Gone Series Complete Collection

by Grant, Michael

  One leg of his trousers had been crudely ripped to expose the wound. There was a blue, blood-soaked bandage tied around his lower thigh. It hurt. It burned like someone was sticking a red-hot poker into his flesh.

  Diana was beside him. It took him a moment to make sense of her shaved head. “I found these in one of the offices. Take them.” She transferred four Advil from her hand to his. “It’s twice the regular dose, but I doubt it will kill you.”

  “What happened?” he rasped.

  “Bullet. But it just grazed you and kept going. It cut a kind of neat little furrow. It’ll hurt, but the bleeding’s already stopped.”

  “Okay, Jack, snap out of it,” Caine said. He sounded harried and worried. Things weren’t going quite as he had planned. “You know what you’re here for.”

  Two of Drake’s soldiers returned, loudly abusing Mickey Finch and Mike Farmer, who had their hands tied behind them. They’d been found hiding in offices. Cowering under desks. “Oh good,” Caine said breezily, “the hostages are here.”

  “We told them to throw down any guns they had, and this retard just did,” one of the goons crowed. “All we had was a shotgun and a pistol and this kid had a machine gun and he still gave up. Little wussy. The other one didn’t have a gun.”

  Mickey and Mike looked miserable and very afraid. Their expressions grew bleaker still when they saw Brittney on the floor in a puddle of blood.

  Drake strode toward them, pushed Mike aside, and grabbed the machine gun. He ran his tentacle over the stock, over the cocking mechanism, holding it almost reverently. There was an expression not far from love in his cold, blue eyes. “I like this. The girl’s gun was a piece of crap, but this is cool. Very cool.”

  “Maybe you two should get a room,” Diana said.

  “None of the freaks has power enough to mess with me if I’m carrying one of these,” Drake said.

  “Yeah, not even Caine,” Diana agreed brightly. “Now you can be the boss, right?”

  Jack stood rooted in place watching all this, still unable to focus on his so-called job.

  How had he let himself be dragged into this? There was a girl not ten feet away from him who might die, if she wasn’t dead already. He could take three steps and be standing in her blood, as he was sitting in his own.

  “Jack,” Caine said. “Snap out of it. Get to work. Now!”

  Jack moved like he was in a dream, shaking his head, his ears still ringing from the gunfire. His leg burned. And the material of his trousers, wet, clung to him. He stepped gingerly to the nearest computer console and sat down heavily in a swivel chair. The monitor was old. The look of the software was old. The computer didn’t even have a mouse, it was all keyboard-controlled.

  His heart sank further still. Old software meant all kinds of keystrokes, nothing he was used to. He slid open a drawer hoping to find a manual, or at least a cheat sheet.

  “How’s it look?” Caine asked. He laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder, a friendly gesture meant to reassure Jack. For the first time in his life it occurred to Jack that he wanted to spin around and punch Caine. Punch him hard.

  “It’s totally unfamiliar software,” Jack said.

  “Nothing you can’t handle, though. Right?”

  “I can’t do it very fast,” Jack said. “I have to work through it.”

  The hand on his shoulder tightened its grip. “How long, Jack?”

  “Hey, I’m hurt, all right? I got shot!” When Caine just stared at him, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know. It depends.”

  He could sense Caine’s tension, the bottled-up rage that fed on fear. “Then don’t waste time.”

  Caine released him and turned back to Drake. “Put the hostages in the corner.”

  “Uh-huh,” Drake said absently. He was still fondling the submachine gun.

  Caine strode quickly up to him and smacked the barrel of the gun. “Hey. Take care of business. Brianna could be back here at any second. If it’s not her, it’ll be Taylor. You’d better not be screwing around.”

  Brittney lay on the floor, not moving, not making a sound. Was she alive? Jack wondered. Given how badly she was hurt, and knowing now how much pain even a grazing wound could cause, he wondered if she might not be better off dead.

  Jack found an ancient loose-leaf binder, smallish, with torn page ends sticking out here and there, festooned with age-curled Post-it notes marking pages.

  He started to work his way through it. He was looking for a guide to the function keys. Without that he had nothing. The lack of a mouse was crippling: he’d never seen, let alone used, a computer without a mouse. It was amazing that such things still existed.

  “Diana,” Caine ordered. “Read our two hostages. I don’t want to find out they’re hiding some power. Drake? How’s it going?”

  “I’m going to string the wire,” Drake said.

  “Good,” Caine said.

  Jack stole a glance and saw that Drake was holding a spool of bare wire, quite thin but strong looking. He was surveying the doorway, looking for something.

  Drake shrugged, dissatisfied with what he was seeing. He began to wrap one end of the wire around the broken middle hinge where it was still attached to the wall. It was a tall door with three hinges, one that was just above head level, one at ankle height, one splitting the difference.

  Drake stretched the wire from the hinge to a heavy metal filing cabinet against the wall. He passed the spool through a drawer handle and pulled it tight. He cut the wire with a pair of needle-nose pliers and wrapped the wire back on itself, tightening it further.

  Diana stepped back from the two hostages and said, “They’re both clear. The one may be a one bar, but at that level he doesn’t even know what powers he has. If he even has anything at all useful.”

  “Good,” Caine said.

  Diana sauntered over and flopped into the swivel chair closest to Jack. She stared moodily at the monitor in front of her.

  “What’s Drake doing?” Jack whispered.

  Diana turned her languid eyes on him. “Hey. Jack wants to know what you’re doing, Drake. Why don’t you tell him?”

  “Jack is supposed to be working,” Caine interrupted. “He’s busy.”

  Jack turned hastily back to the notebook. There it was: a list of function keys. He frowned and began to work his way through the keys, pressing, seeing the results, moving on methodically to the next key.

  Drake had finished with the wire. He ducked beneath it and disappeared down the hallway from the direction they had come, uncoiling wire as he went.

  “I’m in the main directory,” Jack announced. “This is so old. This is, like, DOS or something.”

  Despite himself he was becoming fascinated by the challenge at hand. It was computer archaeology. He was deciphering a language that was pre-Windows, pre-Linux, pre-everything. It took his mind off the pain. Mostly.

  “I hope you weren’t too madly in love with Brianna, Jack,” Diana said.

  “What? No. No way.” Jack could feel himself blushing. “No. That’s stupid.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He felt his way, step by step, through the directory, looking for controls that might not even be there, commands that might not even exist.

  Drake reappeared. He was whistling happily to himself. “Slice and dice,” he said. “Slice and dice.”

  “Good,” Caine said. “That’s one. Now set up for Taylor. Remember, we don’t want anyone shooting Jack or hitting any of the equipment.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Drake said. He pointed his tentacle at one of his two thugs. “You. Bring the shotgun.” When the boy had complied, Drake spent a few minutes moving him around the room, checking sightlines. “Okay. You have a simple job. You see Taylor popping in here, you shoot.”

  The kid looked pale. “I have to shoot her?”

  “No, you have a choice,” Drake said. “You can shoot her or not. It’s up to you.”

  The kid breathed a sigh.

  “Of course,
if you don’t shoot her?” Drake snapped his whip arm. The tentacle wrapped around the boy’s throat. “If you don’t shoot her? If you forget, or get distracted, or miss? I’ll whip you till I see bone.”

  Drake laughed happily and unwrapped his arm. “I believe we are ready,” he announced. “Taylor has a load of buckshot waiting for her. And if little Brianna decides to breeze on in at a hundred miles an hour, she’ll hit the wires.”

  “And set off an alarm?” Jack asked.

  Drake laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  “Slice and dice,” Drake said. “Slice and dice.”

  Jack didn’t look at Drake. He looked at Diana. Her eyes were windows on darkness.

  “Get back to work, Jack,” Caine said.

  The McClub was closed down. There was a sign on the door that said, “Sorry, We Are Closed. Will Reopen Tomorrow.”

  Duck didn’t know why he had been drawn there. Of course it was closed—it was after midnight. He had just craved company. Hoped someone was hanging around. Pretty much anyone.

  In the three days—well, technically four, since it was tomorrow already—since Duck had fallen through the bottom of the swimming pool, his life had actually managed to get worse. First off, he had lost his private oasis of calm. The pool was obviously unfixable. He had spent some effort looking for another pool, but no other spot had been nearly as great as the one he had lost.

  In the second place, no one believed him. He had become a joke. Kids didn’t bother to go and check out the pool to see if the hole was really there. And of course Zil and his punk friends didn’t exactly step up to validate Duck’s story.

  When he’d tell people about this weird, un-asked-for power, they’d demand he demonstrate. But Duck didn’t want to demonstrate. It meant getting mad, for one thing, and he wasn’t naturally an angry person.

  More importantly, it meant falling into the ground. And Duck had not enjoyed that the first time around. It had been sheer luck that he had passed out before he fell right on past the cave. He could have kept falling until he reached the molten core of the earth. That was the image in his head, anyway. Falling through the ground, down through the crust and the mantle and the whatever other layers there were that he had probably learned about in school but couldn’t recall now, all the way down to the big melted metal and rock core.

  In his mind’s eye that would look like the scene at the end of The Lord of the Rings. He would be like Gollum, swimming for a few seconds in all that lava, then incinerated.

  But that image was almost a relief compared to the other possibility: that he would simply be buried alive. That he would fall a hundred feet into the ground and have no way of extricating himself. He would slowly suffocate as the dirt walls of the hole filled in, clods falling onto his upturned face, dirt filling his eyes, his mouth, his nose . . .

  He grabbed the handle of the McClub door to steady himself. The images were waking nightmares. They were in his thoughts more and more often.

  It didn’t help that no one else took the problem seriously. Kids laughed at his story. They thought the whole thing was funny. The part about falling through the bottom of the pool. The part about the cave. The radioactive side cave. The blue bats. The emergence from the waves, half naked and shivering. The way he’d had to climb the cliff up from the beach, forcing himself to grin happily lest anger cause him to fall and keep on falling. Climbing had been the easiest part. He’d felt light with relief.

  He had told the story and kids roared with laughter. The first day or so he’d played along. He enjoyed making people laugh. But he’d gone very quickly from being a funny storyteller to being an object of ridicule.

  “Your power is the power to gain so much weight, you actually sink into the ground?” That had been Hunter, who thought himself a real comedian. “So, you’re basically Fatman?”

  After that it was open season: Fatman led to Fall-through Boy, the Spelunker, the Sinker, the Miner, and the one he heard most often, the Human Drill.

  Kids didn’t get it: It wasn’t funny. Not really. Not if you thought about it. Not if you spent the night tossing and turning, barely able to sleep because you worried that you might get angry in some dream and fall to a slow, agonizing death.

  Hunter had also ridiculed his tale of the blue bats. “Dude—or should I call you the Human Drill? Dude, bats sleep during the day and fly at night. Your blue bats? According to you, they woke up when it got light. How do you figure? Plus, no one but you has ever seen them.”

  “They’re blue, like the sky, so you wouldn’t see them flying overhead or through the water,” Duck had pointed out to no avail.

  He let go of the club door. Probably better that it was closed. He was lonely, but maybe loneliness wasn’t as bad as the ridicule.

  Duck looked around, feeling lost. It was late. No one was out. In the old days his parents would have grounded him for a year if they’d found out he was wandering the streets at night.

  No one was in the plaza. It was a creepy place at night. The graves were there. The shattered outline of the church dark against the stars. The burned remains of the apartment building. There were a couple of lights on in town hall—no one bothered going around and turning out lights. The streetlights were still on, although some had burned out and others, especially the ones in the plaza, had been broken either by the battle or by vandals.

  The plaza was a place of ghosts now. Ghosts and long shadows.

  Duck headed wearily toward home. So-called home. It meant passing by the church. It at least was dark. It was lit nowadays only on meeting nights because the original lighting system had not survived. Lights were strung from the town hall on an extension cord. Someone usually remembered to yank the cord out of the socket when they were done.

  Rubble, some of it massive chunks of masonry, blocked the sidewalk on the church side. No one had ever cleaned it up. Probably no one ever would. Duck walked down the middle of the street, mistrusting the shadows on either side.

  He heard a scuffling sound in the church. A dog, probably. Or rats.

  But then, an urgent whisper, “Hey! Hey, Duck!”

  Duck stopped. The voice was coming from the direction of the church.

  “Dude!” the whisper, louder now.

  “What? Who is that?” Duck asked.

  “It’s me, man. Hunter. Keep it down. They’ll kill me if they find me.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Duck, man, come here, I can’t be yelling back and forth.”

  Reluctantly—very reluctantly because he expected some trick—Duck crossed the street.

  Hunter was crouched behind a piece of rubble that still held a portion of stained-glass window. He stood up when Duck approached, which brought his face into the light. He didn’t look as if he was planning a prank. He looked scared.

  “What’s up?” Duck asked.

  “Come back here, man, so no one can see us.”

  Duck climbed over the rubble, skinning his shin in the process.

  “Okay,” Duck said, once he was in Hunter’s rubble hideaway. “What?”

  “Can you hook me up, dude? I didn’t catch any dinner.”

  “Uh . . . what?”

  “I’m hungry,” Hunter said.

  “Everybody’s hungry,” Duck pointed out. “I drank a jar of gravy for dinner.”

  Hunter sighed. “I’m starving here. I didn’t get dinner. I barely got any lunch. I was trying to save up.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Zil. He and the normals are after me.”

  Duck had the definite feeling he was either being elaborately punked, or had wandered into someone else’s crazy dream. “Man, if you’re here to bust on me, just get it over with.”

  “No, man. No way. I’m sorry about all that, you know, teasing you and all. I was just trying to get along with them, you know?”

  “No. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hunter.”

  Hunter hesitated, looking like he migh
t try to bluster. But then he collapsed. He sat down hard on the ground. Duck knelt awkwardly beside him. The awkwardness was compounded when he heard the telltale sniffle. Hunter was crying.

  “What happened, man?” Duck asked.

  “Zil. You know Zil, right? We were having an argument. He goes totally nuts. He tries to kill me with a fireplace poker. So what am I supposed to do?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was totally in the right,” Hunter said. “I was totally in the right. Only I didn’t get Zil because Harry came rushing in. He got in between us.”

  “Okay.”

  Hunter sniffled again. “No, man. Not okay. Harry goes down. He hits the floor. I wasn’t even aiming at him, he didn’t do anything. You have to help me, Duck,” Hunter pleaded.

  “Me? Why me? All you ever do is pick on me.”

  “Okay, okay, that’s true,” Hunter admitted. He had stopped crying. But his voice was, if anything, even more urgent. “But, look, we’re on the same side, here.”

  “Um . . . what?”

  “We’re freaks, man. You aren’t getting this, are you?” Irritation helped Hunter’s self-control. The sniffling stopped. “Dude, Zil is running around getting normals to come out against us. All of us.”

  Duck shook his head in confusion. “What are you talking about, man?”

  Hunter grabbed his arm and held it tight. “It’s us against them. Don’t you get that? It’s freaks against normals.”

  “No way,” Duck scoffed. “First of all, I didn’t hurt anyone. Second of all, Sam is a freak and Astrid’s a normal, and so is Edilio. So how is it that all of them are trying to get us?”

  “You think they won’t come after you next?” Hunter said, not exactly answering. “You think you’re safe? Fine. Go on. Run away home. Play pretend. It’s us against them. You’ll see, when it’s you hiding out from them.”

  Duck disengaged himself from Hunter’s grip. “I’ll see if I can bring you something to eat, dude. But I’m not getting involved in your troubles.”

  Duck climbed back out of the rubble and headed down the street.

  Hunter’s hissed words followed him. “It’s freaks against normals, Duck. And you’re a freak.”