She tossed a pebble finally and did not hear it clatter on stone. “Ah. I believe we have the long drop.” She edged forward until, sure enough, she could sense a gap in the floor.
She crept to the edge of it on hands and knees. She positioned herself in a way to see straight downward. “Eyes open, don’t flinch,” she told herself.
She aimed the shotgun down into the hole and pulled the trigger.
Shotguns were never exactly quiet. But in the confines of the mine shaft it was like a bomb going off.
The muzzle flash stabbed thirty feet down, painting an indelible image of stone walls, a ledge perhaps twenty feet straight down.
The echo of the blast went on for some time. It sounded a bit like when a jet broke the sound barrier. Most likely Drake would hear, unless this shaft went down even farther than she imagined.
Brianna smiled. “That’s right, Drakey boy: I’m still coming.”
Two explosions. Two stabs of light.
No way to know how far away they were. The sound said a long way. The light seemed nearer. Impossible to tell.
It could be anyone. Brianna. Astrid. Or just any number of armed kids who might be lost in the darkness.
“Definitely a gun,” Sam said to no one. How weird that gunfire was almost reassuring.
He did not believe it had come from the same direction as the mine shaft. It was to the right. More like in a line to where he thought Perdido Beach might be. Which was not his objective. He wasn’t on a mission to find and rescue Astrid, if that was her. He was on a mission to—
“Too bad,” he snapped, again talking defiantly to no one.
If it was Astrid, and if she was in a fight, then having whoever she was fighting—maybe even Drake—see a line of Sammy suns approaching would give everything away. If it was Astrid—and he’d already convinced himself it was—he needed to move fast. He wouldn’t just have to walk tentatively into the dark, lighting his path back to home with a row of lights. He would have to run straight into darkness.
Sam fixed in his mind’s eye the direction the flashes had come from. He began to trot, lifting each step high to avoid tripping. He made it surprisingly far before something hard caught his foot and he slammed facedown into the dirt.
“That’s one,” he said. Stood up, and started running again.
It was insanity, of course. Running blind. Running with his eyes closed. Running with absolutely no idea where his foot would land, running when maybe there was a wall or a branch or a wild animal just right there. Right there an inch from his nose.
That was his choice: to inch his way cautiously, try to avoid falling, but never get anywhere. Or to run, and maybe get somewhere, but maybe just run right off a cliff.
Yeah, that’s life, he thought, and as the wry smile formed he plowed into a bush that tripped him, tangled him, and threatened not to let him escape.
Finally he rolled free, stood up, and started running again, picking thorns out of his palms and arms as he went.
All his life Sam had feared the darkness. As a kid he’d lain in his bed at night, tensed against the assault of the unseen but well-imagined threat. But now in this ultimate darkness, it seemed to him that fear of the dark was fear of himself. Not a fear of what might be “out there,” but a fear of how he would react to what was out there. He had spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours in his life imagining how he would cope with whatever terrible thing his imagination had conjured up. It used to shame him, that incessant hero fantasy, that endless mental war-gaming for threats that never materialized. An endless series of scenarios in which Sam did not panic. Sam did not run away. Sam did not cry.
Because that, more than any monster, was what Sam had feared: that he was weak and cowardly. He had a terrible fear of being afraid.
And the only solution was to refuse to be afraid.
Easier said than done when the darkness was absolute, and nothing was foreseen, and there really were genuine, actual, terrible monsters lying in wait.
No night-light now. No Sammy sun. Just darkness so total it negated the very idea of sight.
Having thought about his fear did not lessen it. But continuing to run straight ahead did.
“So just don’t cry,” Sam said.
“I miss Howard,” Orc said. Dekka wasn’t exactly talkative. In fact, she’d barely said a word. Normally Orc didn’t talk all that much, either, but it wasn’t like there was anything to see. Or anything else to do.
Orc was walking in front with Dekka just behind him, following the sounds of his steps. The nice thing about being the way he was, Orc reflected, was that it was pretty hard for anything to trip him.
Most things he just plowed right through. And if it was a bush or a bumpy place or whatever he could warn Dekka.
In some ways it was a pleasant stroll. Nothing to see, hah, hah. But it wasn’t too hot or too cold. The only real problem was that they didn’t know where they were going.
“Sorry about Howard,” Dekka said, too late. “I know you were friends.”
“No one liked Howard.”
Dekka didn’t choose to disagree.
“Everyone just saw him as this guy who sold drugs and booze and all. But he was different sometimes.” Orc crushed a tin can under one foot and with his next step flattened the earth over what felt like a gopher hole.
“He liked me anyway,” Orc said.
Nothing from Dekka.
“You have lots of friends, so you probably don’t understand why Howard—”
“I don’t have a lot of friends,” Dekka interrupted. Her voice was still shaky. Whatever had happened to her back there, it must have been pretty bad. Because as far as Orc was concerned Dekka was a hard, hard girl. Howard always said that about her. Sometimes he would call Dekka names. Probably because Dekka had this way of looking at Howard, like her face would be down, but her eyes would be on him, like they were watching him through her own eyebrows, kind of. And from that direction all you saw were these cornrows and her broad forehead and those hard eyes.
“Sam,” Orc said.
“Yeah.” Dekka’s voice softened. “Sam.”
“Edilio.”
“We work together. We’re not really friends. How about you and Sinder? She likes you okay.”
The idea surprised Orc. “She’s nice to me,” he admitted. He thought it over a little more. “She’s pretty, too.”
“I wasn’t saying she liked you that way.”
“Oh. No. I knew that,” Orc said, feeling as if he’d be blushing if he had more than a few inches of skin left. “That’s not what I was talking about. No.” He forced a laugh. “That kind of stuff, that’s not for me. Not a lot of girls are interested in someone like me.” He didn’t want it to sound like he was feeling sorry for himself, but it probably did.
“Yeah, well, it turns out there aren’t a lot of girls interested in me, either,” Dekka said.
“You mean boys.”
“No. I mean girls.”
Orc missed a step, he was so shocked. “You’re one of those lesbos?”
“I’m a lesbian. And I’m not one of those anything in this place; it looks like I’m the only one of those.”
This was making Orc feel very uncomfortable. Lesbo was just a name to call some ugly girl back when he’d been at school. He hadn’t really thought much about it. And now he had to think about it.
Then a thought occurred to him. “Hey, so you’re like me.”
“What?”
“An only. Like me. I’m the only one like me,” Orc said.
He heard a derisive snort from Dekka. It was an annoyed sound, not a happy laugh. But it was the best she’d come up with so far.
“Yeah,” Orc went on. “You and me, we’re onlies is what we are. The only person made out of rocks and the only lesbo.”
“Lesbian,” Dekka corrected. But she didn’t sound that mad.
Something smacked Orc’s head and poked at his eyes. “Careful. There’s a tree. Grab my waist and I’ll go
around it.”
Lana was right. It wasn’t long before trouble started. Quinn stopped a kid who had taken a burning stick from the fire and was heading toward his home.
“I just want to get my stuff.”
“No fire outside the plaza,” Quinn said. “Sorry, man, but we don’t want another Zil thing with the whole town going up in flames.”
“Then give me a flashlight.”
“We don’t have any to—”
“Then mind your own business. You’re just a stupid fisherman.”
Quinn had grabbed the torch. The kid tried to rip it away, but he, unlike Quinn, had not spent months with his hands gripping an oar.
Quinn wrested the torch away easily. “You can go where you want. But not with fire.”
He’d escorted the kid back to the plaza just in time to see two torches heading away on the far side of the plaza.
Quinn cursed and sent some of his people after them. But the fishing crews were exhausted. They’d been chopping wood and dragging it and sawing it and distributing food and organizing a slit trench.
Lana had been right. She was looking at him now, not saying it, but knowing he was coming to the same conclusion.
“Caine,” Quinn said. “Do you have it back?”
Caine had disappeared for a while. Later Quinn realized he’d walked down to the ocean and washed himself up. His clothing was wet but more or less clean. His hair was slicked back, and the scars of the staples Penny had driven into his head had been healed by Lana.
His hands—the backs, at least—were still covered in anywhere from an eighth of an inch to half an inch of cement. He had a hard time articulating his fingers. But his palms were mostly clean.
He looked gray, even by firelight. He looked like a much older person, like he had gone straight from handsome teenager to weary, beaten old man.
But when he stood he held himself with some dignity.
Caine turned toward the steps. The church had been emptied of anything that would burn. The last of the roof had come down with a sequence of crashes that sent dust billowing out to spark the bonfire. Now the tired crews were tearing handrails and old wooden office chairs, framed pictures and broken-up desks out of the town hall building.
Caine focused on the largest fragment, most of a desk. He extended his hand, palm out.
The desk rose from the ground.
It sailed through the air over upturned faces. Caine set it gently atop the burning pile.
Quinn braced himself for an announcement by Caine that he was back. That he was in charge. That he was still king. And the sad reality was that Quinn would have welcomed it: being in charge of all this was more than he wanted to handle.
“Let me know what else I can do,” Caine said quietly. Then he sat down, cross-legged, and stared into the fire.
Lana sauntered over. “Have to admit: the guy has a genius for doing the wrong thing. We actually need him to be the bad guy, and suddenly he’s Mr. Meek and Mild.”
Quinn was too tired to think of some clever retort. His shoulders sagged. He let his head drop down. “I wish I knew how long we had to keep it together.”
“Until we can’t,” Lana said.
The panic started then. There was no cause that Quinn could see. Suddenly kids on the far side of the fire were shouting and some were squealing. Maybe nothing more than a rat passing through.
But those beside them didn’t know what it was and the panic spread lightning-quick.
Lana cursed and started running. Quinn was right behind her. But the panic came to meet them, kids suddenly screaming without knowing why, running, circling back to the fire, getting spooked and running again, knocking one another over, yelling.
Sanjit’s sister, Peace, knocked into Quinn. He grabbed her shoulders and yelled, “What is it?”
She had no answer, just shook her head and pulled away.
A kid ran into the darkness. His clothing was on fire; the flames streamed behind him as he fled screaming. Dahra Baidoo tackled him like a football player and rolled him over to kill the flames.
Other kids grabbed torches and formed into knots and paranoid clusters, back-to-back like ancient warriors surrounded by foes.
And then to Quinn’s utter horror a girl ran straight into the fire. She was screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!”
He leaped to cut her off, but he was too late. The heat drove him back as he cried, “No! No! No!”
Then, as if grabbed by a divine hand, the girl came flying back out of the fire. She was rolled across the ground. It was rough but effective. The fire that had just caught onto her shorts went out.
Quinn turned, grateful, to Caine. But Caine did not look at him. Quinn heard Lana shouting at kids, telling them to stop acting like idiots, to calm down.
Some listened. Others did not. More than one lit torch went off into the darkness. Quinn wondered how long it would be before he started seeing fires throughout this poor, beaten town.
Lana came storming back, furious, practically spitting with rage. “No one even knows what it was. Some idiot yelled something and off they went. Like cattle. I hate people.”
“Do we go after the ones that got away?” Quinn wondered aloud.
But Lana wasn’t ready for a calm discussion. “I really, sometimes, really just hate them all.”
She threw herself down on the steps. Quinn noticed a slight smile on Caine’s lips. Caine favored him with a curious look. “Question for you, Quinn: how long would you have stayed on strike?”
“What?”
“Well, seemed to me like you were ready to have all these people go hungry over Cigar.”
Quinn rested his fists on his sides. “How long would you have defended Penny?”
Caine made a small laugh. “Being in charge. It’s not easy, is it?”
“I haven’t tortured anyone, Caine. I haven’t turned anyone over to some psycho girl who’ll drive them insane.”
Caine sagged a little at that. He looked away. “Yeah, well… You pretty much had me beat, Quinn. Albert was already thinking about how he’d get rid of me, not whether.”
“Albert had his escape plans ready.”
Caine’s eyes glinted in the firelight. “We’ll see. I liked that island. Never should have left. Diana told me not to. There are other boats. Just maybe I’ll pay old Albert a visit one of these days.”
“You should do that,” Quinn said. He was remembering the sight of those tiny eyes like beans in the blackened sockets of Cigar’s head. Let Caine go after the island. It might be good to see whether those missiles Albert claimed to have would work.
But Caine seemed already to have lost interest in Quinn’s anger. “More likely we’re all dead soon,” he said.
“Yeah,” Quinn agreed.
“I would have liked to see Diana again. No baby now.”
“Are you relieved?” Lana asked harshly.
Caine thought it over for so long it seemed he’d forgotten the question. Then at last, “No. Just kind of sad.”
THIRTY-THREE
5 HOURS, 12 MINUTES
WAS THAT LIGHT?
Astrid opened her eyes wide. Stared.
Yes. An orange glow. A fire.
A fire!
“Cigar, I think I see town. I think I see a fire.”
“I see it, too. Like devils dancing!”
They walked forward eagerly. Astrid registered the fact that the ground beneath her boots was no longer flat and hard and occasionally interrupted by some unnamed weed, but had become bumpier, dry clods of dirt that tripped her as they rose and formed rows and from those rows rose neatly ordered plants.
What she noticed was the light.
And then Cigar’s screams.
But Cigar screamed a lot, so Astrid kept walking and ignored his mad shrieks that something was in his feet.
Then it all came together and Astrid knew. She felt something pushing at the leather of her boot.
“Zekes!” she cried, and stumbled back, fell down, jumped u
p like the ground was electrified, crawled, stood, ran back, back until the ground was hard and flat again.
She fumbled in the dark, fingers searching for and then finding the whipping worm, its head already through the leather and touching her flesh, and she got her hands around it even though it fought, and she pulled at it with all her strength and it came free and whipped around, quick as a cobra, and sank its nasty, tooth-ringed mouth into her arm, but she had the tail and yelled, “No! No!” and then it was away from her.
She had thrown it. Somewhere.
Cigar cried pitiably.
And then, so much more terrible, laughed and laughed in the dark.
Astrid with shaking hands grabbed the shotgun and fired it once.
She saw the edge of the field.
She saw Cigar frozen in a twisting fall.
He was in the field.
She heard the greedy mouths burrowing into him. A sound like hungry dogs eating.
“Petey! Petey! Help him!”
Cigar said, “Oh,” in a small, disappointed voice.
And the only sound in the darkness was the relentless feeding of the worms.
She sat there listening, no choice but to hear. Tears flowed. She sat with her knees together, head in twisting hands, crying.
How much time passed until the worm sounds were finished she couldn’t know. The stink … that remained.
She was alone now. Completely and absolutely alone in a darkness that seemed almost like a living thing, as if she had been swallowed whole and was now in the belly of some indifferent beast.
“All right, Petey,” Astrid said at last. “No choice, huh, brother? The crazy behind door number one or the crazy behind door number two. Show me what you have to show me, Peter.”
She saw him. Not him, not like there was light, but something, like the darkness had warped around itself. A suggestion of a shape. A little boy.
“Are you there?” she asked.
Something cold, like someone had slid an icicle through her scalp and through her skull and pushed it deep inside her brain. No pain. Just a terrible cold.
“Petey?” she whispered.
Peter Ellison did not move. He stayed very, very still. His hand touched her on the head, but only just, just barely, and he stayed very still.
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