Delay of pain: that was the meaning of life, wasn’t it?
“I’ve made some bad decisions,” Caine said, not really meaning to say it out loud.
Had Diana been there she’d have said something like Duh but cooler and funnier and meaner, and he’d have been annoyed but he’d have tried to kiss her and eventually she would have let him, and was it really possible that her lips had been that soft?
Virtue said, “Well, you’re ruthless and narcissistic and totally devoid of morals.”
Caine shot a look at Virtue, wondering if there was any way all of that amounted to a compliment. Probably not. From Diana it would have been a perfect blend of snark and admiration, but Virtue seemed to have decided at some point to take his name seriously. The kid had no sense of humor that Caine could detect. He was a straight arrow. It was baffling.
“If I’m so ruthless, how come I don’t walk down to the barrier and start slamming kids into the ground until they obey me?”
Virtue shrugged. “Because your birth mother or your adoptive parents might be out there watching?”
Caine bit at his thumbnail, a nervous habit when he was feeling thwarted.
“Also TV cameras,” Virtue went on.
“Sam fried Penny’s body in front of his—our—mother,” Caine said, just to argue.
Virtue said nothing.
“What?” Caine demanded.
“Well . . . Sam is stronger than you are,” Virtue said.
Caine considered throwing Virtue into the wreckage of the church. It would be satisfying. But if he did that, it would upset Virtue’s brother Sanjit, and Sanjit and Lana were close, and the last thing Caine needed was trouble with Lana, the Healer. She had saved his life, and despite the fact that he was mostly incapable of gratitude, it wasn’t wise to pick a fight with the closest thing they had to a doctor.
“We have visitors,” Virtue said. Caine heard it, too: a car’s engine. With gas as rare as food it was very unusual to hear an engine running.
A white van drove slowly—as slowly as only an inexperienced and frightened driver could go—down San Pablo Avenue. It came to a stop at a distance, and Caine found himself hoping it was trouble. Trouble he could handle. A fight would be a wonderful relief from the tedium.
Out stepped Edilio, and a second later, Sam.
So. Maybe it was a fight. Hah!
But Edilio was walking ahead with Sam hanging back and looking unusually reticent, even a bit abashed. Then Toto, the weird kid with the Spider-Man fixation, climbed out.
“We’re not here for trouble,” Edilio said, holding up his hand and crushing Caine’s hopes.
“True,” Toto affirmed.
Caine sighed. “Well, that’s just great. Okay. Choo, go grab a couple of chairs.”
“Caine,” Sam said, and nodded.
“Sam. What do you want here? Is the surf up?”
Sam nodded to Edilio. “This is his party.”
When the chairs came, they sat down around the large but rather forlorn desk. There was no chair for Toto. Caine didn’t care.
“I’d offer you milk and cookies, but we seem to be out,” Caine said. He put his feet up on the desk just to remind them who was boss here.
“It’s true. He has no milk. Or cookies.” Toto.
Edilio got right to it. “We can’t have this. We need to get food production back up. We need to think through how to deal with the lookers. We need rules and organization.”
“Yeah, brilliant,” Caine said. “I wish I’d thought of that. Choo, make a note: need people to get back to work. That’s genius. That’s what you came to say? Are you asking me to go down there and start smacking kids around?”
Edilio pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “No. In fact, I don’t think you can help, Caine. No one trusts you. No one will follow you.”
“That’s the truth,” Toto said. Then, in response to Caine’s withering glare, he added, “Spidey.”
“Oh, I see,” Caine said. “No one trusts me, but they will follow Saint Sammy here. Well, not to be impolite but—”
Caine’s hand came up fast, and the telekinetic punch hit Sam right in the chest. Sam went flying. In fact he flew straight backward through the air. Ten feet. At least—maybe even a dozen feet. And when he hit, he landed on his butt, and the momentum carried him into a backward roll.
Caine laughed delightedly. This was so much better than just sitting around and—
Sam was up faster than Caine expected, and he managed to leap aside and dodge Caine’s next blow. Sam’s hands were up, palms out. Not ten feet away. And the real problem was that Caine was still seated.
It’s not easy to move quickly when you’re sitting and your feet are up on a desk.
“I’d actually rather not have to kill you,” Sam said. “But if your hand so much as twitches . . .”
Caine let his hands hang in the air, carefully aimed just a bit off target.
He looked at Sam’s face. His brother’s eyes were focused narrowly on his own. Smart boy. Sam had gained experience since the old days when they were an even match. An inexperienced fighter watches the opponent’s hands; a smart fighter watches the other guy’s face.
Caine had to carefully control his eyes, not shift, not look toward—
Sam’s right hand was still aimed directly on Caine’s body. But from his left came the air-sizzling green light. It burned in a flash through the leg of Caine’s chair.
The chair tipped; Caine slipped, landed on his side, rolled fast, and as Sam rushed him pulled one of his newer tricks: he blasted the concrete directly below himself, throwing his own body back with the recoil.
It worked! Sam rushed past, grabbing air. Unfortunately, Caine’s new tactic was not a precision technique. It knocked the wind from him, and he banged the back of his head hard on a stair and saw stars.
“Ow.”
Caine tried to roll to his feet, but something was jabbing him in the crotch. He shook off the stars and saw Edilio standing over him. Edilio had the business end of his automatic rifle in a very sensitive place.
“If you move, Caine, I will shoot your balls off,” Edilio said. “Toto?”
“He will,” Toto said. “Although he’s not sure it will be just your balls.”
Caine glared up at Edilio, murder in his eyes. “You’d get off one round—maybe—and then I’d knock your head right off your shoulders.”
“He believes he could knock your head right off—” Toto began.
“No doubt,” Edilio said. “I guess you have to decide whether one more killing will compensate for your . . . loss.”
“What’s the matter, Sam? You can’t fight your own battles? You have to have your boy here cover for you?” Caine said.
Sam started to respond, then seemed to think better of it and remained silent. He even took a step back.
Edilio said, “Toto. I’m going to say some things to King Caine. You evaluate.”
“I will, Spidey.”
“One: I’m my own man,” Edilio said.
“He believes it.”
“Two: I am sick to death of this tired-ass sibling nonsense between you two.”
“He believes it is tired-ass,” Toto said.
“Three: the gaiaphage and Drake—your daughter and your former partner—”
“Partner? He was my henchman,” Caine said. “Partner would be an equal. Drake was never my equal.”
“Three,” Edilio repeated, “the gaiaphage and Drake are out there, and I don’t think they’re just camping.”
This made Toto hesitate. Then: “He does not believe they are camping.”
“And now, I have a question for you, Caine: Do you believe you can take on Gaia alone? Yes or no?”
Caine’s gaze slid toward Toto. Caine hated the very idea of a truth teller. Control was impossible without some dishonesty. But then his thoughts turned inward. He imagined fighting the gaiaphage alone. He could picture it all too clearly. Fear gnawed at the edges of his mind, and memories of
terrible pain, weakness . . . despair.
“Yes or no?” Edilio pressed.
“You know the answer,” Caine muttered.
Edilio pulled the gun barrel away. He extended a hand to help Caine up, but Caine just gave him a hard stare and climbed to his feet. He looked at his now three-legged chair. “That was a nice, comfortable chair.”
He dusted himself off. The admission—even unspoken—that he couldn’t take Gaia on alone left him feeling depressed. From the very start he’d been paranoid that a power greater than himself might emerge. In the beginning there had been only the two “four bar” mutants: him and Sam. Gradually they’d come to realize that Little Pete was somewhere off the scale, but that hadn’t worried Caine too much, because Little Pete was just Little Pete, however godlike his powers.
Now here was Gaia, the physical embodiment of the gaiaphage, and Caine knew too much about that creature to believe it could be beaten by one guy with the power of telekinesis.
“So I’m supposed to stand aside and let Sam just walk in and take over,” Caine said. “That’s not—”
“Not me,” Sam interrupted. “Him.”
Caine looked in disbelief at Edilio. “What? The machine-gun wetback here?”
Sam stiffened at that, but Edilio with a small gesture waved it off. So Sam said, “There are exactly five people who are trusted by just about everyone. I’m one, but I kind of suck at running things—”
“True,” Toto said, and this time caught a hard look from Sam.
“Lana is trusted,” Sam went on, “but . . . well, she’s Lana, and she has a job. And Dekka is trusted, but also . . . well, she’d be the first to say she doesn’t want to run anything. The fourth person is Quinn.”
“I tried to get Quinn to do something more than fish,” Caine protested.
“I know,” Sam said. “The other person everyone trusts is Edilio.”
Caine barked out an incredulous laugh. “Are you seriously here to tell me you want Edilio to take over running Perdido Beach?”
“He’s already running the lake.”
“That’s . . .,” Toto began, hesitated, and said, “mostly true.”
“Yeah, well, I’m still king here,” Caine said. It sounded ridiculous, even to him. He pointed a finger at Toto. “No: don’t say it.”
Edilio said, “I can work well with Quinn. I get along well with Lana. I get along with Astrid and Dekka, who’ll stay at the lake. Sam trusts me. And the fact is, even you trust me, Caine.”
“I do?”
“Yes,” Edilio said.
“He believes it,” Toto muttered.
“You’re still Sam’s boy, Edilio.”
“Sam won’t be here, or at the lake. He’s going after your daughter.”
Caine chose not to argue that label, though it filled him with extreme and conflicting emotions. “Sam is going after Gaia and Drake alone? Hah. If I can’t do it alone, neither can he.”
“He believes this.”
“Not alone,” Edilio said.
It took Caine a few beats to get it. “No. Go kill yourself. Eat your own gun. No. No no no.”
“You’re happy here counting fish and nagging kids to work?” Edilio asked.
“He’s not,” Virtue said, beating Toto to the punch and earning an annoyed glance from Caine. “He’s only done it for two days since the battle, and he’s already bored.”
“Here’s the proposal,” Edilio said. He had shouldered his assault rifle. “I come to Perdido Beach, work with Quinn and Sanjit and of course Virtue. And maybe bring Computer Jack down, too. Lana, well, she’ll do whatever she wants to do, as usual.”
“Wait, I thought Jack was dead.”
“No. Lana got to him in time,” Sam said. “But he’s shook up, that’s for sure. He could use a change and something to keep his mind occupied.”
Caine shook his head no, but it wasn’t as firm as it might have been.
Sam leaned forward, elbows on knees, and said, “Caine, you’re not a king any more than I’m a mayor.”
“No, then what am I?” Caine demanded, hating the pleading tone in his voice.
“You’re a bully and a sociopath. You’re a thug and a killer. You’re also smart and powerful and you don’t scare easy.”
“True,” Toto affirmed.
“And you love Diana,” Virtue said.
“What? Shut up, Choo.”
All eyes turned to Toto, who nodded and said, “He does.”
“Probably the only person you ever did care for,” Edilio said. “And surely the only person who loves you. And you’re going to leave her out there? With Drake and that monster child of yours?”
Caine saw something then on Sam’s face. An emotion he was anxious to conceal. Guilt? Sam suddenly had the need to rub his face. Caine’s instinct was pinging, warning him of . . . well, he didn’t quite know what. And Sam kept his mouth shut, which meant Toto was no help.
Caine swallowed hard and looked helplessly at Edilio.
Edilio nodded, accepting Caine’s surrender.
“You know what?” Caine said. “You want Perdido Beach? It’s all yours, my friend: it’s all yours.”
And thus ends my brief reign, Caine thought mordantly.
He had to fight down the urge to grin. He drew a deep, satisfying breath. His eyes met Sam’s. Sam had a knowing smile, seeing and understanding, as no one else could, Caine’s relief at giving up power.
“This is only because I’m bored,” Caine said. “I’m not running off to rescue Diana. Or do the right thing or any of that.”
“That is not—” Toto began, but Virtue reached over and put a hand over the truth teller’s mouth.
Well, at least Diana would be grateful, Caine thought. And then smiled. Nah. She wouldn’t be.
SIX
73 HOURS, 3 MINUTES
THEY HAD SOON discovered that Gaia needed to eat. So did Diana, but Drake didn’t care about Diana: Diana could starve for all he cared. Diana could die a slow, painful death, hopefully caused by him, by Drake.
Gaia was a very different matter. Gaia could make him feel terrible pain, deep-down-inside pain. Drake’s body, his unkillable body that somehow shared space with Brittney’s, didn’t normally feel much. Only the most intense pain broke through.
What Gaia did to him when she was displeased—that broke through.
Anyway, it wasn’t like Drake could disobey Gaia. She might now look like a little girl, but Drake knew who and what she really was. Who else was he going to serve? He and Caine had parted ways. Caine had become weak. Drake had nowhere else to go if he wasn’t with Caine. And in the gaiaphage he had found someone much tougher, more demanding. More powerful. Someone who would never be weak.
His sharp eyes detected movement on a rock. A lizard. He unwrapped his reddish, ten-foot-long tentacle arm from around his waist. He took careful aim, snapped the bullwhip arm, and sent the lizard flying.
He scooped up the dead thing and dropped it into the canvas bag slung from his belt. He’d so far nailed maybe a half pound of lizards—about all there was to be found out here in the desert emptiness. Should he carry it back to Gaia? Was it enough? Or would she punish him for bringing too little?
On the one hand, even here, a mile away from her, Drake could feel her hunger. Her hunger was his hunger. His only hunger since he—whatever he was—no longer felt the need for food. Or water. Or air.
But pain? He could still feel that, at least the pain she gave him. If he brought her too little, there was the thing the gaiaphage could do to him, that twisting inner agony, that little visit to hell.
Just then he spotted a roadrunner. The bird was about a foot and a half long from sharp beak to the end of its long tail. Of course that was mostly feathers and bone. But maybe a few ounces of actual meat, too, and if he nailed it he could head back to Gaia in the certainty of a pleasant, or at least pain-free, welcome.
They were quick little birds, though. Not as fast as the cartoon Road Runner, but quick and dodgy.
The bird had its head cocked. One eye was aimed right at Drake. He froze. He needed to halve the distance before he could strike.
The bird darted half a foot and suddenly had a lizard in its mouth. The lizard was still alive, thrashing in the bird’s beak, and that distraction let Drake advance with, slow, silent steps.
Then: the unsettling feeling that presaged the emergence of Brittney. Since they had been buried together and resurrected they had shared . . . well, not a body, really. In fact they shared nothing except that they seemed to trade existences. He would be there, and then Brittney would emerge, and while she was present, he was simply gone.
“Not now!” he hissed, frustrated at the thought of losing his prey.
He snapped his whip arm, but it was already a foot shorter. The roadrunner was gone.
Brittney opened her eyes to see she was alone, in a very dry-looking place, nothing but brambles and sand and stone. She noticed the bag on her belt. Looking in she saw a wad of lizards, some in pieces.
The hunger that had motivated Drake filled her as well, the hunger of her god. The thought of Gaia eating well, growing stronger, made Brittney smile. What a miracle to have her god take on human form, become the baby Gaia! No, not a baby anymore, a beautiful little girl, and growing at an amazing rate. By the time Brittney got back to her, she could be a preteen.
Wouldn’t that be exciting!
Food. That was the first thing.
She saw a roadrunner dart into a thornbush. She wasn’t fast enough to catch the bird, but she wondered . . .
Brittney dropped to her hands and knees and crawled to the bush. She got as low as she could and shielded her eyes from the glare of the true sun beating down very hard here near the center of the FAYZ.
It was shadier beneath the bush, but she could still see clearly, and there was her reward: a circular nest and in the center of that nest three small, white eggs, no more than an inch and a half in diameter.
Brittney carefully lifted the eggs from the nest and put them in her bag. She pulled apart a bit of the nest and used it to pack the eggs carefully so they wouldn’t break.