Not for the first time he wished it was still Sam he had to report to, not the other two. In fact, if there was anyone he really wished he could tell, it was Astrid. Too bad no one had seen her. She might well be dead. But Astrid was the only one who would look at this and actually try to figure out what it meant.
“Okay, let’s get back to work,” Quinn said. “We’ll keep an eye on it, see if it changes by the end of the day.”
FOUR
50 HOURS
FOR ALL OF his five years Pete Ellison had lived inside a twisted, distorted brain. No longer.
He had destroyed his dying, diseased, fever-racked body.
Poof.
All gone.
And now he was … where? He didn’t have a word for it. He had been freed from the brain that had made colors scream and turned every sound into a hammering cymbal.
He drifted now in a silent, blissful place. No loud noises. No too-bright colors. No brain-frying complexity of overwrought sensation. No blond sister with her bright yellow hair and stabbing blue eyes.
But the Darkness was still there.
Still looking for him.
Still whispering to him. Come to me. Come to me.
Without the cacophony of his brain Pete could see the Darkness more clearly. It was a glowing blob at the bottom of a ball.
Pete’s ball.
That realization surprised him. But yes, now he remembered: such noise, people screaming, his own father in panic, all of it like hot lava poured into Pete’s skull.
He had not understood what was happening, but he could see clearly the cause of all the panic. A green tendril had reached for and touched long glowing rods, caressed them with a greedy, hungry touch. And then that arm of the Darkness had reached for minds—weak, malleable minds—and demanded to be fed the energy that flowed from those rods.
It would have meant a release of every sort of light, and everyone except the Darkness would have been burned up.
Meltdown. That was the word for it. And it had already begun and it was too late to stop it by the time Pete’s father was rushing around and Pete was moaning and rocking.
Too late to stop the reaction and the meltdown. By normal means.
So Pete had made the ball.
Had he known what he was doing? No. He looked back at it now with a feeling of wonder. It had been an impulse, a panic reaction.
He had never meant a lot of things to happen that did happen.
He was like that guy Astrid used to have in the stories she read to him. The one called God. The one who said, “Poof, make everything!”
Pete’s world was full of pain and disease and sadness. But hadn’t the old world been that way, too?
He no longer had his handheld game. He no longer had his body. He no longer had his old, miswired brain. He no longer balanced atop the sheet of glass.
Pete missed his old game. It had been all he had.
He floated in a sort of haze, a world of vapors and disconnected images and dreams. It was quiet, and Pete liked quiet. And in this place no one ever came to tell him it was time to do this or do that or go here or hurry there.
No sister’s loud yellow hair and stabbing blue eyes.
But as time passed—and he was sure it must be passing, somewhere if not here—he could picture his sister without feeling the mere image overwhelming.
It surprised Pete. He could look back at that day in the power plant and almost look on the confusion and screeching sirens and panic without feeling panic himself. It still all seemed like too much, way too much, but no longer so much that he would lose all self-control.
Was it that memories were quieter? Or that something had changed in him?
It had to be that second thing, because Pete’s mind no longer felt the same. For one thing he felt as if he could think about himself for the first time in his jangled life. He could wonder where he was and even who he was.
The one thing he knew was that he was bored with this disconnected existence. For most of his life the only peace and pleasure he had found had been within his handheld game. But he had no game to play here.
He had wished for a game.
He had gone looking for a game, but there was nothing like his old handheld. Just avatars that seemed to drift by. Avatars, symbols with curlicues inside. They formed into groups or clusters. Or sometimes they went off alone.
He sensed there might be a game, but with no controls, how could the game be played? Many times he had watched the shapes, and sometimes it almost seemed they were looking at him.
He peered closer at the avatars. They were interesting. Little geometric shapes but with so much twisted and coiled inside them so that he had the impression that he could fall into any one of those avatars and see a whole world within.
He wondered if it was one of those games you just … touched. It felt wrong and dangerous. But Pete was bored.
So he touched one of the avatars.
His name was Terrel Jones, but no one called him anything but Jonesie. He was just seven, but he was a big seven.
He was a picker working an artichoke field. It was hard, hard work. Jonesie spent six hours a day walking down the rows of chest-high artichoke plants with a knife in his gloved right hand and a backpack on his back.
The larger artichokes were higher up on the plant. Smaller ones lower down. The up-chokes—picker slang for the higher ones—had to be a minimum of five inches across. The ankle-chokes—the lower ones—had to be at least three inches. This was to make sure the pickers didn’t wipe out the whole crop at once.
No one was exactly sure if this rule made sense, but Jonesie didn’t see any reason to argue. He just moved along the row cutting with practiced ease and tossing the chokes over his shoulder to drop into the backpack. Up one row and down the next was all it would take to fill his pack. Then he would sling it off and dump it into the old wagon—a big, ramshackle wooden thing that rested on four bald car tires.
And that was all Jonesie had to worry about. Except that right now he was finding it more and more tiring. He felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath.
He reached the end of the row carrying no more than the usual weight of chokes, but staggered to the wagon. Jamilla, the wagon tender, had that relatively soft job because she was only eight years old and small. All she had to do was pick up the stray chokes that might fall to the ground, and carefully rake the chokes in the wagon into an even layer, and check in each backpack load on a sheet of paper for Albert so that the daily harvest could be accounted for.
“Jonesie!” Jamilla cried angrily when he failed to heft his bag high enough and it slipped from his hands, spilling chokes everywhere.
Jonesie started to say something but his voice was gone. Just not there.
He tried to suck in breath to cry out, but air did not flow through his mouth and into his lungs. Instead he felt a sudden, searing pain, like a cut, like a knife was drawn across his throat from ear to ear.
“Jonesie!” Jamilla screamed as Jonesie fell to the ground, facedown.
His mouth gulped helplessly at the air. He tried to touch his throat but his arms didn’t move.
Jamilla had jumped down from the wagon. Jonesie could see a misty, distant, distorted image of her above him. A face, mouth wide, all the way open, screaming silently.
And behind her a shape. It was transparent but not invisible. A huge hand with one finger extended. That finger reached through his body. He couldn’t feel it.
And then he couldn’t feel anything.
Jamilla’s scream brought Eduardo and Turbo from the adjacent fields. They came at a run from different directions, but Jamilla hardly noticed them at first. She stared and screamed and screamed....”
And then she spun away and started running. Turbo caught her in his arms. He had to lift her up off the ground to get her to stop running.
“What is it? Is it zekes?”
Zekes were the carnivorous worms that inhabited many of the fields and had to be bribed with payments of blue
bats and junk fish.
Jamilla went still. Turbo was there, and now so was Eduardo. They were her friends, her coworkers.
Jamilla steeled herself to try to explain what had just happened. But before she could gain control of her raw voice, Eduardo said, “What is that?”
Jamilla felt Turbo crane to see past her. He set her down. She no longer felt like running. Or screaming. Turbo left her and walked the ten steps to join Eduardo.
“What is that thing?” Turbo asked. “Is that what scared you, Jammy?”
“Looks like some kind of weird fish or something.”
“Big. And weird,” Turbo repeated. “I worked a couple of days filling in with Quinn and I never saw anything like that.”
“Like a fish with, like, armor. But what’s it doing here in the middle of a choke field?”
Jamilla did not dare to come any closer. But her voice was her own again.
“It’s Jonesie,” she said.
The two boys turned slowly to look at her. “Say what?”
“He was… Something touched him. And his whole body…” She made a writhing movement with her hands. Twisting the fingers together as somehow the pieces of Jonesie had been twisted together, turned inside out, and formed this … thing.
They stared at her. Probably glad to have any excuse not to stare at the thing she was calling Jonesie.
“Something touched him? What touched him?”
“God,” Jamilla said. “God’s hand.”
Turk brought Cigar in with his hands tied behind his back.
“Untie him,” Penny said.
Cigar was nervous. Penny smiled at him. He seemed to relax a little.
“I don’t think I’ll have any problems with Cigar,” Penny said to Turk. “He’s basically a good kid.”
Cigar swallowed hard and nodded.
Plywood had been nailed up over the windows. The room was bare. Before leaving town Sam had left a small Sammy sun burning in one corner. It provided the only light and added a lugubrious quality, casting dark green shadows in the corners. It was dawn but you’d never know it in this room. Not even high noon would penetrate here.
“I’m really sorry,” Cigar said. “About what happened, I mean. You’re right, actually; I mean, I’m not bad.”
“No, of course you’re not bad,” Penny said. “Just a murderer.”
Cigar’s face went pale. His left hand started shaking. He didn’t know why. Why just his left hand? He fought the urge to grab it and hold it still. He stuck it in his pocket and tried not to breathe too loud.
“What do you like, Cigar?” Penny asked.
“What do I like?”
Penny shrugged. She was moving around him, her bare feet silent. “What kind of stuff do you miss? From the old days, I mean. From before.”
Cigar shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t stupid. He could sense there was a cat-and-mouse game being played. He knew Penny’s reputation. He’d heard about her. And the way she would walk almost past him, then back up to send him a searching, penetrating look made him queasy.
He decided on an innocuous answer. “Candy.”
“Like candy bars?”
“Like Skittles. Or Red Vines. Anything, I guess.”
Penny smiled. “Look in your pocket.”
Cigar felt in the front pocket of his jeans. He felt a packet of something that hadn’t been there before. He pulled it out and stared in amazement at a fresh pack of Skittles.
“Go on. Have some,” Penny said.
“They’re not real. Are they?”
Penny shrugged. She twined her hands behind her back. “Try them. You tell me.”
He tore the package open with trembling fingers. He spilled a half dozen of the bright pellets on the floor before catching the next few. He popped them in his mouth.
Cigar had never tasted anything half so wonderful. “Where… Where did you get these?”
Penny stopped. She leaned in close to him and jabbed suddenly at his head with her finger. It hurt, but just a little. “In there. From inside your head.”
Cigar looked doubtfully at the Skittles still in the pack. His mouth watered. Sugar was almost a forgotten memory. But he was pretty sure the candies had never been this good. These were crazy good. He could eat a million of these, and maybe they weren’t real, but they felt real in his hand and tasted better than real in his mouth.
“Good, huh?” Penny asked. She was still way too close.
“Yeah. Really good.”
“People think because things aren’t real that the pleasure wouldn’t be as great. I used to think that, too. But things that are in your head can be pure, you know? Realer than real.”
Cigar realized he’d finished the whole pack. He wanted more. He had never wanted anything half as much as he wanted more Skittles.
“Can I have more?” he asked.
“Maybe if you asked me nicely.”
“Please? Please can I have more?”
She put her lips close to his ear and whispered, “On your knees.”
He barely hesitated. The longer he went without more of the candy the more he wanted it. The need was incredibly urgent. It took his breath away, he needed the candy so badly.
Cigar dropped to his knees. “Can I have more?”
“You’re easy to train.” Penny smirked.
Suddenly there was a handful of Skittles in Cigar’s palm. He tossed them into his mouth. “Please, more?”
“How about some Red Vines?”
“Yeah, yeah!”
“Lick my foot. No, not the top, you idiot.”
She held her foot up so he could lick the dirty sole and Red Vines sprouted in his hand. He rolled onto his back and gobbled them up and licked her foot again and got more, and his head was swimming, swirling, the taste of candy overwhelming, like nothing, like nothing he’d ever had, like nothing could ever have been, but so good. He needed more, desperately.
The Red Vines were in his hand and somehow hard to get. Like they had melted into his skin and he had to dig at them with his fingernails, and he did and sucked on the ends as soon as he had freed them.
And then, with a sickening lurch, the Red Vines weren’t candies anymore. They were the veins in his wrists.
“Ahhhh, ahha, ahhh!” Cigar cried in horror.
Penny clapped her hands together. “Oh, ho-ho, Cigar, we are going to have a lot of fun together.”
FIVE
44 HOURS, 12 MINUTES
ASTRID PACKED ALL her perishable food into her backpack. It wasn’t much, but she might be gone for a while, and she couldn’t tolerate the idea of letting anything go to waste.
She checked her shotgun. She had four shells loaded and five more in her pack.
Nine shotgun shells would kill just about anything.
Except Drake.
Drake scared her deep down. He had been the first person in her life to hit her. To this day she could remember the sting and force of his slap. She could remember the certainty that he would quickly escalate to closed-fist punches. That he would beat her and that the beating would give him pleasure so that nothing she could ever say would stop him.
He had forced her to insult Little Pete. To betray him.
It hadn’t bothered Petey, of course. But it had eaten at her insides. It seemed almost quaint now when she recalled that guilt. She’d had no way of knowing then that she would someday do far, far worse.
Fear of that psychopath was part of the reason she had needed to manipulate Sam. She had needed Sam’s protection for herself and even more for Little Pete. Drake wasn’t Caine. Caine was a heartless, ruthless sociopath who would do anything to increase his power. But Caine didn’t revel in pain and violence and fear. However amoral, Caine was rational.
To Caine’s eyes Astrid was just another pawn on the chessboard. To Drake she was a victim waiting to be destroyed for the sheer pleasure it would bring him.
Astrid knew she couldn’t kill Drake with the shotgun. She could blow his head off his shoulder
s and still not kill him.
But that image brought her some sense of reassurance.
She slung the gun over her shoulder. The gun’s weight and length, along with the pack that was loaded down with water bottles, made her a bit slower and more awkward than when she was running free down the familiar trail.
Astrid had never measured the distance from her camp to Lake Tramonto, but she guessed it was six or seven miles. And if she was going to follow the barrier so as to avoid getting lost, it would mean traveling over rough terrain, up steep hills without trails. She’d have to keep up a pretty good pace to get there before night and see Sam.
Sam.
The name made her stomach tense. He would have questions. He would make accusations. He would be angry. He would resent her. She could deal with all of that. She was strong.
But what if he wasn’t mad or sullen? What if he smiled at her? What if he put his arms around her?
What if Sam told Astrid he still loved her?
She was far less prepared to deal with that.
She had changed. The sanctimonious girl with so many certainties in her head had died with Little Pete. She had done the unforgivable. And she had seen the person she truly was: selfish, manipulative, ruthless.
She was not a person Sam could love. She was not a person who could love him back.
Probably it was a mistake going to him now. But whatever her failures and foolishness, she still had her brain. She was still, in some attenuated way, Astrid the Genius.
“Yeah. Right. Genius,” she muttered. That was why she was living in the woods with fleabites in her armpits, smelling of smoke and carrion, hands a mass of calluses and scars, eyes darting warily to identify every sound in the woods around her, tense, practicing the smooth unlimbering of a shotgun. Because that was definitely the life of a genius.
The trail led closer to the barrier now. She knew this trail well; it would disappear through the barrier. There would be some rough terrain for half a mile before another trail would appear. Or maybe it was the same trail doubling back; who could tell.
Here, suddenly, she noticed that the dark part of the barrier had crept higher. Two tall spikes of black on the barrier, like fingers reaching up out of the earth. The taller of the two stretched up for maybe fifteen or twenty feet.