Diana made no move. “Are you going to tell me what happened to you out there in the desert with Pack Leader?”
Caine snorted. “You don’t want to know.”
“Yes,” Diana insisted, “I do.”
“All that matters is I’m back,” Caine said with all the bravado he could manage.
Diana nodded. The movement caused her hair to fall forward, to caress her perfect cheek. Her eyes glittered moistly. But her lush lips still curled into an expression of distaste.
“What’s it mean, Caine? What does ‘gaiaphage’ mean?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard the word before.”
Why was he lying to her? Why did it seem so dangerous that she should know that word?
“Go get them,” Caine said, dismissing her. “Get Drake and Bug.”
“Why don’t you take it easy? Make sure you’re really . . . I was going to say ‘sane,’ but that might be setting the bar kind of high.”
“I’m back,” Caine reiterated. “And I have a plan.”
She stared at him, head tilted sideways, skeptical. “A plan.”
“I have things I have to do,” Caine said, and looked down, incapable, for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp, of meeting her gaze.
“Caine, don’t do this,” Diana said. “Sam let you walk away alive. He won’t do that a second time.”
“You want me to bargain with him? Work something out?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, that’s just what I’m going to do, Diana. I’m going to bargain. But first I need something to bargain with. And I know just the thing.”
Astrid Ellison was in the overgrown backyard with Little Pete when Sam brought her the news and the worm. Pete was swinging. Or more accurately he was sitting on the swing as Astrid pushed him. He seemed to like it.
It was dull, monotonous work pushing the swing with almost never a word of conversation or a sound of joy from her little brother. Pete was five years old, just barely, and severely autistic. He could talk, but mostly he didn’t. He had become, if anything, even more withdrawn since the coming of the FAYZ. Maybe it was her fault: she wasn’t keeping up with the therapy, wasn’t keeping up with all the futile, pointless exercises that were supposed to help autistics deal with reality.
Of course Little Pete made his own reality. In some very important ways he had made everyone’s reality.
The yard was not Astrid’s yard, the house not her house. Drake Merwin had burned her house down. But one thing there was no shortage of in Perdido Beach was housing. Most homes were empty. And although many kids stayed in their own homes, some found their old bedrooms, their old family rooms, too full of memories. Astrid had lost track of how many times she’d seen kids break down sobbing, talking about their mom in the kitchen, their dad mowing the lawn, their older brother or sister hogging the remote.
Kids got lonely a lot. Loneliness, fear, and sadness haunted the FAYZ. So, often kids moved in together, into what amounted almost to frat or sorority houses.
This house was shared by Astrid; Mary Terrafino; Mary’s little brother, John; and more and more often, Sam. Officially Sam lived in an unused office at town hall, where he slept on a couch, cooked with a microwave, and used what had been a public restroom. But it was a gloomy place, and Astrid had asked him more than once to consider this his home. They were, after all, a family of sorts. And, symbolically at least, they were the first family of the FAYZ, substitute mother and father to the motherless, fatherless kids.
Astrid heard Sam before she saw him. Perdido Beach had always been a sleepy little town, and now it was as quiet as church most of the time. Sam came through the house, letting himself in, calling her name as he went from room to room.
“Sam,” she yelled. But he didn’t hear her until he opened the back door and stepped out onto the deck.
One glance was all it took to know something terrible had happened. Sam wasn’t good at concealing his feelings, at least not from her.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, just strode across the weedy, patchy grass and put his arms around her. She hugged him back, patient, knowing he’d tell her when he could.
He buried his face in her hair. She could feel his breath on her neck, tickling her ear. She enjoyed the feel of his body against hers. Enjoyed the fact that he needed to hold her. But there was nothing romantic about this embrace.
At last he let her go. He moved to take over pushing Little Pete, seeming to need something physical to do.
“E.Z.’s dead,” he said without preamble. “I was touring the fields with Edilio. Me, Edilio, and Albert, and E.Z. along for entertainment. You know. No good reason for E.Z. to even be there, he just wanted to ride along and I said okay because I feel like all I ever do is say no, no, no to people, and now he’s dead.”
He pushed the swing harder than she’d been doing. Little Pete almost fell backward.
“Oh, God. How did it happen?”
“Worms,” Sam said dully. “Some kind of worm. Or snake. I don’t know. I have a dead one in there on the kitchen counter. I was hoping you’d . . . I don’t know what I was hoping. I figure you’re our expert on mutations. Right?”
He said the expert part with a wry smile. Astrid wasn’t an expert on anything. She was just the only person who cared enough to try and make sense in a systematic, scientific way of what was happening in the FAYZ.
“If you keep pushing him, he’ll be fine,” Astrid said of her brother.
She found the creature in a Baggie on the kitchen counter. It looked more like a snake than a worm, but not like any normal snake, either.
She pressed gingerly on the bag, hoping it really was dead. She spread waxed paper on the granite counter and dumped the worm out. She rummaged in the junk drawer for a tape measure and did her best to follow the contours of the creature.
“Eleven inches,” she noted.
Then she found her camera and took a dozen photos from every angle before using a fork to lift the monstrous thing back into the Baggie.
Astrid loaded the pictures onto her laptop. She dragged them into a folder labeled “Mutations—Photos.” There were dozens of pictures. Birds with strange talons or beaks. Snakes with short wings. Subsequent pictures showed larger snakes with larger wings. One, taken at a distance, seemed to show a rattlesnake the size of a small python with leathery wings as wide as a bald eagle’s.
She had a blurry photo of a coyote twice the size of any normal coyote. And a close-up of a dead coyote’s mouth showing a strangely shortened tongue that looked creepily human. There was a series of grotesque JPEGs of a cat that had fused with a book.
Other photos were of kids, most just looking normal, although the boy called Orc looked like a monster. She had a picture of Sam with green light blazing from his palms. She hated the picture because the expression on his face as he demonstrated his power for her camera was so sad.
Astrid clicked opened the worm pictures and used the zoom function to take a closer look.
Little Pete came in, followed by Sam.
“Look at that mouth,” Astrid said, awestruck. The worm had a mouth like a shark. It was impossible to count the hundreds of tiny teeth. The worm seemed to be grinning, even dead, grinning.
“Worms don’t have teeth,” Astrid said.
“They didn’t have teeth. Now they do,” Sam said.
“See the things sticking out all around its body?” She squinted and zoomed in closer still. “They’re like, I don’t know, like minuscule paddles. Like legs, only tiny and thousands of them.”
“They got into E.Z. I think they went right through his hands. Right through his shoes. Right through his body.”
Astrid shuddered. “Those teeth would bore through anything. The legs push it forward once it’s inside its victim.”
“Thousands of them in that field,” Sam said. “E.Z. goes in, they attack him. But me and Albert and Edilio are outside, we haven’t stepped into the field
, and they don’t come after us.”
“Territoriality?” Astrid frowned. “Very unusual in a primitive animal. Territoriality is usually associated with higher life-forms. Dogs or cats are territorial. Not worms.”
“You’re being very calm about all this,” Sam said, almost but not quite accusingly.
Astrid looked at him, reached with her hand to gently turn him away from the horrible image, forcing him to look at her instead. “You didn’t come to me so I could scream and run away and you could be brave and comforting.”
“No,” he admitted. “Sorry. You’re right: I didn’t come to see Astrid my girlfriend. I came to see Astrid the Genius.”
Astrid had never liked that nickname much, but she’d accepted it. It gave her a place in the dazed and frightened community of the FAYZ. She wasn’t a Brianna or a Dekka, or a Sam, with great powers. What she had was her brain and her ability to think in a disciplined way when required.
“I’ll dissect it, see what I can learn. Are you okay?”
“Sure. Why not? This morning I was responsible for 332 people. Now I’m only responsible for 331. And part of me is almost thinking, okay, one less mouth to feed.”
Astrid leaned close and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Yeah, it sucks to be you,” Astrid said. “But you’re the only you we have.”
That earned her a bleak smile. “So, shut up and deal with it?” he said.
“No, don’t ever shut up. Tell me everything. Tell me anything.”
Sam looked down, unwilling to make eye contact. “Everything? Okay, how about this: I burned the body. E.Z. I burned the mess they left behind.”
“He was dead, Sam. What were you supposed to do? Leave him for the birds and the coyotes?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I know. But that’s not the problem. The problem is, when he burned? He smelled like meat cooking, and I . . .” He stopped talking, unable to go on. She waited while he mastered his emotions. “A dead sixth grader was burning, and my mouth started watering.”
Astrid could too easily imagine it. Even the thought of burning meat made her mouth water. “It’s a normal, physiological reaction, Sam. It’s a part of your brain that’s on automatic.”
“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced.
“Look, you can’t go around moping because something bad happened. If you start acting hopeless, it will spread to everyone else.”
“Kids don’t need my help to feel hopeless,” he said.
“And you’re going to let me cut your hair,” Astrid said, pulling him close and ruffling his hair with one hand. She wanted to get his mind off the morning’s disaster.
“What?” He looked confused by the sudden change of topic.
“You look like a fugitive from some old 1970s hair band. Besides,” she argued, “Edilio let me cut his hair.”
Sam allowed himself a smile. “Yeah. I saw. Maybe that’s why I keep accidentally calling him Bart Simpson.”
When she glared at him, he added, “You know, the spiky look?” He tried to kiss her, but she drew back.
“Oh, you’re just so clever, aren’t you?” she said. “How about I just shave your head? Or hot-wax it? Keep insulting me, people will be calling you Homer Simpson, not Bart. Then see how much Taylor makes goo-goo eyes at you.”
“She does not make goo-goo eyes at me.”
“Yeah. Right.” She pushed him away playfully.
“Anyway, I might look good with just two hairs,” Sam said. He looked at his reflection in the glass front of the microwave.
“Does the word ‘narcissist’ mean anything to you?” Astrid asked.
Sam laughed. He made a grab for her but then noticed Little Pete eyeing him. “So. Anyway. How’s LP doing?”
Astrid looked at her brother, who was perched on a kitchen counter stool and gazing mutely at Sam. Or, anyway, in Sam’s direction—she could never be sure what he was really looking at.
She wanted to tell Sam what had been happening with Little Pete, what he had started doing. But Sam had enough to worry about. And for a moment—a rare moment—he wasn’t worrying.
There would be time later to tell him that the most powerful person in the FAYZ seemed to be . . . what would the right term be for what Little Pete was doing?
Losing his mind? No, that wasn’t quite it.
There was no right term for what was happening to Little Pete. But, anyway, this wasn’t the time.
“He’s fine,” Astrid lied. “You know Petey.”
THREE
106 HOURS, 11 MINUTES
LANA ARWEN LAZAR was on her fourth home since coming to Perdido Beach. She’d first stayed in a house she’d liked well enough. But that house was where Drake Merwin had captured her. It felt like a bad place after that.
Then she’d moved in with Astrid for a while. But she quickly discovered that she preferred being alone with just her Labrador retriever, Patrick, for company. So she’d taken a house near the plaza. But that had made her too accessible.
Lana didn’t like being accessible. When she was accessible, she had no privacy.
Lana had the power to heal. She’d first discovered this ability the day of the FAYZ, when her grandfather had disappeared. They’d been driving in his pickup truck at the time, and the sudden disappearance of the driver had sent the truck rolling down a very long embankment.
Lana’s injuries should have killed her. Almost did kill her. Then she discovered a power that might have lain hidden within her forever, but for her terrible need.
She had healed herself. She’d healed Sam when he was shot; and Cookie, whose shoulder had been split open; and many wounded children after the terrible Thanksgiving Battle.
The kids called her the Healer. She was second only to Sam Temple as a hero in the FAYZ. Everyone looked up to her. Everyone respected her. Some of them, especially the ones whose lives she’d saved, treated her with something like awe. Lana had no doubt that Cookie, for one, would give his life for her. He had been in a living hell until she’d saved him.
But hero worship didn’t stop kids from pestering her at all hours, day and night, over every little pain or problem: loose teeth, sunburn, skinned knees, stubbed toes.
So she had moved away from town and now lived in a room in the Clifftop Resort.
The hotel hugged the FAYZ wall, the blank, impenetrable barrier that defined this new world.
“Calm down, Patrick,” she said as the dog head-butted her in his eagerness for breakfast. Lana pried the lid off the ALPO can and, blocking Patrick, spooned half of it into a dish on the floor.
“There. Jeez, you’d swear I never feed you.”
As she said it she wondered how long she would be able to go on feeding Patrick. There were kids eating dog food now. And there were skin-and-bones dogs in the streets, picking through trash next to kids who were picking through trash to find scraps they’d thrown out weeks earlier.
Lana was alone at Clifftop. Hundreds of rooms, an algae-choked pool, a tennis court truncated by the barrier. She had a balcony that afforded a sweeping view of the beach below and the too-placid ocean.
Sam, Edilio, Astrid, and Dahra Baidoo—who acted as pharmacist and nurse—knew where she was and could find her if they really needed her. But most kids didn’t, so she had a degree of control over her life.
She looked longingly at the dog food. Wondering, not for the first time, what it tasted like. Probably better than the burned potato peels with barbecue sauce she’d eaten.
Once, the hotel had been full of food. But on Sam’s orders Albert and his crew had collected it all, centralized it all at Ralph’s. Where Drake had managed to steal a good portion of the dwindling remainder.
Now there was no food in the hotel. Not even in any of the mini-bars in the rooms, which once had been stocked with delicious candy bars, and chips and nuts. Now all that was left was alcohol. Albert’s people had left the booze, not knowing quite what to do with it.
Lana had stayed away from the little brown and white bottles. So far.
Alcohol was how she had managed to get herself exiled from her home in Las Vegas. She’d snuck a bottle of vodka from her parents’ house, supposedly for an older boy she knew.
That was the cleaned-up story she’d managed to sell to her parents, anyway. They had still packed her off for some time to “think about what you’ve done” at her grandfather’s isolated ranch.
Now, in the world of the FAYZ, Lana was a sort of saint. But she knew better.
Patrick had finished his food as coffee brewed in the room. Lana poured herself a cup and dumped in a Nutrasweet and some powdered cream, rare luxuries that she’d found by searching the maids’ carts.
She stepped out onto the balcony and took a sip.
She had the stereo on, the CD player that had been in the room. Someone, some previous inhabitant of the room, she supposed, had left an ancient Paul Simon CD in there, and she’d found herself playing it.
There was a song about darkness. A welcoming of darkness. Almost an invitation. She had played it over and over again.
Sometimes music helped her to forget. Not this song.
Out of the corner of her eye she spotted someone down on the beach. She went back inside and retrieved a pair of binoculars she’d liberated from some long-gone tourist’s luggage.
Two little kids, they couldn’t be more than six years old, playing on the rock pier that extended into the ocean. Fortunately there was no surf. But the rocks were like jumbled razor blades in places, sharp and slick. She ought to . . .
Later. Enough responsibility. She was not a responsible person, and she was sick of having it forced on her.
Various adult vices were spreading through the population of the FAYZ. Some as benign as coffee. Others—pot, cigarettes, and alcohol—were not so harmless. Lana knew of six kids who were confirmed drinkers. They had tried to get her to cure their hangovers.
Some others were smoking their way through bags of weed found in their parents’ or older siblings’ bedrooms. And on just about any day you could see kids as young as eight choking on cigarettes and trying to look cool. She’d once spotted a first grader trying to light a cigar.
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