Gone Series Complete Collection

by Grant, Michael

  Mustard. Relish. Onions. Tomatoes.

  His mouth was watering at the thought. But then his mouth would have watered at the idea of a real hot dog topped with Brussels sprouts.

  He made up his mind. It wasn’t about freaks versus normals. It was about whether he could just leave Hunter out there cowering all through the night.

  No. He’d bring him the relish and then, if Hunter needed a place to hide, he’d let him stay in the basement here at the house.

  Duck slipped the relish into the pocket of his jacket and headed with great reluctance back into the night.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the church.

  “Hunter. Yo, Hunter,” he called in a hoarse whisper.

  Nothing.

  Great. Perfect. He was being punked after all.

  He turned and started to walk away. But around the corner came a group of seven, maybe eight kids. It took him only a second to spot the baseball bats.

  Zil was in the lead.

  “There’s one!” Zil shouted, and before Duck could even react the seven boys were rushing him.

  “What’s up?” Duck asked.

  The boys surrounded him. There was no denying their menacing attitude, but Duck was determined not to give them an excuse to start swinging.

  “What’s up?” Zil mocked. “The Human Drill wants to know what’s up.” He gave Duck a shove. “One of your kind killed my best friend, that’s what’s up.”

  “We’re sick of it,” another boy chimed in.

  Various voices muttered agreement.

  “Guys, I didn’t hurt anyone,” Duck said. “I’m just . . .”

  He didn’t know what he was just. The hostile eyes around him narrowed.

  “Just what, freak?” Zil demanded.

  “Walking, man. Anything wrong with that?”

  “We’re looking for Hunter,” Hank said.

  “We’re going to kick his butt.”

  “Yeah. Maybe rearrange his nose,” Antoine said. “Like maybe it would look better sticking out the side of his face.”

  They laughed.

  “Hunter?” Duck said, working to sound innocent.

  “Yeah. Mr. Microwave. Killer chud.”

  Duck shrugged. “I haven’t seen him, man.”

  “What’s that in your pocket there?” Zil demanded. “He’s got something in his pocket.”

  “What? Oh, it’s nothing. It’s—”

  The baseball bat swung with unerring accuracy. Duck felt the blow on his hip where the relish hung in his jacket pocket. The soggy sound of wet glass shattering.

  “Hey!” Duck yelled.

  He started to push his way through them, but his feet wouldn’t move. He looked down, uncomprehending, and saw that he had sunk up to his ankles in the sidewalk.

  “Okay, stop making me mad,” he cried desperately.

  “Stop making me mad,” Zil repeated in a taunting, singsong voice.

  “Hey, man, he’s sinking!” one of them yelled.

  Duck was up to mid-calf. Trapped. He met Zil’s contemptuous gaze and pleaded, “Come on, man, why are you picking on me?”

  “Because you’re a subhuman moof,” Zil said, adding, “duh.”

  “You want Hunter, right?” Duck asked. “He’s in there, man, behind all this stuff.”

  “Is that so?” Zil said. He nodded to his gang, and all together they climbed into the rubble in search of their true prey. Someone, Duck didn’t see who, smashed the stained glass fragment with his bat.

  Duck took a deep breath. “Happy thoughts, happy thoughts,” he whispered. He had stopped sinking, but he was still trapped. He squirmed his foot this way and that. Finally he pulled one foot free—minus the shoe. The other foot came out easier, and he managed to keep the shoe.

  Duck took off at a run.

  “Hey, get back here!”

  “He lied, man, Hunter’s not here!”

  “Get him!”

  Duck ran all-out, yelling, “Happy thoughts, happy thoughts, ah hah hah hah!” desperate to keep anger at bay, forcing his mouth into a grin.

  He made it across the street. He was well out in front of the mob, but not far enough ahead that he would be able to get inside his house and lock the door before they caught him.

  “Help! Someone help me!” he cried.

  His next step landed hard.

  The step after that broke the curb.

  The third step plowed down through the sidewalk and he fell hard.

  His chin hit concrete and crunched through it like a rock through glass.

  He was falling into the earth again. Only this time he was facedown.

  Zil and the others immediately surrounded him. A blow landed on his back. Another on his behind. Neither blow hurt. It was like they were hitting him with straws rather than bats. Then they could no longer reach him because he had fallen all the way through the cement and was sinking through the dirt.

  “Scratch one chud,” Duck heard Zil crow.

  Then, “What happened, man?”

  “All the lights went out,” someone said, sounding scared.

  There was a frightened curse, and the sound of running footsteps.

  Duck Zhang, facedown in dirt, kept sinking.

  Mary was lying in bed, in the dark, running her hands over her belly, feeling the fat there. Thinking, just a few more weeks of dieting, maybe. And then she’d be there. Wherever “there” was.

  The water bottle beside her bed was empty. Mary climbed wearily from her bed. She opened the bathroom door and flipped on the light. For a moment she saw someone she did not recognize, someone with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes.

  Then sudden, total darkness.

  In the basement of town hall, in the gloomy space kids called the hospital, Dahra Baidoo held Josh’s hand.

  He wouldn’t stop crying.

  They’d brought him from the battle at the power plant. One of Edilio’s soldiers had dropped him off.

  “I want my mom, I want my mom.” Josh was rocking back and forth, deaf to any words Dahra had, lost and ashamed.

  “I want my mom,” he cried.

  “I just want my mom.”

  “I’ll put on a DVD,” Dahra said. She had no other solution. She’d seen kids like this before, too many to keep track of. Sometimes it was all just too much for some kids. They broke, like a stick bent too far. Snapped.

  Dahra wondered how long it would be before she was one of them.

  How long until she was holding herself and rocking and weeping for her mother?

  Suddenly, the lights went out.

  “I want my mom,” Josh wept in the dark.

  At the day care John Terrafino lay zoned out, one eye half open, watching a muted TV while he fed a bottle to a cranky ten-month-old. The bottle wasn’t filled with milk or formula. It was filled with water mixed with oatmeal juice and a small amount of puréed fish.

  None of the baby care books had recommended this. The baby was sick. Getting weaker every day. John doubted the baby, whose name was also John, would live very long.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered.

  The TV blinked off.

  •••

  Astrid had gotten Little Pete to bed, finally. She was exhausted and worried. Her eye hurt where the baseball bat had caught her. She had a gruesome bruise in yellow and black. Ice had helped, but not much.

  She needed to sleep; it was one in the morning, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not yet. Not until she knew Sam was okay. She wished she could have gone to the power plant with him. Not that she would have been much help, but she would at least have known.

  Strange how, in just three short months, Sam had come to feel like a necessary part of her life. More than that, even. A necessary part of her. An arm, a leg. A heart.

  She heard a noise from the street. Running. She tensed, expecting to hear the pounding of feet on her porch. But no one approached.

  Was it Hunter coming back? Or was Zil still running around looking for trouble? There wasn’t an
ything she could do about it. She had no powers, or none that mattered, anyway. All she could do was threaten and cajole.

  By the time she reached the window, the street was empty and quiet.

  She hoped Hunter was hiding somewhere. They’d have to figure out what to do about that situation and it would be very tricky. Explosive, maybe. But it wasn’t going to be solved tonight.

  What was happening with Sam? Had he managed to stop Caine?

  Was he hurt?

  Was he dead?

  God forbid, she prayed.

  No. He wasn’t dead. She would feel it if he was.

  She wiped away a tear, and sighed. No way she could sleep. Not happening. So she sat herself down in front of the computer. Her hands were shaking as she touched the keyboard. She needed to do something useful. Something. Anything to keep from thinking about Sam.

  At the bottom of the screen were the usual icons for Safari and Firefox. Web browsers that, when opened, would just remind her that she was not connected to the internet.

  Astrid opened the mutation file. There were all the bizarre pictures. The cat that had melded with a book. The snakes with tiny wings. The seagulls with raptor talons. The zeke.

  She opened a Word document and began to type.

  The one constant seems to be that mutations are making creatures—humans and nonhumans—more dangerous. The mutations are almost all in the form of weapons.

  She paused and thought about that for a moment. That wasn’t quite right. Some kids had developed powers that seemed to be essentially useless. The truth was, Sam wished more mutants had developed what he called “serious” powers. And there was Lana, whose gift was definitely not a weapon.

  Weapons or defense mechanisms. Of course it may be that I simply have not observed enough mutations to know. But it would not exactly be surprising if mutations tended to be survival mechanisms. That’s the whole point of evolution: survival.

  But was this evolution? Evolution was a series of hits and misses over the course of millions of years, not a sudden explosion of radical changes. Evolution built on existing DNA. What was happening in the FAYZ was a radical departure from the billion years’ worth of code in animal DNA. There might be genes for speed, but there was no gene for teleportation, or for suspension of gravity, or for telekinesis.

  There was no DNA for firing light from the palms of your hands.

  The fact is, I don’t

  The screen went blank. The room was dark.

  Astrid stood up and went to the window. She pulled back the curtains and looked out at total darkness. Not a light on in the street.

  She let herself out onto the porch.

  Darkness. Everywhere. Not a single light from the surrounding houses.

  Someone a few doors down yelled in outrage, “Hey!”

  Caine had reached the power plant. Sam had failed.

  Astrid stifled a sob. If Sam was hurt . . . If . . .

  Astrid felt fear like icy fingers reaching through her nightgown. She stumbled into the kitchen. She opened the junk drawer and found, after some searching, a flashlight. The light from it was faint and failed in seconds.

  But in the few seconds of light she found a candle.

  She tried to light it from the stove. But the gas ran unlit because it required electricity to fire.

  Matches. A lighter. Surely there were some matches somewhere.

  But there was no way to find them without light. She had a candle and no way to light it.

  Astrid felt her way to the stairs and climbed to Little Pete’s room. The Game Boy was beside his bed, where he always left it. If he woke up and found it missing, he would go nuts. He would . . . there was no telling what he would do.

  She carried the Game Boy down the stairs and used the light from the LED to search the junk drawer. No matches, but there was a yellow Bic lighter.

  She struck a flame and lit the candle.

  She had avoided thinking about Sam for the last few moments, intent on her search. But there was no escaping the fact that Sam had rushed off to stop Caine. And he had not succeeded. The only question now was: Had he survived?

  A line from an old poem bubbled up from Astrid’s near-photographic memory. “The center cannot hold,” she whispered to the eerily lit kitchen. The verse played in her head.

  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Astrid repeated.

  The center, maybe. But surely, even here in the FAYZ, God listened and watched over His children.

  “Please let Sam be okay,” she whispered to the candle.

  She made the sign of the cross on her chest and knelt before the kitchen counter as if it were an altar.

  “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil.”

  In the old days when she had said this prayer, the devil was a creature with horns and a tail. Now in her mind the devil had the same face as Caine. And when the prayer went on to speak of “the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls,” the picture in her mind’s eye was of a dead-eyed boy with a snake for an arm.

  TWENTY-SIX

  17 HOURS, 49 MINUTES

  “WHAT IS IT you want, Caine?” Sam’s voice, calling from outside. He sounded angry, frustrated. Defeated.

  Caine bowed his head. He savored the moment. Victory. Just four days had passed since he had regained some measure of control over himself. And now he had beaten Sam.

  “Four days,” he said, just loudly enough for those in the room to hear. “That’s how long it took me to defeat Sam Temple.” Caine locked eyes with Drake. “Four days,” Caine sneered. “What did you accomplish in the three months I was sick?”

  Drake met his gaze, then wavered, and looked down at the floor. There was red in his cheeks, a dangerous glitter in his eyes, but he could not meet Caine’s triumphant scowl.

  “Remember this when you finally decide it’s time to take me on, Drake,” Caine whispered.

  Caine turned to the others and beamed happiness at his crew. Jack, still at the computer, a sloppy, bloody mess, but so engaged in his work that he was barely aware of what was going on. Bug, drifting in and out of view. Diana pretending to be unimpressed. He winked at her, knowing she wouldn’t respond. Drake’s two soldiers, lounging.

  “What do I want?” Caine yelled back through the charred hole in the wall. Then, carefully enunciating each word for emphasis. “What. Do. I. Want?”

  And then, Caine drew a blank. For a moment, just a moment before he recovered, he couldn’t think of what he wanted. No one else heard the hesitation. But Caine felt it.

  What did he want?

  He searched for an answer and found one that would do. “You, Sam,” Caine purred. “I want you to walk in here all by yourself. That’s what I want.”

  The hostages, Mickey and Mike, looked at each other in disbelief. Caine could guess what they were thinking: their big hero, Sam, had failed.

  Sam’s voice was muffled but audible. “I would, Caine. To tell you the truth, it would probably be a relief.” He sounded weary. He sounded beaten. Luscious, wonderful sounds to Caine’s ears. “But we all know how you act when there’s no one there to stop you. So, no.”

  Caine let out a loud, theatrical sigh. He smiled ear to ear. “Yeah, I thought you’d take that attitude, Sam. So I have an alternative. I have a trade in mind.”

  “Trade? What for what?”

  “Food for light,” Caine said. He put his hand to his ear as if listening. To Diana, he whispered, “Hear that? That’s the sound of my brother realizing he’s beaten. Realizing he just became my . . . what’s a good word? Servant? Slave?”

  Sam y
elled, “Looks to me like you’re the one in trouble, Caine.”

  Caine blinked. A warning light was flashing in the back of his mind. He had just made a mistake. He didn’t know what, but he had made a mistake.

  “Me?” Caine yelled. “I don’t think so. I own the light switch, brother.”

  “Yeah, I guess you do,” Sam shouted. “And I’ve got you surrounded. And if you’re short on food up at Coates, my guess is you don’t have a lot with you here. So I’m guessing you’ll get hungry pretty soon.”

  Caine’s smile froze.

  “Well, there’s an unexpected development,” Diana said dryly.

  Caine bit his thumbnail and yelled, “Hey, brother of mine, do I have to remind you that I have two of your people hostage in here?”

  There was a long silence and Caine braced himself, thinking that Sam might launch another attack. Finally, Sam spoke. He sounded both more grim and more confident. “Go ahead, Caine, do whatever you want with the hostages. Then you won’t have hostages anymore. And you’ll still be hungry.”

  “You think I won’t turn the hostages over to Drake?” Caine threatened. “You’ll be able to listen to them scream.” He could feel the color rising in his cheeks. He knew Sam’s answer. It wasn’t long in coming.

  “Two seconds after I hear anyone yelling, in we come,” Sam said. “It will be bloody, and I’d like to not have that. But you know I have enough people with enough power to do it.”

  Caine chewed his thumbnail. He glanced at Diana, willing her to have some solution, some helpful idea. He carefully avoided making eye contact with Drake.

  “So, I have a better idea,” Sam yelled. “How about I give you ten minutes to get out of there? And I give you my word you can go back to Coates.”

  Caine squeezed out a laugh that was half snarl. “Not happening, Sam. I’m holding this place. And you can go back to a very dark town.”

  There was no answer.

  The silence was eloquent. Sam didn’t need to say anything else. And Caine had nothing left to say. It felt as if there was a band tightening around his chest. Like he had to fight for each breath.

  Something was not right. Something was very much not right. The fears that lived in his nightmares were rising now, like an incoming tide inside his head. He was in a trap.