“Okay, I just have to eat something first. I ran a hundred miles, probably.” She zipped away, leaving Astrid and Dekka, and the head, which was still making faint vocalizations of an unpleasant nature.
“I have an idea,” Dekka said. “There’s a cooler in my trailer. I get it, I poke some holes in it, put the head in, weigh it down with rocks, and we sink him at the end of a long rope. Maybe it’ll even kill him.”
Astrid sighed. “This would be a story not to tell the Today show. I’ll start getting some rocks.”
EIGHT
68 HOURS, 42 MINUTES
DRAKE COULD HEAR perfectly well, although there was something of an echo effect. But pretty well given that his head was separated from his body and split in two still-somewhat-mismatched halves.
He had heard what they were planning. And he was afraid. It was an odd kind of fear, disconnected from his body: there was no stomach-churning, no shortness of breath, no quickening of his pulse.
But he was afraid. He had spent long weeks buried underground—it had had an effect on him. He was not quite human, but he could still feel fear.
And pain. Not like he would have in the old days, but still . . . he could feel the body that was no longer attached to his head.
He itched for his whip hand. God, he would make these two witches pay. Oh, definitely. He could picture it. He had pictured it, many times, especially Astrid. How long had he hated her? Probably from their very first meeting. She was just that kind of girl: hate at first sight.
But now . . .
Dekka, the dyke, was using a Phillips screwdriver to poke holes in the plastic cooler. It wasn’t easy—she was slamming it again and again, like some crazy killer. She’d already put a couple of dozen holes in it.
Astrid was just standing there, watching her, and looking back at Drake. He knew she wanted to say something to him. She wanted to tell him, Hah, see, now it’s me on top. Now it’s me looking down at you. She couldn’t hide the look of triumph, not from Drake.
“Ready,” Dekka said.
Astrid squatted down. She grabbed a handful of his hair, and suddenly he was up and swinging through the air.
He saw the cooler with its top open. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t manage that much noise, and he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
Astrid set him down—didn’t drop him, set him down—in the cooler.
“I have a bike chain I can wrap around it,” Dekka said. “Then I’ll tie the rope around the whole thing, in case we need to haul him back up.”
“Drake,” Astrid said. “Last chance: tell us where we can find Gaia and Diana.”
For a terrible moment Drake considered it. But he knew that whatever these two could do was nothing next to the pain the gaiaphage could inflict.
He cursed weakly.
The two of them set heavy chunks of broken concrete in beside him. Astrid closed the lid. Darkness stabbed through with beams of light from the holes.
The cooler rocked back and forth with much scraping noise as they wrapped the chain and then the rope.
“That’ll hold,” Dekka said.
Drake felt the cooler being lifted. It teetered precariously as they almost lost their grip.
Then: A short drop. A splash.
Water began seeping in through the screwdriver holes as air leaked out. Water came in from all directions, like some kind of awful multihead shower. Soon there was an inch of water in the bottom, and when Drake tried to curse, it was lake water that he sucked up into his severed throat.
The descent seemed to take forever. Then: a bump as the cooler landed on the lake bottom.
It took ten minutes for the box to fill completely with water as it rose over his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and finally swirled his hair.
But he was not dead.
Tiny fish, guppies, came sneaking in through the holes. They nibbled at him, but stopped once they’d had a taste. Still, they swirled around him, faintly luminescent in the dark water, like dull fireflies.
They looked into his ears. They poked curious heads into his nose. They swam up into his esophagus and from there up into his mouth.
They were still there when Drake began screaming without sound as he changed into Brittney.
The idea of facing Taylor without a cigarette was bothering Lana quite a bit. Not that she was addicted to cigarettes, she told herself; it wasn’t anything like that. Only a very weak person would become addicted, and she was not weak.
The fact that she’d been shaking and even more snappish than usual all day absolutely did not prove that she was addicted. Neither did the fact that she’d spent much of the day searching for smokes or cursing Sanjit.
And yet she was thinking of cigarettes even as she turned the key in the lock. The old electronic key system at the hotel didn’t work, of course, but she hadn’t wanted to leave Taylor free to just walk away—like she could anyway—so Lana had told Sanjit to screw a lock onto the door. He was handy that way. It was almost a pity she would have to shoot him.
Strange the idea of locking Taylor up. Before her recent—well, it wasn’t quite a mutation; no one knew what it was—anyway, before all this, she’d had the power to teleport. To “bounce,” as she called it, from one place to the next with just a thought. Maybe she still could, but she’d have a hard time standing up when she got wherever she was going.
Lana slid open the bolt.
“Taylor. It’s me.”
She opened the door. No one had ever closed the curtains in the room, so it was bright with the slanting rays of the setting sun. Different light now. Hard to say what made it different; it just was. The old sky and the old sun had had a seasonless sameness to them. This sun—the real sun—set a little earlier, and a low cloud bank out beyond the barrier bent the light into shades of yellow and gold.
It was a different gold than the gold color of Taylor’s skin: Taylor was more metallic. Almost as if she really was made of actual gold. She sat propped up in the hotel bed, leaning on her one stump arm, the other complete arm in her lap. Her legs had been placed on the bed with her, but one had fallen off and was on the floor.
Taylor was completely nude, but it didn’t matter. She had none of the signs of gender. She was a golden Gumby with one arm and a long, green, reptilian tongue.
The best theory anyone had was that it had been done by Little Pete. Little Pete was not thought to have done it maliciously—Petey was incapable of malice. Or any intention, really. He might be the most powerful person in the FAYZ but he was still, despite it all, a five-year-old autistic kid. Couldn’t blame him. He’d probably just been playing. A heedless, unaware little god.
With great power comes great responsibility, Lana thought, recalling the line from the Spider-Man movie. But Little Pete had all kinds of power and no responsibility.
“Let’s try the hand again, Taylor,” Lana said. “Where is it?”
Maybe Taylor understood what she was saying, maybe not. Her ears looked normal, but who knew what went on down inside them? And who knew what went on in her brain? Or if she still had a brain?
Lana couldn’t find the hand, which was disturbing. She’d had no evidence that Taylor could move off her bed. Then she found it all the way across the room and behind the permanently off television. Were the parts moving on their own? Once, Brianna had told Lana that Drake could do that: reassemble. As if the parts had lives of their own. Was Taylor the same sort of thing Drake now was? Or at least similar?
No. Drake still looked like Drake. Taylor . . . well . . . But maybe there was some kind of similarity. It was a puzzle. A creepy, creepy puzzle.
Lana carried the cold thing back and pressed it against Taylor’s stump. She focused her thoughts on healing the stump. Had Taylor been a regular human, it might well have worked. It wouldn’t be the first appendage Lana had reattached. But it wasn’t working, just as it hadn’t worked on earlier efforts.
“What do I do with you?” Lana asked Taylor. “What are you? You’re sure
not human. Or even mammal, obviously. Or . . .”
A thought struck her. Was she sure Taylor was even an animal?
A second more perverse thought popped into her head: what would happen if she dragged Taylor out to the balcony to wave to the lookers out there? Hey there, tourists, check this out! That should keep your nightmares fresh for a while.
She wondered how much The Powers That Be in the FAYZ—Sam, Caine, Edilio, and Astrid—had thought about the outside world’s view of what was going on. The reality in the FAYZ was way weirder than the lookers could imagine. This wasn’t just a bunch of kids trapped in a bubble; it was an unprecedented event in the history of the planet. The barrier wasn’t the only thing separating inside from outside—things could happen here that just flat could not exist out there.
For example: a girl able to heal with a touch.
“Yeah, let’s not even start thinking about that,” she told herself. She looked at Taylor, a pretty girl with dead eyes and golden skin and black hair like a sheet of rubber. “Are you more like a plant?”
No answer.
“Are you made out of Play-Doh?”
There came a soft knock at the door. “Can I come in?”
“Why not?” she answered sourly.
Sanjit stepped in. “Any change?”
Lana shook her head. “What if she isn’t an animal? If she was a plant, what would we do if we wanted to try and reattach a broken stem or whatever? Bring me a knife. The big sharp one.”
“A plant?”
He fetched the knife.
“Now, hold her stump,” Lana said.
Sanjit shuddered. “You know, Lana, that’s one of those phrases I could have gone my whole life without hearing. ‘Hold her stump.’” He had seen a lot in his life and dealt with some serious weirdness, but Taylor gave him the willies. Nevertheless, he came around the bed, stepping over Lana’s legs, and took hold of the stump.
Lana took the knife and began to shave off a thin slice of the stump. Taylor turned her head to watch, but there was no evidence it was causing her any pain or concern. Sanjit, on the other hand, was turning green.
Lana removed an oval slice and picked it up like a piece of bologna. She held it to the light, inspecting it critically. Then she laid it aside and took a similar slice from the hand. Then she pressed the two newly cut pieces together.
“Get me some duct tape,” Lana said.
“Some what?”
“Some tape,” she said impatiently. “Tape. Staples. Whatever.”
It took Sanjit twenty minutes, and he came back with a roll of white Velcro.
“How am I going to Velcro this?”
“It’s adhesive-backed. It’s like tape. I couldn’t find tape. I found a stapler, but this will be better. Also less disturbing.”
“Wimp. Get me a cigarette.”
He pulled another half cigarette from his pocket, stuck it in her lips—she was busy holding the hand and the arm together—and lit it.
Then he rolled out a foot of Velcro, cut it, and carefully taped the body parts together.
An hour later they carefully unwound the tape.
“Huh. It’s adhering,” Lana said. “A little, anyway. Huh. Wow. You think you could manage a trip into town?”
“Why? So you can try to find your smokes with me out of the way?”
“Yeah, that, too. But mostly I was thinking you could bring Sinder back here. I saw her in town, down from the lake. Or she might be out at the barrier playing wave-at-the-’rents. Either way, get her: she has a green thumb.”
“I don’t feel it,” Sam said.
Caine shook his head. “Me neither.”
They were at the entrance to the mine shaft. They hadn’t even discussed their first stop; they’d both just known that it had to be here. This mine shaft was where the gaiaphage had lain for years, growing and festering. This had been the nexus of the evil, its home.
“Should we go in and check?”
“No,” Caine said. “I’ve been in. It wasn’t enjoyable.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t,” Caine said flatly.
Caine felt Sam watching him, impatient, ready to move on. But Caine was mesmerized by that dark, blank opening. Once, it had been neatly framed with timber, but now it was more of a gash in the ground, a twisted mouth with stone teeth.
The memory of it . . . Dread had left a permanent mark on him. Pain. Fear.
Loneliness.
“Lana knows,” Caine said at last. “And I guess Diana does now, too.” That thought, that realization, something he should have long since acknowledged, rocked him.
When he had come crawling away from this terrible place and found his way home, shattered and insane, Diana had helped him. Who had helped Diana?
“Once it touches your mind, see . . .,” Caine said, “once it really reaches inside you, it doesn’t let go. It doesn’t just stop. It’s like a, you know, like a wound, like you got cut real badly, and you stitched it up, but it won’t really heal.”
“Lana fought it,” Sam said.
“So did I!” Caine snapped. Then, more quietly, “So did I. I still do. It’s still in my head. It still reaches out to me sometimes.” He nodded, now almost seeming to have forgotten Sam. “Hungry in the dark.”
He had fought it. But he hadn’t fought it alone.
What the hell? He felt tears in his eyes. He tried to shake it off. Diana had spoon-fed him, and protected him, and cleaned him. And what had he done? He’d been sitting in Perdido Beach feeling sorry for himself while she was out there. With it.
“Is that what you’re going to tell people if we get out of this?” Sam asked. “That the gaiaphage made you do it? Because I don’t buy it.”
If Sam expected a furious answer, Caine disappointed him. He wasn’t going to let Sam bait him. At the moment he didn’t care about Sam.
The failing light was casting long shadows. They would need to think about finding a place to spend the night.
“Won’t make any difference what I say,” Caine said softly. “Won’t be me telling the story. It’ll be a hundred kids if we get out of here. All those kids who mostly just kept their heads down all through this, they’ll be the ones telling the story.”
“Why do you say that?”
Caine laughed. “Sometimes you are so naive. You think you and me and the other big deals are going to be the only ones talking to whoever? The cops? The FBI? Don’t be stupid. You think the adults are going to listen to us? They’ll be afraid of us.”
“You think we’ll still have our powers? Even if we did—”
“It’s not about that, Sammy boy.” Caine turned his back on the mine shaft. It seemed to take a great deal of effort for him to do that, and once he’d accomplished it he nodded like yes, yes he could do it. “It’s not about the powers, man; it’s that we aren’t kids anymore. Look what we’ve been through. Look what we’ve done. Look at yourself, surfer dude. We’ve done something none of our parents have even come close to. We didn’t take over their boring world; we took over a world about a thousand times tougher. If we walk out of this alive, we won’t have to bow our heads to anyone. There’ll be guys who were in wars hearing what we did and thinking, ‘Whoa.’ You and me, we can say, ‘You got yourself some medals, soldier? Yeah, well, I lived through the FAYZ.’”
“I haven’t thought much past wanting to get out of here and have a pizza.” Sam was trying to lighten the mood, probably because what Caine was saying made Sam squirm.
But Caine wasn’t done. “They’ll be afraid of us, brother, not because we can shoot light out of our hands or throw people through walls, but because we’ll be the living proof that they’re nothing special just because they’re old. They’ll fear us and they’ll hate us. Most of them, anyway. And they’ll try to use us, make money off us.” He sighed. “You don’t know much about human nature, do you?”
At last Caine smirked and nodded his head, satisfied with himself and satisfied as well with t
he troubled expression on Sam’s face.
Sam said, “Yeah, well getting back to reality here, we should make sure the gaiaphage doesn’t come back this way. Let’s shut this place down once and for all.”
Caine spun on his heel, looked back at the mine shaft. “Now, that is an excellent suggestion.” He raised his hands, palms out. Loose rock from all around the mine entrance hurtled into the pit. Boulders rose and suddenly veered, fast as jet fighters, to crash into the hole. Pebbles and rocks and bushes and dirt and bits of broken timber all flew at the entrance.
The noise was a screaming hurricane.
“That outcropping up there, that big rock?” Sam pointed to a sun-bleached boulder about the size of a house. “If I get it to break loose, can you handle it?”
“Let’s find out.”
Sam aimed green beams of light at the rock and held them on target for several minutes. The rock went from orange-by-sunset to a deep, glowing red. There was a loud cracking sound, and half of it broke away, a single very big, very hot boulder.
Caine focused and stopped its slide down the hill. He swung it left and let it drop just to the side of the cave entrance.
“Break it up a little more,” Caine said.
Sam focused the killing light again and held it until the face of the rock began to melt. It fell into two uneven pieces, which Caine easily drew back and then hurled into the mine shaft entrance, blocking it completely.
Sam once again focused energy and held it for a very long time, lighting the mountain’s face with the green glow, until the rock softened into magma and crumbled wetly into the shaft entrance.
Finally he stopped. The boulder formed a welded plug that would have to be blasted out with a great deal of dynamite should anyone wish to dislodge it.
Without looking at Caine, Sam said, “Something we’re good at.”
“Yep. Something we’re good at. But listen to me, Sammy boy, I have one rule for when we throw down with the gaiaphage: Diana doesn’t get hurt.”
It took Sam completely by surprise. “We may have no choice.”