Quinn stood up again, shook his head ruefully, and said, “Okay, I get it. I’ll stick to fishing.”
Albert met his eyes. “Cookout in the plaza tonight. Spread the word, okay?”
THIRTY-FOUR
7 HOURS, 2 MINUTES
DIANA STARTED TO cry when Sanjit put the bowl of Cheerios in front of her. He poured from a carton of shelf-stable milk and the milk was so white and the cereal so fragrant, so wonderfully noisy as it sloshed around in the blue bowl.
She reached for it with her fingers. Then she noticed the spoon. It was clean. Bright.
With trembling fingers she dipped the spoon into the cereal and raised it to her lips. The rest of the world disappeared then, for just a few moments. Caine and Penny wolfed from their own bowls, Bug completely visible as he did likewise. But all she noticed, all she felt, was the cool crunch, the rush of sugar, the shock of recognition.
Yes, this was food.
Diana’s tears ran down her face into the spoon, adding a touch of salt to her second bite.
She blinked and saw Sanjit staring at her. He held the industrial-size box of cereal at the ready in one hand, the carton of milk in the other.
Penny laughed and spilled cereal and milk from her lips.
“Food,” Caine said.
“Food,” Bug agreed.
“What else do you have?” Caine asked.
“You have to take it slow,” Sanjit said.
“Don’t tell me how to take it.”
Sanjit did not back down. “You aren’t the first starving people I’ve seen.”
“Someone else from Perdido Beach?” Caine demanded sharply.
Sanjit exchanged a look with the younger boy, Virtue. He’d told Diana that was his real name.
“So it’s pretty bad on the mainland,” Sanjit said.
Caine finished his cereal. “More.”
“A starving person eats too much all at once, he gets sick,” Sanjit said. “You end up puking it all up.”
“More,” Caine said with unmistakable threat in his voice.
Sanjit poured him a refill, then did the same for the rest of them. “Sorry we don’t have any Cap’n Crunch or Froot Loops,” Sanjit said. “Jennifer and Todd are into nutrition. I guess it wouldn’t do for them to be photographed with fat children.”
Diana noted the sardonic tone. And as she gulped the second bowl she noted, too, that her stomach was cramping. She made herself stop.
“There’s plenty of food,” Sanjit said gently just to her. “Take your time. Give your body time to adjust.”
Diana nodded. “Where did you see starving people?”
“Where I grew up. Beggars. Maybe they’d get too sick to beg sometimes, or just have a run of bad luck, and then they’d get pretty hungry.”
“Thanks for the food,” Diana said. She wiped away tears and tried to smile. But she remembered that her gums were swollen and red and her smile wasn’t too attractive.
“I also saw scurvy sometimes,” Sanjit said. “You have it. I’ll get you each some vitamins. You’ll be better in a few days.”
“Scurvy,” Diana said. It seemed ridiculous. Scurvy was from pirate movies.
Caine was looking around the room, appraising. They were at a massive wooden table just beyond the kitchen. It could have seated thirty people on the long benches.
“Nice,” Caine said, waving his spoon to indicate the room.
“It’s the staff table,” Virtue said. “But we eat here because the family table is kind of uncomfortable. And the formal dining room . . .” He petered out, fearing he’d said something he shouldn’t.
“So, you’re like superrich,” Penny said.
“Our parents are,” Virtue said.
“Our stepparents,” Sanjit corrected.
“Jennifer and Todd. ‘J-Todd,’” Caine said. “That’s what they were, right?”
“I think they preferred ‘Toddifer,’” Sanjit said.
“So. How much food do you have?” Caine asked bluntly, not liking that Sanjit wasn’t quivering with fear.
It had been a long time since anyone had faced Caine without fear, Diana realized. Sanjit had no idea what he was dealing with.
Well, Sanjit would learn soon enough.
“Choo? How much food do we have?”
Virtue shrugged. “When I figured it out, it was enough for the two of us to last maybe six months,” he said.
“There’s just the two of you?” Diana asked.
“I thought J-Todd had, like, ten kids or whatever,” Bug said.
“Five,” Sanjit said. “But we weren’t all here on the island.”
Diana didn’t believe it. Right then, as soon as the words were out of Sanjit’s mouth, she didn’t believe it. But she kept silent.
“Diana,” Caine said. “Have you read our two friends here?”
To Sanjit, Diana said, “I need to hold your hand. For just a moment.”
“Why?” Virtue demanded, defending his brother.
“I can tell whether you have any strange . . . mutations,” Diana said.
“Like him,” Sanjit said, nodding toward Caine.
“Let’s hope not,” Diana said. Her stomach was settling down enough and now she really, really wanted to know what else was behind the pantry doors.
Sanjit gave her his hand. Palm up. Like he was making a gesture of peace. Open-handed. Trusting. But his eyes were not.
Diana held his hand. His hand was still. Hers was shaking.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. It had been some time since she had done this. She tried to remember the last time, but memories were scattered fragments, too tiring to make sense of.
She felt it work. She squeezed her eyes tight, both relieved and afraid at the same time.
“He’s a zero,” Diana said. Then, to Sanjit, “Sorry. I don’t mean it that way.”
“I didn’t think you did,” Sanjit said.
“You next,” Diana said to Virtue.
Virtue held his hand out like he was shaking hands. Fingers curled in as if he was thinking of making a fist. Diana took his hand. There was something there. Not a two bar, not quite. She wondered what his power was, and whether he was even aware of it.
The mutations occurred in different degrees, at different times. Most kids seemed never to develop powers. Some developed powers that were pointless. Only twice had Diana ever read a four bar: Caine and Sam.
“He’s a one,” she told Caine.
Caine nodded. “Well, that’s both bad and good. Bad because if you did have serious powers you might be useful to me. Good because since you don’t, I have very little reason to worry about you.”
“That sounds kind of stupid,” Sanjit said.
Bug and Penny stared in disbelief.
“I mean, it sounds good, but then if you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense,” Sanjit said. “If I did have these powers you’re talking about, I’d be a threat. I don’t, so I’m not as useful as I’d be if I did. Useful and threatening are actually the same thing here.” But as he said it he smiled a huge, innocent-seeming smile.
Caine returned the smile. But it was a shark smiling at Nemo.
No, that was wrong. Sanjit’s smile was slyer than that. Like he knew what he was doing was dangerous.
Not many people held their own with Caine. Diana did. But she had long known that was part of her appeal to him: Caine needed someone who wasn’t intimidated.
But that wasn’t going to work for Sanjit. She wondered if there was some way she could warn him that he wasn’t dealing with a garden variety schoolyard bully who would give him a wedgie.
She saw the dangerous light in Caine’s eyes. She felt the way everyone held their breath. So must Sanjit. But he held Caine’s gaze and kept that infectious smile in place.
“Get me something else to eat,” Caine said at last.
“Absolutely,” Sanjit said. Virtue followed him out of the room.
“He’s lying about something,” Caine said in a low vo
ice to Diana.
“Most people lie,” Diana said.
“But not you, Diana. Not to me.”
“Of course not.”
“He’s hiding something,” Caine said. But then Sanjit and Virtue came back carrying a serving tray loaded with cans of peaches, and a box of graham crackers with big tubs of jelly and peanut butter. Unimaginable luxuries, worth so much more than gold.
Whatever Sanjit was hiding, Diana thought, it was nowhere near as important as what he was giving them.
They ate and ate and ate. Not caring that their stomachs cramped. Not caring that their heads pounded.
Not even caring when weariness and exhaustion caught up with them and one by one their eyes drooped.
Penny slid from her chair, like a passed-out drunk. Diana glanced blearily at Caine to see if he was going to react. But Caine just put his head down on the table.
Bug was snoring.
Diana looked at Sanjit, her eyes barely able to focus. He winked at her.
“Oh,” Diana said, and then crossed her arms on the table and lay her head down.
“It’s going to be really bad when they wake up,” Virtue said. “Maybe we should kill them.”
Sanjit grabbed his brother and pulled him close for a quick hug. “Yeah. Right. We’re a pair of desperate killers.”
“Caine may be, though. When he wakes up . . .”
“The Ambien I gave them should keep them asleep for a while at least. And when they wake, they’ll be tied up. And we’ll be gone,” Sanjit said. “At least, I hope. The way it sounds, we’d better take some time to get food stowed away first. Which means a lot of climbing up and down and up and down.”
Virtue swallowed. “You’re actually going to do it?”
Sanjit’s smile was gone. “I’m going to try, Choo. That’s all I can do.”
THIRTY-FIVE
1 HOUR 27 MINUTES
SAM WAS FINALLY where he’d known all along he would end up. It had taken him all day to get there. The sun was already sinking toward the false horizon.
The Perdido Beach nuclear power plant was eerily silent. In the old days it had kept up a constant roar. Not from the actual nuclear reactor, but from the giant turbines that turned superheated steam into electricity.
Things were as he’d left them. A hole burned into the control room wall. Cars smashed here and there by Caine or by Dekka. All the evidence of the battle that had taken place a few short months ago.
He went in through the turbine room. The machines were big as houses, hunched, coiled metal monsters turned to so much scrap.
The control room, too, as Caine and he had left it. The door ripped from its hinges by Jack. Dried blood—Brittney’s, most of it—formed a flaky brown crust on the polished floor.
The ancient computers were blank. The warning lights and indicator lights were all dead, except for a fading pool of illumination cast by a single functioning emergency beam. The battery would be exhausted soon.
No wonder Jack had refused to come back to this place. It wasn’t fear of radiation. It was fear of ghosts. It hurt Jack deep down inside, Sam thought, to see machines rendered useless.
Sam’s steps echoed softly as he walked. He knew where he was going, where he had to go.
There was a badge on a desk, one of the warning badges that turned color when radiation levels were high. Sam picked it up, looked at it, not sure whether he cared.
Safe or not, he was going to the reactor.
Sunlight shone through the hole Caine had blown in the concrete containment vessel. But it was faint: sunset reflected off the mountains.
Sam raised his hand and formed a ball of light. It didn’t reveal anything but shadows.
He reached the spot. Right here Drake had shown Sam that he could cause a chain reaction and kill every living thing in the FAYZ.
Right here Drake had named the price.
This was the floor where Sam had laid down and taken the beating.
Sam saw the wrapper of the morphine syringe that Brianna had stuck into him. Here, too, the floor was coated in a flaky brown scum.
A noise! He spun, raised his hands and shot brilliant beams of light.
Something cracked. He fired again and swept the killing beam from left to right, slowly around the room, burning anything it touched.
A catwalk ladder crashed to the floor. A computer monitor exploded like a burned-out lightbulb.
Sam crouched, ready. Listening.
“If someone’s there you’d better tell me,” he said to the shadows. “Because I’ll kill you.”
No voice spoke.
Sam formed a second light and tossed it high overhead. Now shadows crossed each other, cast by two competing lights.
Another light and another and another. He formed them with his will and hung them in the air like Japanese lanterns. He saw no one.
His beams had cut cables and melted instrument panels. But there were no bodies lying on the floor.
“A rat, probably,” he said.
He was shaking. The lights were still not enough, it was still too dark. And even if it were light, something could be hiding anywhere. Too many nooks and crannies, too many awkward machines providing possible concealment.
“A rat,” he said, without any conviction. “Something.”
But not Drake.
No, Drake was in Perdido Beach, if in fact he was anywhere outside of Sam’s overworked imagination.
The reactor chamber was only fractionally lighter than when he’d come in. He’d found nothing. He’d learned nothing.
“I blew the crap out of the place though,” he said.
And accomplished? Nothing.
Sam stuck one hand in the neck of his T-shirt. He touched the skin of his shoulder. He reached under his shirt and touched his chest and stomach. Reached around with both hands to run his fingers along his sides and back. New wounds, the still-fresh marks of Drake’s whip. But worse was the memory of old wounds.
He was here. He was alive. He was hurt, yes, but his skin was not hanging in tatters.
And he was very definitely alive.
“Well,” Sam said. “There’s that.”
He had needed to come back to this place because this place filled him with terror. He had needed to take possession of this place. This very place where he had begged to die.
But had not died.
One by one he extinguished the Sammy Suns, until only the faint, indirect rays of sunset lit the room.
He stood for a moment, hoping he was saying good-bye to this place.
Sam turned and walked away, heading toward home.
Brittney woke up facedown in the sand. For a terrible moment she thought she was underground again.
The Lord might ask anything of her, but please God, not that. Not that.
She rolled over, blinked her eyes and was surprised to see that the sun was still in the sky.
She was above the tide line, several body lengths from the thin lace of surf. something, a soggy lump the size of a person, was between her and the water. Half in the surf, legs stretched onto dry land, like he’d been running into the ocean, tripped, and had drowned.
Brittney stood up. She brushed damp sand from her arms, but it stuck to the gray mud that coated her from head to toe.
“Tanner?”
Her brother was not near. She was alone. And now fear began to make her shake. Fear for the first time since she had emerged from the ground. It was a dark, soul-eating monster, this fear.
“What am I?” she asked.
She could not tear her gaze away from the body. She could not stop her feet from moving her closer. She had to see, even though she knew, deep inside knew, that what she would see would destroy her.
Brittney stood over the body. Looked down at it. Shirt torn to ribbons. Puffy lacerated flesh. The marks of a whip.
A terrible animal noise strangled Brittney’s throat. She had been there, on the sand, unconscious when it happened. She’d been right there, just a few f
eet away when the demon had struck this poor boy.
“The demon,” Tanner said, appearing beside her.
“I have not stopped him, Tanner. I failed.”
Tanner said nothing and Brittney looked at him, pleading. “What is happening to me, Tanner? What am I?”
“You are Brittney. An angel of the Lord.”
“What aren’t you telling me? I know there’s something. I can feel it. I know you’re not telling me everything.”
Tanner did not smile. He did not answer.
“You’re not real, Tanner. You’re dead and buried. I’m imagining you.”
She looked at the damp sand. Two sets of footprints came to this place. Hers. And the poor boy in the surf. But there was a third set as well, not hers, not the boy’s. And this set of footprints did not stretch back across the beach. It was only here. As if it belonged to someone who had materialized out of thin air and then disappeared.
When Tanner still said nothing, Brittney pleaded with him. “Tell me the truth, Tanner. Tell me the truth.” Then, in a trembling whisper, “Did I do this?”
“You are here to fight the demon,” Tanner said.
“How can I fight a demon when I don’t know who or what he is, and when I don’t even know what I am?”
“Be Brittney,” Tanner said. “Brittney was good and brave and faithful. Brittney called on her savior when she felt herself weaken.”
“Brittney was . . . You said Brittney was,” Brittney said.
“You asked for the truth.”
“I’m still dead, aren’t I?” Brittney said.
“Brittney’s soul is in heaven,” Tanner said. “But you are here. And you will resist the demon.”
“I’m talking to an echo of my own mind,” Brittney said, not to Tanner, to herself. She knelt and put her hand on the wet, tousled head. “Bless you, poor boy.”
She stood up. Faced the town. She would go there. She knew the demon would go there too.
Mary worked on the next week’s schedule in her cramped little office. John stood in the doorway.
In the plaza they were starting to cook food. Mary smelled it, even through the omnipresent stink of pee and poop and finger paint and paste and filth.
Gone Series Complete Collection Page 110