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 watching 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.”
“So it’s a mutant?” Sam asked, anxious to reach some kind of conclusion and then bury the carcass and do his best to forget about it and get back to the twin thought streams of “solution” and “sex.”
Astrid didn’t answer. Her silent staring went on and on. At last she said, “Every mutant so far has been survivable. You shoot light out of your hands and never get burned. Brianna runs at a hundred miles an hour but her knees don’t break. The mutations haven’t harmed anyone yet. In fact, the mutations have been survival tools, really. Like the goal was to build a stronger, more capable human being. No. No, this is something different.”
“Okay. What?”
She shrugged, pulled off her gloves, and tossed them onto the open wound. “This is bits of human—probably the missing girl—and coyote. Mix and match. Like someone just randomly took parts from one and swapped them for parts from the other.”
“Why would—” Sam began.
But Astrid was still talking, to herself more than to him. “Like someone tossed two different DNAs into a hat and drew out this and that and tried to fit them together. It’s … it’s stupid, really.”
“Stupid?”
“Yeah. Stupid.” She looked at him as if she was surprised to be talking to him now. “I mean, it’s something that makes no sense. It serves no purpose. It’s obvious it wouldn’t work. Only an idiot would think you could just randomly plug pieces of human into a coyote.”
“Wait a minute. You’re acting like this is someone doing it. A person. How do you know it isn’t just something natural?” He thought about that for a moment, sighed, and added, “Or at least what passes for natural in the FAYZ.”
Astrid shrugged. “What’s happened so far? Coyotes evolved limited powers of speech. Worms developed teeth and became aggressive and territorial. Snakes grew wings and developed a new form of metamorphosis. Some of us developed powers. So far there’s been a lot of strange, but not a lot of stupid. This, though, this”—she aimed her finger at the carcass of the monstrosity—“is just stupid.”
“The gaiaphage?” Sam asked, feeling in his gut it was the wrong answer.
Astrid held his gaze for a moment but her brain was somewhere else. “Not stupid,” she said.
“You j
ust said it was—”
“I was wrong. It’s not about stupid. It’s ignorant. Clueless.”
“Is there—” He wasn’t surprised when she interrupted him as if he hadn’t even been talking.
“Unbelievable power,” Astrid said. “And absolute ignorance.”
“What does that mean?” Sam asked.
Astrid wasn’t listening. She was slowly turning her head, eyes aimed all the way to the right, as if she thought someone was sneaking up on her.
It was so compelling that Sam followed the direction of her gaze. Nothing. But he recognized the movement: how many times in the last months had he done the same himself? A sort of paranoid, sidelong glance at something that wasn’t there?
Astrid shook her head slowly. “I’m… I have to go. I’m not feeling well.”
He watched her walk away. It was irritating, to put it mildly. Infuriating.
In the old days he’d have called her out on it, demanded to know what she was thinking.
But he sensed that what he had with Astrid was fragile. She was back, but not all the way back. He didn’t want to start a battle with her. There was a war coming, no time for battles with someone he loved.
But her abrupt departure had the effect of leaving him with only one thread to follow, one thing to think about: the solution.
The solution that did not exist.
Penny lived alone in a small house on the eastern edge of town. From her upstairs bedroom window she could see just a narrow slice of the ocean and she liked that.
She wanted to move into Clifftop. But Caine had denied that request. Clifftop was Lana’s to do with as she pleased. Even when Lana had moved to the lake—temporarily, as it turned out—Clifftop had remained a no-go zone.
“No one messes with Lana,” Caine had decreed.
Lana, Lana, Lana. Everyone just loved Lana.
Penny had spent some time with her when Lana fixed her shattered legs. It had taken a long time, in fact, because there were so many breaks in the bones. Penny found Lana stuck-up. It was certainly a relief to have her legs fixed, and it was very nice not to have that pain, but that didn’t mean Lana had a right to act all high-and-mighty and above it all.
And have an entire massive hotel all to herself. Deciding who could come or go.
It bothered Penny that Lana had that kind of respect. Because Penny knew she could leave Lana crawling and crying and tearing her eyes out like Cigar had done.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Five minutes alone with Little Miss Healer. See how she liked it. See how high-and-mighty she was then.
The only problem was that Caine would kill Penny. Caine felt nothing for Penny. She had hoped after Diana took off… But no, there was no disguising Caine’s look of contempt whenever he saw Penny.
Even now, even with all Penny’s power, Caine was still the big man, the popular guy, the good-looking guy who would spit on someone like Penny, with her scraggly hair and awkward, bony arms and flat-as-a-board chest. Even now life was all about who was hot and who was not.
But Caine wasn’t the only boy around.
There was a soft knock at the back door. Penny opened it for Turk.
“Were you careful?” she asked.
“I went way out of the way. Then I jumped a couple of fences.” He was breathing hard and sweating. She believed him.
“All that just to see me?” Penny asked.
He didn’t answer. He flopped down in one of the easy chairs, sending up a cloud of dust. He leaned his gun against the side of the chair. Then he pulled off his boots, making himself comfortable.
Suddenly a scorpion crawled onto his arm. He yelled, swatted at it frantically, jumped out of his chair.
Then he saw the smile on her face.
“Hey, don’t do that to me!” Turk cried.
“Then don’t ignore me,” she said. She hated the pleading sound in her own voice.
“I wasn’t ignoring you.” He sat back down, carefully inspecting for scorpions—as if it had been real.
Turk wasn’t the smartest guy, Penny acknowledged with a sigh. He was no Caine. Or Sam. Or even Quinn. Maybe they could ignore Penny, and not even treat her like a girl, and curl their lips in disgust at her, but not Turk. Turk was just a dumb punk.
Penny felt a surge of fury so strong she had to turn away to hide it. Overlooked, ignored, forgotten Penny.
She was the middle of three girls in her family. Her older sister was named Dahlia. Her younger sister was named Rose. Two pretty flower names. And a plain old Penny in between.
Dahlia was a beauty. As early as Penny could remember their father had loved Dahlia. He had dressed Dahlia up in all kinds of outfits … feathers, silky underwear … and taken hundreds of pictures of her. Right up until Dahlia started to develop.
And then, when their father lost interest in Dahlia, Penny had naturally assumed she would be the one, the beloved, the admired one. She assumed she would be the one posing, bending this way and that, showing and concealing, making little coy faces or scared faces, depending on what her father needed.
But her father had barely noticed Penny. Instead he’d moved past her to pretty little Rose.
And soon it was Rose starring in the pictures her father uploaded to the internet.
It was a few years before Penny came to understand that what her father did was against the law.
Then she had waited until her father was at work and she had taken his laptop with her to school and shown the pictures to some of the kids. A teacher had seen and called the police.
Her father had been arrested. Penny’s mother started drinking more than ever before. And all three girls had been sent to live with Uncle Steve and Aunt Connie.
Surprise, surprise, poor little victimized Dahlia and Rose—poor, pretty little Dahlia and Rose—had gotten all the sympathy and all the attention.
Their father hanged himself in his jail cell after other inmates had beaten him.
Penny had put Drano in Rose’s cereal, just to see how pretty she would be with her throat burned out. And then Penny was shipped off to Coates.
In two years at Coates she had not heard from her sisters. Or her aunt and uncle. Her mother had written her once, an incoherent, self-pitying Christmas card.
Penny was as ignored at Coates as she had always been. Until she began to develop her power. It came late to her. After the first big battle in Perdido Beach, when Caine had walked off into the wilderness with Pack Leader.
When he returned at last, ranting and seemingly insane, Penny kept her secret to herself. She knew better than to show Drake. Drake was ruthless: he would have killed her. Caine was softer, smarter than Drake. When at last Caine came back to something like sanity, Penny started to show him what she could do.
And still she was ignored in favor of Drake and, worst of all, that witch Diana. Diana, who never loved Caine, who always criticized him, had even betrayed him and fought with him.
In that terrible moment standing at the edge of the cliff on San Francisco de Sales Island, when Caine could save only one of them, Diana or Penny, he had made his choice.
Penny had endured pain like nothing she could have ever imagined. But it cleared her mind. It strengthened her. It obliterated what faint echoes of pity were still left in her.
Penny was no longer ignored.
She was hated.
Feared.
No longer ignored.
“You have anything to drink?” Turk asked.
“You mean water?”
“Don’t be stupid; you know I don’t mean water.” Water was no longer in short supply. The eerie cloudburst Little Pete had created still rained down. There was a stream running right down the street, all the gutters carefully blocked so that the stream ran all the way down and out through a gap in the wall to form a pool in the sand of the beach.
Penny fetched a bottle from her kitchen. It was half-full of whatever vile liquid Howard brewed. It smelled like a dead animal, but Turk took a long, long drink.
; “Want to make out?” Turk asked.
She slinked toward him, unconsciously mimicking the things she’d seen Dahlia and Rose do.
Turk made a face. “Not like that. Not like you.”
Penny felt it like slap in the face.
“Like you were the other time. You know, in my head. Make it like the other time.”
“Oh, like that,” she said flatly. Penny had the power to send horrifying visions. But she also had the power to create beautiful illusions. They were one and the same. It was one of the ways she had driven Cigar over the edge. She’d found a picture of his mother and made him see her…
Now, for Turk, she made a vision of Diana.
And a while later she spoke, using the vision of Diana still to say, “Turk, the time has come.”
“Mmm?”
“Caine humiliated me,” Penny said with Diana’s voice.
“What?”
“He’s the only one who can stop me,” Penny said. “He’s the only one who can humiliate me like that.”
Turk was dumb but not that dumb. He pushed her away.
She became herself again.
“One of these days he’ll kill you, Turk,” Penny said. “Remember what he did to your friend Lance?” She drew a long arc in the air and punctuated it with a “Splat!”
Turk looked nervously around. “Yeah, I remember; that’s why I am totally loyal to the king. He’s the king and I don’t mess with him.”
Penny smiled. “No, you just fantasize about his girlfriend.”
Turk’s eyes widened. He swallowed anxiously. “Yeah, well, what about you?”
Penny shrugged.
“Anyway, she’s not even his girlfriend anymore,” Turk said.
She stayed silent, waiting, knowing he was so very weak, so very fearful.
“What are you even talking about, Penny?” Turk cried. “You’re crazy.”
Penny laughed. “We’re all crazy, Turk. The only difference is I know I’m crazy. I know all about me. You know why? Because sitting there with my legs broken and wanting to scream every single minute, eating the scraps Diana brought me, that kind of clears out your mind and you start seeing things the way they are.”