Brothers and sisters were together. Friends were together. Some of the really little kids, the kindergarteners, the first graders, were wandering on the grounds, not really going anywhere. They weren’t old enough to know their way home.
Preschoolers in Perdido Beach mostly went to Barbara’s Day Care, a downtown building decorated with faded appliqués of cartoon characters. It was next to the Ace hardware store and across the plaza from the McDonald’s.
Sam wondered if they were okay, the littles down at Barbara’s. Probably. Not his responsibility. But he had to say something.
“What about all these little kids?” Sam said. “They’ll wander into the street and get run over.”
Quinn stopped and stared. Not at the little kids, but down the street. “You see any cars moving?”
The stoplight changed from red to green. There were no cars waiting to go. The sound of car alarms was louder now, maybe three or four different alarms. Maybe more.
“First we see about our parents,” Astrid said. “It’s not like there aren’t any adults anywhere.” She didn’t seem sure of that, so she amended it. “I mean, it’s unlikely there are no adults.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “There must be adults. Right?”
“My mom will most likely either be home or playing tennis,” Astrid said. “Unless she has an appointment or something. My mom or dad will have my little brother. My dad’s at work. He works at PBNP.”
PBNP was Perdido Beach Nuclear Power. The power plant was just ten miles from the school. No one in the town thought about it much anymore, but a long time ago, in the nineties, there had been an accident. A freak accident, they called it. A once-in-a-million-years coincidence. Nothing to worry about.
People said that’s why Perdido Beach was still a small town, why it hadn’t ever gotten really big like Santa Barbara down the coast. The nickname for Perdido Beach was Fallout Alley. Not very many people wanted to move to a place called Fallout Alley, even though all the radioactive fallout had been cleaned up.
The three of them, with Quinn a few steps ahead, walking fast on his long legs, headed down Sheridan Avenue and turned right on Alameda.
At the corner of Sheridan Avenue and Alameda Avenue was a car with the engine running. The car had smashed into a parked SUV, a Toyota. The Toyota’s alarm came and went, screeching one minute, then falling silent.
The air bags in the Toyota had deployed: limp, deflated white balloons drooped from the steering wheel and the dashboard.
No one was in the SUV. Steam came from beneath the crumpled hood.
Sam noticed something, but he didn’t want to say it out loud.
Astrid said it: “The doors are still locked. See the knobs? If anyone had been inside and gotten out, the doors would be unlocked.”
“Someone was driving and blinked out,” Quinn said. He wasn’t saying it like it was supposed to be funny. Funny was over.
Quinn’s house was just about two blocks down Alameda. Quinn was trying to maintain, trying to stay nonchalant. Trying to keep acting like cool Quinn. But all of a sudden, Quinn started running.
Sam and Astrid ran too, but Quinn was faster. His hat fell off his head. Sam bent and scooped it up.
By the time they caught up, Quinn had thrown open his front door and was inside. Sam and Astrid went as far as the kitchen and stopped.
“Mom. Dad. Mom. Hey!”
Quinn was upstairs, yelling. His voice got louder each time he yelled. Louder and faster, and the sob was clearer, harder for Sam and Astrid to pretend not to hear.
Quinn came pelting down the stairs, still yelling for his family, getting only silence in return.
He still had his shades on, so Sam couldn’t see his friend’s eyes. But tears were running down Quinn’s cheeks, and tears were in his ragged voice, and Sam could practically feel the lump in Quinn’s throat because the same lump was in his own throat. He didn’t know what to do to help.
Sam set Quinn’s fedora down on the counter.
Quinn stopped in the kitchen. He was breathing hard. “She’s not here, man. She’s not here. The phones are dead. Did she leave a note or anything? Do you see a note? Look for a note.”
Astrid flicked a light switch. “The power is still on.”
“What if they’re dead?” Quinn asked. “This can’t be happening. This is just some kind of nightmare or something. This . . . this isn’t even possible.” Quinn picked up the phone, punched the talk button, and listened. He punched the button again and put the phone to his ear again, then dialed, stabbing at buttons with his index finger and babbling the whole time.
Finally, he put the phone down and stared at it. Stared at the phone like he expected it to start ringing any second.
Sam was desperate to get to his own house. Desperate and afraid, wanting to know and dreading knowing. But he couldn’t rush Quinn. If he made his friend leave the house now, it would be like telling Quinn to give up, that his parents were gone.
“I had a fight with my dad last night,” Quinn said.
“Don’t start thinking that way,” Astrid said. “One thing we know: you didn’t cause this. None of us caused this.”
She put her hand on Quinn’s shoulder, and it was as if that was the signal for him to finally fall apart. He sobbed openly, pulled his shades off, and dropped them on the tile floor.
“It’s going to be okay,” Astrid said. She sounded like she was trying to convince Quinn, but also herself.
“Yeah,” Sam said, not believing it. “Of course it is. This is just some . . .” He couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence.
“Maybe it was God,” Quinn said, looking up, suddenly hopeful. His eyes were red and he stared with sudden, manic energy. “It was God.”
“Maybe,” Sam said.
“What else could it be, right? S-so—so—so—” Quinn caught himself, choked down the panicked stutter. “So it’ll be okay.” The thought of some explanation, any explanation, no matter how weak, seemed to help. “Duh, of course it will be okay. It’ll totally be okay.”
“Astrid’s house next,” Sam said. “She’s closest.”
“You know where I live?” Astrid asked.
This would not be a good time to admit that he had followed her home once, intending to try to talk to her, maybe ask her to go to a movie, but had lost his nerve. Sam shrugged. “I probably saw you sometime.”
It was a ten-minute walk to Astrid’s home, a two-story, kind-of-new house with a pool in the back. Astrid wasn’t rich, but her house was much nicer than Sam’s. It reminded Sam of the house he used to live in before his stepfather left. His stepfather hadn’t been rich, either, but he’d had a good job.
Sam felt weird being in Astrid’s home. Everything in it seemed nice and a little fancy. But everything was put away. There was nothing out that could be broken. The tables had little plastic cushions on the corners. The electrical sockets had childproof covers. In the kitchen the knives were in a glass-front cupboard with a childproof lock on the handle. There were kid-proof knobs on the stove.
Astrid noticed him noticing. “It’s not for me,” she said snippily. “It’s for Little Pete.”
“I know. He’s . . .” He didn’t know the right word.
“He’s autistic,” Astrid said, very breezy, like it was no big thing. “Well, no one here,” she announced. Her tone said she’d expected it, and it was fine.
“Where’s your brother?” Sam asked.
Astrid yelled then, something he hadn’t known she could do. “I don’t know, all right? I don’t know where he is.” She covered her mouth with one hand.
“Call to him,” Quinn suggested in a strange, carefully enunciated, formal voice. He was embarrassed by his freak-out. But at the same time, he wasn’t quite done freaking out.
“Call to him? He won’t answer,” Astrid said through gritted teeth. “He’s autistic. Severely. He doesn’t . . . he doesn’t relate. He won’t answer, all right? I can yell his name all day.”
“It�
��s okay, Astrid. We’re going to make sure,” Sam said. “If he’s here, we’ll find him.”
Astrid nodded and fought back tears.
They searched the house inch by inch. Under the beds. In the closets.
They went across the street to the home of a lady who sometimes took care of Little Pete. There was no one home there, either. They searched every room. Sam felt like a burglar.
“He must be with my mom, or maybe my dad took him to the plant with him. He does that when there’s no one else to babysit.” Sam heard desperation in her voice.
Maybe half an hour had passed since the sudden disappearance. Quinn was still weird. Astrid seemed about to fall apart. It wasn’t even lunchtime but already Sam was wondering about night. The days were short, it was November 10, almost Thanksgiving. Short days, long nights.
“Let’s keep moving,” Sam said. “Don’t worry about Little Pete. We’ll find him.”
“Is that meant to be a pro forma reassurance or a specific commitment?” Astrid asked.
“Sorry?”
“No, I’m sorry. I meant, you’ll help me find Petey?” Astrid asked.
“Sure.” Sam wanted to add that he would help her anywhere, anytime, forever, but that was just his own fear talking, making him want to babble. Instead, he started toward his own house, knowing now beyond doubt what he would find, but needing to check, anyway, and to check something else, too. Needing to see if he was crazy.
Needing to see if it was still there.
This was all crazy. But for Sam, the crazy had started long before.
For the hundredth time Lana craned her head to look back and check on her dog.
“He’s fine. Stop fretting,” Grandpa Luke said.
“He could jump out.”
“He’s dumb, all right. But I don’t think he’ll jump out.”
“He’s not dumb. He’s a very smart dog.” Lana Arwen Lazar was in the front seat of her grandfather’s battered, once-red pickup truck. Patrick, her yellow Labrador, was in the back, ears streaming in the breeze, tongue hanging out.
Patrick was named for Patrick Star, the not-very-bright character on SpongeBob. She wanted him up front with her. Grandpa Luke had refused.
Her grandfather turned on the radio. Country music.
He was old, Grandpa Luke. Lots of kids had kind of young grandparents. In fact, Lana’s other grandparents, her Las Vegas grandparents, were much younger. But Grandpa Luke was old in that wrinkled-up-leather kind of way. His face and hands were dark brown, partly from the sun, partly because he was Chumash Indian. He wore a sweat-stained straw cowboy hat and dark sunglasses.
“What am I supposed to do the rest of the day?” Lana asked.
Grandpa Luke swerved to avoid a pothole. “Do whatever you want.”
“You don’t have a TV or a DVD or internet or anything.”
Grandpa Luke’s so-called ranch was so isolated, and the old man himself was so cheap, his one piece of technology was an ancient radio that only seemed to pick up a religious station.
“You brought some books, didn’t you? Or you can muck out the stable. Or climb up the hill.” He pointed with his chin toward the hills. “Nice views up there.”
“I saw a coyote up the hill.”
“Coyote’s harmless. Mostly. Old brother coyote’s too smart to go messing with humans.” He pronounced coyote “kie-oat.”
“I’ve been stuck here a week,” Lana said. “Isn’t that long enough? How long am I supposed to stay here? I want to go home.”
The old man didn’t even glance at her. “Your dad caught you sneaking vodka out of the house for some punk.”
“Tony is not a punk,” Lana shot back.
Grandpa Luke turned the radio off and switched to his lecturing voice. “A boy who uses a girl that way, gets her in the middle of his mess, that’s a punk.”
“If I didn’t get it for him, he would have tried to use a fake ID and maybe have gotten in trouble.”
“No maybe about it. Fifteen-year-old boy drinking booze, he’s going to find trouble. I started drinking when I was your age, fourteen. Thirty years of my life I wasted on the bottle. Sober now for thirty-one years, six months, five days, thank God above and your grandmother, rest her soul.” He turned the radio back on.
“Plus, the nearest liquor store’s ten miles away in Perdido Beach.”
Grandpa Luke laughed. “Yeah. That helps, too.”
At least he had a sense of humor.
The truck was bouncing crazily along the edge of a dry gulch that went down a hundred feet, down to more sand and sagebrush, stunted pine trees, dogwoods, and dry grasses. A few times a year, Grandpa Luke had told her, it rained, and then the water would go rushing down the gulch, sometimes in a sudden torrent.
It was hard to imagine that as she gazed blankly down the long slope.
Then, without warning, the truck veered off the road.
Lana stared at the empty seat where her grandfather had been a split second earlier.
He was gone.
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 for 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 move.
She looked at it and screamed. Her right forearm, from elbow to wrist, no longer formed a straight line. It was twisted into an angle like a flattened “V.” 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.
THREE
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. But 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. But 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. But in the meantime have a cookie, then come down to the plaza.”
Gone Series Complete Collection Page 2