“What does Caine want?” Astrid asked.
Jack could not believe Astrid hadn’t withered in the face of Diana’s confidence. Most people did. Most people couldn’t stand up to her. If they did, they were sorry.
Jack thought he saw a flicker of appreciation spark Diana’s dark eyes.
“What does Caine want? He wants what he wants. And he’ll get it,” Diana said. “Now, run off to the funeral over there. Stay out of my way. And take care of your little brother. Jack?”
The sound of his own name snapped Jack out of his trance. “Yes.”
“Come.”
Jack fell into step behind Diana, ashamed of his instant, doglike obedience.
They marched up the steps of the town hall. Caine, to the surprise of no one who knew him, had taken over the mayor’s office. He was behind a massive mahogany desk, rocking slowly from side to side in a too-big maroon leather chair.
“Where did you go?” Caine asked.
“I went to get Jack.”
Caine’s eyes flickered. “And where was Computer Jack?”
Diana said, “Nowhere. He was just wandering, lost.”
She was covering for him, Jack realized with a shock.
“I ran into that girl,” Diana said. “The blond with the strange brother.”
“Yes?”
“They call her Astrid the Genius. I think she’s involved with that kid, the fire kid.”
“His name is Sam,” Caine reminded her.
“I think Astrid’s someone we need to keep an eye on.”
“Did you read her?” Caine asked.
“I got a partial read, so I’m not sure.”
Caine spread his hands in exasperation. “Why am I begging for information here? Just tell me.”
“She’s on about two bars.”
“Any idea what her powers may be? Lighter? Speeder? Chameleon? Not another Dekka, I hope. She was difficult. And hopefully not a Reader like you, Diana.”
Diana shook her head. “No idea. I’m not even sure she’s two bars.”
Caine nodded. Then he sighed as if the weight of the world were on his shoulders. “Put her on the list, Jack. Astrid the Genius: two bars. With a question mark.”
Jack pulled out his PDA. It no longer got internet, of course, but its other functions still worked. He punched in the security code and opened the file.
The list opened. There were twenty-eight names on it, all Coates kids. In the column after each name was a number: one, two, or three. Only one name had a four after it: Caine Soren.
Jack focused on thumbing in the information.
Astrid. Two bars. Question mark.
He tried not to think about what it meant for the pretty blond girl.
“That went better than I hoped,” Caine said to Diana. “I predicted there’d be some local bully we’d have to deal with. And I said there would be a natural leader. We get the bully working for us, and we keep an eye on the leader until we’re ready to deal with him.”
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Diana said. “He’s cute.”
“Did you get a reading on him?”
Jack had seen Diana take Sam’s hand. So he was amazed when Diana said, “No. I didn’t have a chance.”
Jack frowned, uncertain if he should remind Diana. But that was stupid. Of course Diana would know if she’d read Sam or not.
“Do it as soon as you can,” Caine said. “You saw the way everyone looked at him? And when I asked for nominations, his was the first name mentioned. I don’t like it, his being Nurse Temple’s son. That’s a bad coincidence. Get a read on him. If he has the power, we may not be able to wait to deal with him.”
Lana was healed.
But she was weak. Hungry. Thirsty.
The thirst was the worst thing. She wasn’t sure she could stand it.
But she had been through hell and survived. And that gave her some reason for hope.
The sun was up but not yet touching her with its rays. The gulch was in the shade. Lana knew that her best chance was to make it back to the ranch before the ground grew as hot as a pie fresh from the oven.
“Don’t start thinking about food,” she rasped. She was heartened to discover that she still had a voice.
She tried to climb straight back up to the road, but two skinned knees and two abraded palms later she admitted that wasn’t happening. Even Patrick couldn’t make the climb. It was just too steep.
That left following the ravine until, hopefully, it came out somewhere. It wasn’t an easy walk. In most places the ground was hard, but in other places it shifted and slid and landed her on hands and knees.
Each time she fell, it was harder to get back up. Patrick was panting hard, plodding rather than bounding, just as tired and footsore as she was.
“We’re in this together, right, boy?” she said.
Brush tore at her legs, rocks bruised her feet. In places there were thickets of thornbush that had to be bypassed. In one place the thorns couldn’t be avoided, and she had to work her way through with time-wasting caution, accumulating scratches that burned like fire on her bare legs.
But once through she laid her hand on the scratches, and the pain ebbed. After ten minutes or so, there was no sign of the scratches.
It was miraculous. Lana was convinced of that. She knew she didn’t personally have the power to heal dogs or people. She’d never done it before. But how the miracle came about, she did not know. Her mind was on more pressing issues: how to scale this sudden rise, or skirt that bramble patch, or where, where, where in this parched landscape she could find water and food.
She wished she’d paid a lot more attention to the lay of the land while driving to and from the ranch. Did this gulch head for the ranch, or did it veer past? Was she almost there? Was she now wandering blindly toward the true desert? Was anyone looking for her?
The walls of the ravine weren’t as tall anymore, but they were just as steep, and closer. The gulch was narrowing. That had to be good news. If it was narrowing and becoming shallower, didn’t that mean she must be nearing the end?
She had her eyes down on the ground, watching out for snakes, when Patrick stopped stock-still.
“What is it, boy?” But she saw what it was. There was a wall across the gulch. The wall rose impossibly tall, far higher than the gulch itself, a barrier made of…of nothing she had ever seen before.
Its sheer size, combined with its utter strangeness in this place, struck fear into her. But it didn’t seem to be doing anything. It was just a wall. It was translucent, like watery milk. It shimmered just slightly, as if it might be a video effect. It was absurd. Impossible. A wall where no wall had any business being.
She edged closer, but Patrick refused to come along.
“We have to go see what it is, boy,” she urged.
Patrick disagreed. He had no interest in seeing what it was.
Up close she could make out a faint reflection of herself.
“Probably a good thing I can’t see myself any better,” she muttered. Her hair was stiff with dried blood. She knew she was filthy. She could see that her clothing was ripped, and not in an artistic, trendy way, just ripped to ribbons in places.
Lana covered the last few feet to the barrier and touched it with one finger.
“Ahh!”
She yelped and pulled her finger away. Before the crash she would have described the pain as searing. Now she had higher standards for what counted as real pain. But she wouldn’t be touching the wall again.
“Some kind of electric fence?” she asked Patrick. “What is it doing here?”
There was no choice now but to try to scale the side of the gulch. The problem was that Lana was pretty sure the ranch lay to her left, and that side was impossible to climb. She would have needed a rope and pitons.
She figured she could make it up the right side, pushing from tumbled boulder to crumbling ledge. But then, unless she was totally turned around, she’d be placing the gulch between herself and the
ranch.
The remaining alternative was to head back the way she came. It had taken half the day to get this far. The day would be over before she made it back to her starting point. She would die back where she started.
“Come on, Patrick. Let’s get out of here.”
It took what felt like an hour to climb the right-hand slope. All the while under the silent, baleful stare of the wall that Lana had come to think of as a living thing, a vast malevolent force determined to stop her.
When she finally reached the top, she blinked and shaded her eyes and scanned left to right, all the way. That’s when she almost fell apart. There was no sign of the road. No sign of the ranch. Just a sheer ridge and no more than a mile of flat land before she would have to start climbing.
And that impossible wall. That impossible, could-not-be-there wall.
One way blocked by the gulch, the other by the mountains, the third by the wall that lay across the landscape like it had been dropped out of the sky.
The only open path was back the way she had come, back along the narrow strip of flat land that followed the gulch.
She shielded her eyes and blinked in the sunlight.
“Wait,” she said to Patrick. “There’s something there.”
Nestled up against the barrier, not far from the foot of the mountains. Was it really a patch of green, shimmering in the rising heat waves? It had to be a mirage.
“What do you think, Patrick?”
Patrick was indifferent. The spirit had gone from the dog. He was in no better shape than she was herself.
“I guess a mirage is all we have,” Lana said.
They set off together. At least it was easier than the climb up out of the gulch. But the sun was like a hammer now, beating down on Lana’s unprotected head. She could feel her body giving up even as her spirit was tortured by doubt. She was chasing a mirage with the last of her strength. She would die chasing a stupid mirage.
But the green patch did not disappear. It grew slowly larger as they closed the distance. Lana’s consciousness was a flickering candle now. In and out. Alert for a few seconds, then lost in a formless dream.
Lana staggered, feet dragging, half blind from the relentless glare of the sun, when she realized that her foot had stepped from dust onto grass.
Her toes registered the sponginess of the grass.
It was a minuscule lawn, twelve feet by twelve feet. In the center was a back-and-forth sprinkler. It was not turned on. But a hose led from the sprinkler. The hose led around a small, windowless wooden cabin.
It wasn’t much of a cabin, no bigger than a single room. Behind the cabin was a half-tumbled wooden shack. And a windmill of sorts, really just an airplane propeller placed atop a ramshackle tower twenty feet tall.
Lana staggered along the hose, following it to its source. It came from a once-painted, now sandblasted steel tank elevated on a platform of railroad ties beneath the makeshift windmill. A rusty pipe jutted up from the ground beneath the windmill. There were valves and connecting pipes. The hose came to an end at a faucet welded into the end of the tank.
“It’s a well, Patrick.”
Lana fumbled frantically with weak fingers at the hose connection.
It came off.
She twisted the knob and it turned. Water, hot and smelling of minerals and rust, came gushing.
Lana drank. Patrick drank.
She let the water flow over her face. Let it wash the blood from her face. Let it soften her crusted hair.
But she had not come this far to let her salvation drain away for a momentary pleasure. She twisted the knob shut again. The last drop quivered on the brass lip, and she took it on her fingertip and used it to clean the crust from her bloodied eye.
Then, for the first time in forever, she laughed. “We’re not dead yet, are we, Patrick?” Lana said. “Not yet.”
SIXTEEN
171 HOURS, 12 MINUTES
“YOU HAVE TO boil the water first. Then you put in the pasta,” Quinn said.
“How do you know that?” Sam was frowning, turning a blue box of rotini around trying to find instructions.
“Because I’ve seen my mom do it, like, a million times. The water has to start boiling first.”
Sam and Quinn stared at the big pot of water on the stove.
“A watched pot never boils,” Edilio said.
Sam and Quinn both looked away. Edilio laughed. “It’s just a saying. It’s not actually true.”
“I knew that,” Sam said. Then he laughed. “Okay, I didn’t know it.”
“Maybe you can just zap it up with your magic hands,” Quinn suggested.
Sam ignored him. He found Quinn’s teasing on that front annoying.
The firehouse was a two-story cinder-block cube. Down below was the garage that housed the fire engine and the ambulance.
The second floor was the living area, a large room that encompassed a kitchen, an oblong dining table, and a mismatched pair of couches. A door led to a separate, narrow room lined with bunk beds, space for six people.
The main room was almost but not quite cheerful. There were photos of firefighters, some in stiff formal poses, some goofing with their buddies. There were letters of thanks from various people, including illustrated letters from the first-grade class visit that all began with “Dear Firefighter,” although the spelling was sometimes mysterious.
There was a large round table that had displayed the remains of an abruptly abandoned poker game—fallen hands of cards, chips, cigars in ashtrays—when the three of them first arrived but had since been cleaned off.
And there was a surprisingly well-stocked pantry: jars of tomato sauce, cans of soup, boxes of pasta. There was a red lacquered can of homemade cookies, now pretty stale but not inedible if you microwaved them for fifteen seconds.
Sam had accepted the assignment as fire chief. Not because he wanted to, but because so many other people seemed to want him to. He hoped no one would call on him to actually do anything, because after three days in the firehouse the three of them still barely knew how to start the fire engine, let alone drive it anywhere or do anything with it.
The one time a kid had come rushing up yelling “Fire,” Sam, Quinn, and Edilio had half carried, half dragged a hose and a hydrant wrench six blocks only to discover that the kid’s brother had microwaved a can. The smoke was just from a burned-out microwave oven.
But, on the plus side, they knew where to find all the emergency supplies in the ambulance. And they had practiced with the big hose and the hydrant outside so they could be quicker and more efficient than Edilio had been at the first fire.
And they had totally mastered the fireman’s pole.
“We’re out of bread,” Edilio said.
“Don’t need bread if you have pasta,” Sam said. “They’re both carbs.”
“Who’s talking about nutrition? You’re supposed to have bread with a meal.”
“I thought your people ate tortillas,” Quinn said.
“Tortillas are bread.”
“Well, we have no bread,” Sam said. “Not of any kind.”
“In another week or so, no one will have any bread,” Quinn pointed out. “Bread has to be made fresh, you know. It gets moldy after a while.”
Three days had passed since Caine and his posse had swept into town and basically taken over.
Three days with no one arriving to rescue them. Three days of deepening depression. Three days of growing acceptance that, for now, at least, this was life.
And the FAYZ itself—everyone called it that now—was five days old. Five days with no adults. Five days without mothers, fathers, big brothers and sisters, teachers, police officers, store clerks, pediatricians, clergy, dentists. Five days without television, internet, or phones.
Caine had been welcomed at first. People wanted to know that someone was in charge. People wanted there to be answers. People wanted rules. Caine was very good at establishing his authority. Each time Sam had dealt with him, he
came away impressed at the way Caine could act with complete confidence, as if he had been born to the job.
But already, in just three days, doubts had grown, too. The doubts centered on Caine and Diana, but more still on Drake Merwin. Some kids argued you needed someone a little scary around to make sure rules were obeyed. Other kids agreed with that, but pointed out that Drake was more than a little scary.
Kids who defied Drake or any of his so-called sheriffs had been slapped, punched, pushed, knocked down or, in one case, dragged into a bathroom and given a swirlie. Fear of Drake was replacing fear of the unknown.
“I can make tortillas fresh,” Edilio said. “I just need flour, a little shortening, salt, baking powder. We have all that here.”
“Save it for taco night,” Quinn said. He took the pasta from Sam and dumped it into the pot.
Edilio frowned. “You hear something?”
Sam and Quinn froze. The loudest sound was the boiling water.
Then they all heard it. A voice, wailing.
Sam took three steps to the fireman’s pole, wrapped his legs and arms around it, and dropped through the hole in the floor to land in the garishly lit garage below.
The garage was open to the evening air. Someone—a girl, judging by the long reddish hair—was slumped on the threshold, looking like she might be trying to crawl, moving but not really going anywhere.
Three figures advanced up the driveway from the street.
“Help me,” the girl pleaded softly.
Sam knelt beside her. He recoiled in shock. “Bette?”
The left side of Bouncing Bette’s face was covered in blood. There was a gash above her temple. She was panting, gasping, like she had collapsed after a marathon and was trying with her last ounce of energy to crawl across the finish line.
“Bette, what happened?”
“They’re trying to get me,” Bette cried, and clutched at Sam’s arm.
The three dark figures advanced to the edge of the circle of light. One was clearly Orc. No one else was that big. Edilio and Quinn moved into the garage doorway.