“In which case the boat doesn’t matter,” Caine said. “We survive here, on the island, or we die.” He cast a reptilian look at Bug. “Some of us sooner than others.”
“Which way do we go?” Penny wondered aloud. “Right or left?”
“Anyone have a coin we can flip?” Diana asked.
Caine stood up. He shaded his eyes and looked left. Then right. “The cliffs look lower to the right.”
“Can’t you just go all magic powers and levitate us up to the top of the cliff?” Paint asked and then giggled nervously, slobbering down his red-stained lips.
“I’ve been wondering just that,” Caine said thoughtfully. “It’s a long way up. I don’t know.” He looked down at the kids in the boat. Diana knew what was coming next. She wondered idly who would get the honor.
“Let’s go, Paint,” Caine said. “You’re about useless, might as well be you.”
“What?” Paint’s alarm was comical. Diana would have felt sorry for him another time. But this was life and death and right now.
And Caine was right: Paint didn’t exactly contribute anything vital. He had no powers. He was no good in a fight. He was a druggie moron who had long since fried whatever brain he’d had.
Caine raised his hands and Paint floated up from his seat. It was as if Caine was lifting him from the middle of his body because Paint’s feet dangled and kicked and his arms waved. His long, ratty brown hair drifted and swirled as if he was in a slow-moving tornado.
“No, no, no,” he moaned.
Paint floated out over the water.
“If you lowered him a little it would be like he was walking on water,” Penny said.
Paint moved closer to the cliff, still just a few feet above the water, now twenty or thirty feet away from the boat.
“You know, Penny,” Diana said, “it’s not all that funny. If it works we’ll all be going up the same way.”
Somehow that fact had not occurred to Penny. Diana felt a distant sort of satisfaction at the way sadistic pleasure turned to worry on the girl’s face.
“Okay, now for the altitude,” Caine said. Paint began to rise again, up the cliff face. It was almost bare, hard-packed soil dotted with extrusions of rock and a few scattered bushes that looked like they’d chosen a very precarious spot to grow.
Paint rose. Diana held her breath.
“No, no, no!” Paint’s voice floated back down, ignored. He was no longer kicking. Instead he was trying to twist around to face the cliff, arms straining outward, looking for something—anything—to grab.
Halfway up, the height of a five story building, Paint’s ascent slowed noticeably. Caine took a deep breath. He didn’t seem to be straining physically. His muscles were not taut; the power he had was not about muscles. But his expression was grim and Diana knew that in some unfathomable way he was exerting all his power.
Paint rose, but more slowly.
And then he slipped. Fell.
Paint screamed.
He came to rest just ten feet in the air.
“Let’s go get him,” Caine said. Tyrell lowered the outboard into the water and the boat moved toward the screaming, wailing boy.
Caine dropped him into the boat. He landed hard, fell onto his rear end and began sobbing.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Diana said.
Caine shook his head. “No. I guess it’s too far. I could throw him that far. I’ve thrown cars that far. But I can’t levitate him.”
No one suggested throwing Paint. Diana’s warning that whatever worked would be done to each of them in turn kept them quiet. Diana mentally measured the distance Paint had traveled. Maybe seventy, eighty feet in all. So. Now she knew how far Caine could reach. The day might come when it would be very good to know that.
THIRTY
10 HOURS, 28 MINUTES
SAM HAD NO idea what he was doing, or even why.
He had run in blind panic from Perdido Beach. That shameful fact filled his mind, driving out even hunger.
He had seen Drake and he had panicked.
Freaked.
Lost it.
After bumming a free meal off Hunter Sam had headed toward the power plant. The power plant was where it had happened.
The beating, the whipping, had been so bad that Brianna had found morphine in the medical supplies at the plant and jabbed the needle into him and even then, even after the painkiller flooded him, the pain was too awful to endure.
But he had endured. And he’d lived through the next nightmarish hours, the morphine hallucinations, the staggering, stumbling, needing-to-scream hours.
He had fought Drake again, but it was Caine who had finally killed the psychopath. Caine had thrown Drake down a mine shaft that then collapsed on Drake’s head. Nothing could have survived.
And yet, Drake was alive.
He’d coped since that day by knowing that Drake was dead, buried under tons of rock, dead, gone, never to be faced again. That fact had let him cope.
But if Drake was unkillable…
Immortal…
Would Drake always be a part of life in the FAYZ?
Sam sat on the edge of the cliff, just half a mile from the power plant. He had found a bike on the way there and ridden it until the tire blew out. Then he had walked down the winding coast road intending to return to the power plant, to that room where it had happened. The place where Drake had broken him.
That was the thing of it, Sam thought, as he looked out over the empty, sparkling sea: Drake had broken something inside him. Sam had tried to put it back together. He’d tried to go back to being Sam. The Sam everyone expected him to be.
Astrid had been a part of it. Love and all. It was so corny, but love had kept him from despair. Love and the cold comfort of knowing that Drake had died while Sam had survived.
Love and revenge. Nice combination.
And responsibility, he realized suddenly. That had helped in a strange way, knowing that kids needed him. Knowing that he was necessary.
Now Astrid was telling him he was not so necessary. And, by the way, not so loved. And the comfort of thoughts of Drake’s broken body lying under the ground? Gone.
Sam took off his shirt. The wound in his shoulder didn’t look like much. When he probed it with his finger he could feel something hard and round just below the skin.
He squeezed the wound with his fingers, wincing at the pain, squeezed some more and the dull lead ball came out along with a little blood.
He looked at the ball. A shotgun pellet. About the size of a BB. He tossed it away. A Band-Aid would have been nice, but he would have to content himself with washing the wound.
He started climbing down the cliff, needing something to do, and hoping he might find something to eat down in the tidal pools in the rocks.
It was a tough climb. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get back up once he was down. But physical movement seemed necessary to him.
I could jump in the water and swim, he told himself.
I could swim until I can’t swim anymore.
He wasn’t afraid of the ocean. You couldn’t be a surfer and be afraid of the ocean. He could start swimming, straight out. From here it was ten miles to the distant FAYZ wall. Couldn’t see it from here, couldn’t usually see it at all until you were up close to it. It had a gray, satiny, pseudo-reflective character that fooled the eye. As far as they knew, it was a complete sphere, a dome, though it looked like the sky, and at night it looked like stars.
He wondered if he could reach the wall. Probably not. He wasn’t in as good a shape as he’d been back in the old days.
He’d probably wear out after a mile. If he swam hard, maybe a mile, maybe a mile and a half. And then, if he let it, the ocean would take him down, swallow him up. Not the first person to be taken by the Pacific. There were human bones scattered across the ocean floor, from here to China.
He reached the rocks and bent over awkwardly to rinse the shotgun wound in salt water.
Then he beg
an poking around in the tidal pools. Darting little fish. Some mollusks too tiny to bother opening. But after half an hour he had collected a couple handfuls of mussels, three small crabs, and a seven-inch-long sea cucumber. He placed them all in a small tidal pool. Then he aimed one palm at the pool and blasted it with enough light to set the salt water boiling.
He sat on slick rocks and ate the seafood stew, gingerly picking pieces out of the hot broth. It was delicious. A little salty, which would be bad later unless he found fresh water, but delicious.
It improved his mood, eating. Sitting by the water. Being alone with himself. No one demanding anything of him. No terrible threat to rush off and handle. No nagging details.
Suddenly, to his own amazement, he laughed out loud.
How long had it been since he’d sat by himself, no one in his face?
“I’m on vacation,” he said to no one.
“Yes, I’ll be taking some time off. No, no, I won’t be answering my phone or even checking my BlackBerry. Also, I won’t be burning holes in anyone. Or getting the crap beaten out of me.”
An outcropping hid Perdido Beach from view, which was just fine. He could make out the nearest of the small islands and looking north he could see the spit of land that jutted out from the power plant.
“Nice place,” Sam said, looking around at his rocky perch. “If only I had a cooler of sodas I’d be set.”
His mind drifted to Perdido Beach. How were they doing in the aftermath of the fire? How were they dealing with Zil?
What was Astrid doing right now? Probably bossing everyone around with her usual confidence.
Picturing Astrid was not helpful. There were two pictures in his mind, vying for dominance. Astrid in her nightgown, the one that was modest and sensible until she happened to step in front of a light source and then…
Sam shook that off. Not helpful.
He pictured the other Astrid with the haughty, cold, contemptuous expression she wore in the council meetings.
He loved the first Astrid. The Astrid who occupied his daydreams and sometimes his night dreams.
He couldn’t stand the other Astrid.
Both Astrids frustrated him, although in very different ways.
It wasn’t like there weren’t other pretty girls in the FAYZ, ready to more or less throw themselves at Sam. Girls who maybe wouldn’t be quite so moral, or quite so superior in their attitude.
It seemed to Sam that, if anything, Astrid was getting more and more that way. She was becoming less the Astrid of his daydreams and more the Astrid who had to control everything.
Well, she was head of the council. And Sam had agreed that he couldn’t run things all by himself. And he’d never wanted to run anything to begin with. He had resisted, in fact. It had been Astrid who manipulated him into taking on the responsibility.
And then she had taken it away from him.
He wasn’t being fair. He knew that. He was being self-pitying. He knew that, too.
But the bottom line with Astrid was that the answer from her was always “No.” No to any number of things. But when things went wrong, suddenly it was his responsibility.
Well, no more.
He was done being played. If Astrid and Albert wanted to keep Sam in some little box, where they could take him out and use him whenever they wanted, and then not even let him do his job—they could forget it.
And if Astrid wanted to think of herself and Little Pete and Sam as being some kind of family, only Sam never got to, well…she could forget that, too.
You didn’t run away because of any of that, a cruel voice in his head said. You didn’t run away because Astrid won’t sleep with you. Or because she is bossy. You ran away from Drake.
“Whatever,” Sam said aloud.
And then, a thought occurred to Sam that rocked him. He’d become a big hero because of Astrid. And when he seemed to have lost her, he stopped being that guy.
Was that possible? Was it possible that arrogant, frustrating, manipulative Astrid was the reason he could play Sam the Hero?
He had shown some courage before, the actions that earned him the nickname School Bus Sam. But he had immediately walked away from that image, done his best to disappear back into anonymity. He’d been allergic to responsibility. When the FAYZ came he’d been just another kid. And even after the FAYZ came he’d done his best to avoid the role that others wanted to force on him.
But then there had been Astrid. He had done it for her. For her he’d been the hero.
“Yeah, well,” he said to the rocks and the surf, “In that case, I’m fine being regular old Sam.”
He felt comforted by that thought. For a while. Until the image of Whip Hand bubbled to the surface again.
“It’s just an excuse,” Sam admitted to the ocean. “Whatever’s going on with Astrid, you still have to do it.”
He still, no matter what, had to face Drake.
“I’m glad you saw that, too, Choo,” Sanjit whispered. “Because otherwise I’d be sure I was crazy.”
“It was that kid, that boy. He did it. Somehow,” Virtue said.
The two of them were in the rocks atop the cliff. There was scarcely an inch of the island they hadn’t explored both before the big disappearance and after. Much of the island had been denuded of trees dating back to a time when someone had raised sheep and goats on the island. But at the fringes there was still virgin forest of scrub oak, mahogany and cypress trees, and dozens of flowering bushes. The island foxes still hunted in these woods.
In other places palm trees swayed high above tumbled rocks. But there were no beaches on San Francisco De Sales Island. No convenient inlets. In the days of sheep ranching the shepherds had lowered the animals in wicker baskets. Sanjit had seen the tumbled remains of that apparatus, had considered trying to swing out over the water for the sheer fun of it, had decided it was crazy when he noticed that the support beams were eaten by ants and termites.
The island was almost impregnable, which was why his adopted parents had bought it. It was one place the paparazzi couldn’t reach. In the interior of the island was a short airstrip large enough to accommodate private jets. And at the compound was the helipad.
“They’re going east,” Sanjit commented.
“How did he do that?” Virtue asked.
Sanjit had noticed about Virtue that he was not quick to adapt to new and unexpected circumstances. Sanjit had grown up on the streets with con men, pickpockets, magicians and others who specialized in illusion. He didn’t think what he had just witnessed was an illusion, he believed it was real. But he was ready to accept that and move on.
“It’s impossible,” Virtue said.
The boat was definitely under way again, heading east, which was good. It was the long way around the island. It would take hours and hours for them to get to where the beached yacht lay.
“It’s not possible,” Virtue said again, and now it was starting to get on Sanjit’s nerves.
“Choo. Every single adult disappears in a heartbeat, there’s no TV or radio, no planes in the sky, no boats sailing by. Have you not figured out we’re not exactly in the land of possible? We have been picked up, kidnapped, and adopted all over again. Except this time it wasn’t to America. I don’t know where we are or what’s going on. But brother, we’ve been through this before, you know? New world, new rules.”
Virtue blinked once. Twice. He nodded. “Kind of, we have, huh? So, what do we do?”
“Whatever we have to do to survive,” Sanjit said.
And then the old familiar Virtue was back. “That’s a nice line, Wisdom. Like something out of a movie. Unfortunately it’s kind of meaningless.”
“Yes. Yes, it is,” Sanjit admitted with a grin. He slapped Virtue on the shoulder. “Coming up with something more meaningful is your thing.”
“Can you guys handle things for a few minutes?” Mary asked. John glanced at the three helpers, three kids who had either been scheduled or, in the case of one, was a homeless
fugitive who had come to the day care looking for shelter and been put to work.
During the night and morning the population of the day care more than doubled. Now the numbers were starting to decline a little as kids drifted off in ones or twos, looking for siblings or friends. Or homes that, from all that Mary had heard, might no longer exist.
Mary knew she probably should not let anyone leave. Not until they were sure it was safe.
“But when would that be?” she muttered. She blinked a couple of times, trying to focus. Her vision was weird. More than just sleepiness. A blur that turned edges to neon when she moved her head too fast.
She searched for and found her pill bottle. When she shook it, it made no sound. “No, no way.” She opened it and looked inside. She upended it. Still empty.
When had she finished it off? She couldn’t remember. The depression beast must have come for her and she must have fought it off with the last of the meds.
At some point. Before. Must have.
“Yeah,” she said aloud, voice slurred.
“What?” John asked, frowning like it was all he could do to pay attention.
“Nothing. Talking to myself. I have to go find Sam or Astrid or someone, whoever is in charge. We’re out of water. We need twice the usual amount of food. And I need someone to…you know…” She lost her train of thought, but John didn’t seem to notice.
“Use some of the emergency food to feed them until I get back,” Mary said. She walked away before John could ask how he was supposed to stretch four cans of mixed vegetables and a vacuum-pack of spicy dried peas to cover thirty or forty hungry kids.
Near the plaza things didn’t look much different than usual. They smelled different—smoke and the acrid stench of melted plastic. But the only evidence of the disaster at first was the pall of brown haze that hovered above the town. That and a pile of debris peeking out from behind the McDonald’s.
Mary stopped at town hall, thinking maybe she would find the council hard at work making decisions, organizing, planning. John had gone on a tour with them earlier, but if he was back they should be, too.