Moonlight picked Orc out of a pile of jumbled rock. Astrid wondered if Sam knew that Orc had gone ashore. She wondered if she needed to send word.
No. This was the more important mission. She had to get to Perdido Beach. Maybe Caine and Albert knew what was coming. But maybe not. If the kids in town weren’t prepared they would panic and then they would all be lost.
An image came to mind, unbidden, unwelcome: a picture of kids in absolute darkness walking lost in the desert. They would walk until a hungry zeke, or a coyote, or Drake caught them. And those would be the luckier ones. Most would die an excruciating death of hunger and thirst.
Astrid steered clear of Orc. He was searching for someone or something. It had to be Drake, which could only be a good thing from her point of view.
She tried to think of something other than the image her mind had conjured of slow death by starvation in absolute darkness.
She needed to think.
Darkness wasn’t the end state, was it? Surely something was causing the barrier to darken. The stain had a reason if not a purpose. It meant something. But what?
Most likely it was linked to the gaiaphage, that unknowable evil. The FAYZ’s own personal Satan.
No one knew much about it. Lana didn’t like to talk about it. Little Pete had been in contact with it, manipulated by it. The chimera that called itself Nerezza had been its creature. It had co-opted Caine at one point, or so the story went, but Caine had broken free.
Astrid began to jog, careful to watch the path beneath her feet. As soon as she was well away from the lake she planned to stay just off the gravel road. She wasn’t sure if that was the smart thing to do or very stupid. But she reasoned that anyone looking for her would first check the main roads.
It would take her longer this way. But no one would expect her—of all people—to go overland through rough terrain.
Well, they didn’t know her. In the last four months she had become quite comfortable with rough terrain.
She loped along, glorying in the sense of power from overcoming fear. Yes, it was dark. Yes, evil forces were on the loose. But she would outrun them or outthink them or if necessary outfight them.
If she couldn’t do any of those, then she would endure.
A pang of guilt stabbed her without warning. She should have made her case to Sam and tried to get him to agree. She shouldn’t have just run off on her own.
He would never have agreed.
She was doing the right thing. For once she was deciding to act. Not to manipulate or convince. But to act.
With luck she would reach Perdido Beach by morning.
And with a bit more luck she would be back with Sam by tomorrow night.
Brittney knew what she was to do. Mostly. The god that named itself gaiaphage had told her what she and Drake were to do. But the gaiaphage had not given her the power to keep Drake’s memories as her own. Each time she emerged it was into a situation that might be totally unexpected.
In this case she recognized the crack in the bluff and knew she was hiding from Brianna. But now it was night and that was a surprise.
Almost as big a surprise as the fact that when she peered out she saw Orc looming huge no more than fifty feet away from the opening.
Brittney froze. The coyotes were already as quiet and still as statues.
Orc was slowly laboring up the hill, searching as he went in a steady, methodical way that was like nothing she’d ever seen from her former jailer.
He was meticulously scanning the ground, stomping through bushes, shoving boulders aside. Orc would not find them anytime soon, and the coyotes would show Brittney another hiding place if need be, but there was something disturbing in the way Orc was searching. Methodical. Calm. Dangerous.
The coyotes would be no use against Orc. And Brittney would be helpless. Orc was powerful. He could rip her into pieces. Those massive gravel hands could tear her apart as easily as she might tear a piece of bread.
He couldn’t kill her, or Drake; so it seemed. But even now, as far from her old life as it was possible to get, Brittney felt sick with dread at what Orc could do. She might not feel pain like she once had. But she would feel something.
Orc moved on, lumbering past, a starlit beast. She did not understand why he wanted her, or wanted Drake, but she was sure that was his purpose.
Her hand brushed against a smooth rock face and she felt something wet.
“Whip Hand made blood,” Pack Leader said.
“It’s too dark to see,” Brittney said. “Do you—” No, that was stupid. Pack Leader did not read. But still, he might know something. She didn’t have to ask.
“Rock that lives came from there.” Pack Leader couldn’t point, but he could aim his eyes. Through the gap in the rock Brittney could see what might be a small rowboat. She inched forward, silent, afraid of a massive stone hand reaching down from above. Inch by inch, until she was standing outside of the cave. She stood perfectly still. Listened. She heard the monster moving rocks, but the sound was not close at hand.
The moon shone down on the forlorn rowboat. It had painted trim—possibly green, impossible to tell for sure.
She scanned the boats at anchor, bobbing gently at the end of ropes or in some cases seemingly just drifting randomly. A sailboat caught her eye. It had trim that was very much like that on the rowboat.
“We must go,” Brittney told Pack Leader. “I’ll take Orc’s—Rock That Lives—boat. You’ll wait on shore to fight off anyone who comes along.”
Pack Leader’s soulless, intelligent eyes stared at her. “Pack hide from Swift Girl and Rock That Lives.”
“No,” Brittney said. “We cannot hide any longer.”
“Swift Girl kills many coyotes.”
“You’ll have to take your chances. The Darkness commands.”
Pack Leader’s tail flicked. “Bright Hand is there.” He pointed his muzzle at the houseboat. “Rock That Lives is close. Pack Leader does not see Whip Hand. Does not see Darkness.”
Brittney gritted her teeth. So that was it. The coyotes were calculating the odds and not liking what they saw. Cowards.
“Are you dogs?” Brittney taunted.
But Pack Leader was unmoved. “Pack almost gone. And only three pups.”
“If Drake was here, he would whip the fur off you!”
“Whip Hand is not here,” Pack Leader said placidly.
“Fine. Then wait here. I’ll go alone.”
Pack Leader did not argue. Neither did he agree.
Brittney began to pick her way quietly, cautiously down toward the shore. She stayed under the cover of rocks when she could and hunched down low when she had no choice but to cover open ground.
She kept a sharp eye on the houseboat. She didn’t need Drake’s memories to know that was where Sam would be. And she listened carefully for Orc.
The last fifty yards there was no cover, nothing she could do to hide as she crossed the pebbly shore to the rowboat. She crouched and looked hard at the houseboat. She saw no one on the top deck. That didn’t mean eyes weren’t watching from the houseboat’s windows. But if she could only barely see them it stood to reason they could see her only if they were staring in her direction.
Once the boat started moving . . .
She rushed to the rowboat and crouched in its shadow, eyes on the houseboat. If she tried to move the boat, she would be caught. Maybe Drake could have done it, moving swiftly in a way that she could not. But she had no idea how to row a boat and was likely to make noise.
If she tried to swim, it would be even worse. She knew how to swim, but she knew only the crawl, and the splashing would draw every ear in the small fleet.
Then Sam and his people would hear and they would catch her and Sam would burn her to ashes.
She would fail Drake. She would fail the gaiaphage.
Then: a flash of genius. Brittney almost laughed out loud.
She breathed, but she did not need to breathe.
Brittney began
picking up small rocks and stuffing them in her pockets. She tied off the bottom of her shirt, as tight as she could make it, then dropped more rocks down the front of her shirt, using her arms to hold them all in like a pregnant woman’s belly.
Weighed down, she walked into the water. As the water rose around her she kept her gaze on the sailboat. She walked directly toward it, fixing the direction in her mind.
The water rose over her waist, over her chest, to her mouth and nose. And then it closed over her head.
She was almost completely sightless in the water. The only light was from the moon, and it seemed to reach only a few feet into the lake.
Brittney focused all her energy on walking in a straight line. The rocks controlled her buoyancy, but still she tended to float just a little, which made holding to a straight line very hard.
Freezing water filled her lungs. She could tell that it was cold, but the cold did not bother her. What did bother her was the certainty that she was off course. How many steps should she take? How far out was the sailboat? It had seemed like perhaps two hundred steps, but she had lost count after stumbling and losing some of the rocks that held her down.
No choice now but to surface. She opened the bottom of her shirt and let the rocks fall free. Her feet came up off the stony lake bottom and she floated upward.
It took a very long time. She was not very buoyant.
All the while she looked around and saw nothing until she was near the surface. Then she saw a rope slanting down into the darkness below.
She swam underwater, silent, no bubbles issuing from her mouth. She gripped the rope and began to pull herself upward, careful not to yank on that line.
She came up face-first. The twisted wires of her braces glinted with moonlight. A boat—a boat with a tall mast and what might be green trim—was directly above her.
Brittney wasn’t sure whether it was proper to say a prayer of thanks to the gaiaphage. Maybe that was just for her old God. But she smiled in the renewed belief that she had purpose, and that she was serving her master well.
TWENTY-ONE
15 HOURS, 12 MINUTES
ASTRID’S PLAN WOULD have been brilliant.
Except that in distancing herself from the road for safety she managed to get lost.
This quasi-desert was not her familiar woods. And the funny thing about a road was that from a distance you couldn’t actually see it at night unless you were seeing streetlights or car lights.
The FAYZ had neither.
So the gravel road disappeared from view, and although she was sure she was paralleling it, she seemed now to be in much less austere countryside than that which the road passed through.
The moon had set and the stars provided far too little light to see by. So she had gone slower and slower. And then she had tried to turn a sharp right angle to intersect the road. But the road was not there. Or if it was there it was much farther off than she had imagined.
“Stupid,” she told herself. So much for the newly competent Astrid. She’d managed to lose herself in just a couple of hours.
As much as she hated to admit it, the only wise movement now was to stand still and wait for dawn. If dawn came. That thought sent a thrill of fear through her stomach. Even by starlight she was helpless. In total darkness she could wander forever. Or more accurately, wander until thirst and hunger killed her.
She wondered which would do it first. People assumed it was thirst. But she’d read in a book somewhere that hunger—
“Not helpful,” she said aloud, just for the reassurance of hearing her own voice. “If . . . when . . . the sun comes up I’ll be able to locate the ridges and hills and maybe even see a bit of ocean.”
So she found a patch of ground with some tall grass and sat down carefully.
“Bad start,” she admitted. Lost in the wilderness. How long had Moses and the Hebrews managed to stay lost on the Sinai Peninsula before stumbling into the land they were to reconquer? Forty years?
“A pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. And they still couldn’t find their way out of the Sinai,” Astrid muttered. “I’ll settle for one last day of sunlight.”
At some point sleep carried her off to unsettling dreams. And when she woke at last she knew that her one wish was not to be granted.
Looking up, she could make out a circle of deepest, darkest blue just beginning to lighten on the eastern edge and push the stars away.
Beneath that midnight blue was black. Not the black of night with stars and the Milky Way and distant galaxies, but the absolute blank, flat black of the stain.
The sky no longer stretched from horizon to horizon. The sky was a hole in the top of an upended bowl. The sky was the circle at the top of a well. And before the day was done the sky would be altogether gone.
Caine woke. His head was pounding. A headache so painful he thought he might pass out from the sudden onslaught of pain.
Then he felt something else. It felt like cuts. Itchy and sharp at once, all around his head.
He reached to touch it. But his hands would not move.
Caine’s eyes opened.
He saw the gray cement block, shaped like a bowl. It rested on the coffee table. His hands were in the block to the wrists.
Fear struck. Panic.
He fought to control it but he couldn’t. He cried out.
“No, no, no, no!”
He tried to pull back, tried to free his hands, but they were absolutely held fast by the concrete, which itched and squeezed his skin. He had done this to people; he had ordered this done and he knew the results; he knew what it did; he knew the cement could not just be broken off; he knew he was trapped, powerless.
Powerless!
He jumped to his feet, but the cement block weighed him down so that he stumbled forward and banged his knee against the sharp edge of the concrete. Pain in his knee, but nothing next to the panic, nothing compared to the awful pain in his head.
He whimpered like a scared child.
With all his strength he lifted the cement block. It banged against his thighs, but yes, he could lift it; he could carry it.
But not far. He set it down but missed the table, so that it slammed onto the floor, bending him over into an upside-down U.
Had to get a grip. Had to not panic.
Had to figure out . . .
He was at Penny’s house.
Penny.
No.
Sick, terrible dread filled him.
He looked up as well as he could and there she was, walking toward him. She stopped just inches from his bowed head. He was staring at her feet.
“Do you like it?” Penny asked.
She held an oval mirror down so that he could look at it and see his face. His head. The streams of dried blood that had run from the crown she’d made of aluminum foil and then stapled to his head.
“Can’t be a king without a crown,” she said. “Your Highness.”
“I’ll kill you, you sick, twisted maggot.”
“Funny you should mention maggots,” she said.
He saw one then. A maggot. Just one. It was squirming up out of the concrete block. Only it wasn’t coming from the cement; it was coming from the skin of his wrist.
He stared at it. She’d put maggots in with his hands!
A second one was coming out now. No bigger than a grain of rice. Eating its way through his skin, coming out of . . .
No, no, it was one of her illusions. She was making him see this.
They would burrow into his flesh and—
No! No! Don’t believe it!
It wasn’t real. The cement was real, nothing else, but he could feel them now, not one or two, but hundreds, hundreds of them eating into his hands.
“Stop it! Stop it!” he cried. There were tears in his eyes.
“Of course, Your Highness.”
The maggots were gone. The feeling of them digging into him was gone. But the memory persisted. And even though he knew absolutely that t
hey were not real, the sense memory was powerful. Impossible to dismiss.
“Now we’re going on a walk,” Penny said.
“What?”
“Don’t be shy. Let’s show off that washboard stomach of yours. Let’s let everyone see your crown.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Caine snapped.
But then something dropped onto his left eyelash. He couldn’t bring it into focus. But it was small and white. And it writhed.
His resistance crumbled.
In the space of minutes he had gone from king—the most powerful person in Perdido Beach—to slave.
With a desperate heave he lifted the block and staggered toward the door.
Penny opened it and her step faltered.
“It’s still night,” Caine said.
Penny shook her head slowly. “No. I have a clock. It’s morning.” She threw him a haunted, troubled look, as if she suspected him of some trick.
“You look scared, Penny,” he said.
That brought the hard look back to her face. “Get going, King Caine. I’m not afraid of anything.” She laughed, suddenly delighted. “I don’t have fear. I am fear!”
She liked it so much she repeated it, cackling like a mad creature. “I am fear!”
Diana stood on the deck of the sailboat. One hand was on her belly, rubbing it absentmindedly.
She saw the leaders—Sam, Edilio, Dekka—all standing on the White Houseboat looking at the place where the rising sun should be.
My baby.
That was her thought. My baby.
She didn’t even know what it meant. She didn’t understand why it filled her mind and simply shoved aside every other thought.
But as she gazed in growing horror at that dark sky all Diana could think was, My baby.
My baby.
My baby.
Cigar wandered, not really knowing where he was. Nothing looked like it should look. In his world, things—houses, curbs, street signs, abandoned cars—were merest shadows. He could make out their edges, enough to avoid walking into them.
But living things were twisty phantasms of light. A palm tree became a narrow, silent tornado funnel. Bushes beside the road were a thousand crooked fingers twisting together like the hands of a cartoon miser. A seagull floated overhead looking like a small, pale hand waving good-bye.
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