Gone Series Complete Collection (217 page)

They wandered out of earshot at that point, presumably into the cabin. But Drake had heard a female pronoun.

Was it possible? Was Diana on this very boat?

He grinned in the darkness. He would wait and be sure. The opportunity would arise. His faith in the gaiaphage had not failed him yet.

From boat to boat, one after the next, Sam rowed.

At each boat he climbed aboard and crouched to enter whatever cabin they had. In the smaller sailboats or motorboats he installed one or two Sammy suns.

Sammy suns were the long-lasting manifestation of his power. Rather than firing light in a killing beam he could form balls of light, which then burned without heat and hung in the air. They experimented a bit and discovered that the Sammy sun would stay in place relative to the boat when it moved, a rather important consideration.

Some of the boats, like the houseboats, got as many as three or four Sammy suns.

Halfway through the process, Sam realized he was feeling very weary. He’d had this same feeling after battles where he’d had to use his powers. He’d always assumed it was just the depression that followed any fight. Now he was wondering if the use of the power itself had some kind of tiring effect.

Maybe. But it didn’t matter. The Sammy suns were reassuring to kids. No one—least of all Sam—could tolerate the idea of being trapped in perpetual darkness. It was inconceivable. It struck terror right down to his core.

The last Sammy suns were for the big houseboat. Five in all, including an especially large one floating beside the front railing.

They would be in the dark. But they would not be totally blind.

“That helps,” Edilio said, welcoming him back.

“For a while,” Sam said grimly.

“For a while,” he agreed.

He couldn’t help but pick up his binoculars and scan the shore. Orc was still out searching. Good. If they were lucky he might find Drake, and Sam would rush to help.

But he wasn’t really interested in watching Orc. It was Astrid he searched for.

If she made it to Perdido Beach, what was the earliest she could get back? It had to be before the sky closed. If she was trapped out there in the dark, she would have to literally crawl along the road. And not everything needed light to hunt and kill. The darkness might keep Drake at bay, but the coyotes and snakes and zekes . . .

He had to do something. But he didn’t know what. It ate out his insides, that not knowing what to do.

“I could hang Sammy suns along the road,” he said.

“Once we have a deal with Albert and Caine,” Edilio agreed. “But if we do it now, it will just be a beacon enticing all of Perdido Beach to come. We aren’t ready for that.”

Sam clenched his mouth shut. He hadn’t really expected Edilio to say anything about it. He was just thinking out loud. And he was still mad at Edilio. He needed to be mad at someone, and Edilio was there.

Worse, Edilio did not seem to fear the coming darkness. He was his usual calm, capable self. Normally that was reassuring. But Sam was having a hard time just taking a full breath. He was exhausted from hanging suns and making all sorts of reassuring noises to his people on the boats.

He didn’t believe what he was saying. Astrid was out there somewhere. Darkness was coming. The endgame was being played. And he had no plan.

He had no plan.

Sam looked up. The sun was now beginning to appear as it rose above the edge of the stain. Way, way too high in the sky. But the light was welcome. Welcome and heartbreaking when he contemplated the fact that he might never see it again.

The water sparkled. The white hulls brightened. The village, the little campground, and nearby woods lit up.

Edilio was watching one of the boats through his own binoculars. “It’s Sinder,” he reported. “She wants permission for her and Jezzie to go ashore and harvest their veggies.”

“Yeah. It makes sense.” He raised his voice to a shout. “Breeze! Dekka! On deck!” Then in a normal speaking voice to Edilio he said, “Sinder will need someone watching her back.”

Brianna appeared seconds after the sound of her nickname died. Dekka came up a few moments later.

“It’s light enough for you, Breeze,” Sam said.

“Yeah, it’s Florida in July,” Brianna said, rolling her eyes at the strange tea-stained light.

“I thought you wanted to go back out,” Sam said tersely.

“Dude. Of course I do. Chill. I was just making a joke.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, teeth still gritted. His jaw hurt. His shoulders were knots of pain. “Soon as Sinder gets near shore you meet her. Stay on her until she and Jezzie are done.”

“I don’t have to sit right on top of them,” Brianna said with faux innocence. “I mean, I can go in and out, you know? Check on them, run down the road a ways, see what’s what. . . .”

Before Sam could answer Edilio said, “We need a strategy, not a lot of people running off in different directions. Astrid’s probably in PB by now. If Drake attacks us here, we’ll need you, Brianna. But if you run into him without Sam, the best you can get is a draw.”

It made perfect logical sense. But it did nothing to address Sam’s desperate desire to do. To do. Not to talk, or watch, or worry, but to do.

The mission to grab the missiles had done little to ease his desire for action. Without thinking about it he held his palms up before his face. How long since he had fired the killing light rather than just hanging lights?

He realized Edilio and Dekka were both watching him with solemn expressions. Brianna was smirking. All three of them had read his thoughts.

“Well, we can eat some big-ass radishes, at least,” Sam muttered lamely.

“All this is just coping,” Dekka said. “None of it is about winning.”

“Drake is here. Somewhere. The gaiaphage is . . . no one knows exactly where,” Edilio said. “We don’t even know what’s happening in Perdido Beach. We don’t know what Albert is up to. We don’t know where Caine stands in all this. We don’t know why Taylor hasn’t bounced in to tell us what is going on.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Sam said bitterly. “Astrid’s right to try to reach Perdido Beach. And meanwhile we’re stuck. Tied down. Flies on one of those sticky strips.”

Sam’s palms felt itchy. He squeezed his fists tight.

There was logic. And then there was instinct. Sam’s instinct was screaming that he was losing a fight with each passing, passive, patient second.

The rising sun cast deep shadows on Astrid’s soul. It was one thing to know it was going to happen. It was a very different thing to see it.

The sky itself was disappearing. This would be the last daylight of the FAYZ.

She looked around, trying to orient herself. The result was near panic. The road from the lake to Perdido Beach went in a southwesterly direction along the western slope of the Santa Katrina Hills. Then it intersected the highway.

But she’d lost sight of the road. And she’d somehow managed to wander into a gap between two hills.

The Santa Katrinas weren’t the biggest hills, though up close they could be imposing. They were dry, of course, without rainfall in the FAYZ. She remembered seeing them from the highway long ago after December rain, when they had suddenly turned green. But now they were just rock and desiccated weeds and stubby, struggling trees.

The road was presumably straight back to the west. But that could be miles, and she might find herself hitting the road no more than a mile or two from Lake Tramonto. That would be humiliating if Sam had sent Brianna out to find her. It would make Astrid’s mission to warn Perdido Beach look a lot less like Paul Revere and a lot more like the harebrained scheme of an incompetent girl.

Already she’d been delayed. The dawn—such as it was—had come. People in Perdido Beach could see it without any help from her.

Which meant that all she could do now was hope to send a message of solidarity and to offer Sam’s services as a light bringer.

Even that relied on speed. She was sure some kids at least would already be on their way out of Perdido Beach.

If she wanted speed, she’d have to go through the hills. If this pass went all the way through in a more or less straight line, then no problem. If it dead-ended against some hill she’d have to climb, that would be a problem.

Astrid set off at a trot. She was very fit after her months living in the woods and could move at this half-run, half-walk pace for hours so long as she had water.

The hills rose on either side. The one on the right began to seem oppressive, steep and glowering. The peak was exposed rock where some long-ago storm or earthquake had stripped the thin topsoil away. And that exposed rock looked like a grim-faced head.

The trail continued to be pretty easy. Once upon a time there’d been running water, but now the narrow streambed was choked with dried-out weeds.

Astrid saw something move up to her right, up the sheer slope of what she was thinking of as Mount Grimface. She didn’t stop, but kept moving, looked and now saw nothing.

“Don’t get spooked,” she told herself. That kind of thing had happened a lot in the forest: a noise, a sudden movement, a flash of something or other. And inevitably she’d been afraid it was Drake. Just as inevitably it had been a bird or a squirrel or a skunk.

Now, though, the sense that she was being watched was hard to shake. As if Mount Grimface really was a face and it was watching her and not liking what it saw.

Ahead the path curved away to the left, and Astrid welcomed the chance to move away from the sinister mountain, but at the same time, as she took that curve, she had an almost overpowering sense that whatever had been watching her was now behind her.

And coming closer.

The urge to break into a full-on run was hard to resist. But she couldn’t look as if she was fleeing, panicking.

She came around a blind corner and almost plowed into him.

Astrid stopped. Stared. Screamed.

Screamed so that she forgot to draw her gun until she was already screaming and backing away, and finally out came the shotgun and her fingers fumbled for the trigger. She raised the gun to her shoulder, sighted down the barrel.

She aimed for the eyes. Those awful marble-size eyes in bloody-black sockets.

It was a boy. That fact took a few long beats to penetrate her consciousness. Not some giant monster, a boy. He had strong shoulders and a deep tan. There were cuts on his face, like the claw marks of a wild animal. They seemed fresh. And she saw blood on his fingernails.

His expression was impossible to read—the eyes, those awful chickpea-size eyes—made any emotion impossible to guess.

“Don’t move or I’ll blow your head off,” Astrid said.

The boy stopped walking. The eyes seemed unable to locate her, looking up and left and everywhere but straight at her.

“Are you real?” the boy asked.

“I’m real. So is this shotgun.” Astrid heard the quaver in her voice, but her grip on the gun was steady and she was keeping it on target. One squeeze of her right index finger and there’d be a loud noise and that horrifying head would explode like a water balloon.

“Are you . . . Are you Astrid?”

She swallowed hard. How did it know her name? “Who are you?”

“Bradley. But everyone calls me Cigar.”

The gun lowered several inches of its own accord. “What? Cigar?”

The boy’s mouth made a sort of grin. The grin revealed broken and missing teeth.

“I see you,” Cigar said. He stretched out a bloody hand to her, but like a blind person feeling for something he couldn’t quite locate.

“Stay back,” she snapped, and the gun went to her shoulder again. “What happened to you?”

“I . . .” He tried another smile, but it twisted into a grimace and then a terrible groan, a cry of agony that stretched on and on before ending in a wild burst of laughter.

“Listen, Cigar, you need to tell me what happened,” Astrid insisted.

“Penny,” he whispered. “She showed me things. My hands were . . .” He raised his palms to look at them, but his eyes were elsewhere, and a moan came from deep in his throat.

“Penny did this?” Astrid lowered the gun. Halfway. Then, hesitantly, all the way down. But she did not sling it back over her shoulder. She kept her grip tight and her finger resting on the trigger guard.

“I like candy, see, and I did a bad thing and then the candy was in my arm and then I was eating it and oh, it tasted so good, you know, and Penny gave me more, so I ate it up and it hurt and there was blood, maybe, lots of blood, maybe, maybe.”

The tiny eyes swiveled suddenly to look past Astrid.

“It’s the little boy,” Cigar said.

Astrid glanced over her shoulder, just quick, just a glance, almost involuntary because she wasn’t ready to lower her guard yet, not ready to turn around. Her head was already turning back toward Cigar when she realized what she had seen.

Seen? Nothing much. A distortion. A twisting of the visual field.

She looked back. Nothing.

Then back to Cigar.

“What was that?”

“The little boy.” Cigar giggled and placed his hand over his mouth like he’d said a dirty word. Then in a low whisper, “The little boy.”

Astrid’s throat was tight. The flesh on her arms rose into goose bumps. “What little boy, Cigar?”

“He knows you,” Cigar said, very confidential, like he was telling a secret. “Screaming yellow hair. Stabby blue eyes. He knows you, he told me.”

Astrid tried to speak and couldn’t. Couldn’t ask the question. Couldn’t accept what the answer might be. But at last, strangled words came from her mouth.

“The little boy. Is his name Pete?”

Cigar reached to touch his own eye, but stopped. He looked for a moment as if he were listening to something, though there was nothing but the sounds of gentle breeze and grating grasshoppers. Then he nodded eagerly and said, “Little boy says: ‘Hello, sister.’”

OUTSIDE

SERGEANT DARIUS
ASHTON
was very good with a truck engine. This did not mean he was necessarily good with an air compressor. But his lieutenant said a mechanic was needed at a site around the far side of the dome.