Now she was looking at the feathery structure of a carrot top against the blank black of the stain. It had the odd effect of making the leaf seem like a work of abstract art.
She looked up from the plant and saw the stain suddenly shoot upward. What had been a ragged, undulating wave of black extending only a dozen or so feet above her head blossomed like one of her charges to become a terrible black bloom thirty, fifty, a hundred feet high before it slowed and stopped.
She hoped Jezzie hadn’t seen it. But when her friend stood up there were tears running down her cheeks.
“I feel bad inside,” Jezzie said simply.
Sinder nodded. She glanced at Orc, but he was absorbed in reading. “Me, too, Jez. Like . . .” She didn’t have the words for what it was like. So she just shook her head.
Jezzie wiped dirt from her brow and managed to actually transfer more dirt there. She was looking down toward the marina. Sinder followed her gaze and saw Sam and Astrid holding each other close on the top deck of the White Houseboat.
Jezzie said, “At first when I heard she was back I thought it was a good thing. I thought Sam would be happy. You know: he’s been lonely.”
It was a fact of life in the FAYZ that kids cut off from TMZ and Facebook and the ins and outs of Hollywood and reality shows focused much of their gossip hunger on the closest thing they had to celebrities: Sam, who most people liked and everyone worried about; Diana, who most people didn’t like but whose baby everyone worried about; the baby itself, in particular betting about its gender and possible powers; news of Caine from Perdido Beach; affectionate speculation about Edilio and the nature of his friendship with the Artful Roger; theories about Astrid with passionate disagreement as to whether she was a good person and good for Sam, or alternately a sort of Jadis, the White Witch from Narnia; and, of course, the whispered-about, much-speculated-about relationship (or lack of same) between Brianna and Jack and/or Brianna and Dekka.
Remarks about Sam’s state of mind were no more unusual than speculation about Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber had once been. Except that every person at the lake felt his or her own fate was all too closely tied to Sam Temple.
“He doesn’t look good,” Jezzie said. Sam was a tiny, distant figure from where she stood. And Sinder might have pointed that out on some other day. But the truth was that something about the way Sam held Astrid was wrong.
Sinder looked out across her garden, the plants she knew as individuals, many with names she and Jezzie had given them. And she saw the line of stain push slowly now, slowly but relentlessly, toward the sky.
Drake found the light almost unbearable. The setting sun stabbed his eyes with jagged pain. How long since he had seen the sun? Weeks? Months?
There was no time down in the gaiaphage’s lair, no rising or setting moon, no mealtime, bath time, wake-up time.
The coyotes were waiting for him in the ghost town below the mine entrance. Pack Leader—well, the current Pack Leader, if not the original—licked a scab on his right front paw.
“Take me to the lake,” Drake said.
Pack Leader stared at him with yellow eyes. “Pack hungry.”
“Too bad. Take me.”
Pack Leader bared his teeth. The coyotes of the FAYZ were not the runts that coyotes had been back before the FAYZ. They weren’t as big as wolves, but they were big. But it was easy to see that they were not well. Their fur was mangy. There were bare patches on all of them where scraped gray-and-red flesh showed through. Their eyes were dull. Their heads hung low and the tails dragged.
“Humans take all prey,” Pack Leader said. “Darkness says don’t kill humans. Darkness does not feed pack.”
Drake frowned and counted the pack. He saw seven, all adults, no pups.
As if reading Drake’s mind, Pack Leader said, “Many die. Killed by Bright Hands. Killed by Swift Girl. No prey. No food for pack. Pack serves Darkness and pack goes hungry.”
Drake barked out a disbelieving laugh. “Are you bitching out the gaiaphage? I’ll whip the skin off you!”
Drake unwrapped his tentacle arm, which had been wound around his torso.
Pack Leader retreated a few dozen feet. The pack might be weak with hunger but they were still far too quick for Drake to catch. He felt uneasy. The gaiaphage would not listen to excuses. Drake had a mission. He had been to the lake before, but never alone. He knew he could follow the barrier, but the barrier itself was a long way off. If he wandered around lost he might be spotted. The success of his mission lay in stealth and surprise.
And then there was the problem of Brittney. Had the gaiaphage told her what to do? Would she do it? Would she know how to find the way without the coyotes as guides?
“How am I supposed to feed you?” Drake demanded.
“Darkness say to coyote: don’t kill human. Did not say don’t eat dead human.”
Drake laughed with a certain delight. This Pack Leader was definitely a smarter animal than the original one. The gaiaphage had ordered the beasts not to kill humans for fear they might unknowingly kill someone useful: Lana, or even Nemesis. But Drake knew which humans were expendable.
“You know where I can find a human?” Drake asked.
“Pack Leader knows,” Pack Leader said.
“Okay, then. Let’s get you boys some dinner. Then we go get Diana.”
Astrid found Edilio just coming back down from the Pit. The Artful Roger and Justin, the little kid Roger looked after, were with him, but Edilio sent them both away when he spotted Astrid.
“I got that thing, that . . . whatever it was. Up under a tarp. You want to look at it now?” Edilio asked.
“No. I’m sorry you had to do that. It couldn’t have been very pleasant.”
“It wasn’t,” Edilio said flatly.
“Listen, it looks like the stain is accelerating. Sam wants me to check the frames early.”
“I saw it growing. Faster. A lot faster,” Edilio said. “But I understand if Sam wants more information.” He blew out a weary breath and drank from a water bottle.
“Don’t come yourself,” Astrid said. “Just send one of your guys.”
Edilio made an incredulous face. “And tell Sam something happened to you because I wasn’t there?”
Astrid treated it as a joke and laughed.
But Edilio didn’t join in. “Sam’s all we’ve got. You’re all Sam’s got. Come on, it’ll be a quick, easy walk without having to carry those frames.”
The plan had been to allow twenty-four hours before checking the frames. The idea had been that a frame that was 10 percent stain might grow to 20 percent stain and that then Astrid could calculate the rate of growth.
But now that the plan was revealed as absurdly optimistic. All the frames were 100 percent filled with black. There was no chance of an accurate calculation: it had grown too far, grown too fast. And the rate of acceleration could only be increasing exponentially.
She stood looking up, craning her neck to see the tallest black finger yet. It stretched three hundred feet up the side of the dome.
As she watched, it grew. She could see it moving.
Then, from a low point in the stain, a new black tendril shot up as fast as a car on the freeway. It just seemed to explode up-ward. Up and up, and she tilted her head back to see it, and up farther and farther.
The stain crossed the line between blank pearly gray and sunlight. Then it slowed. But that slim black finger violated the sky like graffiti on the Mona Lisa. It was vandalism. It was ugliness.
It was the future written clearly for Astrid to see.
FIFTEEN
22 HOURS, 16 MINUTES
MOHAMED HAD SET out from the lake on the tedious walk to Perdido Beach as soon as he could get a water bottle and a little food in his belly.
He carried a pistol and a knife, but he wasn’t really worried. Everyone knew he was under Albert’s protection. And no one messed with Albert’s people.
For most of the time since the coming of the FAYZ, Mohamed
had lain low, stayed out of the way of all the big wheels who were busy killing and being killed.
As crazy as things were in the FAYZ, the smart move was to just do the minimum to get food and shelter. And not even shelter some of the time.
He was thirteen, a man. He was thin and starting to get taller, a growth spurt that had left his shorts too short and his shoes too tight. His family had just moved to Perdido Beach when his mother got a job at the power plant. The school was supposed to be better than the one he’d been at in King City. His dad still worked there, working ten hours a day at the family’s Circle K, selling gas and cigarettes and milk to a mostly Hispanic population. It was a really long commute, and some nights his dad hadn’t come home, which made everyone feel strange and abandoned.
But that was the way it was, his father had explained. A man worked. A man did what he had to do to take care of his family. Even if it meant he saw less of them.
Sometimes Moomaw—Mohamed’s paternal grandmother—would talk about going back to Syria. But Mohamed’s father would shut that down right away. He had left Syria when he was twenty-two and didn’t miss it at all, not even a little, no, sir. Yes, he’d been a medical student there and sold hot dogs to farmhands now, but it was still better.
Was it tough sometimes being the only Muslim at the Perdido Beach school? Yeah. He’d been pushed around by Orc a few times. Kids made fun of him for praying. For refusing the pepperoni pizza at lunch. But pretty soon Orc had lost interest and most kids didn’t even think twice about where his parents came from or how he prayed.
Fortunately Mohamed’s family had never been all that strict about the dietary laws. He hadn’t eaten pork since the coming of the FAYZ, but he would have in a heartbeat if anyone had some. He’d eaten rat, cat, dog, bird, and fish and slimy things he didn’t have a name for. He’d have jumped all over a pepperoni pizza if anyone had one. Staying alive was not a sin: Allah saw all; Allah understood all.
Someday this would all end; Mohamed was sure of that. Or tried to be. Someday the barrier would come down and his father and mother and brothers and sister would be waiting for him.
How would he get along with his brothers? They would ask him all the questions his parents wouldn’t. They’d ask him what he had done. They’d ask him if he represented. They’d ask him if he had stood up or wimped out. That was what brothers were like, at least his.
Whenever the barrier came down there would be all kinds of people talking to the media and telling all kinds of stories. And pretty quick people would realize they hadn’t just all sat around catching up on their homework.
People would realize it had been more like a war. And then all those questions. Were you scared, Mohamed? Were you picked on? Did you ever run into all these insane freaks we hear about on TV?
Did you ever kill anyone? What was it like?
He hadn’t killed anyone. He’d had a couple of fights; one of them was pretty bad. He’d had a nail driven into his butt cheek and broken his wrist.
Mohamed figured he’d change that story a little. Nail in the butt sounded funny. It hadn’t been, but if he ever got out, yeah, he’d change that story.
As for freaks, the only one he’d spent any time with was Lana. She had healed his butt and his wrist.
So, yeah, don’t diss all the freaks, not to Mohamed.
When it came time for the Big Split, Mohamed had been forced to commit, one way or the other. He had gone to Albert and asked his advice. Until then Mohamed had stuck to working in the fields, but Albert had seen something in him.
Albert had liked him for the fact that he had no real friends. No family inside the FAYZ. He liked the way Mohamed had managed to stay under the radar. All those things—plus Mohamed’s basic intelligence—made him just right for the job Albert had for him: representing AlberCo at the lake.
Mohamed still had no friends. But he had a job. An important one. Albert would want to know details of Astrid’s return. He’d want to know that she was measuring some kind of stain on the dome. Maybe he’d want to know about some weird, mutant animal Astrid had supposedly killed. And he would definitely want to hear what Mohamed knew about the secret mission Sam and Dekka had gone out on.
Mohamed walked down the familiar, dusty road.
He walked alone.
Howard was already en route to Coates. He had a long day of work ahead of him. Hopefully his contractors would have run some corn and assorted other vegetables and fruits up to Coates and locked them in the rat-proof steel cupboards in the kitchen.
Howard would have to chop the produce up as small as he had patience for, then carry it to the still. He had a little firewood in place, hopefully enough to get the cooker started. Then while the batch was cooking he would have to hack around the woods looking for fallen trees, which he would then have to cut.
All of this used to be Orc’s job. Orc could haul a lot of bottles. Orc could haul a lot of firewood. Orc swinging an ax was a whole different story from Howard’s doing it. Orc was like two swings and snap, the log would be cut through. For Howard the same job could take fifteen minutes.
This bootlegging thing was getting to be a lot less fun. It was a lot more like real work. In fact, Howard realized with a sudden shock, he was now working harder than just about anyone else. Kids picking veggies in the fields didn’t even work like Howard did.
“Gotta get Orc to be normal again,” Howard muttered to the bushes. “Boy needs to take a drink or six and start feeling it again.”
After all, Orc and him were friends.
Drake stood atop the rise. He’d just returned after a Brittney episode and was surprised to find that she had kept moving along with the coyotes.
“Human,” Pack Leader said.
Drake followed the direction of the animal’s intense gaze. A kid—Drake couldn’t tell who it was—was down below, walking steadily along the dirt-and-gravel road. “Yep,” Drake said. “There’s your lunch.”
SIXTEEN
22 HOURS, 5 MINUTES
“SO. WHAT IS it?” Sam asked.
The “it” in question had been carried to a picnic table not far from the Pit. A plastic tarp had been spread out over and under it—after all, kids still used these tables sometimes. The picnic area was inconveniently far from town but still had a nice view of the lake.
“It’s a coyote, mostly,” Astrid said. “With a human face. And back legs.”
He glanced at her to see if she was really as calm as she seemed. No. She was not calm, but Astrid could do that, seem totally in control when she was freaking out inside.
She’d managed to seem calm when she came back from her quick trip with Edilio. She’d been calm when she said, “The sun may come out tomorrow. But it may not. And unless something changes that will be the last sunrise.”
And he had put on a pretty good show of looking calm himself. He’d given Edilio orders to come up with a list of places where he could hang a Sammy sun. They’d had a very calm discussion of other ways to prepare: start food rationing, test the effect of Sammy suns on growing plants—after all, maybe his own personal light could trigger photosynthesis. Move to more use of nets for fishing; maybe a hovering Sammy sun would bring fish to the surface.
Plans they all knew were bull.
Plans that were about nothing but prolonging the agony.
Plans that would fall apart as soon as the kids in Perdido Beach realized the only light they were likely to see was up here at the lake.
Sam was going through the motions. Pretending. Putting on a brave face to delay the inevitable total social meltdown.
In the back of his mind the gears spun like mad. Solution. Solution. Solution. What was it?
Astrid had laid out a large chef’s knife, a meat cleaver—borrowed from a seven-year-old who carried it for protection—and an X-Acto knife with a less-than-perfect blade.
“It’s beyond creepy,” Sam said.
“You don’t have to be here, Sam,” she said.
“No, I love w
atching autopsies of disgusting mutant monsters,” Sam said. He felt like throwing up and she hadn’t even started.
Solution. Solution. Solution.
Astrid was wearing pink Playtex gloves. She rolled the creature onto its back. “You can see the line where the human face stops and the fur starts. There’s no human hair, just coyote. And look at the legs. There’s no blurring. It’s a clean line. But the bones inside? Those are coyote bones. It’s articulated like a coyote leg covered with human skin and probably muscle, too.”
Sam had run out of useful things to say or energy to say them. He was fighting the surge of bile into his throat, hoping not to puke. A sudden gust of wind bringing the smell of the Pit did not help. Plus the creature itself smelled. Like wet dog and urine and sticky-sweet decay.
And throughout it all: solution. Where was the solution? Where was the answer?
Astrid took the cleaver and slammed it into the creature’s exposed belly. It made a six-inch cut. There was no bleeding; dead things didn’t bleed.
Sam braced himself to burn anything that suddenly emerged, Alien-like, from the cut. But nothing popped or squirmed out. He had terrible memories of what he’d had to do with Dekka. He’d burned her open to get the bugs out of her. It had been the most gruesome thing he’d ever done. And now as Astrid used the big knife to saw away and widen the cut, it was all coming back.
Astrid turned away from the smell to compose herself. She pulled out a rag and tied it over her mouth and nose. Like that would help. She looked like a very pretty bandit.
Incredibly a second line of thinking was forcing its way into his consciousness. He wanted her. Not here, not now, but soon. Soon. The endless, hopeless brain merry-go-round that sang the solution song sang a much nicer tune, too. Why couldn’t he just crawl into his bunk with Astrid and let someone else break his soul searching for a nonexistent solution?
Astrid now cut vertically, opening the animal up along its length. “Look at this.”
“Do I have to?”
“You can see organs attached to each other that just don’t fit. It’s bizarre. The stomach is the wrong size for the large intestine. It’s like a really bad plumber tried to attach different-size pipes together. I can’t believe this thing lived as long as it did.”
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