“Stay tight,” Drake muttered as his soldiers exchanged skeptical, worried looks.
Diana swiveled in her chair. “So what now, Fearless Leader? He’s right: we don’t have any food.”
Caine winced. He ran a hand through his hair. His head felt hot.
He turned quickly, feeling as if someone was sneaking up behind him. No one there but the girl, Brittney, on the floor.
How had he not seen this coming? How had he not realized he would be trapped here? Even if he could somehow reach his people at Coates, they were far fewer in number than the number of kids Sam could command.
And none would come. Not here. Not with Sam surrounding the place.
Sam could have fifty people sitting outside the power plant within a few hours. And what could Caine do?
What could he do?
They had taken the power plant. They had turned off the lights in Perdido Beach. But now they were trapped. It was impossible.
Caine frowned, trying to concentrate. Why had he done it? In the space of a minute he had gone from crowing triumph to dismal humiliation.
What he had done? It made no sense. It gained him nothing. All he had thought was: Take the plant. Take it, and hold it. Then . . .
Then . . .
Caine felt himself sinking, mind swirling down and down as if a pit had opened beneath him.
The realization was sudden and sickening. He hadn’t taken the power plant in order to get food for his people, or even to show his power over Sam. He hadn’t been following his own desires at all.
Caine, the color all drained from his face now, stared at Drake.
“It’s for him,” Caine said. “It’s all for him.”
Drake narrowed his eyes, uncomprehending.
“He’s hungry,” Caine whispered. It hurt him to see the dawning realization in Diana’s eyes as he said the words, “He’s hungry in the dark.”
“How do you know?” Drake demanded.
Caine spread his hands, helpless to explain. Words would not come.
“It’s why he let me go,” Caine said, more to himself than to Diana or Drake. “It’s why he released me. For this.”
“Are you telling me we’re living out some fever dream of yours?” Diana was poised between laughing and crying, incredulous. “Are you telling me we did all this because that monster out in the desert is in your head?”
“What does he need us to do?” Drake asked, eager, not angry. A dog anxious to please his true master.
“We have to bring it to him. We have to feed him,” Caine said.
“Feed him what?”
Caine sighed and looked at Jack. “The food that brings the light to his darkness. The same thing that brings light to Perdido Beach. The uranium.”
Jack shook his head slowly, understanding but not wanting to understand. “Caine, how do we do that? How do we take uranium from the core? How do we move it for miles across the desert? It’s heavy. It’s dangerous. It’s radioactive.”
“Caine, this is crazy,” Diana pleaded. “Drag radioactive uranium across the desert? How does this help you? How does this help any of us? What is the point?”
Caine hesitated. He frowned. She was right. Why should he serve the Darkness? Let the creature feed itself. Caine had problems of his own, his own needs, his own—
A roar so loud, it seemed to vibrate the walls, filled the room. It knocked Caine to his knees. He clapped his hands over his ears, trying to block it out, but it went on and on, as he cringed and covered himself and fought the sudden desire to void his bowels.
It stopped. The silence rang.
Slowly Caine opened his eyes. Diana looked at him like he had gone crazy. Drake stared incredulous, on the edge of laughing. Jack merely looked worried.
They hadn’t heard it. That inhuman, irresistible roar had been for Caine alone.
Punishment. The gaiaphage would be obeyed.
“What is going on with you?” Diana asked.
Drake narrowed his eyes and smirked openly. “It’s the Darkness. Caine is no longer running things. There’s a new boss.”
Diana gave voice to Caine’s own thoughts.
“Poor Caine,” she said. “You poor, screwed-up boy.”
For Lana each step seemed too loud, like she was walking on a giant bass drum. Her legs were stiff, knees welded solid. Her feet felt each pebble as though she were barefoot.
Her heart pounded so hard, it seemed the whole world must be able to hear it.
No, no, it was just her imagination. There was no sound but the soft cornflake crunch of sneakers on gravel. Her heart beat for her ears only. She was no louder than a mouse.
But she was convinced it could hear her. Like an owl listening and watching for prey in the night, it watched and it waited, and all her stealth was like a brass band to it, him, the thing, the Darkness.
The moon was out. Or what passed for the moon. The stars shone. Or something very like stars. Silvery light illuminated tips of brush, the seams of a boulder, and cast deep shadows everywhere else.
Lana picked her way along, holding herself tight. The gun was in her right hand, hanging by her side, brushing against her thigh. A flashlight—off for now—stuck up from her pocket.
You think you own me. You think you control me. No one owns me. No one controls me.
Two points of light winked in the shadows ahead.
Lana froze.
The twin lights stared at her. They did not move.
Lana raised the gun and took aim. She aimed at the space directly between the two points of light.
The explosion lit up the night for a split second.
In that flash she saw the coyote.
Then it was gone and her ears were ringing.
From back down the trail she heard a wooden door creaking, slamming. Cookie’s voice. “Lana! Lana!”
“I’m okay, Cookie. Get back inside. Lock the door! Do it!” she yelled.
She heard the door slam.
“I know you’re out there, Pack Leader,” Lana said. “I’m not so helpless this time.”
Lana started moving again. The explosion, the bullet—which almost certainly had missed its target—had settled her down. She knew now that the mutant coyote leader was there, watching. She was sure the Darkness also knew.
Good. Fine. Better. No more sneaking. She could march to the mine and take the key from the corpse. And then march back to the building where Cookie waited with Patrick.
The gun felt good in her hand.
“Come on, Pack Leader,” she purred. “Not scared of a bullet, are you?”
But her bravado faded as she drew near the mine entrance. The moonlight painted the crossbeam above the entrance with faintest silver. Below it a black mouth waiting greedily to swallow her up.
Come to me.
Imagination. There was no voice.
I have need of you.
Lana clicked the flashlight on and aimed the beam at the mouth of the cave. She might as well have pointed it at the night sky. The beam illuminated nothing.
Flashlight in her left hand. Pistol heavy in her right. The smell of cordite from the shot she’d fired. The crunch of gravel. Limbs heavy. Mind in something like a dream-state now, all focus narrowed down to a simple task.
She reached the mine shaft entrance. There above it, perched on the narrow ledge, stood Pack Leader snarling down at her.
She aimed her flashlight and swung the pistol to follow the beam, but the coyote darted away.
He’s not trying to stop me, Lana realized. He’s just observing. The eyes and ears of the Darkness.
Into the mine entrance. The beam searched and stopped when it found the object.
The face was like a shrunken head, yellow skin taut against bones that waited patiently to emerge. The rough, patched denim seemed almost new by comparison with the ancient-looking mummy flesh and sere-grass hair.
Lana knelt beside him. “Hey, Jim,” she said.
She now had to choose between the gun and
the light. She laid the gun on Jim’s collapsed chest.
She found his right front pocket. Wrangler jeans. The pocket loose. Easy enough to reach in. But the pocket was empty. She could reach the hip pocket easily enough as well, but it was also empty.
“Sorry about this.” She seized the waist of his jeans and rolled him toward her, exposing the other hip pocket. The body moved oddly, too light, too easily shifted, so much weight evaporated.
Empty.
“Human dead.”
She knew the voice instantly. It wasn’t a voice you ever forgot. It was Pack Leader’s slurred, high-pitched snarl.
“Yes, I noticed,” Lana said. She was proud of the calmness of her tone. Inside, the panic was threatening to engulf her, just one pocket left, and if the keys weren’t there?
“Go to the Darkness,” Pack Leader said.
He was a dozen feet away, poised, ready. Could she reach the gun before Pack Leader could reach her?
“The Darkness told me to pick this guy’s pockets,” Lana said. “The Darkness says he wants gum. Thinks maybe Jim has a pack.”
During her time as Pack Leader’s captive, Lana had come to respect the coyote leader’s ruthless determination, his cunning, his power. But not his intelligence. He was, despite the mutation that allowed speech, a coyote. His frame of reference was hunting rodents and dominating his pack.
Lana shoved the corpse away from her, rolling it back to reveal the remaining pocket. The gun clattered onto the rock, Hermit Jim between Lana and the weapon.
No chance now that she could reach it before Pack Leader could reach her.
Lana fumbled for and found the pocket.
Inside, something cold and hard-edged.
She drew the keys out, squeezed them tight in her fist, then thrust them into her own pocket.
Lana leaned out over poor, dead Jim and swept the flashlight until she found the gun.
Pack Leader growled deep in his throat.
“The Darkness asked for it,” she said.
Her fingers closed on it. Slowly, knees creaking, she stood up.
“I forgot. I have to get something,” she said. She walked directly toward the coyote.
But this was too much for Pack Leader.
“Go to Darkness, human.”
“Go to hell, coyote,” Lana answered. She did not move the light, did not telegraph her move, just snapped the gun up and fired.
Once. Twice. Three times. BangBangBang!
Each shot was a bolt of lightning. Like a strobe light.
There was an entirely satisfying coyote yelp of pain.
In the strobe she saw Pack Leader leap. Saw him land hard, far short of his objective.
She was past him and running now, running blind and heedless down the path and as she ran she screamed. But not in terror.
Lana screamed in defiance.
She screamed in triumph.
She had the key.
TWENTY-SEVEN
17 HOURS, 48 MINUTES
BRIANNA WOKE.
It took a while for her to make sense of where she was.
Then the pain reminded her. Pain all down her left arm, left hip, left calf, left ankle.
She had been wearing a denim jacket over a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. The hoodie was burned away on her left shoulder and arm, a skid burn. A three-inch oval was gone from her shorts on the same side.
The skin beneath was bloody. She had hit the roof at high speed. The concrete had been like sandpaper.
It hurt amazingly.
She was on her back. Staring up at the bogus stars. Her head hurt. Her palms were scraped raw but nowhere near the scraped-to-the-meat injuries on her side.
Brianna picked herself up, gasping from the pain. It was like she was on fire. She looked, expecting almost to see actual flames.
It was scary bright on the roof of the power plant. So she could see the wounds all too clearly. The blood looked blue in the fluorescent light. Her injuries weren’t life-threatening, she reassured herself, she wasn’t going to die. But oh, man, it hurt and it was going to keep on hurting.
“Happens when you slam concrete at a couple hundred miles an hour,” she told herself. “I should wear a helmet and leathers. Like motorcycle guys.”
That thought offered a welcome distraction. She spent a few seconds contemplating a sort of superhero outfit for herself. Helmet, black leather, some lightning-bolt decals. Definitely.
It could have been worse, she told herself. It would have been worse if she were anyone else on earth, because when she had hit the deck her body wanted to go tumbling out of control. That would have broken her arms and legs and head.
But she was the Breeze, not anyone else. She’d had the speed to slam palms and feet against concrete fast enough—barely—to turn a deadly tumble into an extremely painful skid.
She limped at regular speed over toward the edge of the roof. But the way the building was constructed the edges sloped away, round-shouldered, rather than forming a nice, neat ninety-degree angle. So she couldn’t see straight down, though she could see the gate and the parking lot, all blazing bright. Beyond, the dark mountains, the darker sea.
“Well, this was a stupid idea,” Brianna admitted.
She had attempted to fly. That was the fact of it. She had tried to translate her great speed into a sort of bounding, leaping version of flight.
It had made perfect sense at the time. Sam had ordered her not to enter the power plant’s control room. But by the same token she had to try to get the lay of the land, to see where all of Caine’s people might be positioned. She’d thought: What would be better than the view from on top of the turbine building?
She’d been toying for a long time with the idea of flying. She’d worked out the basic concept, which amounted to running real fast, leaping onto something a little high, then jumping to something higher still. It wasn’t rocket science. It was no different from leaping from rock to rock while crossing a stream. Or perhaps like taking a set of stairs two at a time.
Only in this case the “stairs” had been a parked minivan, and a low administrative building, with the final “step” being the turbine structure itself.
The first two steps had worked fine. She had accelerated to perhaps three hundred miles an hour, leaped, slammed off the roof of the minivan, landed on the admin building, kept almost all of her speed, taken six blistering steps to regain whatever speed she’d lost, and made the jump to the roof of the massive concrete hulk.
And that’s when things had gone wrong.
She was just short of landing on the flat part of the roof and instead hit the shoulder. It was more like belly-flopping than it was the sort of airplane-landing-on-runway situation she was looking for.
She’d seen the concrete rushing up at her. She’d motored her feet like crazy. She’d managed to avoid sliding off and falling all the way to the ground, but her desperate lunge had ended with an out-of-control impact that had come very close to killing her.
And now, now, having reached this perch, she couldn’t actually see much of anything.
“Sam is going to kill me,” Brianna muttered.
Then, as she bent a knee, “Ow.”
The roof was a few hundred feet long, one third as wide. She trotted—slowly—from one end to the other. She found the access door easily, a steel door set in a brick superstructure. This would lead down to the turbine room and from there to the control room.
“Well, of course there would be a door,” Brianna muttered. “I guess I should pretend that was my plan right from the start.”
She tried the doorknob. It was locked. It was very locked.
“Okay, that sucks,” Brianna said.
She was desperately thirsty. Even more desperately hungry. Thirst and hunger were often extreme after she had turned on the speed. She doubted she’d find any food up on this roof the size of a parking lot. Maybe water, though. There were massive air conditioners, each the size of a suburban home. Didn’t air conditioning
always create condensation?
She zipped at a moderate speed over to the closest AC unit, ow, ow, owing as she ran. Brianna let herself in. Found a light switch. Her heart leaped when she spotted the Dunkin’ Donuts box. In a flash she was there. But there was nothing inside but some tissue paper smeared with the crusty remains of pink icing and a half dozen brightly colored sprinkles.
Brianna licked the paper. It had been so long since she’d tasted anything sweet. But the result was just a sharpening of the pain in her stomach.
She found what she hoped was a water pipe, white plastic. She looked around for a tool and found a small steel box containing a few wrenches and a screwdriver. In seconds she had popped the pipe and was filling her stomach with ice cold water. Then she let the water pour over the burns on her skin and cried out at the agony of it.
She next carried the screwdriver—it was large and heavy—to the steel door. She inserted it into the gap between the handle and the frame and pushed. There was no give. Not even a little.
In frustration she stabbed at the door. The screwdriver made a spark and a scratch. Nothing more.
“Great. I’m trapped on the roof,” she said.
Brianna knew she needed medical attention. A visit with Lana would be great. Failing that, she needed bandages and antibiotics.
But all of that was nothing compared to the hunger. Now that the adrenaline rush was wearing off, the hunger was attacking her with the ferocity of a lion. She had started the night hungry. But then she had run perhaps twenty-five miles. On a very empty stomach.
It was a ridiculous situation to be in. No one knew she was up here. She probably couldn’t yell loud enough to make herself heard over the noise of the plant. Even if she could, she probably wouldn’t want to because if Sam had failed, somehow, then the guy who heard her would be Caine.
Then she spotted the pigeon.
“Oh, my God,” Brianna whispered. “No.”
Then, “Why not?”
“Because, ewww.”
“Look, it’s no different from a chicken.”
She retrieved the donut box. She tore the paper into little strips. She found an ancient newspaper and tore it up as well. She found a wooden pallet and with a saw from the toolkit, and superhuman speed, she soon had a small pile of wood.
Gone Series Complete Collection Page 68