Astrid stood rooted in place.
“It’s Bonnie,” Edilio said, his voice shrill. “It’s her. It’s her face. No,” he moaned, a long, drawn-out wail.
The creature ignored Edilio, just kept walking on two coyote front legs and twisted furless legs—bent human legs—in the back. Kept walking as though those empty, blue, human eyes were blind, and those shell-like pink human ears were deaf.
Edilio wept as it kept moving.
Astrid aimed her revolver at the creature’s heart, just behind the shoulder, and fired. The gun kicked in her hand and a small, round, red hole appeared and began leaking red.
She fired again, hitting the creature in its canine neck.
It fell over. Blood pumped from the thing’s neck and formed a pool in the sand.
Once again, the avatar broke apart.
Pete had tried to play with the bouncy avatar and it had broken apart, changed color and shape, and stopped.
He had tried to play with another avatar and it had melted into something different.
Was this the game?
It wasn’t very fun.
And he was beginning to feel bad when the avatars fell apart. Like he was doing a bad-boy thing.
So he had imagined the avatars all back the way they started.
Nothing happened. But things always happened when Pete wanted them really hard. He had wanted the terrible sirens and screams to stop and the world not to burn up and he had created the ball he now lived in.
He had wanted other things and they had happened. If he wanted something badly enough it happened. Didn’t it?
Well, now he was feeling sick inside and he wanted the avatars to go back and be right again. But they didn’t.
No, Pete corrected himself. He’d always been afraid when the big sudden things happened. He couldn’t just wish them and make them happen. He’d always been scared. Panicked. Screaming inside his overloaded brain.
He wasn’t afraid now. The frenzy that used to take him over couldn’t touch him now. That was the old Pete. The new Pete wasn’t scared of noises and colors and things that moved too fast.
The new Pete was just bored.
An avatar floated by and Pete knew it. Even without the stabbing bright blue eyes, without the shrieking voice. He knew her. His sister, Astrid. A pattern, a shape, a coil of strings.
He felt very lonely.
Had he ever felt lonely before?
He felt it now. And he longed to reach out, and with just the smallest touch, to let her know he was here.
But, oh, so delicate, those avatars. And his fingers were all thumbs.
The joke made him laugh.
Had he ever laughed before?
He laughed now. And that was enough for a while, at least.
Albert had made the decision early on to play Caine’s ridiculous game of royalty. If Caine wanted to call himself king, and if he wanted people to call him “Your Highness,” well, that didn’t cost Albert a single ’Berto.
The truth was Caine did keep the peace. He enforced rules, and Albert liked and needed rules.
There had been very little shoplifting at the mall, the ironically named stalls and card tables that were the market outside the school.
There had been fewer fights. Fewer threats. Albert had even seen a decline in the number of weapons being carried. Not much of a decline, but every now and then you could actually see a kid forgetting to carry his nail-studded baseball bat or machete.
Those were good signs.
Best of all, kids showed up for work and they put in a full day.
King Caine scared kids. And Albert paid them. And between the threat and the reward, things were running more smoothly than they ever had under Sam or Astrid.
So if Caine wanted to be called king . . .
“Your Highness, I’m here with my report,” Albert said.
He stood patiently while Caine, seated at his desk, pretended to be absorbed in reading something.
Finally, Caine looked up, affecting an expression of unconcern.
“Go ahead, Albert,” Caine said.
“The good news: Water continues to flow from the cloud. The stream is clean—most of the dirt and debris and old oil and so on has been washed away. So it’s probably drinkable down at the beach reservoir as well as directly from the rain. Flow rate is twenty gallons an hour. Four hundred and eighty gallons a day, which is more than we need for drinking, with enough left over to water gardens and so on.”
“Washing?”
Albert shook his head. “No. And we can’t have kids showering in the rain as it falls, either. Kids are washing their butts in what will end up being drinking water once we open the reservoir.”
“I’ll make a proclamation,” Caine said.
There were times Albert almost couldn’t resist the impulse to laugh. Proclamation. But he kept a straight, impassive face.
“Food is not as good,” Albert went on. “I made a graph.” He drew a nine-by-twelve poster board from his briefcase and held it so Caine could see it.
“Here’s food production over the last week. Good and steady. You see a drop today because we have nothing from the fishing crews. And this dotted line is the food supply over the next week, projected.”
Caine’s face darkened. He bit at his thumbnail, then stopped himself.
“As you know, Cai—Your Highness . . . sixty percent of our vegetables and fruit comes from worm-infested fields. Eighty percent of our protein comes from the sea. Without Quinn we have nothing to feed the worms. Which means picking and planting basically stop. To make matters worse, there’s a crazy story going around about one of the artichoke pickers being turned into a fish.”
“What?”
“It’s just a crazy rumor, but right now no one is harvesting artichokes.”
Caine cursed and shook his head slowly.
Albert put away the graph and said, “In three days we’ll have major hunger. A week from now kids will start dying. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous things get when kids get hungry.”
“We can replace Quinn. Get other kids out in other boats,” Caine said.
Albert shook his head. “There’s a learning curve. It took Quinn a long time to get to be as good and efficient as he is. Plus he has the best boats, and he has all the nets and poles. If we decided to replace him, it would be probably five weeks before we would get production back up to nonstarvation levels.”
“Then we’d better get started,” Caine snapped.
“No,” Albert said. Then added, “Your Highness.”
Caine slammed his fist down on the desk. “I’m not giving in to Quinn! Quinn is not the king! I am! Me!”
“I offered him more money. He isn’t looking for more money,” Albert said.
Caine jumped up from his chair. “Of course not. Not everyone is you, Albert. Not everyone is a money-grubbing . . .” He decided against finishing that thought, but kept ranting. “It’s power he wants. He wants to bring me down. He and Sam Temple are friends from way, way back. I should have never let him stay. I should have made him go with Sam!”
“He fishes in the ocean, and we’re on the ocean,” Albert pointed out. This kind of outburst irritated Albert. It was a waste of time.
Caine seemed not to have heard. “Meanwhile Sam’s sitting up there with that lake stocked with fish, and his own fields, and somehow he has Nutella and Pepsi and Cup-a-Noodles, and what do you think happens if kids here start thinking we have no food?” Caine was red in the face. Furious. Albert reminded himself that Caine, while an out-of-control ego-maniac, was also extremely powerful and dangerous. He decided against answering the question.
“We both know what happens,” Caine said bitterly. “Kids leave town and head for the lake.” He glared at Albert as if it was all Albert’s fault. “This is why it’s no good having two different towns. Kids can just go where they want.”
Caine threw himself back in his chair but banged his knee on the desk. With an angry sweep of his ha
nd he threw the desk crashing into the wall. The impact was hard enough to knock the ancient pictures down, all those ego shots of the original mayor. The desk left a long, triangular dent in the wall.
Caine sat chewing his thumbnail and Albert stood thinking of all the more useful things he could be doing. At last Caine used his powers to scoot the desk back into place. He seemed to need something to lean on in a dramatic fashion, because that was what he did, placing his elbows on the table, forming his fingers into a steeple, an almost prayerful position, and tapping the fingertips thoughtfully against his forehead.
“You’re my adviser, Albert,” Caine said. “What do you advise?”
Since when had Albert become an adviser? But he said, “Okay, since you ask, I think you should send Penny away.” When Caine started to object, Albert, finally evincing his impatience, raised his hand. “First, because Penny is a sick, unstable person. She was bound to cause problems, and she’ll cause more. Second, because what happened to Cigar turns everyone against you. It’s not just Quinn: everyone thinks it’s wrong. And third, if you don’t and if Quinn stands firm, this town will empty out.”
And if you don’t, Albert added silently, I will suddenly learn about a cache of missiles up the coast. And you, King Caine, will go to take them.
Caine’s prayerful hands fell flat on the desk. “If I give in, everyone will think . . .” He took a shaky breath. “I’m the king. They’ll think I can be beaten.”
Albert was actually surprised. “Of course you can be beaten. Your Highness. Everyone can be beaten.”
“Except for you, right, Albert?” Caine said bitterly.
Albert knew he shouldn’t let himself be baited. But the cheap shot rankled. “Turk and Lance shot me,” he said, with his hand on the doorknob. “I’m only alive because of luck and Lana. Believe me: I stopped thinking I was unbeatable.”
And made plans, he thought, but did not say.
FOURTEEN
24 HOURS, 29 MINUTES
THEY WATCHED MOHAMED leave.
Then, when she was sure Sam had at least a couple of minutes to think clearly, Astrid told him what they had found in the desert. “Edilio’s bringing it in so we can take a look at it. I came straight back. When they get it here I’ll see what I can learn.”
Sam seemed barely to pay attention. His eyes were drawn toward the barrier. He wasn’t alone. The stain was clearly visible to kids as they worked. The kids out in the fields probably wouldn’t notice, but the ones still here in the town around the marina couldn’t avoid seeing it.
They came in ones or twos or threes to ask Sam what it meant. And he would say, “Get back to work. If you need to worry, I’ll let you know.”
Each time he said it—and it must have been two dozen times—he used the same gruff but ultimately reassuring voice.
But Astrid knew better. She could feel the tension bleeding from his every pore. She saw the way the corners of his mouth tugged downward, the way his forehead formed twin vertical worry lines between his eyes.
He didn’t need some new thing to worry about. So the awful freak monster thing she and Edilio had found, that would have to wait. Because all Sam had time for right now was the mesmerizing advance of the stain. His imagination was torturing him. She could see it in the way his hands would form into fists, tighten and then release, but the release was forced, conscious, and accompanied each time by a deliberate exhalation.
He was seeing a world of total darkness.
So was Astrid. And though it made no sense she worried about her tents. The ropes needed tightening periodically or they would start to sag. And the fabric of the tent itself needed checking, because small tears got bigger fast, and beetles and ants were very good at finding such openings.
She recalled once waking up in the tent to find a steady stream of ants crossing right over her face and picking at a morsel of food she’d let fall. She had jumped up and run for the water, but not before the ants panicked at her panic and bit her a dozen times.
She could smile at the memory now. At the time it had made her cry at the weirdness and sadness of her stupid life.
But she had learned from that. And there had never again been so much as a crumb of anything edible in her tent.
And what about the time she found a snake in her boot? Lesson learned there, too.
If no one picked her blackberries, the birds would get them.
She went on this way for a while, fully aware of the fact that she was nostalgic over things that had usually been pretty miserable, realizing that she was as trapped as Sam in waiting, waiting, waiting for doom.
The image of the coyote with the human face and legs came suddenly to mind. It knocked the breath out of her.
BANG. BANG. She could hear the sound of the gun better in memory than she had at the time. At the time she’d been numb. Now she recalled, too, the way the gun bucked. The way the abomination bled out in the sand.
The way the little girl’s face relaxed in death and the blind eyes filmed over.
What terrible thing was happening? Why couldn’t she figure it out? Why couldn’t she help Sam to pull off one more impossible victory?
One of the great reliefs about living on her own had been the fact that she had no expectations to meet. She didn’t have to be Astrid the Genius, or Astrid the Mayor, or Astrid Sam’s girlfriend, or Why-won’t-she-shut-up Astrid.
All she’d had to do was get enough food to eat each day. A huge accomplishment that was all hers.
Sam had binoculars to his eyes. He checked the barrier. Then swung them inland.
“Mo’s on his way,” he said. He shifted slightly. “So is Howard, out in front of him by a quarter mile. He’s just . . . Okay, now I can’t see him.” He lowered the binoculars. “Figures. Howard’s heading to his still to bring back one more shipment of booze.”
Astrid made a wry smile. “Life goes on, I guess.”
Sam frowned. “You were telling me something. Earlier.”
“Get back to work. If I need you to worry, I’ll let you know.”
“Very funny.” He almost smiled.
He looked suddenly very young. Well, he was, Astrid supposed. So was she. But they’d forgotten about all that in this world where they were the elders. He looked like a kid, a teenager, a boy who ought to be yelling happily as he ran into the surf with his board.
That image made her hurt. A tear welled. She pretended to have a speck of dust in her eye and wiped it away.
He wasn’t fooled. He put his arms around her and drew her close. She couldn’t look at him for fear of crying. She couldn’t see the fear in him and not want to just hold him like he was a little boy.
“No,” he whispered. “You have to open your eyes, Astrid. I don’t know how many more times I’ll see them.”
Her cheek was wet when she pressed it to his.
“I want to make love to you again,” he said.
“I want to make love to you, Sam,” she answered. “We’re scared.”
He nodded and she saw his jaw clench. “Inappropriate, I guess.”
“Human,” she said. “Most of human history people huddled, scared in the dark. Living in little huts with their animals. Believing the woods around them were haunted by spirits. Wolves and werewolves. Terrors. People would hold on to each other. So that they wouldn’t be so afraid.”
“I have to ask you to do something dangerous soon,” Sam said.
“You want me to go out and check the measurements again.”
“I know we were thinking tomorrow morning. . . .”
She nodded. “I think it’s growing faster than that. I think you’re right. I think we need to know whether we’ll have a sunrise tomorrow.”
His face was bleak. He wasn’t looking at her, but past her. He looked like he wanted to cry but knew it was futile.
Once again she saw him as he must have been once upon a time, long, long ago. A big, good-looking boy out in the waves, trading jokes with Quinn, giddy that they were skipping
school. Happy and carefree.
She imagined him drawing strength from the sun beating down on his brown shoulders.
The FAYZ had finally found the way to beat Sam Temple. Without light he would not survive. When the final night came with no prospect of dawn, he would be done.
She kissed him. He did not kiss her back, just gazed at the growing stain.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, Sinder had been very fond of black. She had painted her fingernails black. Dyed her brown hair jet-black. Donned clothing that was either black or some secondary color chosen to accentuate the black.
Now her color was green. She loved green. Carrots were orange and tomatoes were red, but each lived within green. The green turned light into food.
“How cool is photosynthesis?” Sinder called to Jezzie, who was a half dozen rows away, down on her knees, searching with deadly focus for weeds, bugs, or disease that might endanger her beloved plants. An overprotective mother had nothing on Jezzie. The girl hated weeds with a burning passion.
Jezzie didn’t answer—she frequently didn’t when Sinder turned loquacious. “I mean, I remember learning about it in school, but, man, who cared? Right? Photo-wuh? But I mean, it turns light into food. Light becomes energy becomes food and becomes energy again when we eat it. It’s like . . . You know . . .”
“It’s a miracle,” Orc rumbled.
“No,” Jezzie said, “it would be a miracle if it didn’t also work for weeds. Then it would be a miracle.” She’d found a root of something she didn’t like and was pulling on it, grunting with the effort.
“I could pull that for you,” Orc said.
“No, no, no!” both girls cried. “But thanks, Orc.”
Orc did not wear shoes, but if he had they’d probably have been size twenty. Extra, extra, extra wide. When he stepped into the garden things had a tendency to be crushed.
Sinder liked to get down low and look at her plants from close up. From one side she would see the miraculous leaves outlined against the backdrop of the lake and the marina area. From the other side she would see them almost like mounted specimens against the pearly gray blankness of the barrier.
Gone Series Complete Collection Page 162