But oh, Lord, how he wanted her now. Not to make love but just to have her there in the darkness beside him. To hear her voice. That above all. The sound of her voice was the sound of sanity, and he was entering the valley of shadow. Walking into pure, absolute darkness.
He walked until he was out of the faint circle of light cast by the numerous Sammy suns of the lake. Then he hung a new light, taking solace from the sphere as it grew in his hands.
But the light reached only a few feet. Turning back as he walked on, he could see it. But it cast only a faint light, a light whose photons seemed to tire easily.
Into the darkness. Step. Step.
Something was squeezing his heart.
His teeth would fragment if he bit down any harder.
“It’s just the same as it was,” he told himself. “Same but darker.”
Nothing changes when the light goes out, Sam. His mother had said that a thousand times. See? Click. Light on. Click. Light off. The same bed, the same dresser, the same laundry you’ve strewn all over the floor . . .
Not the point, that younger Sam had thought. The threat knows I’m helpless in the dark. So that’s not the same.
It’s not the same if the threat can see and I can’t.
It’s not the same if the threat knows it doesn’t have to hide, but can make its move.
Useless to pretend the darkness isn’t any different.
It’s different.
Did something bad happen to you in the dark, Sam? They always wanted to know. Because they assumed all fear must come from a thing or a place. An event. Cause and effect. Like fear was part of an algebra equation.
No, no, no, so not getting the point of fear. Because fear wasn’t about what made sense. Fear was about possibilities. Not things that happened. Things that might.
Things that might . . . Threats that might be there. Murderers. Madmen. Monsters. Standing just a few inches from him, able to see him, but his eyes useless. The threats, they could laugh silently at him. They could hold their knives, guns, claws right in his face and he wouldn’t be able to see.
The threat could be. Right. Here.
His legs already ached from tension. He glanced back at the lake. He had been climbing and it was below him now, a sad collection of stars like a dim, distant galaxy. So very far away.
He couldn’t look back for long because the possibilities were all around him now.
The light of day showed you the limits of possibility. But walk through the dark, the absolute, total darkness, and the possibilities were limitless.
He hung a Sammy sun. He didn’t want to leave it behind. It was light that revealed stones. A stick. A dried-out bush.
It was almost better not to bother. Seeing anything just made the darkness seem darker. But the lights were also a sort of bread-crumb trail, like Hansel and Gretel. He would be able to find his way home.
Hopefully as well, he’d be able to see whether he was veering left or right.
But the lights had one other effect: they would be seen by whatever else was out here.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. But in the darkness the one man holding a candle is a target.
Sam walked on into the dark.
Quinn had brought everyone into the plaza with grilled fish. The fire still burned, but lower and lower.
Lana had healed all who needed it.
For now there was quiet.
Kids had broken into Albert’s place and come back with some of his hoard of flashlights and batteries. Quinn had quickly confiscated them. They were worth far more than gold, far more even than food.
Some of Quinn’s crew were using the light of a single flashlight and a number of crowbars to tear apart the pews in the church and bring them out to keep the fire going.
No one was leaving. Not yet.
The orange-red glow cast a faint, flickering wash of color on the limestone of town hall, on the long-abandoned McDonald’s, on the broken fountain. On grim young faces.
But the streets leading away simply disappeared. The rest of the town was invisible. The ocean, occasionally faintly audible over the sound of snapping wood and muted conversation, might as well be a myth.
The sky was black. Featureless.
All of the FAYZ was just this bonfire now.
Close to the fire sat Caine. People left plenty of room for him. He smelled. And he still cried out in pain as a new pair of kids—the third pair—chipped away at his hands by firelight. They were down to the small stuff now. The very painful, small strokes that often drew blood.
Every now and then Lana would come by to heal a cut or two so that the blood didn’t render the concrete too slippery for the chisel.
Quinn was there at the moment when a firm blow separated Caine’s hands so that they were no longer attached to each other.
“The palms first,” Caine ordered, still somehow commanding, despite everything.
They used needle-nose pliers to pry pieces off. Skin came away, too. Each time they asked him if it was okay, and each time he gritted his teeth and said, “Do it!”
His hands were being skinned. Piece by piece.
Quinn could barely stand to watch it. But he had to admit one thing: Caine might be a thug, an egomaniac, a killer, but he was no coward.
Lana pulled Quinn aside a little way, into the dark beyond the reach of firelight. Down Alameda Avenue until Quinn could see nothing. Not even the hand in front of his face. “I wanted you to see just how dark it is,” she said.
She was inches from him. He could see nothing.
“Yeah. It’s dark.”
“Do you have a plan?”
Quinn sighed. “For total darkness? No, Lana. No plan.”
“They’ll burn buildings if the fire goes out.”
“We can keep the bonfire going for a while. We’ll feed the whole town in, piece by piece if we have to. And we have water. Little Pete’s cloud is still producing. It’s the food.”
They both had too many memories of hunger. Silence.
“We’re bringing all the food in. From storage at the Ralphs, from Albert’s compound. People didn’t have much in their homes. Add it all up and we’ve got maybe two days’ short rations. Then it starts.”
“Starvation.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t know what the point of this conversation was. “Do you have a plan?”
“It won’t take two days, Quinn. You feel what this darkness does to you? The way it closes in around you? All of a sudden kids realize they’re in this big fishbowl. Fear of the dark, fear of being closed in. Most will be okay for a while, but it’s not about ‘most.’ It’s about the weakest links. The kids who are already about as messed up as they can be.”
“Anyone goes nuts, we’ll deal with him,” Quinn said.
“And Caine?”
Quinn said, “You’re the one who put me in charge, Lana. I hope you didn’t think I had some magic answer.”
A third breathing sound could be heard. “Hi, Patrick. Good boy.”
Quinn heard her fumbling around in the dark, looking for his ruff, finding it, then scratching it vigorously.
“They’ll start going crazy,” Lana said. “Absolutely crazy. When that happens . . . ask Caine for help.”
“What’s he going to do?” Quinn asked.
“Whatever it takes to keep people under control.”
“Wait a minute. Whoa.” He had an instinct to grab her arm. But he didn’t know where her arm was. “Are you telling me to turn Caine loose on anyone who gets out of line?”
“Can you stop some bunch of kids if they decide to steal the food for themselves? Or go nuts and start burning things?”
“Lana. Why does it matter?” he asked. He felt the energy draining from him. She had asked him to take over. Now she was telling him to use Caine like a weapon. For what? “What does anything matter, Lana? Can you tell me that? Why should I hurt some kid for losing his mind when anyone could lose their mind?”
Lana sai
d nothing. She said nothing for so long, Quinn began to wonder if she had left silently. Then, in a voice so low it didn’t even sound like her: “In the dark like this I can feel it. So much closer. It’s more real to me than you are because I can see it. I see it in my head. There’s nothing else to see, so I see it.”
“You’re not telling me why I should hurt anyone, Lana.”
“It’s alive. And it’s scared. It’s so scared. Like it’s dying. Like that kind of scared. I see . . . I see images that don’t really mean anything. It’s not really reaching for me anymore. It doesn’t have time to reach for me anymore. It’s the baby it wants. All its hopes are on the baby.”
“Diana’s baby?”
“It doesn’t have the baby yet, Quinn. Which means it’s not over yet. Even here in the dark, with all of us so scared. It’s not over. Believe that, okay? Believe that it’s not over.”
“It’s not over,” Quinn said, feeling and probably sounding puzzled.
“Those kids back there, if they start to panic they’ll hurt themselves. I won’t be able to find them and help them, so they’ll die. And see, that’s what I’m not going to let him do. The gaiaphage, I mean. I can’t kill him, I can’t keep him from getting the baby. What I can do, and what you can do, too, Quinn, is keep as many of us alive as possible, for as long as possible. Maybe because it’s the right thing to do. But also . . . also . . .” He felt her touch his chest, fumble from there to find his shoulder, then down to take his hand and hold it with a surprisingly strong grip. “Also because I’m not letting him win. He wants us all dead and gone, because as long as we live, we’re a threat. Well, no. No. We’re not going to give up.”
She let go of his hand.
“It’s the only way I have left to fight him, Quinn. By not dying, and by not letting any of those kids back there die.”
THIRTY-ONE
8 HOURS, 58 MINUTES
PENNY HAD NEVER felt like this before. She’d never experienced a sense of awe. Never even known what people were talking about when they went on and on about some sunset or the sweep of stars in a clear night sky.
But now she was feeling something.
She couldn’t see. It was as black as if her eyes had been gouged out. (A thought that made her smile at memories of Cigar.) And yet she knew where she was going.
Her cut foot no longer mattered. When she stubbed her toe on a rock it didn’t matter. That she had to feel her way along the narrow path with her hands out like a blind person, it didn’t matter, none of it, because she could feel . . . feel something so great, so, so magnificent.
She’d never been here before, but it was a homecoming anyway.
She laughed out loud.
“You can feel it, can’t you?”
Penny was startled by the voice. It was coming from where Drake had been but it was a girl’s voice. Of course: Brittney.
“I feel it,” Penny confirmed. “I feel it.”
“When you get closer you’ll hear his voice inside you,” Brittney said. “And it’s not some dream or something; it’s real. And then, when you get all the way down to the bottom, then you can actually touch him.”
Penny thought that sounded weird. Not that she had a big problem with weird. But Brittney was not Drake. Drake she could respect. The Whip Hand—and even more, the will to use it—made Drake powerful.
And attractive, too, as she remembered from former days. She hadn’t ever paid that much attention to him back then because Caine was the one for her. Caine had the dark good looks and the brain—so smart. Drake had been a very different boy: like a shark. He looked like a shark, with dead eyes and a hungry mouth.
Well, she’d been wrong about Caine. Caine was totally under the thumb of that witch Diana. Drake, though, he sure didn’t love Diana. In fact, he hated her. He hated her as much as Penny did.
Maybe Drake was better-looking after all. Anyway, good luck to Diana trying to steal him away like she had Caine.
Brittney was bringing up the rear. Then Penny. Diana and Justin stumbled and wept and fell down in front, feeling their clumsy way along.
Unfortunately Penny could not sustain the illusion that had paralyzed Brianna from this distance. It would have faded by now. Which meant Brianna was free to come after them.
Penny grinned in the dark. Good luck catching them. Let Brianna come back in range again. Her speed was useless now. She was nothing now. The Breeze? Hah. If she came within range, Penny would make her run, run real fast, run until her legs broke. Hah!
“He’ll speak to me; he’ll speak to you,” Brittney said in a singsong voice. “He’ll tell us what to do.”
“Shut up,” Penny snapped.
“No,” Brittney chided in a voice dripping with sincerity. “We mustn’t fight amongst ourselves.”
“We mustn’t?” Penny mocked her. “Shut up until Drake comes back.” Then, not happy with the silence from Brittney, silence that sounded like disapproval, Penny said, “I don’t take orders from anyone. Not you. Not Drake. Not even the whatever you call it.” But she licked her lips nervously as she said it.
“The gaiaphage,” Brittney said. She laughed, not cruelly, but with a knowing condescension. “You’ll see.”
Penny was already “seeing.” Not that she could see anything, not even a finger held right up to her eye, but she could feel the power of it. They had reached the entrance to the mine shaft. The darkness, already absolute, was now tight around them.
It was easier to find their way, just to feel for the timbers along the side. But harder to breathe.
A low moan escaped from Diana.
Penny had a fleeting impulse to give her something to be scared of. But that was the problem: fear was the very air they were breathing now.
“There are some hard places,” Brittney warned. “There’s a big, big drop. It will break your legs all up if you fall.”
Penny shook her head, a gesture no one could see. “No way. No way. Done that, not doing it again.”
Brittney’s voice was silky. “You could always leave.”
“You think I . . .” Penny had to struggle to take the next breath. “You think I won’t?”
“You won’t,” Brittney said. “You’re going to the place you always wanted to be.”
“No one tells me—” Penny snarled. But the defiance died in midsentence. She tried again. “No one . . .”
“Careful,” Brittney said smugly. “This next section is all jumbled-up rock. You’ll have to crawl over it.” Then, in that weird singsong voice she got from time to time, she said, “Crawl on our knees, on our knees we crawl to our lord.”
Brianna was breathing hard without moving.
The darkness, it was her kryptonite. Couldn’t use super-speed when you couldn’t see where you were going.
So dark. It was actually worse than the images Penny had put in her head. Those had been cool in a way. This, though, this was just nothing.
Just nothing nothing nothingness.
Well, not total nothing, now that she thought about it. When she held the machete up in front of her face there was the tangy smell of steel. She drew her shotgun and there was the feel of the short stock and the smell of gunpowder residue.
She could imagine the muzzle flash. It would be loud.
Bright, too.
Now there was a thought. She had what? Twelve rounds?
Yeah. Interesting.
There were sounds, too. She could hear them all up the path. Probably at the mine shaft entrance by now.
Brianna could feel the dark presence of the gaiaphage. She wasn’t immune to that dark weight on her soul. But she wasn’t paralyzed by it. She felt the gaiaphage, but it didn’t frighten her. It was like a warning, like a terrible deep voice saying, “Stay away, stay away!” But Brianna didn’t scare worth a damn. She heard the warning; she felt the malice behind it; she knew it wasn’t a fake or a joke; she knew it represented a force of great power and deep evil.
But Brianna wasn’t wired the way most
people were. She’d known that about herself—and about other people—for some time. Since even before the FAYZ, but much more now since she had become the Breeze.
She remembered once when she was young. How old was she then? Maybe three? Her and some older kids, that boy and his stupid sister who used to live three houses down. And they said, “We’re going to sneak into the old restaurant that burned up.”
It was a big old Italian restaurant. It looked half-normal from the outside except there was yellow police tape across the charred front door.
The two kids, she had no idea what their names were, tried to get little Brianna to be spooked. “Oh, look, that’s where some guy burned up. His ghost is probably haunting this place. Boo!”
She hadn’t been scared. Actually she’d been disappointed when she realized there was no ghost.
Then came the rats. There must have been two dozen of them, at least. They came scurrying out like they were being chased, rushing from the burned-out kitchen into the smoke-stinking dining room where the three kids were and the Olafsons—that was their name, Jane and Todd Olafson; no wonder she didn’t remember it—those two had screamed and run for it. The girl, Jane, had tripped and cut her knee pretty badly.
But Brianna had not run. She’d stood her ground with her talking Woody doll in one hand. She remembered one of the rats had stopped and cocked its rat face to look at her. Like it couldn’t believe she wasn’t running. Like it wanted to say, “Hey, kid, I’m a huge rat: why aren’t you running?”
And she had wanted to say, “Because you’re just a stupid rat.”
She felt her way step by step now. Way too slow for a normal person, let alone the Breeze.
“Oh, I feel you, old dark and scary,” she muttered. “But you’re just a stupid rat.”
Sam could look back and see a string of ten lights behind him. The line they made wobbled a bit but it was basically straight. Of course, he could no longer see the lake or its firefly lights.
He wondered about all the others out in this terrible darkness. Some maybe had flashlights going slowly dim. Some might have built fires. But many were just walking into darkness. Scared. But not stopping.
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