Gone, Page 25

  He fidgeted and bit his lip, using the pain to keep him from thinking any more about Astrid and her shirt and her hair and skin. “Not the time, not the place,” he muttered under his breath.

  Little Pete sat, legs crossed, and stared into the fire. Sam wondered what was going on in his head. He wondered what power was concealed behind those innocent eyes.

  “Hungry,” Little Pete said. “Munchy, munchy.”

  Astrid gave him a hug. “I know, little brother. We’ll get food tomorrow.”

  One by one they felt their eyelids grow heavy. One by one they stretched out, fell silent, slept. Sam was the last. The fire was dying. The darkness was moving in from every direction.

  He sat cross-legged, crisscross-applesauce they called it when he was in kindergarten, turned his hands around, palms up, and lay them on his knees.

  How?

  How did it happen? How had this happened to him?

  How could he control it, make it happen on command?

  He closed his eyes and tried to recall the panic he’d felt whenever he had created light. It wasn’t hard to remember the emotion, but it was impossible to feel it.

  As quietly as he could, he stole away from the fire. The darkness under the trees might conceal a thousand terrors. He walked toward his fear.

  Pine needles crunched beneath his feet. He walked until he could only just make out the faint glow of the fire’s embers behind him and could no longer smell the piney smoke.

  He raised his hands, the way he’d seen Caine do, palms out, like he was signaling someone to stop, or else like he was a pastor blessing a congregation.

  He dredged up the fear of that nightmare in his bedroom, the panic when Little Pete was choking him, the sudden reaction when the firestarter tried to kill him.

  Nothing. It wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t simulate fear, and trying to scare himself with a dark forest wasn’t working, either.

  He spun. A noise behind him.

  “It’s not working, is it?” Astrid said.

  “It almost did, you almost scared me enough to make it happen,” Sam said.

  Astrid came closer. “I have a terrible thing I want to tell you.”

  “A terrible thing?”

  “I betrayed Petey. Drake. He wanted me to call him a name.” She was twisting her fingers together so hard, it looked painful.

  Sam took her hands in his. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. Just…”

  “Just what?”

  “He slapped me a couple of times, it wasn’t so bad, but—”

  “He hit you?” It felt like he had swallowed acid. “He hit you?”

  Astrid nodded. She tried to explain, but her voice betrayed her. So she pointed at the side of her face, at the place where Drake’s hand had hit her with enough force to jerk her head sideways. She steadied and tried again. “No big deal. But I was scared. Sam, I was so scared.” She stepped closer, wanting maybe to have his arms around her.

  Sam took a step back. “I hope he’s dead,” he said. “I hope he’s dead, because if he isn’t, I’ll kill him.”

  “Sam.”

  His fists were clenched. It felt like his brain was boiling inside his skull. His breath came shallow and harsh.

  “Sam,” Astrid whispered. “Try it now.”

  He stared, uncomprehending.

  “Now,” she yelled.

  Sam raised his hands, palms out, aimed toward a tree.

  “Aaaaahhhh!” he yelled, and bolts of brilliant, green-tinged light shot from his hands.

  He dropped his hands to his side, panting, stunned by what he had done. The tree was burned through. It fell, slowly at first, then faster, and crashed heavily in a patch of thornbush.

  Astrid came up behind him and slid her arms around him. He felt her tears on the back of his neck, her breath in his ear. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You can’t summon fear whenever you need it, Sam. But anger is fear aimed outward. Anger is easy.”

  “You manipulated me?” He untwined her arms and turned to face her.

  “It happened with Drake, just like I told you,” Astrid said. “But I wasn’t going to tell you until I saw you out here trying. You kept saying it was fear that made the power work. So, I thought…”

  “Yeah.” He felt strangely defeated. He had just, for the first time, willed the light to come. But he felt sad, not elated. “So, I have to be mad, not scared. I have to want to hurt people.”

  “You’ll learn to control it,” Astrid said. “You’ll get better at it, so that you can use the power without having to feel anything.”

  “Well, won’t that be a happy day?” Sam said with bitter sarcasm. “I’ll be able to burn someone without feeling anything.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I really am. Sorry for you, I mean, sorry this has to happen. You’re right to be afraid of the power. But the truth is, we need you to have this power.”

  They stood, distant from each other though only a foot apart. Sam’s mind was far away, playing out memories from a time that seemed like a million years ago. A million years, or maybe just eight days.

  “Sorry,” Astrid whispered again and threaded her arms beneath his to pull him against her.

  He rested his chin on her head, looking past her, seeing the fire, seeing the darkness everywhere else, the darkness that had scared him ever since he was a baby.

  “Sometimes you catch the wave. Sometimes the wave catches you,” he said at last.

  “It’s the FAYZ, Sam. It’s not you: it’s just the FAYZ.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  113 HOURS, 33 MINUTES

  LANA’S FOOT CAUGHT a root and she fell onto her hands and knees. Patrick bounded over to look at her, but kept his distance.

  Nip, the coyote who was Lana’s personal tormentor, snapped his jaws at her.

  “I’m getting up, I’m getting up,” Lana muttered.

  Her hands were scraped. Again.

  Her knees were bloody. Again.

  The pack was well out in front, weaving through sagebrush, leaping ditches, stopping to sniff at gopher holes, then moving on.

  Lana could not keep up. No matter how fast she ran, the coyotes always outpaced her, and when she fell behind, Nip would snap at her heels, and occasionally draw blood.

  Nip was a low-ranked coyote, anxious to prove himself to Pack Leader. But he wasn’t vicious, not like some of them, so he wouldn’t rip and tear at her with his teeth, he would only snarl and snap. But when she delayed the pack with her slow, clumsy human running, then Pack Leader would snarl at Nip and slash at him while Nip whimpered and abased himself.

  Patrick was lowest of all in status, lower even than Lana. He was a big, strong dog, but he bounded along with his tail wagging, his tongue lolling, which the swift, efficient coyotes seemed to find contemptible.

  The coyotes were solitary hunters, catching even the fastest rabbits or squirrels. Patrick was left to his own devices, and since he was much slower, he was going hungry.

  Lana had been offered one of Pack Leader’s kills—a half-eaten, still half-alive jackrabbit, but she wasn’t that hungry. Yet.

  She had almost forgotten that none of this was possible. Amazing how quickly she had come to accept a world defined by a giant barrier. Absurd that she knew she could heal with a touch. Ridiculous that she had accepted the fact that Pack Leader could speak. In words. In English, however garbled.

  Madness.

  Insanity.

  But what had happened down in that mine, down where the seething darkness hid, far from the sun, far from the world of reason, had killed whatever doubt remained for Lana: the world had gone crazy.

  She had gone crazy.

  Lana’s task now was to survive, not to analyze or understand, just to survive.

  Her shoes were already beginning to fall apart. Her clothing was ripped in several places. She was filthy. She’d had to urinate and defecate in the open, like a dog.

  Her legs and hands had b
een repeatedly torn by sharp rocks, sliced by thorns, stabbed by mosquitoes. She had even been bitten by a cornered raccoon. But the wounds never lasted long. They hurt, each time they hurt, but Lana healed them.

  They had run throughout the night, the coyotes, chasing the next meal.

  It had been just twelve hours or so, but already it seemed like forever.

  “I’m a human,” she told herself. “I’m smarter than he is. I’m superior. I’m a human being.”

  But here in the wild, in the dark desert night, she wasn’t superior. She was slower and more clumsy and weaker.

  To keep her spirits up, Lana talked to Patrick, or to her mother. That, too, was crazy.

  “Really enjoying my time here, Mom,” Lana said. “I’m losing a little weight. The coyote diet. Don’t eat anything and run all the time.”

  Lana fell into a hole and felt her ankle twist and break. The pain was excruciating. But the pain would last only a minute. The exhaustion was far deeper, the despair more painful.

  Pack Leader appeared, looking down at her from a jutting rock.

  “Run faster,” Pack Leader ordered.

  “Why are you keeping me prisoner?” she demanded. “Kill me or let me go.”

  “The Darkness says no kill,” Pack Leader said in his tortured, high-pitched, inhuman voice.

  She did not ask him what he meant by “the Darkness.” She had heard its voice in her head, down at the bottom of Hermit Jim’s gold mine. It was a scar on her soul, a scar her healing power could not touch.

  “I’m only slowing you down,” Lana sobbed. “Leave me here. Why do you want me around?”

  “Darkness say: You teach. Pack Leader learn.”

  “Learn what?” she cried. “What are you talking about?”

  Pack Leader leaped at her, knocked her flat on her back, and stood over her with his teeth bare above her exposed throat. “Learn to kill humans. Gather all packs. Pack Leader leader of all. Kill humans.”

  “Kill all humans? Why?”

  Pack Leader was salivating. A long string of slobber fell from his muzzle onto her cheek. “Hate human. Human kill coyote.”

  “Stay out of towns and no one kill coyote,” Lana argued.

  “All for coyote. All for Pack Leader. No human.” With his strained, unworldly voice, Pack Leader couldn’t really rant for long, but the fury and hatred came through in very few words. She didn’t know what a sane coyote would sound like if it could talk, but there was no doubt in her mind that this was an insane coyote.

  Animals didn’t get grandiose ideas about obliterating a whole species. That thought had not come from Pack Leader. Animals thought about food and survival and procreation, if they thought at all.

  The thing in the cave. The Darkness. Pack Leader was its victim, as well as its servant.

  The Darkness had filled Pack Leader with this evil ambition. But it had not been able to teach Pack Leader the ways to take on the humans. When Lana appeared at the gold mine, the Darkness had seized the opportunity to use her.

  There were limits to the power of the Darkness, no matter how terrifying it might be. It needed to use the coyotes—and Lana—to carry out its will. And there were limits to what the Darkness knew, as well.

  She knew what she had to do.

  “Go ahead, kill me,” Lana said. She arched her neck, presenting it for him, defiant. “Go ahead.”

  One quick bite and it would all be over. She would let the wound bleed. She wouldn’t heal it but would let her arteries pump her life out onto the desert sand.

  At that moment, part of Lana wasn’t sure she was bluffing. The Darkness had opened a door in her mind, a door to something almost as frightening as the Darkness itself.

  “Go ahead,” she challenged the coyote. “Go ahead and kill me.”

  The coyote leader faltered. He let loose an anxious, mewling sound. He had never caught helpless prey that did not struggle for life.

  It was working. Lana pushed Pack Leader’s wet muzzle away. She stood up, her ankle still painful.

  “If you’re going to kill me, kill me.”

  Pack Leader’s brown and yellow eyes burned holes in her, but she did not back down. “I’m not afraid of you.”

  Pack Leader flinched. But then his eyes went to Patrick, and back, with a sly sideways leer. “Kill dog.”

  It was Lana’s turn to flinch. But she knew instinctively that she could not show weakness. “Go ahead. Kill him. Then you’ll have no way to threaten me.”

  Again Pack Leader’s scarred face showed confusion. The thought was complicated. It was a thought with more than one move, like trying to play chess and anticipate what would happen two or three moves further on.

  Lana’s heart leaped.

  Yes, they were stronger and faster. But she was a human being, with a human brain.

  The coyotes had changed in some ways from what they had been: some had muzzles and tongues that now allowed tortured speech, and they were bigger than they should have been, stronger than they should have been, even smarter than they had any right to be. But they were still coyotes, still simple, driven by hunger, by the desire for a mate, by a need for a place within the pack.

  And the Darkness had not taught them how to lie or bluff.

  “The Darkness says you teach,” Pack Leader said, falling back on familiar territory.

  “Fine,” Lana said, her brain buzzing, trying to decide where to lead this conversation. Looking for the advantage. “You leave my dog alone. And you get me some decent food. Some food that humans eat, not filthy half-chewed rabbits. And then I’ll teach.”

  “No human food here.”

  That’s right, you filthy, mangy animal, Lana thought as the next move fell into place. No human food here.

  “I noticed,” she said, tamping down the triumph in her voice, keeping her face carefully neutral, giving nothing away. “So take me to the place where the grass grows. You know what I’m talking about. The place where the patch of green grows in the desert. Take me there, or take me back to the Darkness and tell the Darkness you cannot control me.”

  Pack Leader didn’t like that, and he expressed his frustration not in human speech but in a series of angry yipping sounds that reduced the rest of the pack to anxious skulking.

  He twisted away from her in a pantomime of frustration, unable to control or hide his simple emotions.

  “See, Mom,” Lana whispered as she pressed healing hands on her ankle. “Sometimes defiance is a good thing.”

  Finally, without a word, Pack Leader trotted off toward the northeast. He moved, and the pack followed, but slowly, at a pace that Lana could match.

  Patrick fell into step beside his master.

  “They’re smarter than you, boy,” Lana whispered to her dog. “But they’re not smarter than me.”

  “Wake up, Jack.”

  Computer Jack had fallen asleep at the keyboard. He was spending nights in the town hall, working to deliver on his promise of assembling a primitive cell phone system. It wasn’t easy. But it was fun.

  And it took his mind off other things.

  It was Diana who had awakened him, shaking his shoulder.

  “Oh, hi,” Computer Jack said.

  “That computer keyboard face? It’s not a great look for you.”

  Jack felt his face and blushed. There were imprints of the square keys on his cheek.

  “Big day today,” Diana said, moving across the room to the small refrigerator. She pulled out a soda, popped it open, raised the window shade, and drank while looking down at the plaza.

  Computer Jack adjusted his glasses. One side was a little askew. “It’s a big day? Why?”

  Diana laughed in her knowing way. “We’re going home for a visit.”

  “Home?” It took Jack a few seconds to click. “You mean to Coates?”

  “Come on, Jack, say it like you’re excited.”

  “Why are we going to Coates?”

  Diana came to him and put her hand against his cheek. “So sma
rt. And yet, so slow sometimes. Don’t you ever read that list Caine has you keep? You remember Andrew? It’s his happy fifteenth. We have to get up there before the hour of doom.”

  “Do I have to go? I have all this work to do….”

  “Fearless Leader has a plan that includes you,” Diana said. She spread her hands, dramatic, like she was a magician revealing the payoff of an illusion. “We’re going to film the big moment.”

  Jack was both frightened and excited by the idea. He loved anything involving technology, especially when it gave him an opportunity to show off his technical knowledge. But, like everyone, he’d heard what happened to the twins, Anna and Emma. He did not want to see anyone die, or disappear, or whatever it was they did.

  Yet…it would be fascinating.

  “The more cameras the better,” Jack mused aloud, already working on the problem, already picturing the layout. “If it happens in a flash, we’ll have to get lucky to get a shot at the precise second…. Digital video, not stills. As expensive and high end as Drake can find. Each one has to have a tripod. And we’ll need lots of light. It would be best if we had a simple background, you know, like a white wall or something. No, wait, maybe not white, maybe green, that way I can chroma key. Also…” He stopped himself, embarrassed that he’d gotten carried away, and not liking what he was about to say.

  “Also what?”

  “Look, I don’t want Andrew to get hurt.”

  “Also what, Jack?” Diana pressed.

  “Well, what if Andrew doesn’t want to just stand there? What if he moves? Or tries to run away?”

  Diana’s expression was hard to read. “You want him tied down, Jack?”

  Jack looked away. He hadn’t meant to say that. Not exactly. Andrew was nice enough…for a bully.

  “I didn’t say I want him tied down,” Jack said, emphasizing the word “want.” “But if he moves out of frame, out of where the cameras are pointed…”

  Diana said, “You know, Jack, sometimes you worry me.”

  Computer Jack felt a flush crawl up his neck. “It’s not my fault,” he said hotly. “What am I supposed to do? And, anyway, who do you think you are? You do whatever Caine says, same as me.”