Gone Series Complete Collection

by Grant, Michael

  “You know, of course, that a breeze is actually a slow, meandering sort of wind,” Jack said pedantically.

  “And you know, of course, that I can slap you eight times before you can blink, right?”

  Jack blinked.

  Brianna smiled.

  “Here,” Jack said cautiously. He handed the gun to her, butt first. “Take this.”

  She stuffed it into the backpack at her feet. She drew out a can opener and the can of pizza sauce she’d saved up. She cut the lid from the can and drank the spicy slop inside.

  “Here,” she handed the can to Jack. “There’s a little left.”

  He didn’t argue but tilted the can up and patiently waited as no more than an ounce of red paste slid into his mouth. Then he licked the inside of the can and used his forefinger to spoon out whatever he hadn’t been able to reach with his tongue.

  “So, Jack. Whatever happened to you getting the phones working again?”

  Jack hesitated, like he wasn’t sure he should tell her anything. “They’re up and running. Or will be as soon as I get the word from Sam.”

  Brianna stared at him. “What?”

  “It was a pretty simple problem, really. We have three towers, one here in Perdido Beach, one more up the highway, and one on top of the ridge. There’s a program that checks numbers to make sure the bill has been paid and so on, so that the number is authorized. The program isn’t in the tower, obviously, it’s outside the FAYZ. So I fixed it so that all phones are authorized.”

  “Can I call my mom?” Brianna asked. She knew the answer, but she couldn’t quash the bounce of hope in time to stop herself from asking.

  Jack stared in confusion. “Of course not. That would mean penetrating the FAYZ barrier.”

  “Oh.” The disappointment was like a sharp pain. Brianna, like most of the kids in the FAYZ, had learned to deal with the loss of parents, grandparents, older siblings. But the hope of actually speaking with them . . .

  It was her mother Brianna missed most. There was a big age gap between Brianna and her little sisters. Brianna’s father had been out of her life since the divorce. Her mother had remarried—a jerk—and then had had twins with him. Brianna liked the twins okay, but they were eight years younger than she was, so it wasn’t like they hung out together.

  It was Brianna’s stepfather who had insisted on sending her to Coates. His reason was that her grades were falling. Which was a lame excuse. Lots of kids had trouble with math and didn’t end up getting shipped off to a place like Coates.

  Brianna had talked her mother into standing up to her stepfather. This was going to be her last year at Coates. Next year she was going to be back at Nicolet Middle School, in Banning. Back where she belonged. Not that there weren’t some tough kids at Nicolet, but there were no Caines, no Bennos, no Dianas, and definitely no Drakes.

  No one at Nicolet had ever encased her hands in a block of cement and then left her to starve.

  Besides, it would be so cool to blow all her old friends away with her new power. Their heads would explode. Their brains would melt. She could be a whole track team all by herself.

  “There are no satellites to link to,” Jack was going on in his pedantic way. He was definitely kind of cute. And she thought he was kind of interesting. Kind of cute mostly because he was so clueless while at the same time being scary smart. She had noticed him even before, back when Coates was just a miserable hellhole and Jack was only on the periphery of the Caine clique.

  “Why hasn’t Sam told anyone?” Brianna asked. “Why hasn’t he turned the system back on?”

  “There’s no way to stop the Coates kids from using it, too, unless we disable the tower up on the ridge. Or unless I figure out a way to replace the entire authorization protocol and then authorize only certain numbers. Which would be a big programming job since I would be starting from scratch.”

  “Oh.” Brianna peered closely at him. “Well, we don’t want to do anything that will help Caine and Drake and that witch, Diana. Do we?”

  Jack shrugged. “Well, I was scared of Drake. I mean, everyone is scared of Drake. But Caine and Diana, they were okay to me.”

  Brianna didn’t like that answer. The “interested” smile she’d worn for him evaporated. She held up her hands. The scars from Drake’s cruel “plastering” were gone. But the memory of that abuse, and the horror of starvation, especially now that it was back, were still fresh. “They weren’t so nice to me.”

  “No,” Jack admitted. He looked down at the ground. “But still. I mean, they all—Sam and Astrid and all—they asked me to figure it out, the phones I mean, and I did. I want . . . I mean . . . I mean, I did it. I did it. It works. So we should turn it back on.”

  Brianna’s expression hardened. “No. If it helps the Coates people in any way, then no. I don’t want their lives to be any easier. I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer in every way they can suffer. And then I want them to die.”

  She saw shock register behind those askew glasses. Jack was no different from most people, Brianna admitted to herself with some bitterness: he didn’t take her seriously. Of course she maintained an aura of cool and everything—after all, she was the Breeze. She was a superhero, so she had some obligation to carry off a certain style. But she was also Brianna. Regular girl.

  “Oh, did that sound too harsh?” she asked, letting annoyance resonate in her tone of voice.

  “A little bit,” Jack said.

  “Yeah? Well, thanks for helping. Later,” Brianna said. And she was gone before he could say something else stupid.

  Duck woke up.

  He was completely disoriented. He was flat on his back. Wet. Wearing nothing but a bathing suit. In the dark.

  He was cold. His fingertips were numb. He was shivering.

  He felt something hard and sharp beneath his shoulder blades and he shifted to lessen the pain. He looked around, bewildered. There was a faint light from above. Sunlight bouncing weakly down a long dirt shaft.

  Duck tried to make sense of it. He remembered everything: sinking to the bottom of the pool, then sinking through the bottom of the pool. He remembered choking on water and his lungs burning. There were scrapes down his sides, and along the underside of his arms.

  And now, here he was, in a hole. A deep hole. At the bottom of a mud-sided shaft that he had somehow caused by falling into the earth.

  Falling into the earth?

  It was impossible to be sure how far down underground he was. But from the faraway look of the light, he had to be at least twenty feet down. Twenty feet. Underground.

  Fear stabbed at his heart. He was buried alive. There was no way he’d be able to clamber back up through that narrow muddy shaft to the surface.

  No way.

  “Help!” he yelled. The sound echoed faintly.

  Duck realized that he was not in a confined space. There was air. And the surface beneath him was too hard and too rough to be dirt. He got to his knees. Then, slowly, stood up. There was a ceiling just inches above his head. He stretched his arms to either side and touched a wall to his left, nothing to his right.

  “It’s a pipe,” Duck said to the darkness. “Or a tunnel.”

  It was also pitch black in both directions.

  “Or a cave.”

  “How did this happen?” Duck demanded of the cave. His teeth chattered from cold. From fear as well. There was a faint echo, but no answer.

  He looked up toward the light and yelled, “Help! Help!” a couple more times. But there was zero chance of anyone hearing. Unless of course Zil and the boys who’d been harassing him had gone for help. That was possible, wasn’t it? They might be jerks, but surely they would go for help. They wouldn’t just leave him down here.

  And yet, there were no anxious faces peering down at him from above.

  “Come on, Duck: Think.”

  He was in a tunnel, or whatever, far underground. The tunnel floor was muddy and wet. Despite this, the tunnel did not feel particularly dam
p, not like it was a sewer. And he himself was far less muddy than he should have been.

  “I fell down through the ground. Then I practically drowned and passed out and stopped. The water kept flowing past me and mostly cleaned me off.”

  He was pleased to have even figured that out.

  Gingerly he took steps down the tunnel, holding his hands out ahead of him. He was scared. More scared than he had been in his life. More scared even than the day the FAYZ had happened, or the day of the big battle, when he had hidden in a closet with a flashlight and some comic books.

  He was down here now, alone. No Iron Man. No Sandman. No Dark Knight.

  And it was cold.

  Duck noticed the sound of his own sobbing, and was dismayed to realize he was crying. He tried to stop. It wasn’t easy. He wanted to cry. He wanted to cry for his mother and father and grandmother and aunts and uncles and even his obnoxious big brother and the whole, whole, whole world that was gone and had abandoned him to this grave.

  “Help! Help!” he cried, and again there was no answer.

  Before him were two equally dark choices: The dark tunnel extending to his left. The dark tunnel extending to his right. He felt a slight, almost imperceptible whisper of breeze on his face. It seemed to come from his left.

  Toward air. Not away.

  Carefully, Duck made his way down the tunnel, hands outstretched like a blind person, down the tunnel.

  It was so dark, he could not see his hand in front of his face. No light. None.

  He soon found that it was easier if he kept one hand on the wall. It was rock, pitted and rough, but with bumps and protrusions that felt worn down. The ground below him was uneven but not wildly so.

  “Cave has to lead somewhere,” Duck told himself. He found the sound of his own voice reassuring. It was real. It was familiar.

  “I wish it was a tunnel. People don’t build a tunnel for no reason.” Then, after a while, “At least a tunnel has to go somewhere.”

  He tried to make sense of the direction. Was he going north, south, east, west? Well, hopefully not too far west, because that would lead him to the ocean.

  He walked and occasionally started crying and walked some more. It was impossible to guess how long he’d been down there. He had no idea what time of day it might be. But he soon realized that the place where he’d fallen in was seeming more and more homey by comparison. There wasn’t much light back there, but at least there had been some. And here there was none.

  “I don’t want to die down here,” he said. He was instantly sorry that he had voiced that thought. Saying it made it real.

  At that moment he banged his head on something that shouldn’t have been there, banged it hard.

  Duck cursed angrily and put his hand to his forehead, feeling for blood, and realized his feet were sinking into the ground. “No!” he yelped.

  The sinking stopped. He’d gone up to his knees. But then he had stopped. He had stopped sinking. Carefully, cautiously, he pulled his legs up out of the hard-packed dirt.

  “What is happening to me?” he demanded. “Why . . .” But then he knew the answer. He knew it and couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him earlier.

  “Oh, my God: I’m a freak.”

  “I’m a moof!”

  “I’m a moof with a really sucky power.”

  What exactly the mutant ability was, he wasn’t sure. It seemed to be the power to sink right down through the earth. Which was crazy. And, besides, he hadn’t intended to do any such thing. He sure hadn’t said, “Sink!”

  He started walking again, careful of his head, trying to work through what had happened. Both times he had sunk he’d been angry, that was the first thing. He’d heard the stories of how Sam had discovered his abilities only when he was really scared or really mad.

  But Duck had been scared now for quite a while. He’d been scared since the FAYZ. It was only when he got angry that the thing happened.

  The thing. Whatever it was.

  “If I got mad enough maybe I’d sink clear through the earth. Come out in China. See my great-great grandparents.”

  He crept along a bit farther, toward a dim glow.

  “Light?” he said. “Is that really light?”

  It wasn’t bright, that was for sure. It wasn’t a lightbulb. It wasn’t a flashlight. It wasn’t even a star. It was more like a less dark darkness. Hazy. At a distance that was impossible to guess.

  Duck was sure it was a hallucination. He wanted it to be real, but he feared it wasn’t. He feared it was imagination.

  But he kept moving and the closer he got the less likely it seemed that it was a mirage. There was definitely a glow. Like a glow-in-the-dark clock face, a sickly, cold, unhealthy-looking light.

  Even close up it didn’t glow enough to make out many features, just a few faint outlines of rock. He had to stand and stare hard, straining his eyes for quite some time before he could figure out that the glow was mostly along the ground. And that it came from a side tunnel of the main cave. This second shaft was narrow, far smaller than the main cave, which, it seemed to Duck, had gradually broadened out.

  He could follow this new shaft and at least see something. Not much, but something. Some proof that he wasn’t actually blind.

  But some little voice in his brain was screaming, “No!” His instincts were telling him to run.

  “There’s light down there. It must lead to somewhere,” Duck argued with himself.

  But although Duck had never been the most attentive student, and had very little information of a scientific nature in his brain, he was an avid fan of The Simpsons. He’d seen this glow, in cartoon form. And it featured in any number of comics.

  “It’s radiation,” he said.

  This was wrong, he realized, filled with righteous indignation. Everyone said there was no radiation left from the big accident at the power plant thirteen years ago, when the meteorite hit. But where else would this glow have come from? It must have seeped along underground seams and crevices.

  They had lied. Or maybe they just hadn’t realized.

  “Not a good idea to go that way,” he told himself.

  “But it’s the only light,” he cried, and began to weep with frustration because it seemed he had no choice but to plunge back into absolute darkness.

  And then, Duck heard something.

  He froze. He strained his senses to listen.

  A soft, swishing sound. Very faint.

  A long silence. And then, there it was again. Swish. Swish.

  He’d missed the sound because he’d been focusing on the glow. It was a sound he knew. Water. And it did not, thank God, come from the radioactive shaft.

  Duck hated the ocean. But all things considered, he hated it a bit less than he hated this cave.

  Leaving the glow behind, and feeling carefully ahead, cautious about his bruised forehead, he crept on through pitch blackness.

  SIX

  96 HOURS, 22 MINUTES

  “LOOK, ALBERT, DON’T tell me we have a problem and I can’t do anything about it,” Sam said, practically snarling. He marched along at a quick walk from the town hall to the church next door. Albert and Astrid were with him, struggling to keep up.

  The sun was setting out over the ocean. The dying light laid down a long red exclamation point on the water. A boat was out there, one of the small motorboats. Sam sighed. Some kid who’d probably end up falling in.

  Sam stopped suddenly, causing Albert and Astrid to bump into each other. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound mad. Although I am mad, but not at you, Albert. It’s just I have to go in there and lay down the law, and I’m sorry, but killer worms aren’t making it any easier.”

  “Then hold off for a few days,” Albert said calmly.

  “Hold off? Albert, you were the one who was saying weeks ago, months ago, we had to make everyone get to work.”

  “I never said we should make them work,” Albert countered. “I said we should figure out a way to pay them to work.
”

  Sam was not in the mood. Not in the mood at all. Losing a kid was a tragedy to everyone, but to him it was a personal failure. He’d been handed the job of being in charge, which meant everything that went wrong was on him. E.Z. had been under his care and protection. And now E.Z. was a pile of ash.

  Sam sucked in a gulp of air. He shot a baleful look at the cemetery in the square. Three more graves in just the last three months since Sam had been officially elected mayor. E.Z. wouldn’t get a grave, just a marker. At the rate things were going, they’d run out of room in the square.

  The front door of the church stood open. Always open. That was because it, and much of the church roof, had been damaged in the big Thanksgiving Battle. The wide wooden doors had been blown off. The sides of the opening were shaky, held up by a slab of stone across the top that made the wreckage look like a lopsided Stonehenge monolith.

  Caine had come close to collapsing the entire church, but it was built strong, so three quarters of it still stood. Some of the rubble had been cleared, but not much, and even that had only been pushed into the side street. Like so many ambitious undertakings that had fallen apart as kids quit working and could not be convinced to come back.

  Sam walked straight to the front of the church and mounted the three low steps to what he thought of as the stage, although Astrid had patiently explained that it was called a chancel. The great cross had not been replaced in its rightful spot, but stood leaning in a corner. A close examination would reveal bloodstains where it had once crushed Cookie’s shoulder.

  Not until he turned around did Sam notice how little of the church was filled. There should have been close to 250 kids, leaving aside the day care and the people on guard in various locations. There were closer to eighty present, half of those so young, Sam knew they’d been dumped there by big brothers or sisters looking for a bit of free babysitting.

  Astrid and Albert took seats in the first pew. Little Pete was at the day care. Now that Mother Mary had more help at the day care, Astrid could occasionally leave Pete there, although never for very long. As long as Pete stayed lost in his video game, anyone could care for him. But if Pete got upset . . .