The alarm filled his brain. How many minutes? How many
seconds? The control rods rose with majestic inevitability.
How long until it was too late?
One more failure, Sam thought dully.
“Don’t you want to know what I want, Sam?” Drake cried.
“Me,” Sam said dully. “You want me.”
“That’s the idea, Sam. And you’re going to stand there and
take it. Because if you don’t . . .”
Astrid was with Little Pete, doing one of the long-neglected
exercises. This one involved separating balls by color. There
was a blue box, and a yellow box; blue balls, yellow balls. Any
normal five-year-old could do it. But Little Pete was not any
normal five-year-old.
“Can you put the ball where it belongs?” Astrid asked.
Little Pete stared at the ball. Then his eyes wandered.
Astrid took his hand and placed it on a yellow ball. Too
hard. She was hurting him.
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491
“Can you put this where it belongs?” Her voice was shrill,
impatient.
They were on the floor in Little Pete’s room, sitting in a
corner on the carpet. Little Pete was gone in his head, not
there, indifferent.
Sometimes she hated him.
“Try again, Petey,” Astrid said. She stopped herself from
twisting her fingers together. She was sending signals of being
tense. Not helpful.
She should be running exercises like this every day. Several times a day. But she didn’t. She was only doing it now because she couldn’t stand waiting. She needed something to
take her mind off Sam.
“Sorry,” she said to Little Pete, who was as indifferent to
her apology as to everything else.
Someone knocked at the bedroom door, and she jumped.
The door swung in; it wasn’t closed.
“It’s me, John.”
Astrid climbed to her feet, relieved it was just John. Disappointed it was just John.
“John, what is it?” They wouldn’t send John with bad news.
Would they?
“I can’t find Mary.”
A flood of relief, instantly replaced by more worry. “She’s
not at the day care?”
He shook his head. His red curls went everywhere, a counterpoint to his serious expression. “She was supposed to come in hours ago. She’s almost never late. I couldn’t leave to look
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for her because we’re shorthanded and we have so many kids
sick. I came as soon as I could. I looked in her room. I didn’t
find her there.”
Astrid glanced at Little Pete. He had stalled with his hand
on a yellow ball, and seemingly no interest in doing anything
with it.
“Let me look,” Astrid said.
They entered Mary’s room. It was as neat and organized as
ever. But the bed was unmade.
“She always makes her bed,” Astrid said.
“Yeah,” John agreed.
“What’s that sound?” There was a steady hum. Coming
from the bathroom. The fan. Astrid tried to open the bathroom door, but it was blocked. She leaned into it and pushed it open enough to see inside.
Mary was on the floor, unconscious. She was wearing a
robe that exposed her calves.
“Oh, my God,” Astrid cried. “Mary!”
“Help me push,” Astrid said. Together they forced the
door open enough to let them slip inside. Astrid immediately
noticed the smell of vomit.
“She must be sick,” John said.
The toilet water was slightly discolored. There was a thin
trail of vomit running from Mary’s mouth.
“She’s breathing,” Astrid said quickly. “She’s alive.”
“I didn’t even know she was sick.”
Then Astrid saw the little zipper bag, a little Clinique
cosmetics bag lying with its contents half spilled onto the
bathroom tile.
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She picked it up. She dumped the contents out on the floor.
A mostly empty bottle of ipecac. And several different types
of laxatives.
“John, close your eyes for a minute.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to open Mary’s robe.” She pulled the
knot on the robe’s tie and, feeling vaguely squeamish, opened
the robe.
Mary was wearing only panties. Pink. Strange, Astrid
thought, that she even noticed. Because the thing most noticeable about Mary was her ribs. They could be easily counted.
Her stomach was hollow.
“Oh, poor Mary.” Astrid breathed, and closed the robe
again.
John opened his eyes. They were wet with tears. “What’s
wrong with her?”
Astrid leaned over to reach Mary’s face. She gently pushed
her lips back to see her teeth. She tugged at a lock of Mary’s
hair. Strands came loose.
“She’s starving,” Astrid said.
“She’s getting as much food as the rest of us,” John protested.
“She’s not eating. Or when she does eat, she vomits it back
up. That’s what the ipecac is for.”
“Why would she do that?” John wailed.
“It’s a sickness, John. Anorexia. Bulimia. Both, I guess.”
“We have to get her some food.”
“Yes.” Astrid didn’t explain that just getting Mary food
might not be enough. She’d read about eating disorders.
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Sometimes, if kids didn’t get treatment, they died.
“Nestor, Nestor, Nestor, Nestor.” It was Little Pete, chanting at the top of his lungs. “Nestor, Nestor, Nestor, Nestor.”
A wave of hopelessness swept through her. Astrid closed
her eyes, not wanting to let it get the better of her. She did
not need this. Did not need Mary passed out, maybe near
death. She already had the autistic brother, and the depressed
boyfriend in the middle of some battle. “God forgive me for
that,” she chastised herself. “Come on, John, we have to get
Mary to Dahra.”
“Dahra just has a medical book. She’s not an expert.”
“I know. Look, I don’t know how to take care of someone
with anorexia. At least Dahra’s been reading about medicine.”
“We have to get her some of that deer meat,” John said.
“We have to feed her.”
“What deer meat?”
“Zil has a deer,” John said. “He’s going to share it this evening. At dinnertime.”
Despite everything, Astrid’s stomach rumbled. The idea of
meat was more compelling than anything else. But even hunger couldn’t quiet the warning bells in her head. “Zil? Zil’s got a deer?”
“Everyone is talking about it,” John said. “Turk is telling
everyone that Zil caught Hunter. Hunter had this deer and
was keeping it all for himself. Anyone who wants some meat
just has to come and help them punish Hunter.”
“At least,” he added, “any normal. No freaks allowed.”
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Astrid stared at him. John showed no sign of really understanding what he had just said.
“Is Mary going to be okay?” John asked. “I mean, if we get
her to eat some deer m
eat? Will she be okay?”
“Ahhhhh!” Sam yelled as Drake struck again.
Again and again.
Sam on his knees now. Crying.
Crying like a baby. His shrieks of pain melding with the
harsh lunatic blare of the siren.
If only there was some way to record this, Drake thought.
If only he could tape this moment so he could watch it again
and again.
The great Sam Temple, bleeding and cringing and screaming out in pain as Drake brought his whip hand down again and again.
“Does it hurt, Sam?” Drake gloated. “It kind of hurt when
you burned my arm off. Do you think it hurts like that?”
Again. Slash!
And the reward of a terrible groan.
“They said I wet myself while they were cutting off the
stump,” Drake said. “Have you done that, yet, Sam? Have you
peed yourself, Sam?”
Sam was on his side now, arms over his face, covering
himself. The last blow hadn’t even brought a scream. Just a
shudder. Just a spasm.
“Time to mess up that face of yours,” Drake snarled, and
drew back to bring all his force to bear.
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Down came the whip hand.
There was a blur. Drake wasn’t even sure he had seen anything.
And then it was his own voice crying out in shock and
horror. It didn’t even hurt at first, didn’t hurt, just . . .
Eighteen inches of his tentacle arm lay quivering, jerking
spasmodically on the floor like a dying snake.
Blood sprayed from the severed end. He drew it back to
stare at the stump.
The wire had appeared from nowhere. Wrapped around
one of the catwalk ladders at one end. And at the other end,
Brianna, holding the wire tight.
“Hey, Drake,” Brianna said. “I heard about your idea for
cutting me up with wire. Clever.”
Drake’s mouth gaped open, but no sound came.
The suddenness of it left him dazed, unable to respond.
Frozen.
The severed end still jerked and writhed. Like it had a life
of its own.
“The remote!” Sam cried out.
Drake spread his fingers.
The remote fell.
“Breeze!” Sam shouted.
Drake spun away and ran.
Brianna’s body moved faster than humanly possible.
Her brain moved at normal speed. So it took her several
split seconds to see the remote falling, to realize that if Sam
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was yelling about it in his condition, it was very, very important.
Another split second to guess that the glowing blue was
not a swimming pool.
The remote fell.
Brianna dove.
Her hand gripped the remote just nine inches above the
surface of the water.
If she plunged into that water . . .
She tucked her feet, spun around in midair, and hit the rising control rods as hard as she could.
It wasn’t elegant. She cleared the lip of the pool and skidded across the floor.
But she had the remote. She stared at it.
Now what?
“Sam? Sam?”
Sam said nothing. She leapt to him, rolled him over, and
only then saw to her horror the mess that Drake had made
of him.
“Sam?” It came out as a sob.
“Red button,” Sam managed to gasp.
THIRTY-EIGHT
53 MINUTES
E D I L I O ’ S H A N D S W E R E gripping the wheel so tightly, his
fingers were white. Dekka noticed.
He was gritting his teeth and then forcing himself to
unclench in an unsuccessful effort to relax. Dekka noticed
that, too.
She didn’t say anything about it. Dekka was not a talkative girl. Dekka’s world was inside her, not locked up but kept private. Her hopes were her own. Her emotions were her
business, no one else’s. Her fears . . . Well, nothing good ever
came of showing fear.
The kids in Perdido Beach, like the kids at Coates before
that, tended to read Dekka’s self-contained attitude as hostile.
She wasn’t hostile. But at Coates, that dumping ground for
problem children, being just a little scary was a good thing.
At Coates, Dekka had belonged to no clique. She’d had no
friends. She didn’t make trouble, kept her grades up, followed
most of the rules, kept her nose out of other people’s business.
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But she noticed what went on around her. She had known
longer than most that some of the kids at Coates were
changing in ways that could not logically be possible. She
had known that Caine had gained some strange new power.
She’d seen Drake Merwin for the dangerously sick creature
he was. And Diana, of course, beautiful, seductive, knowing
Diana.
Dekka had felt the attraction of the girl. Diana had played
her, teased her, mocked her, and left Dekka feeling more vulnerable than she had in a long time. But Diana had told no one Dekka’s secret. In the environment of Coates, that fact
would have come back to Dekka very quickly.
Diana knew how to keep secrets. For her own purposes.
In those early days at Coates, Dekka had barely noticed
Brianna. That attraction had come later, after Caine and
Drake had made their move and imprisoned all the budding
freaks at Coates.
Dekka had been stuck beside Brianna, the two of them
weighed down by the cement blocks encasing their hands. Side
by side they’d eaten from a trough. Like animals. That’s when
Dekka had started to admire Brianna’s unbroken spirit.
You could knock Brianna down. But she didn’t stay down.
Dekka loved that.
Of course, nothing would ever come of it. Brianna was
probably totally straight. And with lousy taste in guys, in
Dekka’s opinion.
“Not far,” Edilio said. “The ghost town’s just ahead. Be
ready.”
“Ready for what?” Dekka grumbled. “No one’s explained
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any of this to me. All Sam said is, I’m supposed to crush some
cave.”
Edilio had his machine gun on his lap. He clicked the
safety to the off position. He had a pistol wedged under his
leg. He pulled this out, clicked the safety to off, and handed
it to Dekka.
“You’re starting to worry me just a little bit, Edilio.”
“Coyotes,” Edilio said. “And worse, maybe.”
“What’s the ‘worse’?”
They slowed as they drove down the main street of what
Dekka realized must have once been a town. All fallen down
now. Sticks and dust and faded smears of cracked, ancient
paint.
“Don’t you feel it?” Edilio asked.
And she did. Had for several minutes already, without
knowing what it was, what to call it.
“How close do you have to be to do your thing?” Edilio
asked.
When Dekka tried to answer, she found her mouth was
too dry, her throat too tight. She swallowed dust and tried
again. “Close.”
The Jeep r
eached the bottom of the trail. Edilio pulled the
car around so that it was facing away. He left the keys in the
ignition. “I don’t want to have to fumble for the keys,” he said.
“Hopefully the coyotes haven’t learned to steal cars.”
Dekka found she was strangely reluctant to get out of the
Jeep. She saw sympathy and understanding in Edilio’s eyes.
“Yeah,” he said.
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1
“I don’t even know what I’m scared of,” Dekka said.
“Whatever it is,” Edilio said, “let’s go kill it.”
They started up the trail. They soon came upon the fly-
covered corpse of a coyote.
“We got one at least,” Edilio said.
They stepped carefully past the dead animal. Edilio kept
his machine gun at the ready, sweeping the barrel slowly, side
to side. The pistol was heavy in Dekka’s hand. She searched
each rock, each crevice, waiting, tense, clenching muscles she
didn’t know she had.
Slowly they climbed.
And there, at last, the entrance to the mine.
“Can you do it from here?” Edilio whispered.
“No,” Dekka said. “Closer.”
Dragging feet through the dirt and gravel. Like they were
walking through molasses. Every molecule of air seemed to
drag at them. Slow-mo. Edilio’s finger flexing spasmodically
on the trigger. Dekka’s heart thudding.
Closer.
Close enough.
Dekka stopped. Edilio, with exquisite slowness, turned to
point his gun at the two coyotes that had appeared almost by
magic just above the mine shaft.
Dekka tucked her pistol into the back of her belt. She had
some vague, distant memory of someone telling her, “Better
if it goes off to shoot a hole in your butt than in your . . .”
A million years ago. A million miles away. Another planet.
Another life.
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Dekka raised her hands, spread them wide and . . .
Movement from within the cave.
Slow, steady. A hint of pale flesh in the shadow.
Lana moved like a sleepwalker. She came to a stop just
within the cave, under the overhang.
She looked right at Dekka.
“Don’t,” Lana said in a voice not her own.
When Sam came to some time later, Brianna was kneeling
beside him, a first-aid kit open on the floor. She was spraying
cold liquid bandage onto his worst whip marks.
“Drake,” Sam managed to gasp.
“I’ll take care of him later,” Brianna said. “You first.”
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