Gone Series Complete Collection (273 page)

The population of the FAYZ, choked, terrorized, and battered, rushed in a wild panic down the highway. It was a stampede, and Sam was nearly swept along. But he held on to Astrid, held on to her and looked at her face and saw the bruises.

“Who?” he demanded.

“Sam, it doesn’t matter; it’s over,” Astrid shouted to be heard above the roar of wind and fire.

“Who?” he demanded again.

“Drake. He wasn’t dead. He may still not be dead. But Sam, there are police now, and—”

But Sam had broken free. He walked into the swirling smoke.

Astrid could barely breathe, but she would not let him walk away. Not when the end was this close. It was Edilio who left her no choice. He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her bodily down the highway until she stopped struggling.

“He told me to take care of you,” Edilio said.

Those were the last words they could speak, as the smoke thickened, choking them, blinding them. They staggered on together, seeing nothing but glimpses of people rushing by, just following the ribbon of concrete beneath their feet.

Then the smoke lessened. The wind was blowing itself out, and a countervailing breeze now flowed from the south.

And then, there they were, Astrid and Edilio, standing at the edge, at the very end of the FAYZ wall.

And then through.

Out.

One hundred and seventy-one people—babies in arms, toddlers, kids—ran and stumbled into the arms of waiting parents. They ran to be scooped up by waiting paramedics.

Some kids ran, ran down the road, down the highway, screaming past the TV trucks, past the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, pushing and shoving through the well-meaning and the ill-intentioned alike because there was no safe distance for them, not until they could no longer hear or see any part of the place.

THIRTY-TWO

0
MINUTES

SAM FELT
THE
heaviness in his lungs lessen. His eyes were still on fire, but he was able to open them.

He didn’t know where to look, only the person he was looking for.

“Drake!” he yelled. “Come out and fight me, Drake!”

The person who appeared was not Drake. Lana and Patrick stepped out of the smoke.

“The barrier is down,” Sam said. “Fire’s coming fast. Have you seen Drake?”

“Last I heard he was dead. But in this place . . .” She shook her head and looked somewhere between amused and resigned. “Sam, if the barrier’s down, you don’t have to do this.”

“He hurt Astrid,” Sam said. “She’s alive. But he took her. He hurt her.”

“And here you are the tragic hero, after all,” Lana said dryly. She was unusually droll for Lana. The world was ending and she was being witty. “You may find you need this. And you know what? I think I’m done with it.”

She slipped something heavy into the waist of his jeans, and then walked away with her dog.

Sam felt the butt of Lana’s automatic pistol. Was it true? True that he didn’t have to do this? True that he needed the gun?

“Drake!” he yelled.

He heard the town burning. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The heat was intense, right on the line between barely tolerable and not. It was like standing too close to a fireplace, feeling it dry your skin, and knowing that another five degrees and you’d no longer be dry: you’d be burned. There were sparks everywhere in the air. The whole town would burn.

“Drake!”

The whip slashed his back, a pain like being branded by a hot iron.

He spun, and Drake’s fist smashed him in the face.

Sam went down on one knee, aimed his hands, and fired.

Nothing happened.

Drake seemed as shocked as Sam. He made a single, sudden laugh. “Not so dangerous now, are you, Sam?”

Drake struck again, and the whip burned across Sam’s shoulders. Sam lurched forward.

“I had fun with your girlfriend, Sam,” Drake said.

Sam tried again. But the light did not come. He was powerless. He drew the pistol.

“Come on, you know better than that, Sam, Sam, the hero man. You know bullets don’t kill me.”

“Gaia’s dead. The FAYZ is ended,” Sam said, and leveled the pistol at Drake’s face. “So I don’t know what will work and what won’t. Why don’t we find out?”

But a line had appeared around Drake’s neck. It was blood red, like a gruesome smile. Like the mark a hanged man might bear. It was widening, a gap forming between what had been Drake’s neck and Alex’s neck.

Drake hadn’t noticed yet. He grinned and slashed Sam hard, landing the whip’s blow again across his shoulder, curling around to tear at his back.

But when he retracted his whip arm, it was shorter. A foot-long segment had broken off. It lay like some nightmare worm on the sidewalk.

“No,” Drake said, but the sound of his voice was weakened by air sucking in through his neck.

Drake tried to strike again, to bring Sam down, but his whip arm was limp; it barely moved. It was curling from the end, seeming to crisp like parchment held too close to the fire.

“I’ll get out of here,” Drake said in a fading whisper. “I will find her. And I will make it last for days, Sam. I’ll make her scream, Sam. I’ll make her—”

Sam’s finger tightened on the trigger. It would be good to pull it. Drake was disintegrating before his eyes, and yet still,
still
, it would be good to pull that trigger. To feel the gun buck in his hand. To see the impact.

At that moment, as Sam stood poised between shooting and not, Drake’s head toppled off its grafted body and hit the ground.

One. Two. Three. Four. And the body collapsed.

The terrible whip arm looked like the skin a snake sheds during molting.

Sam picked up Drake’s head. The eyes fluttered, as though there might still be life.

Sam walked stiffly up the steps to the church, where the fire burned hot. He forced himself forward into the heat, feeling the hair on his head turn crisp, eyes so dry he couldn’t blink. And tossed Drake’s head into the flames.

“Okay,” he said to no one at all. “Now, I can get the hell out of here.”

THE TOLL

THREE HUNDRED
AND
thirty-two kids between the age of one month and fourteen years had been confined within the FAYZ.

One hundred and ninety-six eventually emerged.

One hundred and thirty-six lay dead.

Dead and buried in the town plaza.

Dead and floating in the lake or on its shores.

Dead in the desert.

In the fields.

Dead of battles old and recent. Of starvation and accident, suicide and murder.

It was a fatality rate of just over 40 percent.

AFTERMATH 1

SAM TEMPLE
WAS
taken by helicopter to a hospital in Los Angeles, where there were specialists there in burn injuries. He wasn’t consulted: he was found on his knees, obviously in shock, extensively burned. EMTs took over.

Astrid Ellison was taken to a hospital in Santa Barbara, as was Diana Ladris.

Other kids were shared out among half a dozen hospitals. Some specialized in plastic surgery, others in the effects of starvation.

Over the next week all were seen by psychiatrists once their immediate physical injuries were addressed. Lots of psychiatrists. And when they weren’t being seen by psychiatrists, they were being seen by FBI agents, and California Highway Patrol investigators, and lawyers from the district attorney’s office.

The consensus seemed to be that a number of the Perdido survivors, as they were now known, would be prosecuted for crimes ranging from simple assault to murder.

First on that list was Sam Temple.

Astrid tried many times to phone him from her hospital room, but calls to his hospital were being blocked. No, the nurses explained each time, they could not get him to the phone. No, they could not deliver a message. Not their fault. Talk to the district attorney’s office.

Astrid was able to visit Diana, who she found out was being cared for in the same hall, just three doors down.

Astrid walked slowly, cautiously, her body stiff from bruises and stiffer still from the bandages on her whip burns. They’d given her a cane to use.

She was not going to walk with a cane.

They’d offered her heavy-duty painkillers.

She’d rejected them, restricting herself to a few ibuprofen. The last thing she wanted was to be out of her mind, off in la-la land, when shrinks and cops and family were forever questioning her.

She had not told her parents about her own role in her brother’s death. She had only told them that he had died a very good death.

Astrid had seen their pain. She had also seen their hidden but still-visible relief. They would not have to readjust to their out-of-control autistic son. That had hurt the most. But who was she to judge?

She found Diana’s room. Diana was sitting in her bed using a remote control to idly flip through the channels on the wall-mounted TV.

“You,” Diana said by way of greeting.

“Me,” Astrid said.

“Can’t believe it,” Diana said. “All this time. And there’s still nothing on.”

Astrid laughed and lowered herself slowly into a chair. “You know how they say hospital food is so awful? Somehow I’m not having that reaction.”

“Tapioca beats rat,” Diana said.

“I never minded rat as much as that dog jerky we were getting for a while. The stuff Albert had them flavor with celery salt? That was the culinary low point for me.”

“Yeah, well, I had a lower low point,” Diana said, sounding angry. Or maybe not angry, maybe hurt.

Astrid put a hand on Diana’s arm, and Diana did not shake it off.

“How is Sam?” Diana asked.

“They won’t let me talk to him. But they’re going to release me in a couple of days. I’ll find him.”

“Won’t your parents try to stop you?”

Astrid considered this, then barked out a laugh. Diana joined in.

“Oh, my God, we have parents again,” Astrid said, wiping away a tear. “We’re kids. We’re teenagers again.”

A nurse poked her head in. “Listen, ladies, it’s not visiting hours, but there’s someone here to see you.”

“Who?” Diana asked.

The nurse looked left and right like she was afraid to be overheard. “It’s a young woman. She seems very determined. In fact, I almost called the police because she scared me.”

Astrid and Diana exchanged a look.

“Black or white?” Astrid asked.

“She happens to be white.”

“Lana!” Astrid and Diana said in unison.

“You’d better send her in,” Diana said. “You don’t want to say no to Lana. That would be, um, reckless.”

“And she’s saved more lives than every doctor and nurse in this hospital,” Astrid said.

Lana arrived a moment later, looking strangely clean, with her hair cut, and wearing clothing that was not stained or filthy or cut or patched together. She did not have a pistol. She did not have a cigarette.

“Oh, my God,” Diana said to Astrid. “Lana’s a girl.”

“Yeah, hysterical. Cracking me up,” Lana said with her very familiar, very hard-core snarl. “What, there’s only one chair?”

“Who have you seen?” Astrid asked.

“I saw Dekka. She’s with her folks. And if I said she wasn’t happy about things, that wouldn’t really begin to cover it. She wants to see Sam. Everyone wants to see Sam. Talked to Edilio on the phone. He’s in hiding. Worried about
la migra
coming for him and his family.”

“Edilio is in hiding,” Astrid snapped. “Edilio has to worry about being kicked out of the country. Our Edilio.”

“He’s got a volunteer lawyer—”

But Astrid wasn’t done. “They should be putting up statues to Edilio. They should be naming schools after that boy—no, no, I’m not going to call him a boy. If he’s not a man, then I’ll never meet one.”

Lana nodded approvingly, obviously enjoying and sharing in Astrid’s outrage.

“And you, too,” Astrid said to Lana. “No, don’t even wave me off.”

“Whoa,” Lana said. “I had a power. I didn’t make that happen. I used it. No big deal.”

“I don’t suppose you can still . . . ,” Diana began, waving a hand toward Astrid’s bandages.

Lana shook her head, not sadly, but with evident relief. “Nope. No, I cannot. I am no longer the capital ‘H’ Healer. I am Lana Arwen Lazar, period,
finito.
Just some girl with a weird name. I thought maybe I might miss it. Guess what? No. No, not even a little. You know what I do now? I eat. And I sleep. I throw sticks for Patrick. And then I do it all over again. That’s my plan, for the rest of my life. Eat, sleep, play with dog.”

“Have they got the shrinks all over you?” Diana asked.

“They tried,” Lana said with a curl of her lip. “I don’t see them coming back at me anytime soon.”

All three laughed at that. But Diana grew serious. “Honestly? I don’t mind the therapy much. I, uh . . . I don’t know.

I just. It’s okay. For me, anyway.”

They fell silent then. The only sounds were of gurneys in the hallway, a child crying somewhere, a male and a female voice laughing flirtatiously.

Astrid looked at Lana, now leaning against the window, and Diana, lost in thought, and reminded herself that at times she had hated Diana. She had told Sam to kill her if necessary. And she had disliked Lana as a short-tempered bitch who sometimes abused her privileges.

She let her mind move beyond these two. Orc, who had been the first to kill in the FAYZ, the first murderer. A vicious drunk. But someone who had died a hero.

Mary. Mother Mary. A saint who had died trying to murder the children she cared for.

Quinn, who had been a faithless worm at the start and had been a pillar at the end.

Albert. She still didn’t know quite what to think of Albert, but it was undeniable that far fewer would have walked out of the FAYZ without Albert.

If her own feelings were this conflicted, was it any wonder the rest of the world didn’t know what to do with the Perdido survivors?

“Sorry, I kind of dragged the mood down,” Diana said wryly.