“That power plant is the town’s lifeline,” Caine said. “Control the electricity and Sam will give us whatever we want.”
“Don’t you think Sam knows this? And probably has guards at the power plant?” Diana said.
“I’m sure there are guards. But I’m sure they won’t see Bug. So, fly now, little Bug. Fly away and see what you can see.”
Bug and Diana both turned to leave. The one excited, the other seething. Drake stayed behind.
Caine seemed surprised, maybe even a little worried. “What is it, Drake?”
“Diana,” Drake said. “I don’t trust her.”
Caine sighed. “Yeah, I think I get that you don’t like Diana.”
“It’s not about me not liking the . . .” He’d been about to use the “b” word, but Caine’s eyes flared and Drake reworded it. “It’s not about me not liking her. It’s about her and Computer Jack.”
That got Caine’s full attention. “What are you talking about?”
“Jack. He’s got powers now. And I’m not just talking about his tech skills. Bug saw him down in Perdido Beach. That backhoe they have? The wetback was digging a grave, and the backhoe toppled into it. Bug says Jack picked it up. Just pulled it up out of the hole like it was no heavier than a bike.”
Caine sat down on the edge of his bed. Drake had the impression Caine had needed to sit down for a while, that standing for more than a few minutes was still heavy work.
“Sounds like he’s at least a two bar. Maybe even a three,” Caine said. Diana had invented the system of bars, copying the idea from cell phones. Diana’s own power was the ability to gauge power levels.
Drake knew that there were only two known four bars: Sam and Caine. There was speculation about Little Pete, who had demonstrated some major stuff, but how dangerous could a half-brain-dead little five-year-old really be?
“Yeah, so Jack could be a three bar. Only not according to Diana, right? Diana says she read him at zero bars. So maybe the power develops late, okay. But from zero to three?” Drake shrugged, not needing to push the issue, knowing that Caine—even a sick, weakened Caine—was connecting the dots in his head.
“We never did get an explanation for why Jack switched sides and ran to Sam,” Caine said softly.
“Maybe someone put him up to it,” Drake said.
“Maybe,” Caine said, not wanting to admit the possibility. “Get someone to watch her. Not you, she knows you watch her. But get someone to keep an eye on her.”
The worst thing about the FAYZ from Duck Zhang’s point of view was the food. It had been great at first: candy bars, chips, soda, ice cream. That had all lasted a few weeks. It would probably have lasted longer but people had wasted it—leaving ice cream to melt; gorging on cookies, then leaving the bag out where dogs could get at it; letting bread mold.
By the time they’d burned through all the sweets and snack food it was too late to do anything about the fact that all of the meat and chicken, with the exception of bacon, sausage, and ham, and all the fresh produce except potatoes and onions was expired or rotten. Duck had been forced to help clean all that out of Ralph’s. A crew of resentful kids had shoveled rotting lettuce and stinking meat for days. But what could you do when Sam Temple looked right at you, pointed his finger, and said, “You.” The boy could fry you. Plus, he was the mayor, after all.
Then had come the canned soup, dry cereal, crackers and cheese period.
Right now Duck would give anything for a can of soup. His breakfast had been canned asparagus. Which tasted like vomit and everyone knew it made your pee stink.
But there were good things about the FAYZ, too. The best thing about the FAYZ, from Duck Zhang’s point of view, was the pool. It wasn’t exactly his pool, but it might as well be because here he was, floating in it. On a Monday morning in early March when he normally would have been in school.
No school. Nothing but pool. It took some of the sting out of hunger.
He was a sixth grader, small for his age, Asian, although his family had been American since the 1930s. Back in the day his folks had worried he was getting fat. Well, no one was very fat in the FAYZ. Not anymore.
Duck loved the water. But not the ocean. The ocean scared him. He couldn’t get past the idea that a whole world was down there below the waves, invisible to him while he was visible to them. Them being squids, octopi, fish, eels, jellyfish and, above all, sharks.
Pools on the other hand were great. You could see all the way to the bottom.
But he’d never had a pool of his own. There was no public pool in Perdido Beach, so he could only swim when he happened to have a friend with a pool, or when he was on vacation with his parents and they stayed at a hotel with a pool.
Now, however, with kids in Perdido Beach able to live pretty much wherever they liked, and go pretty much wherever they liked, Duck had found a perfect, secluded, private pool. Whom it belonged to, he couldn’t say. But whoever they were, they had a great setup. The pool was big, kidney-shaped, with a ten-foot depth at one end so you could dive in headfirst. The whole thing was the prettiest shade of aqua tile with a gold sunburst pattern in the bottom. The water—once he’d figured out how to add chlorine and clean the filters—was as clear as glass.
There was a nice wrought-iron table with an umbrella in the middle and some very comfortable chaise lounges for him to lie out on if he chose. But he didn’t choose to lie out. He chose to lie back on a float. A bottle of water bobbed alongside him on its own separate float. He had a cool pair of Ray-Bans on and a light coating of sunblock and he was—in a word—happy. Hungry, but happy.
Sometimes, when Duck felt particularly good, it almost seemed as if he didn’t even need the raft to hold him up. Sometimes if he was happy enough he could actually feel the pressure of his back on the plastic lessen. Like he weighed less or something. In fact he’d once awakened suddenly from a happy dream and had fallen a couple of feet into the water. At least, that’s what it seemed like, although it was obviously just part of the dream.
Other times, if he became angry for some reason, maybe just remembering some slight, it seemed to him that he grew heavier and the float would actually start to sink into the water.
But Duck was seldom either very happy or very angry. Mostly he was just peaceful.
“Yeee-ahhh!”
The shout was completely unexpected. As was the huge splash that followed it.
Duck sat up on his raft.
Water sloshed over him. Someone was in the water. His water.
Two more blurs raced toward the pool’s edge and there were two more shouts, followed by two more cannonball splashes.
“Hey!” Duck yelled.
One of the kids was a jerk named Zil. The other two Duck didn’t recognize right away.
“Hey!” he yelled again.
“Who are you yelling at?” Zil demanded.
“This is my pool,” Duck said. “I found it and I cleaned it. Go get your own pool.”
Duck was aware that he was smaller than any of the three. But he was angry enough to feel bold. The float sank beneath him and he wondered if one of the boys had poked a hole in it.
“I’m serious,” Duck yelled. “You guys take off.”
“He’s serious,” one of the boys mocked.
Before he knew it Zil was leaping up from beneath the water and had grabbed Duck by the neck. Duck was plunged underwater, gasping, choking, sucking water into his nose.
He surfaced with difficulty, fighting with suddenly leaden arms to stay afloat.
They hit him again, just roughhousing, not really trying to hurt him, but forcing him under once more. This time he touched down on the bottom of the pool and had to kick his way back to the surface to gasp for air. He clutched at the float, but one of the boys yanked it away, giggling loudly.
Duck was filled with sudden rage. He had one good thing in his life, this pool, one good thing, and now it was being ruined.
“Get out!” he shrieked, but the last w
ord glub-glub-glubbed as he sank like a rock.
What was going on? Suddenly he couldn’t swim. He was on the bottom of the pool, in the deep end, under ten feet of water. He kicked at the tile bottom, trying to shoot back up, but his foot shattered the tile and sent pieces of it spinning through the water.
Now panic took hold. What were they doing to him?
He kicked again, both feet as hard as he could. But he did not rise to the surface. Instead, both feet punched through the tile. He rose not at all. In fact, he was still sinking. His feet were sinking through the tile, scraping through jagged mortar and crumbled concrete, down into mud beneath.
It was impossible.
Impossible.
Duck Zhang was falling through the bottom of the pool. Through the ground beneath the bottom of the pool. It was as if he were standing in quicksand.
Up to his knees.
Up to his thighs.
Up to his waist.
He thrashed madly but he only fell faster.
Broken tile scraped his flanks. Mud slithered into his bathing suit.
His lungs burned. His vision was blurring now, head pounding, and still he fell through solid earth, as if the ground itself were nothing but water.
As the tile reached his chest he slammed his arms down to block himself falling farther, but his arms plowed through the tile and the concrete beneath and the dirt beneath that, and all of it swirled around his head in a cloud of murk and mud.
The pool water was now rushing down around him, pushing into his mouth and nose. He was a loose plug caught in a drain.
Duck Zhang’s world swirled, crazy flashes of feet kicking above him, sparkling sunlight, then his vision tunneled, narrowed, and darkness crowded out the light.
It had been funny for the first minute or so. Zil Sperry had enjoyed sneaking up on Dork Zhang: he and Hank and Antoine creeping around the side of the house, shoving one another playfully, suppressing giggles.
It was Hank who’d found out about Duck’s secret swimming pool. Hank was a born spy. But it was Zil’s idea to wait until Duck had it all cleaned up, until he adjusted the chlorine and got the filter working.
“Let him do the work first,” Zil had argued. “Then we take it from him.”
Antoine and Hank were cool, Zil realized, but if there was serious thinking or planning to be done, it was up to him.
They had achieved total surprise. Duck had probably wet himself. Stupid dork. Big, whiny baby.
But then things had gone wrong. Duck had sunk like a rock. And kept sinking. And suddenly the sun-dappled water had turned into a whirlpool of shocking power. Hank had been standing on the steps and managed to leap up and out of the pool. But Antoine was with Zil in the deep end when Duck pulled the plug.
Zil had managed, just barely, to grab on to the end of the diving board. The water sucked at him, practically pulled his bathing suit off. He barely held on, fingertips scrabbling at the sandpapery surface of the board.
Antoine had been swept away, drawn into the circular motion. The force of the water had rammed him into the chrome ladder, and Antoine had managed to wedge one fat leg between the ladder, and the side of the pool. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his ankle.
Hank hauled Zil to safety. The two of them together helped Antoine clamber awkwardly up where he collapsed like a beached whale on the deck.
“Dude, we almost drowned,” Antoine gasped weakly.
“What happened?” Hank asked. “I couldn’t see.”
“Duck, man,” Zil said, his voice shaky. “He, like, sank through the water and just kept going.”
“I almost got sucked down,” Antoine said, practically in tears.
“More like you almost got flushed,” Hank said. “You looked like a big pink turd going down the bowl.”
Zil didn’t feel like laughing at the joke. He had been humiliated. He’d been made a fool of. He’d been hanging on for dear life, scared to death. He turned his hands palm-up and looked at his scraped, ragged fingertips. They burned.
He could imagine what he must have looked like, dangling from the end of the board, his swimsuit halfway down his butt as the water tugged at him.
There was nothing funny about it.
Zil would not allow there to be anything funny about it.
“What are you two laughing at?” Zil demanded.
“It was kind of—” Antoine began.
Zil cut him off. “He’s a freak. Duck Zhang is a mutant freak. Who tried to kill us.”
Hank looked sharply at him, hesitating, but only for a moment before he picked up Zil’s line. “Yeah. Freak tried to kill us.”
“This stuff isn’t right, man,” Antoine agreed. He sat up and wrapped his hands around his bruised ankle. “How were we supposed to know he was a mutant freak? We were just playing around. It’s like anything we do now we have to be worried about whether someone is normal or some kind of freak.”
Zil stood and looked down into the empty pool. The hole was ragged with broken tile teeth. A mouth that had opened and swallowed Duck and almost gotten Zil as well. Alive or dead, Duck had made a fool of Zil. And someone was going to have to pay for that.
FIVE
104 HOURS, 5 MINUTES
“BULLETS ARE FAST. That’s why they work,” Computer Jack said condescendingly. “If they moved slowly, they wouldn’t be worth much.”
“I’m fast,” Brianna said. “That’s why I’m the Breeze.” She shaded her eyes from the sun and squinted at the target she had in mind, a real estate sign in front of an empty lot pushed up against the slope of the ridge.
Jack pulled out his handheld. He punched in the numbers. “The slowest bullet goes 330 meters per second. Say 1,100 feet per second in round numbers. I found a book full of useless statistics like that. Man, I miss Google.” He seemed to actually choke up with emotion. The word “Google” caught in his throat.
Brianna laughed to herself. Computer Jack was just so Computer Jack. Still, he was cute in his own awkward, maladjusted, twelve-year-old and barely into puberty, voicebreaking kind of way.
“Anyway, 3,600 seconds in an hour, right? So about four million feet per hour, divided by 5,280 feet in a mile. So call it 750 miles an hour. Just one side or the other of the speed of sound. Other bullets are faster.”
“I bet I can do that,” Brianna said. “Sure, I can.”
“I do not want to shoot that gun,” Jack said, looking dubiously at the gun in her hand.
“Oh, come on, Jack. We’re across the highway, we’re aiming toward the ridge. What’s the worst that happens? You shoot a horned toad?”
“I’ve never shot a gun,” Jack said.
“Any idiot can do it,” Brianna assured him, although she had never fired a weapon, either. “But I guess it kicks a little, so you have to grip it firmly.”
“Don’t worry about that. I have a strong grip.”
It took Brianna a few seconds to figure out his ironic tone. She remembered hearing someone say that Jack had powers. That he was extremely strong.
He didn’t look strong. He looked like a dweeb. He had messy blond hair and crooked glasses. And it always seemed like he wasn’t really looking through those glasses but was seeing his own reflection in the lenses.
“Okay. Get ready,” Brianna instructed. “Hold the gun firmly. Aim it at the sign. Let’s do a—”
The gun exploded before she could finish. An impossibly loud bang, a cloud of bluish smoke, and a strangely satisfying smell.
“I was going to say let’s do a test shot,” Brianna said.
“Sorry. I kind of squeezed the trigger.”
“Yeah. Kind of. This time just aim it. At the sign over there, not at me.”
Jack leveled the gun. “Should I count down?”
“Yes.”
“On zero?”
“On zero.”
“Ready?”
Brianna dug her sneakers into the dirt, bent down, cocked one arm forward, the other back, like she was frozen in midrun.
/> “Ready.”
“Three. Two. One.”
Brianna leaped, just a split second ahead of Jack pulling the trigger. Instantly she realized her mistake: the bullet was behind her, coming after her.
Much better to be chasing the bullet rather than have it chasing you.
Brianna flew. Almost literally flew. If she spread her arms and caught some wind she’d go airborne for fifty feet because she was moving faster, quite a bit faster, than a jet racing down the runway toward take-off.
She ran in an odd way, pumping her arms like any runner, but turning her palms back with each stroke. For almost all the mutants of the FAYZ, the hands were the focus of their powers.
The air screamed past her ears. Her short hair blew straight back. Her cheeks vibrated, her eyes stung. Breathing was a struggle as she gasped at hurricane winds.
The world around her became a smear of color, objects flying past at speeds her brain could not process. Streaks of light without definite form.
She knew from experience that her feet would need to be iced down afterward to stop the swelling. She’d already popped two Advil in anticipation.
She was fast. Impossibly fast.
But she was not faster than a speeding bullet.
She risked a glance back.
The bullet was gaining. She could see it, a blur, a small gray blur spiraling after her.
Brianna dodged right, just half a step.
The bullet zoomed languidly by.
Brianna chased it, but it hit the dirt—not really anywhere near the target—while Brianna was still a dozen feet back.
She dropped speed quickly, used the upward slope to slow herself gently, and came to a stop.
Jack was three hundred yards away. The whole race had lasted just over a second, though it had felt longer in Brianna’s subjective experience.
“Did you do it?” Jack shouted.
She trotted back to him at a pace she now thought of as pokey—probably no more than eighty or ninety miles an hour—and laughed.
“Totally,” she said.
“I couldn’t even see you. You were here. And then you were there.”
“That’s why they call me the Breeze,” Brianna said, giving him a jaunty wink. But then her stomach reminded her that she had just burned up the day’s calories. It rumbled so loudly, she was sure Jack must hear it.
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