astrid's home there was a procession of them walking right across the street. Brother John was in the lead. Mother Mary was pushing a two-seat stroller. Some girl in a Coates uniform was carrying a toddler on her hip. Two other kids, drafted for the day, were shepherding the line of some thirty or so preschoolers. They were solemn for a group of little kids but there was at least some horseplay, enough that Mary had to yell, "Julia and Zosia, get back in line."

The twins, Emma and Anna, brought up the rear Sam knew them fairly well, having actually gone out with Anna on a date once. Emma had a single stroller, and Anna was pushing a Ralph's grocery store cart loaded with snacks and diapers and baby bottles.

Sam stopped and waited for them to cross the street. They stuck to the crosswalk, which, he supposed, was a good thing. Best for the prees to learn to cross the street like there might be traffic. Some kids had been doing some driving, often with bad results. Caine had the rules on that too, now: no one was allowed to drive, except for some of Caine's people and Edilio, who theoretically might have to drive the ambulance or the tire truck. If he ever figured out how.