“I’m not a holy anything.”
“But you made peace?”
Astrid took a deep breath. “I’ve changed.”
“Ah. Like that?” Her silence was confirmation. “Lots of people, they go through bad times, they lose their faith. But they come back to it.”
“I didn’t lose my faith, Edilio: I killed it. I held it up to the light and I stared right at it and for the first time I didn’t hide behind something I’d read somewhere, or something I’d heard. I didn’t worry about what anyone would think. I didn’t worry about looking like a fool. I was all alone and I had no one to be right to. Except me. So I just looked. And when I looked . . .” She made a gesture with her fingers, like things blowing away, scattering in the wind. “There was nothing there.”
Edilio looked very sad.
“Edilio,” she said, “you have to believe what’s right for you, what you feel. But so do I. It’s hard for someone who has had to carry the nickname ‘Astrid the Genius’ to admit she was wrong.” She made a wry smile. “But I found out that I was . . . not happier, maybe; that’s not the right word. . . . Not about happy. But . . . honest. Honest with myself.”
“So you think I’m lying to myself?” Edilio asked softly.
Astrid shook her head. “Never. But I was.”
Edilio stood up. “I have to get back out there.” He came to stand beside her, put his arms around her shoulders, and she hugged him, too.
“It’s good to have you back, Astrid. You should get some sleep.” He nodded. “Use Sam’s bunk.”
Astrid felt weariness rise up and almost close her eyes where she sat. A nap. Just a brief one. She made her way to Sam’s bunk and flopped down.
The bed smelled of salt and Sam. The two smells had always been connected in her mind.
She wondered who he had found to be with. Surely someone by now. Well, good. Good. Sam needed someone to take care of him, and she hoped he’d found that.
She felt around, looking for a pillow. She hadn’t had a pillow in a long, long time, and now the idea of one seemed incredibly luxurious.
Instead of a pillow her hand touched sheer, silky fabric. She pulled it to her and ran the fabric against her cheek. She knew it. It was her old nightgown, the filmy white thing she used to wear back in the days when she didn’t need to sleep with her clothes on and a shotgun nestled to her breast.
Her old nightgown. Sam kept it with him, in his bed.
TEN
34 HOURS, 31 MINUTES
“I’M GOING TO risk some light,” Sam said.
“I think some light would be a great idea,” Dekka said.
Sam raised his hands, and a ball of light, like a pale greenish sun, began to form in midair. It created more shadows than illumination. So he leaned to his right as far as he could without moving his feet and hung a second light in midair. The two lights banished some of the shadows.
“Okay, everyone kneel down real slowly and check all around your feet,” Sam instructed.
“Aaahh!” Jack yelled.
“Don’t move!”
“I’m not moving, I’m not moving, my foot is underneath a wire, I’m not moving, Oh, God, I’m going to die!”
Sam formed a third light down by Jack’s feet. Now he could easily see the taut wire crossing the toe of Jack’s boot.
“Dekka, are you clear?” Sam asked.
“I think so. Anyway, I can see where the wire runs now.”
“Okay, then move back to a safe distance.”
“Any idea what a safe distance would be?”
“Far,” Sam said. “Okay, Jack, just stand still. I’m going to scoop the sand out from under your foot. That’ll take the pressure off the wire.”
Sam used his two index fingers to begin very, very delicately scooping sand. Then he used two fingers from each hand.
Jack’s shoe dropped half an inch. Then a bit more.
“Okay, now just move your foot back.”
“You sure?”
“I’m right here next to you, aren’t I?” Sam snapped.
Jack moved his foot. Nothing blew up.
“Now we all just back away.”
“Hey, what are you guys doing?” It was Brianna atop the bluff. “What’s with all the light? I thought we were being all—”
“Stay right there!” Dekka yelled.
“Okay, jeez, you don’t have to yell.”
Sam explained what was going on. “We can’t leave this thing booby-trapped. Some innocent person could stumble across this place. We either have to disarm it or blow it up.”
“Since I’m the tech guy, and disarming a booby trap is a sort of tech problem,” Jack said, “I vote we blow it up from a safe distance.”
“Oh, come on, Jack, don’t be a wimp,” Dekka teased.
“Breeze,” Sam called up to her. “Find us a rope or a long string.”
Brianna blurred out of view.
“Okay, let’s all go down to the water,” Sam said.
They did not have to wait long. In five minutes Brianna was vibrating to a stop next to them.
“I don’t guess you can outrun an explosion, right?” Sam asked doubtfully.
Jack rolled his eyes and sighed his condescending geek sigh. “Seriously? Brianna runs in miles per hour. Explosions happen in feet per second. Don’t believe what you see in movies.”
“Yeah, Sam,” Dekka said.
“In the old days I always had Astrid around to humiliate me when I asked a stupid question,” Sam said. “It’s good to have Jack to take over that job.”
He’d said it lightheartedly, but the mention of Astrid left an awkward hole in the conversation.
Brianna said, “I can’t outrun an explosion, but I’ll tie the string around the wire.”
She zipped over to the wire and zipped back holding the loose end. “Who gets to yank the string?”
“She who ties the string pulls it,” Sam said. “But first—”
BOOOOM!
The containers, the sand, pieces of driftwood, bushes on the bluff all erupted in a fireball. Sam felt a blast of heat on his face. His ears rang. His eyes scrunched on sand.
Debris seemed to take a long time to fall back down to earth.
In the eventual silence Sam said, “I was going to say first we should all lie flat so we didn’t get blown up. But I guess that was good, too, Breeze.”
He looked toward the south. From where he was standing he couldn’t exactly see Perdido Beach. There were no lights except for his eternal Sammy suns, and they would be behind curtains at night.
Down there in town his brother, Caine, was . . . doing what exactly? That was the question. Had this been Caine’s idea, this booby trap? Had he heard or seen the explosion and was he now rejoicing, believing Sam had been killed?
What would Caine do if he thought Sam was dead? Would he come against the lake? Could Albert stop him?
Caine wouldn’t dare attack the lake as long as Sam was alive. As long as Sam was alive and could join forces with Albert, Caine would be careful.
But he wondered how long it would be before Caine moved against Albert and Sam. Would Caine really let Diana have his child and stay with Sam?
It did occur to Sam for just a fleeting moment that Caine might not be the one who had taken the missiles. But there was really only one other possibility. A ridiculous possibility.
Ridiculous.
No, Caine had the missiles. Which meant the four-month-long peace was coming to an end. It was dark, and no one was looking at him, so Sam didn’t feel too guilty about the fact that he was smiling.
Cigar felt hands touching him.
Maybe. Maybe hands. Maybe the paws of a monster who would sink terrible claws into him and rip the flesh from his arm.
He screamed.
Maybe. He couldn’t be sure. Had he ever stopped screaming?
He heard a far-off wail, a hopeless, helpless sound. Was it coming from him?
“I’ve never been able to grow an organ back,” La
na’s voice said. “Last time I tried . . . Let’s just hope you don’t end up with whip eyes.”
He knew her voice. He knew she was there beside him. Yes. That was her touch on him. Unless she was the creature that smiled before chewing your fingers off and then ate its way up your arms, blood spurting around its grinning, needle-toothed mouth, laughing at his pain, chewing him, ripping until he screamed and screamed and his screaming throat became a roaring animal, a lion’s mouth roaring out of his throat. . . .
“Look! Something’s happening.”
Cigar didn’t recognize that voice. A boy’s voice, wasn’t it?
“Who are you?” Cigar cried out.
“It’s Lana.”
“Who are yoooooou?”
“I think he means me. It’s me, Sanjit.”
There were snakes in Cigar’s dried-blood eye sockets. He could feel them. They were writhing like mad.
“Nerves,” Sanjit said.
“You might be feeling something,” Lana said.
“Aaaaahhhhhh!” Cigar cried. He tried to claw at his eyes but his hands were pinned. Helpless. He’d had his arms chewed off, hadn’t he? He didn’t have arms anymore. So how had he clawed the roaches out of his eyes if he had no arms? Answer that, Bradley. His real name, Bradley.
Answer that.
And if you don’t have arms how did you light those cigars, those big fat cigars and puff until the ends were glowing red and so hot and then plunge those red-hot tips into the empty holes of your eye and then shriek in agony and beg God, “Kill me, kill me, kill me”?
“The nerves are regrowing. Unbelievable,” Sanjit said.
“He’s trying to claw his eyes again,” Lana said.
“Yeah,” Sanjit agreed. “This can’t ever happen again. That witch has to be stopped.”
“It was Caine’s doing,” Lana said angrily. “He knows what Penny is like. She’s a mental case. She’s evil. She was always twisted, but after her injuries . . . something snapped in that girl.”
“My eyes!” Cigar screamed.
Something. A bar of faint, distant light. Like the earliest hints of sunrise, like the blackness was just a little bit less black.
“Something is happening,” Sanjit said. “Look! Look!”
“My eyes!”
“Not yet, dude, but something is growing. Little white balls, no bigger than BBs right now.” Sanjit put his hand on Cigar’s chest and dug his ripping, tearing, stiletto fingers into Cigar’s heart and . . .
No. No. That wasn’t real. That wasn’t real.
The light bar, that faint glow was growing. Cigar stared at it, willing it to be real. He needed something to be real. He needed something to not be a nightmare.
“Cigar,” Sanjit said in a kind voice. “It looks like the gouging and the cuts are healing up. And it seems like tiny little eyes are forming.”
But then Lana’s more astringent voice said, “Don’t get your hopes up too much.”
Her hands. On his temples. On his brow. Slowly, slowly she probed toward the black sockets.
“No, no, no, nooooooooo!” he wailed.
Lana’s fingers slid back.
Lana was real. Her touch was real. The light he could see was real. He tried so very hard to hold on to that.
“We’re going to cover your eyes with a cloth, okay?” Sanjit said. “Your eyeballs are jerking around and it may be that the light from the Sammy sun bothers them.”
An eternity, during which he slid in and out of consciousness, in and out of screaming nightmares. At times he was on fire. At times his skin crisped like bacon. At times scorpions burrowed into his flesh.
All the while, Lana kept her hands on his face.
“Listen to me,” Lana said at last. “Can you hear me?”
How much time had passed? The madness was not past, but it was diluted, weakened. The screams still threatened to tear his throat, but he could hold them off; he could mount some resistance, at least.
“We’ve been here all night,” Lana said. “So whatever you’ve got is what you’ve got. I can’t do any more.”
“I’m here, too, brother. It’s me, Quinn.” Quinn laid his calloused hand on Cigar’s shoulder and it made him want to cry. “Listen, dude, however it turns out, you’ve got a place with your crew. You’re one of us.”
“We’re going to take the cloth off now,” Sanjit said.
Cigar felt the cloth slide away.
Quinn gasped.
Cigar saw something that looked very much like Quinn. But a Quinn with a storm of purple-and-red light around his head. Quinn enveloped in what looked like the beginning of a tornado.
Cigar saw Sanjit behind him. He glowed softly, a steady silvery light.
Then he saw Lana. Her eyes were beautiful. Shifting rainbows. Sudden, piercing shafts like bright moonlight. She outshone both Quinn and Sanjit. She was a moon to their stars.
But wrapped around her was a sickly green tendril, like an infinitely long snake that writhed and probed at her, seeking a way into her head.
And that was all that Cigar saw. Because everything around the three kids was blank, empty darkness.
There was no teasing or even conversation on the trip back to the lake. Sam drove slowly. Jack slept, snoring from time to time, but not so loud that it bothered Sam.
Dekka stared out of the window. They had waited until dawn—no point risking another drive through the dark. After all, the need for secrecy was long gone.
Sam had no doubt that Caine had the missiles.
No real doubt. Despite the nagging voice in the back of his head that told him that if Caine had the missiles he’d have long since used them to move against the lake.
No. That was stupid. Caine was probably just biding his time. Waiting.
Brianna came running up alongside the truck and made the signal for Roll down your window.
“You need me anymore?” Brianna asked. “Otherwise I’ll go catch some z’s.”
“No, I’m good, Breeze.”
But she didn’t zoom off; she kept pace. The truck was moving at no more than twenty to thirty miles an hour, so it was a pleasant walking speed for Brianna.
“You’re not letting Caine keep those things, are you?” Brianna asked.
“Not tonight, huh? I’m really beat. I don’t want to think about it. I just want to crawl into my bunk and pull the covers over my head.”
Brianna looked as if she was going to argue, but then she gave a theatrical sigh, winked at Sam like she had already read his inner thoughts, and zoomed away down the road.
Sam noticed that Dekka refused to look at her. He thought of talking to her about it, but he was talked out. He could barely keep his eyes open.
And yet, there it was again, that feeling of not quite seeing something. He felt eyes on him. Something watching him from out there in the black desert night.
“Coyotes,” he muttered. And he almost believed it.
They got back to the lake just as the faintest light of dawn shone from the false sun of the FAYZ. They got nice sunrises on the lake—if you could get past the fact that the “sun” was an illusion crawling up a barrier that was no more than half a mile away across the water.
Sam was stiff and tired. He crept onto the houseboat, careful not to wake anyone, and sidled down the narrow passage to his bunk. The shades were drawn and of course there were no lights, so he felt his way to the edge of his bed and crawled across it on hands and knees to find his pillow.
He collapsed on his back.
But even at the edge of sleep he was aware of something different about the bed.
Then he felt soft breath on his cheek.
He turned and her lips were on his. Not gentle. Not soft. She kissed him hard, and it was like he’d been awakened by an electric power line.
She kissed him and slid on top of him.
Their bodies did the rest.
At some point in the hours that followed he said, “Astrid?”
“Don’t you think you shoul
d have made sure of that about three times ago?” Astrid said in her familiar, slightly condescending tone.
They said many things to each other after that, but nothing that involved words.
OUTSIDE
MARY TERRAFINO HAD come through the barrier four months ago. She had leaped from a cliff inside the FAYZ at the exact moment of her fifteenth birthday.
She had landed. Not on the sand and rocks beneath the cliff, but two miles away from the barrier. She had appeared in a dry gulch and would have died but for the two dirt bikers who were racing across bumps and drops, yelling and roaring along and definitely not looking for what they found.
The bikers had not called for an ambulance. They had called animal control. Because what they thought they had seen was a terribly mangled animal. It was an understandable mistake.
Mary was in a special ward at the UCLA hospital down in Los Angeles. The ward had two patients: Mary and a boy named Francis.
The doctor in charge was a woman named Chandiramani. She was forty-eight and wore her white coat over a traditional sari. Dr. Chandiramani had a tense but proper relationship with Major Onyx. The major was supposedly the liaison with the Pentagon. In theory he was there only to offer Dr. Chandiramani and her team any necessary support.
In reality the major clearly thought he was in charge of the ward. He and the doctors often clashed.
It was all very polite, with never a raised voice. But the Pentagon’s priorities were somewhat different from those of the doctors. The doctors wanted to keep their two horribly damaged patients alive and comfortable. The soldiers needed answers.
Major Onyx had arranged to have equipment installed in the room, and in both adjacent rooms, that definitely had nothing to do with Mary’s medical condition. Dr. Chandiramani had pretended not to understand any of it, but the doctor had not always confined her studies to medicine. In earlier life she had made a serious start at studying physics. And she knew a mass spectrometer when she saw one. She knew that this room, and Francis’s room, were effectively inside of a sort of super-sensitive mass spectrometer. What other instruments the major had packed into the walls and ceiling and floor she could only guess.
Francis was alive. But no way had yet been found to communicate with him. There were brain waves. So he was conscious. But he had no mouth or eyes. He had one appendage that might be an arm, but it was in a continuous state of spasm, so even if the fingers had not been oddly jointed claws he would not have been able to use either a keyboard or a pencil.
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