Gripping Cookie’s bat, Sam raced to get between Orc and Edilio.
“I don’t want to fight you,” Sam shouted.
“I know you don’t want to fight me,” Orc said confidently. “Nobody wants to be fighting me.”
Astrid came striding up. “All of you stop it,” she yelled. Her fists were balled up. There were tears in her eyes. But she was angry, not sad. “We don’t need this crap.”
Howard slid between Orc and Astrid. “Step off, Astrid, my man Orc has to teach this punk a lesson.”
“Step off?” Astrid shot back. “You don’t tell me to step off you . . . you invertebrate.”
“Astrid, stay out of this, I got this,” Sam said. Edilio tried to stand firm, but he could barely stand at all.
Surprisingly, Orc said, “Hey. Let Astrid talk.”
Pumped on adrenaline, Sam almost didn’t hear him. But then he processed what Orc had said and kept his mouth shut.
Astrid took a deep breath. Her hair was flying wild. Her face was red. Finally, struggling for calm, she said, “We’re not looking for a fight.”
“Speak for yourself,” Cookie muttered.
“This is crazy,” Astrid said. “We’re just looking for my brother.”
Orc’s slit eyes narrowed further. “The retard?”
“He’s autistic,” Astrid snapped.
“Yeah. Little Pe-tard,” Orc sneered, but he didn’t push it.
“You should have stopped, Sammy.” Howard made a tsk-tsk sound, shaking his head regretfully.
“That’s what I said, and I’m the one who ends up getting pounded?” Quinn gestured wildly, angry at Sam.
Howard nodded toward Quinn, amused. “You should have listened to your bro there, Sam. I told you last night, you need to take care of my man Orc.”
“Take care of him? What does that mean?” Astrid demanded.
Howard turned cold eyes on her. “You have to show Captain Orc some respect, that’s what I mean.”
“Captain?” Sam resisted the urge to laugh.
Howard stepped close, brave with Orc standing right behind him. “Yeah. Captain. Someone had to step up and take charge, right? You were busy, I guess, maybe surfing or whatever, so Captain Orc volunteered to be in charge.”
“In charge of what?” Quinn asked.
“Stopping everybody running crazy, that’s what.”
“Yeah,” Orc agreed.
“Kids were busting everything up, taking anything they wanted,” Howard went on.
“Yeah.”
“And all those booger-eaters, all those little kids running around, no one to even stop them crying or change their diapers. Orc made sure they were taken care of.” Howard grinned a huge grin. “He comforted them. Or at least made sure someone did.”
“That’s right,” Orc said, as if it was the first time he’d heard it put that way.
“No one else wanted to get things under control, so Orc did,” Howard said. “And so he is the Captain now, until the adults come back.”
“Only they ain’t coming back,” Orc said.
“That’s totally right,” Howard said. “What the Captain said.”
Sam glanced at Astrid. The truth was, someone needed to get people to stop acting crazy. Orc would not have been Sam’s choice for that job. But he didn’t want to do it himself.
The fight had mostly gone out of the situation. And now that the two sides were lined up face-to-face, there was no question who would win if it started up again. It was four to four, but the four bullies included Orc, and he counted for three at least.
“We just want to go look for Little Pete,” Sam said finally, swallowing his anger.
“Yeah? If you’re looking for something, it’s best if you go kind of slow,” Howard said with a smirk.
“You want the golf cart,” Sam said.
“That’s what I’m talking about, Sammy,” Howard said, spreading his hands wide in a gesture of conciliation.
“It’s, like, people pay taxes, right?” Mallet said.
“Exactly,” Howard agreed. “It’s a tax.”
“Who are you, anyway?” Astrid challenged Mallet. “I’ve never seen you at school.”
“I go to Coates Academy.”
Sam said, “My mom’s the night nurse up there.”
“Not anymore,” the kid said.
“Why are you down here?” Astrid again.
“I didn’t get along with the kids up there.” Mallet tried to toss the line off like it was a joke, but the effect was undermined by the fear in his eyes.
“Are there any adults up there?” Sam asked hopefully.
“Aw,” Howard said. “Sammy wants his mommy.”
“Take the golf cart,” Sam said.
“Don’t waste your time trying to look all bad at me. See, I know you, man,” Howard said. “School Bus Sam. Mr. Fireman. You go all heroic, but then you disappear. Don’t you? It kind of comes and goes with you. Everyone last night is all, ‘Where’s Sam? Where’s Sam?’ And I had to say, ‘Well, kids, Sam is off with Astrid the Genius because Sam can’t be hanging out with regular people like us. Sam has to go off with his hot blond girlfriend.’”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Sam said, and instantly regretted it.
Howard laughed, delighted to have provoked him. “See, Sam, you always got to be in your own little world, too good for everyone, while me and Captain Orc and our boys here, we’re always going to be around. You step away, and we step up.”
Sam could feel Astrid and Quinn watching, waiting for him to deny what Howard was saying. But what was the point? Sam had felt the expectations of so many kids in the plaza, kids waiting for him to step up, like Howard said. And all he had wanted to do was run away. He had jumped at the chance to go off with Astrid.
“I’m bored with this,” Orc grunted.
Howard grinned. “Okay, Sam. You can go find Little Pe-tard, but when you come back, you better have a nice present for the Captain. Captain runs the FAYZ, man.”
“The what?” Astrid asked.
Howard was clearly pleased to be asked. “I came up with that myself. FAYZ. Spelled F-A-Y-Z. It stands for Fallout Alley Youth Zone. Fallout Alley, and nothing but kids.”
Howard laughed his mean laugh. “Don’t worry, Astrid, it’s just a FAYZ. Get it? It’s just a FAYZ.”
The sun was hot on her face. Lana opened her eyes. Ominous winged shapes floated above her, crossed the sun, floated back. The vultures watched her and waited, confident of a meal.
Her tongue was swollen so that it filled her mouth, almost gagging her. Her lips were cracked. She was dying.
She looked around for the body of her poor dog. He should have been right there beside her. But there was no body.
She heard a familiar bark.
“Patrick?”
He came bounding over to her, excited, urging her to come and play.
She lifted her one good arm and touched Patrick’s neck. His fur was matted with dried blood. She probed where the fatal bite had been. The wound was closed. There was still a scab on the site, but it was no longer bleeding, and judging from Patrick’s behavior, he had never felt better.
Had she dreamed it all? No, the dried blood was proof.
She strained to recall her last conscious moments from the night. Had she prayed? Was that it, a miracle? She didn’t remember doing that, she wasn’t a person who thought about prayer.
Had she caused this? Had she somehow healed Patrick?
She almost laughed. She was getting delirious. She was losing her mind. Imagining things.
Crazy from the pain and thirst and hunger.
Crazy.
She smelled something foul. Sickly sweet and foul.
She looked at her shattered right arm. The flesh, especially the taut, stretched flesh that barely contained her shattered arm bones, was dark, black edging toward green. The smell was awful.
Lana took several deep breaths, shaky, fighting the upsurge of terror. She’d heard of gangrene.
It was what happened when flesh died or circulation was cut off. Her arm was dying. The smell was the odor of rotting human flesh.
A vulture fluttered to a landing just a few feet away. It stared at her with beady eyes and bobbed its featherless neck. The vulture knew that smell, too.
Patrick came bounding back, barking, and the vulture reluctantly flapped away.
“Not getting me,” Lana croaked, but the weakness of her own voice just scared her further. The vultures were going to get her. They were.
But there was Patrick, healed after a seemingly fatal wound.
Lana laid her left hand on the flesh just below the bone on her right arm. The flesh was hot to the touch. It felt puffy beneath the crust of dried blood.
She closed her eyes and thought, whatever did it, however it happened for Patrick, I want it now for me. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.
She drifted off then, thinking of home. Of her room. Posters on the walls, a dreamcatcher hanging in front of one window, forgotten stuffed animals in a wicker basket, a closet bursting with clothing, her collection of Asian fans, which everyone thought was weird.
She wasn’t mad at her parents anymore. She just missed them. She wanted her mother more than anything. And her dad, too. He would know how to save her.
She dreamed feverish dreams, images that made her gasp and pant and caused her heart to beat like a jackhammer.
She felt herself floating on a thin crust of land. The land was like the skin of a balloon. Below, an open space full of swirling clouds and sudden jets of flame. And farther down still, a monster, something out of her childhood, the monster that had often startled her from sleep.
It was chiseled of living stone, a rough, slow-moving, cunning beast with burning black eyes.
And within that terrible beast, a heart. Only this heart glowed green, not red. And this heart was like an egg, cracked open so that brilliant, painful light escaped.
She woke with a start from the sound of her own cry.
She sat up, as she always did when waking from a nightmare in her own bed.
She sat up.
The pain was terrible. Her head pounded, her back, her . . . She stared at her right arm.
For a while she forgot to breathe. Forgot even the pain in her head and back and leg. Forgot them all. Because the pain in her arm was gone.
Her arm was straight. From elbow to wrist it formed a straight line again.
The gangrene was gone as well. The smell of death was gone.
Her arm was still crusted in dried blood but it was nothing, nothing at all compared with what had been there, nothing like what it had been.
Trembling, she lifted her right arm.
It moved.
Slowly she clenched her right fist.
The fingers came together.
It was not possible. It was not possible. What she was seeing could not be.
But pain didn’t lie. And the searing pain in her arm was now no more than a dull throb.
Lana placed her left hand on her broken leg.
It wasn’t quick. It took a long time and she was terribly weak from thirst and hunger. But she kept her hand there until, an hour later, she did what she had feared she would never do again: Lana Arwen Lazar stood up.
Two vultures sat perched atop the overturned pickup truck.
Lana said, “Guess you waited for nothing.”
ELEVEN
273 HOURS, 39 MINUTES
SAM, QUINN, EDILIO, and Astrid moved off on foot, insults and laughter following them.
“Quinn, Edilio, are you guys okay?” Astrid asked.
“Aside from the big bruise I’ll probably have in the middle of my back?” Quinn answered. “Sure. Aside from the fact that I got pounded on for no reason, I’m perfect. Great plan, brah. Worked out well. We gave away the golf cart, and we got beat up and humiliated.”
Sam bit back a desire to yell at his friend. Quinn wasn’t wrong. Sam had voted to ignore the roadblock, and they had paid a price.
Howard’s words stung. It was like the little worm had peeled back his skin and shown the world what Sam was really like. Not about thinking he was too good for everyone, that was wrong, but about him not wanting to step up. Sam had his reasons, but right now they didn’t matter as much as the burning feeling that he was shamed in front of his friends.
“I’ll be fine, no big thing,” Edilio said to Astrid. “If I keep walking, it’ll go away.”
“Oh yeah, great, be a big man, Edilio.” Quinn sneered. “Maybe you enjoy getting pounded on. Me, no. I do not enjoy getting pounded on. And now we’re supposed to walk all the way to the power plant? Why, so we can look for some little kid who probably doesn’t even know he’s missing?”
Again Sam resisted the surge of anger. As mildly as he could he said, “Brother, nobody is making you come.”
“You saying I shouldn’t?” Quinn took two quick steps and grabbed Sam’s shoulder. “You saying you want me to leave, brah?”
“No, man. You’re my best friend.”
“Your only friend.”
“Yeah. That’s right,” Sam admitted.
“All I’m saying is, who died and made you king?” Quinn asked. “You’re acting like you’re the boss here. How did that happen? How come I’m taking orders from you?”
“You’re not taking orders,” Sam said angrily. “I don’t want anyone taking orders from me. If I wanted people taking orders from me, all I had to do was stay in town and start telling people what to do.” In a quieter voice Sam said, “You can be in charge, Quinn.”
“I never said I wanted to be in charge,” Quinn huffed. But he was running out of resentment. He shot a dark look at Edilio, a wary look at Astrid. “It’s just weird, brah. Used to be it was you and me, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed.
In a whining voice Quinn said, “I just want to get our boards and head for the beach. I want everything to go back to how it was.” Then in a startling shout he cried, “Where is everyone? Why haven’t they come for us? Where. Are. My. Parents?”
They began walking again, Edilio hobbling a little, Quinn falling behind and muttering. Sam walked beside Astrid, still self-conscious in her presence.
“You handled Orc back there,” he said. “Thanks.”
“I tutored him through remedial math.” She made a wry smile. “He’s a little intimidated by me. We can’t count much on that, though.”
They walked down the middle of the highway. It was strange to see the yellow line under their feet, strange.
“Fallout Alley Youth Zone,” Astrid said.
“Yeah. I guess that will stick, huh?”
“Maybe it’s not just a joke,” Astrid said. “Maybe this is about Fallout Alley?”
Sam looked sharply at her. “You mean maybe an accident at the nuclear plant?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure I mean anything.”
“But you think it could be connected? Like the plant blew up or something?”
“The power is still on. Perdido Beach gets all its power from the plant. The lights are still on. So one way or the other, the plant is still running.”
Edilio stopped. “Hey, guys. Why are we walking?”
“Because that jerk Orc and that tool Howard stole our golf cart,” Quinn said.
“Dude,” Edilio said, and pointed at a car that had plunged off the road and come to a stop in the drainage ditch. There were two bikes mounted on a trunk-top bike rack.
“I feel bad taking someone’s bike,” Astrid said.
“Get over it,” Quinn said. “Haven’t you noticed: It’s a whole new world. It’s the FAYZ.”
Astrid peered up at a seagull floating not far above them. “Yes, Quinn. I did notice.”
They took the two bikes and rode two-on, Quinn perched on Edilio’s handlebars, Astrid on Sam’s. Her hair blew in his face, stinging him a little. Sam was sorry when they located two more bikes.
The highway did not go to the power plant. They had to tur
n onto a side road. There was an impressive stone guardhouse at the turnoff, and a red-striped gate, like the ones at a railroad crossing. It was lowered to bar the way. They pedaled around it.
The road wound through hillsides carpeted in desiccated grass and wilting yellow wildflowers. There were no homes or businesses near the plant. It was surrounded by hundreds of acres of emptiness in all directions. Steep hillsides and infrequent stands of trees, meadows and dry creeks.
Eventually the road veered down to the tumbled rock shoreline. The view was stunning, but the surf, normally explosive, was gentle, tamed. The road rose and fell, wound back on itself a couple of times, hid behind hills, and then opened on a new panorama of the ocean.
“There’s another security gate up ahead,” Astrid said.
“If there’s a guard there, I’ll kiss him,” Quinn said.
“This is all constantly watched and patrolled,” Astrid said. “They have almost a private army that protects the plant.”
“Not anymore,” Sam said.
They came to a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. The fence extended down to the rocks on the left, and disappeared up into the hills on the right. There was a much more serious guardhouse here, almost a fortress. It looked like it could handle a major attack. The gate was a tall section of chain link that could roll back and forth at the push of a button.
They stopped pedaling and stood looking up at the obstacle.
“How do we get in?” Astrid wondered.
“Someone climbs the gate,” Sam said. “Rock, paper, scissors?”
The three boys did rock, paper, scissors, and Sam lost.
“Dude. Paper? Come on,” Quinn teased. “Everybody knows you go with scissors on the first round.”
Sam scaled the chain link quickly, but the razor wire gave him pause. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around the most troublesome strand of wire. He carefully swung a leg over and yelped as the wire nicked his thigh. Then he was over. He dropped to the ground, leaving his shirt behind on the wire.
He entered the guardhouse. The air-conditioning was on full blast, making him instantly regret the loss of his shirt.
A bank of color monitors showed the road they had just come down, as well as a rotating array of outdoor scenes: ocean and rock and mountain. It also showed several passcard-protected doors to the plant.
Gone Series Complete Collection Page 8