Gone (3 page)

The truck was going straight down. Lana lurched against the seat belt.

The truck picked up speed, It slammed hard into a sapling and snapped it.

Down the truck went in a cloud of dust, bouncing so hard, Lana slammed against the headliner, her shoulders beaten against the window. Her teeth rattled. She grabbed lor the wheel, but it was jerking insanely and suddenly the truck rolled over

Over and over and over.

She was out of her seat belt, tossing around helplessly inside the cabin. The steering wheel was beating her like an agitator in a washing machine. The windshield smashed her shoulder, the gearshift was like a club across her face, the rearview mirror shattered on the back of her head.

The truck came to a stop.

Lana lay facedown, her body twisted impossibly, legs and arms everywhere. Dust choked her lungs. Her mouth was full of blood. One of her eyes was blocked, unable to see.

What she could see with her one good eye was impossible to make sense of at first. She was upside down, looking at a patch of low cactus that seemed to be growing at right angles to her.

She had to get out She oriented as best she could and reached for the door.

Her right arm would not mow.

She looked at it and screamed. Her right forearm, from elbow to wrist, no longer formed a straight line. !t was twisted into an angle like a flattened *VT It was rotated so that her palm faced out. The jagged ends of broken bones threatened to poke through her flesh.

She thrashed in panic.

The pain was so terrible, her eyes rolled up in her head and she passed out.

But not for long. Not long enough.

When she woke Up, the pain in her arm and left leg and back and head and neck made her stomach rise. She threw up over what had been the tattered headliner of the truck.

"Help me," she croaked. "Help. Someone help!"

But even in her agony she knew there was no one to help. They were miles from Perdido Beach, where she'd lived until a year ago when her folks moved to Las Vegas. This road led nowhere except to the ranch. Maybe once a week someone else would come down this road, a lost backpacker or the old woman who played checkers with Grandpa Luke.

"I'm going to die" Lana said to no one.

But she wasn't dead yet, and the pain wasn't going away. She had to get out of this truck.

Patrick. What had happened to Patrick?

She croaked his name, but there was nothing.

The windshield was starred and crumpled, but she couldn't kick it out with her one good leg.

The only way was the driver's side window, which was behind her. She knew that the mere act of turning around would be excruciating.

Then, there was Patrick, poking his black nose in at her, panting, whimpering, anxious.

"Good boy," she said.

Patrick wagged his tail.

Patrick was not some fantasy dog that suddenly learned to be smart and heroic He did not pull Lana from the steaming wreckage. But he stayed with her as she spent an hour of hell crawling out onto the sand.

She rested with her head shaded by a sagebrush. Patrick licked blood from her face.

With her good hand Lana detailed her injuries. One eye was covered in blood from a gash in her forehead. One leg was broken, or at least twisted beyond use. Something hurt inside her lower back, down where her kidneys were. Her upper lip was numb. She spit out a bloody piece of broken tooth.

The worst by far was the horrifying mess of her right arm. She couldn't bear to look at it. An attempt to lift it was immediately abandoned: the pain could not be endured.

She passed out again and came to much later. The sun was remorseless, Patrick lay curled beside her. And in the sky above, a half-dozen vultures, their black wings spread wide, circled, waiting.

298 HOURS, 05 MINUTES

'THAT TRUCK," SAM said, pointing. "Another crash" A FedEx truck had plowed through a hedge and slammed an elm tree in somebody's front yard. The engine was idling.

They ran into two kids, a fourth grader and his little sister, playing a halfhearted game of catch on their front lawn. "Our mom's not home," the older one said, "I'm supposed to go to my piano class this afternoon. Bui I don't know how to go there."

"And I have tap dance. We're getting our costumes for the recital" the younger one said. "I'm going to be a ladybug"

"You know how to get to the plaza? You know, in town?" Sam said.

"I guess so."

"You should go there."

"I'm not supposed to leave the house" the little one said.

"Our grandma lives in Laguna Beach " the fourth grader said. "She could come get us. Bui we can't get her on the phone. The phone doesn't work."

"I know. Maybe go wait down at the plaza, right?" When the kid just stared at him, Sam said, "Hey, don't get too upset, okay? You have any cookies or ice cream in the house?"

"I guess so"

"Well, there's no one telling you not to eat a cookie, is there? Your folks will show up soon, I think. Bui in the meantime have a cookie, then come down to the plaza."

"That's your solution? Have a cookie?" Astrid asked.

"No, my solution is to run down to the beach and hideout until this is all over," Sam said. "Hut a cookie never hurts"

They kept moving, Sam and Quinn and Astrid. Sam's home was east of downtown. He and his mom shared a small, squashed-looking one-story house with a tiny, fenced back-yard and no real front yard, just a sidewalk. Sam's mother didn't make much money working as a night nurse up at Coates Academy, Sam's dad was out of the picture, always had been. He was a mystery in Sam's life. And last year his stepfather had left, too.

"This is it," Sam said. "We don't believe in showing off with a big house and all,"

"Well, you live near Town Beach," Astrid said, pointing to the only advantage of this house or this neighborhood.

"Yeah, Two-minute walk. Less if I cut through the yard of the house where the biker gang lives."

"Biker gang?" Astrid said.

"Not the whole gang, really, just Killer and his girlfriend Accomplice." Astrid frowned, and Sam said,"Sorry. Bad joke. It's not a great neighborhood "

Now that he was here, Sam didn't want to go in. His mother would not be there.

And there was something in his house maybe Quinn, and especially Astrid, shouldn't see-He led the way up the three sun-faded, gray-painted wooden steps that creaked when you stepped on them. The porch was narrow, and a couple of months ago someone had stolen the rocking chair his mom had put out there so she could sit and rock in the evening before she went to work. Now they just had to drag out kitchen chairs.

That was always the best time of day for them, the beginning of his mother's workday, the end of Sam's. Sam would be home from school, and his mom would be awake, having slept most of the day. She would have a cup of tea, and Sam would have a soda or maybe a juice. She would ask him how school had gone that day, and he wouldn't really tell her very much, but it was nice to think about how he could tell her if he wanted to.

Sam opened the door. It was quiet inside, except for the refrigerator. The compressor on it was old and noisy. The last time they'd talked out on the porch, feet up on the railing, his mom had wondered whether they should get the compressor fixed, or whether it would be cheaper just to get a secondhand refrigerator. And how would they get it home without a truck,

"Mom?" Sam said to the emptiness of the family room. There was no answer.

"Maybe she's up the hill," Quinn said. "Up the hill" was the townie phrase for Coates Academy, the private boarding school. The hill was more like a mountain.

"No" Sam said. "She's gone like all the others."

The stove was on. A frying pan had burned black. There was nothing in the pan. Sam turned off the cooktop.

"This is going to be a problem all over town " he said.

Astrid said, "Yeah, stoves left on, cars running. Somebody needs to go around and make sure things are ogg and the little kids are with someone. And there's pills, and alcohol, and some people probably have guns"

"In this neighborhood some people have artillery" Sam said.

"It has to be God," Quinn said, "I mean, how else, right? No one else could do this, lust make all the adults disappear?"

"Everyone fifteen or over" Astrid corrected. "Fifteen isn't an adult, Trust me, I was in class with them " She wandered tentatively through the living room, like she was looking for something. "Can I use the bathroom, Sam?"

He nodded reluctantly. He was mortified to have her here. Neither Sam nor his mother was really into housekeeping. The place was more or less clean, but not like Astrid's house.

Astrid closed the bathroom door. Sam heard the sound of running water

"What did we do?" Quinn asked. "That's what I don't get. What did we do to piss God off?"

Sam opened the refrigerator. He stared at the food there. Milk. A couple of sodas. Half of a small watermelon placed cut side down on a plate. Eggs, apples. And lemons for his mom's tea. The usual.

"I mean, we did something to deserve this, right?" Quinn said. "God doesn't do things like this for no reason " "I don't think it was God "Sam said. "Dude. Had to be."

Astrid was back. "Maybe Quinn's right. There's nothing, you know, normal, that can do this" she said. "Is there? It doesn't make any sense. It's not possible and yet it happened "

"Sometimes impossible things happen," Sam said.

"No, they don't" Astrid argued. "The universe has laws. All the stuff we learn in science class. You know, like the laws of motion, or that nothing can go as fast as the speed of light. Or gravity. Impossible things don't happen. That's what impossible means" Astrid bit her lip."Sorry. It's not really the time for me to be lecturing, is it?"

Sam hesitated. If he showed them, crossed this line, he wouldn't be able to make them forget it. They would keep at him till he told them everything.

They would look at him differently. They would be freaked, like he was.

"I'm going to change my shirt, okay? In my room. I'll be right back. There's stuff to drink in the fridge. Go ahead"

He closed the door to his room behind him.

He hated his room. The window opened onto an alley and the glass was that translucent kind you couldn't really see out of. The room was gloomy even on a sunny day. At night it was so dark.

Sam hated the dark.

His mom made him lock up the house at night when she was at work. "You're the man of the house now* she would say,"but still, I'd feel better if I knew you had the door locked"

He didn't like it when she said that, about him being the man of the house. The man of the house now.

Now.

Maybe she didn't really mean anything by it. Hut how could she not? It was eight months since his stepfather had lied their old house. Six months since Sam and his mother had moved to this shabby bungalow in this decrepit neighborhood and his mother had been forced to take the low-paying job with the lousy hours.

Two nights ago there had been a thunderstorm and the lights had gone out for a while. He'd been in total darkness, except for faint flashes of lightning that turned the familiar things in his room eerie.

He'd managed to fall asleep for a while, but a huge crack of thunder had awakened him. He'd come out of a terrifying nightmare to total darkness in an empty house.

The combination had been tco much. He'd cried out for his mother. A big, tough kid like him, fourteen, almost fifteen, yelling "Mom" in the darkness. He had reached out his hand, pushing at the darkness.

And then ... light.

It had appeared not quite all the way inside his closet. He could kind of hide it by closing the closet door. But when he'd tried to close the door all the way. the light had simply passed right through it. Like the door wasn't even there. So the door was kind of closed, not all the way. He had hung some shirts casually over the top of the door to block most of the light, but that lame deception wasn't going lo last long. Eventually his mom would see .,. well, when she came back, she would.

He pulled the closet door open. The camouflage fell away.

It was still there.

The light was small, but piercing. And it hovered there, unmoving, unattached to anything, no strings. Not a lamp or a lightbulb, just a tiny ball of pure light

It was impossible. It was something that could not exist. And yet there it was. The light tnat had simply appeared when Sam had needed it, and had not gone away.

He touched it, but not really. His fingers just went through it, feeling only a warm glow, no hotter than bathwater,

"Yes, Sam," he whispered to himself, "still there."

Astrid and Quinn thought today was the beginning, but Sam knew better. Normal life had started coming apart eight months ago. Then, normalcy again And then, this light.

Fourteen years of normal for Sam. Then normal had started to slip off its track.

Today, normal had crashed and burned.

"Sam?"

It was Astrid calling from the living room. He glanced at the doorway, anxious lest she come in and see. He did his hurried best to hide the light again, and went back to his companions.

"Your mom was writing on her laptop" Astrid said.

"Probably checking email" But when he sat down at the table and looked at the screen, it was open to a Word document, not a browser.

It was a diary, lust three paragraphs on the page.

It happened again last night. I wish I could take this to G. But she'll think I'm crazy. I could lose my job. She'll think I'm on drugs. If I had a way to put cameras all over, I could get some proof But I have no proof and C's "mother" is rich and generous to CA. I'd be out the door. Even if I tell someone the whole truth, they'll just put me down as an overwrought mother

Sooner or later, C or one of the others will do some-thing serious. Someone will get hurt. Just like S with T.

Maybe VII confront
c /
don't think he'll confess. Would it make any difference if he knew everything?

Sam stared ai the page. It hadn't been saved. Sam hunted around on the computer's desktop and found the folder labeled "Journal" He clicked on h. It was password protected. If his mother had saved this final page, it too would have been under a password.