Gone Series Complete Collection

by Grant, Michael

  “This is important, Bug. Don’t screw it up.” Drake’s eyes were cold. “If you do? I’ll whip the skin off you.”

  Bug nodded. Drake released him.

  Bug shuddered as the tentacle slithered away. It was like a snake. Just like a snake. And Bug hated snakes.

  It was easy for Bug to turn the camouflage on. He just thought about disappearing and passed his hands down his front like he was smoothing his shirt. He saw Drake’s confused stare, his mean eyes not quite able to focus on Bug’s true location. He knew he was all but invisible. He raised a middle finger to Drake.

  “Later,” Bug said, and crossed the highway.

  Bug hiked cross-country until he was well away from Drake. The moon was up but it was only a sliver and touched only the occasional rock, the odd stalk of weed. He walked straight into a low-hanging tree branch and fell on his butt, mouth bleeding and bruised.

  After that he cut back to the road. The road curved high above the glittering ocean, affording a pretty, if disquieting view. Something about the ocean always felt ominous to Bug.

  Bug figured if he was visible on infrared, well, too bad. He could always switch sides like Computer Jack had done. Of course then he’d be in trouble if Drake ever got hold of him.

  He took Drake’s threats seriously. Very seriously.

  Bug had been beaten many times. His father had been quick with a slap or, when he was good and drunk, a punch. But his father had some limits on his behavior: he was always worried that Bug’s mother would be able to take custody away from him. Not that his father loved him so much—it was that he hated Bug’s mother and wouldn’t do anything that would allow her to win.

  At the worst of times, when his father had been out drinking with his girlfriend and they’d had a fight, Bug had learned to hide. His favorite place was in the attic because it was stuffed with boxes, and behind the boxes there was a spot where Bug could crawl under the eaves and lie flat on the insulation between cross-beams. His father had never found him there.

  It seemed like forever before Bug began to catch sight of the brightly lit power plant. A glimpse through a crease in the hill, a glow coming from beyond a bend in the road. It felt like another forever before he came upon the second guardhouse, the one that squatted across the road with a chain-link and barbed-wire fence extending out in both directions.

  Caine had speculated that the fence, which only one Coates kid had ever seen, might be electrified. Bug wasn’t going to take any chances. He walked along the fence, uphill, into the rough, away from the guardhouse for a hundred yards. He found a stick and began to scoop out the dirt below the fence. It wouldn’t take much, he wasn’t very big.

  Bug felt very exposed. As long as he was digging with the stick, he was visible: sticks did not have the power of camouflage. The moon that before had seemed to cast no light at all now felt like a searchlight focused right on him. And the power plant itself was like some vast, terrifying beast crouched beside the water, blazingly bright in the blackness.

  Bug crawled under the fence on his back. Dirt found its way inside his shirt, but he did not get electrocuted. Not that he really thought the fence was electrified. Still, better to be careful.

  Bug stood up, brushed himself off, and began marching down the hill toward the power plant.

  He was hungry. He would spy and do all the things Drake had told him to do. But first, he would look for food.

  Sam tried to sleep. Wanted desperately to sleep.

  He was in the spare bedroom at Astrid and Mary and John’s house. In the dark. On his back. Staring up at the ceiling.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, there were a half dozen cans of food. He was hungry. But he had had his ration for the day. He had to set the example.

  Still, he was hungry, and the hunger didn’t care about setting an example.

  Food downstairs. And Astrid down the hall.

  A different kind of hunger, that. And there, too, he had to set a good example.

  I am nothing but good examples, he told himself gloomily.

  Not that Astrid would . . . although, how could he know for sure?

  His head buzzed with a crazy list of things he had to do. Had to get people working on picking crops. Had to get people to start carrying their trash to one central location: rats were taking over the nighttime streets, scurrying from trash pile to trash pile.

  Had to get a whole list of younger kids set up in houses with older kids. There were five- and six-year-olds living alone. That was crazy. And dangerous. One of them had thrown a hair dryer into a bathtub last week and blown out power in their home. It was just sheer luck no one had been electrocuted. Two weeks before that a second-grade boy, living by himself, had set his house on fire. Deliberately, it seemed. As a way to get someone, anyone, to pay attention. The blaze had consumed three homes, half a block, before anyone got around to telling the fire department. By the time Ellen had driven the huge old fire truck to the scene, the fire had almost burned itself out.

  The kid had survived with painful burns that Lana had healed. But only after the little boy had writhed and cried in unbearable agony for hours.

  Was Astrid still awake? Was she lying there in the dark? Same as him? Thinking the same thoughts?

  No. She was thinking he was a jerk for authorizing Albert to bribe Orc with beer. Thinking he had no morals. Thinking he was losing it.

  Maybe she was right.

  Not helpful. Not helpful when what you needed was sleep. Not helpful to go over the list of things you needed to do, and the list of things you couldn’t do.

  How crazy was it that he was reduced to fantasizing about a can of chili, the last slightly tasty thing he’d eaten? How long ago? A week? Fantasizing about canned chili. Hamburgers. Ice cream. Pizza. And Astrid, in her own bed.

  He wondered what it would be like to be drunk. Did it make you forget all of that? There was still plenty of alcohol in the FAYZ, even though some kids had started drinking it.

  Could he stop them? Should he bother? If they were going to starve to death, why not let them drink?

  Little kids, drinking rum. He’d seen it. Drinking vodka. They’d make faces at the horrible taste and the burn of it, then they’d take another sip.

  Food poisoning last week, two kids sharing something they had dug out of the garbage. They’d staggered into Dahra’s so-called hospital with fevers. A hundred and four degrees. Vomiting. Vomiting the water and the Tylenol she’d tried to get down them. Thank God for Lana, she’d saved them, but it was a close call. Lana’s power worked better on wounds, things that were broken.

  There would be more electrocutions. More fires. More poisonings. More accidents. Like the boy who had fallen off the roof. He’d fallen two stories, and no one had seen him fall. His sister had found the body.

  He was buried in the town square now, next to the victims of the battle.

  Caine was still out there. Drake. Pack Leader. All of them still out there, somewhere. Sam had fooled himself into believing he was done with them, until Drake and his crew hit Ralph’s.

  In the old days if you had just a little money you could make a phone call and, thirty minutes later, there would be Papa John’s bringing you a giant pizza.

  Melted, bubbly, brown cheese. Greasy pepperoni. Just like that. Just like it was no big deal. He would sell his soul for a pizza.

  Astrid was religious, so probably no, she was not lying in her bed thinking of him. Almost certainly not. Although when they kissed she didn’t seem like she was pulling away. She loved him, he knew that for sure. And he loved her. With all his heart.

  But there were other feelings, in addition to love. Kind of attached to the love feeling, but different, too.

  And Chinese. Oh, man, the little white cardboard boxes full of sweet-and-sour chicken and lemon chicken and Szechuan prawns. He’d never cared much for Chinese food. But it beat cans of butter beans and half-cooked pinto beans and what passed for tortillas made out of flour and oil and water and burned on a stove
.

  Someone would probably come and wake him up, soon, only he wouldn’t be asleep. They came almost every night. Sam, something’s burning. Sam, someone’s hurt. Sam, a kid crashed a car. Sam, we caught Orc all drunk and breaking windows for no reason.

  It wouldn’t be Sam, the pizza’s here.

  It wouldn’t be Astrid saying Sam, I’m here.

  Sam drifted off to sleep. Astrid came in. She stood in the doorway, beautiful in her gauzy nightgown, and said, Sam, it’s okay, E.Z.’s alive.

  Even asleep, Sam knew that was a dream.

  An hour later Taylor simply appeared, teleported into his room—she called it “bouncing”—and said, “Sam, wake up.”

  No dream, this time. It was often Taylor who brought the bad news. She or Brianna, if either was available. They were the fastest means of communication.

  “What is it, Taylor?”

  “You know Tom? Tom O’Dell?”

  Sam didn’t think he did. His brain was not focusing. He couldn’t seem to quite wake up.

  “Anyway, there was a fight between Tom and the girls who live next door—Sandy and . . . and I forget the other girl. Tom got hurt pretty bad from Sandy hitting him with a bowling ball.”

  Sam swung his legs over the side of the bed, but could not keep his eyes open. “What? Why did she hit him with a bowling ball?”

  “She says Tom killed her cat,” Taylor said. “And then he was cooking it on the barbecue in his backyard.”

  That at last penetrated Sam’s bleary brain. “Okay. Okay.” He stood up and fumbled around for his jeans. He had gotten over the embarrassment of being seen in his underwear.

  Taylor handed him his pants. “Here.”

  “Bounce back. Tell them I’m coming.”

  Taylor disappeared, and for a moment Sam tried to tell himself that this was just another dream. There was nothing, after all, that he could do about a dead cat.

  But it was his duty to show up. If he started blowing off his duties, it would look bad.

  “Set a good example,” he muttered under his breath as he crept silently past Astrid’s door.

  EIGHT

  88 HOURS, 52 MINUTES

  ORSAY PETTIJOHN STOOD transfixed. Two kids, the first human beings she had seen in three months, and both were bizarre, creepy. In the one boy’s case, monstrous.

  One was some sort of a demon with a thick tentacle where his right arm should have been.

  The other . . . she wasn’t even sure the other was there for a moment. He appeared, then he disappeared.

  The boy with the frightening tentacle stared after the invisible one. Not quite invisible, Orsay realized when the boy stepped into a pool of light, but close enough. Then the boy with the python arm sighed, cursed under his breath, and opened the creaking door of a Toyota that had unaccountably run fifty feet off the road.

  The boy evidently wanted the window open, but the battery was dead. So he drew a gun, aimed it at the driver’s side window, and fired. The bang was so loud that Orsay gasped. She would have given away her position, but the sound of the explosion also camouflaged the sound of her cry.

  Orsay squatted in the dark, in the dirt, and waited. The boy with the python arm would almost certainly go to sleep.

  And then it would begin again.

  Orsay had been living at the ranger station in the Stefano Rey National Park on the day everyone disappeared.

  She had been mystified. She had been frightened.

  She had also been relieved.

  Just about three months earlier, she had been begging her father for help.

  “What do you mean?” he had asked. He’d been busy poring over paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork involved in being a ranger. It wasn’t just about helping find lost hikers and making sure campers didn’t set the woods on fire while they were toasting marshmallows.

  She had wanted to make him pay attention to her. Just to her. Not phony attention where he was really focused on his work. “Dad, I’m going nuts or something.”

  That declaration had earned her a dubious glance. “Is this about going to see your mom? Because I told you, she’s still not ready. She loves you very much, but she’s not ready for the responsibility.”

  That was a lie, but a well-intentioned one. Orsay knew about her mother’s drug addiction. She knew about her mother’s trips to rehab, each of which was followed by a period of normalcy where she would take Orsay, and put her in school, and arrange tidy little family dinners. Always just enough normal time for Orsay to think, maybe this time, before she would once again find her mother’s “works” stashed in the back of a cupboard, or find her mother barely conscious and sprawled across the couch.

  Her mother was a heroin addict. She’d been a secret heroin addict for a long time, faking it well during the early years when she’d still been married to Orsay’s father and they’d lived in Oakland. Orsay’s father had worked out of the park service regional headquarters.

  But Orsay’s mother’s addiction grew ever worse, and soon there was no hiding it. There was a divorce. Orsay’s mother did not fight for custody. Her father took a job at Stefano Rey, wanting to get far away from the city and far away from his ex-wife.

  Orsay had lived a lonely life since then. School was a once-a-day video link with a classroom all the way off in Sunnyvale.

  Occasionally she’d make a short-term friend with one of the kids who came with their parents to camp. Maybe a nice couple of days of swimming and fishing and hiking. But never more than a day here and a day there.

  “Dad. I’m trying to tell you something important here. It’s not about Mom. It’s about me. There’s something wrong with me. There’s something very, very weird in my head.”

  “Sweetheart, you’re a teenager. Of course there’s something wrong in your head. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be a teenager. It’s normal for you to start thinking about . . . well, diff—”

  And that’s when her father had simply disappeared.

  There.

  Not there.

  She’d thought she was hallucinating. She had thought the craziness had suddenly overtaken her.

  But her father was really gone. So were Ranger Assante and Ranger Cruz and Ranger Swallow.

  So was everyone in the Main West campground.

  The satellite uplink was dead. The cell phones were dead.

  All that first day she had searched, but there was no one. Not in any of the campgrounds she could reach easily, anyway.

  She had been terrified.

  But that night she had felt silence descend on her battered mind. For the first time in weeks.

  The creepy, lurid, crazy-quilt visions of people and places she didn’t know were gone. In its place . . . not peace, exactly. But quiet. Her mind and dreams were her own again.

  Despite her fear, Orsay slept. Reality had become a nightmare, but at least now it was her own nightmare.

  On the second day, Orsay had hiked until she’d encountered the barrier. And then she knew that whatever was happening to her, it was real.

  The barrier was impassable. It hurt to touch it.

  There was no going north. The only way open was to the south, toward the distant town of Perdido Beach, almost twenty miles away.

  Orsay had resisted. She was desperately lonely, but then she had been for a long time. And the compensation for feeling sane again was almost enough to make up for the utter isolation.

  She found enough food in the storehouse and, when that was used up, in the campgrounds.

  For a while she thought she might be the only person left alive. But then she had chanced upon a group of kids hiking through the forest. There were five of them. Four boys and a girl, all about Orsay’s age, except for one younger boy, maybe four or five years old.

  She followed them a while, keeping out of sight. They were noisy enough to hear from a distance. They lacked Orsay’s well-developed woodsman’s skills.

  That night, as they began to sleep, Orsay crept closer, wondering, h
oping . . .

  And then it started.

  The first dream was from a boy named Edilio. Flashes of a day filled with insane action: a huge boat that flew through the air and crashed down on his head; a hotel atop a cliff; a race around a marina.

  Crowding behind Edilio’s dream came visions from a boy named Quinn. These were sad dreams, dark and gloomy and full of emotion, with only a few dark shapes to give them life.

  But then the little boy, the four-year-old, fell into an REM state, and his dreams had blown away the others. It was as if the others’ dreams were on small TVs while the little boy’s dream was on an IMAX movie screen with surround sound.

  Images of terrible menace.

  Images of staggering beauty.

  Things that were somehow both beautiful and terrifying.

  None of it was logical. None of it made sense. But there was no looking away, no chance of hiding from the cascade of pictures, sounds, feelings. It was as if Orsay had tried to stand in front of a tornado.

  The boy, Little Pete, had seen her. Dreamers often did, although they usually weren’t sure who she was or why she was there. They usually ignored her as just another nonsensical element of a random dream.

  But Little Pete had stepped into his own dream and he had come to her. He had stared right at her.

  “Be careful,” Little Pete said. “There’s a monster.”

  And that was when Orsay had sensed a dark presence, looming up behind her. A presence that was like a black hole, eating the light of Little Pete’s dream.

  There was a name for the dark thing. A word Orsay couldn’t make sense of. A word she had never heard. In the dream she had turned away from Little Pete to face the darkness, to ask it its name. To ask it what “gaiaphage” meant.

  But Little Pete had smiled, just a little. He shook his head no, as if chiding a foolish child who’d been about to touch a hot stove.

  And she had awakened, expelled from the dream like an unwelcomed guest at a party.

  Now, months later, she still winced at the memory. But she also craved it. She had spent every night since wishing that she could touch Little Pete’s sleeping mind once more. She savored the fragments she could recall, tried to get that same rush but always failed.