Caine heard footsteps coming up from behind. Without turning to look, he said, “You jumped the gun, Drake.”
“Not me,” Drake said, panting. “Howard spotted me.”
“And Sam?” Caine asked, mesmerized by the dull gray fuel rod, by the contrast between its devastating killing power and its featureless exterior.
“He just pulled up with the Mexican.”
Caine glanced at the hole he’d made in the dome. A loose chunk of concrete came loose, fell a long way, and clattered noisily down on some unseen equipment. Through the hole he could see the hillside, purple in the dying light of the sun.
It would take Jack another ten, fifteen minutes, to maneuver the fuel rod to the loading dock. In ten minutes Sam could be here.
“We can’t have Sam on our butts as we move,” Caine said. An idea occurred to him. Beautiful in its simplicity. Kill two birds with one stone.
“Time for you to prove you’re as tough and mean as you think you are, Drake,” Caine said.
“I don’t have to prove anything,” Drake snapped.
Caine met his lieutenant’s furious gaze. He moved close to Drake. Close enough to whisper if he wanted to, but no, he wanted this to be very public. “Drake, when I sent Diana to get Jack, you know what? She got me Jack. Now, someone needs to stop Sam, or at least slow him down. Should I ask Diana to take care of that? Because she might just find a way. Sam is a guy, after all.”
Diana, bless her twisted heart, immediately saw what Caine was doing.
“Oh, Sam?” She laughed in her knowing way. “You know he’s got to be frustrated with his ice princess. It shouldn’t be too hard for me to…slow him down.”
The line would have worked better before Diana had shaved her head and dressed to look like a boy, but Caine saw that Drake immediately took the bait.
“That’s what you want?” Drake asked. “You want me to take Sam down? Either he kills me or I kill him, right? Either way, that’s good for you and this witch here.”
“You’re stalling, Drake,” Caine said.
Caine could practically read the psychopath’s mind as the gears in his head turned over the possibilities. No way Drake could refuse.
No way. Not if he wanted to go on being Whip Hand. Not if he ever hoped to replace Caine.
“I’ll take Sam down,” Drake said in a voice he intended to be menacing but that came out sounding just a little wobbly.
He must have been less than satisfied with the effect. So with a low growl he repeated, “I’ll stop Sam right here.”
Caine nodded, offering just the slightest acknowledgment. He turned away from Drake and winked at Diana, who kept her expression carefully blank.
Poor Drake. It wasn’t enough to be ambitious. A leader had to be smart. A leader had to be ruthless and manipulative, not just a thug.
Great leaders had to know when to manipulate and when to confront.
Most of all, a great leader had to know when to take great risks.
“Let’s hope they built that fuel rod strong,” Caine said.
He raised his hands and the fuel rod rose, floated in the air, tethered at one end to the crane.
“Hit the release,” Caine ordered.
Jack said, “Caine, if it breaks open—”
“Do it!” Caine roared.
Even Drake took a step back. And Jack hit the button that released the robot crane’s hold.
Caine thrust his arms forward, palms out. The cylinder flew like the bolt from a crossbow.
His aim was good. But not perfect. The cylinder scraped the concrete as it shot through the hole.
“That’s the quick way to do it,” Caine said.
“If we find it and it’s broken open, we’re all dead,” Jack moaned.
Caine ignored him. He turned to Drake. He saw shrewd calculation in his lieutenant’s eyes.
“I’ll take care of Sam,” Drake said.
Caine laughed. “Or he’ll take care of you.”
“I’ll catch up with you, Caine,” Drake said.
It was a warning. He left little doubt that if he survived the encounter with Sam, he’d be ready to take Caine down next.
“Tell you what,” Drake said. “I’ll bring you your brother’s hand. He took mine: it’s time I paid him back.”
Sam watched Edilio and the others drive off. He felt strangely peaceful. The first time in days.
The only life he was risking here was his own. And in his mind, he had a plan: If he did this, he was done. Done.
He’d made too many mistakes. He’d overlooked too many things. It wasn’t him who’d thought to try fishing, it was Quinn. And it wasn’t Sam who’d thought of using SUVs to keep harvesters safe from the zekes. It was Astrid.
Sam had been too late, too slow, too distracted, too unsure. He hadn’t moved in time to ration food. He hadn’t motivated enough people to help out. He’d let the resentment between freaks and normals get ugly. He hadn’t protected Ralph’s from Drake, or the power plant from Caine.
Kids were sitting in the dark in Perdido Beach, thinking thoughts of cannibalism. And he was in charge, so it was on him.
Even now, Sam had the nagging feeling that he had missed something vital. Something. A resource.
A weapon.
Well, if he survived this day, he was finished. Let Astrid be in charge. Or Albert. Or Dekka. Best of all, probably, Edilio.
If he won this day, if he stopped Caine, and if Dekka closed the mine shaft, then that was enough. More than enough.
And if one of them failed? If Caine got through and Dekka did not kill the gaiaphage? It had Lana. It had been inside Caine’s mind. It knew what Lana knew, what Caine knew. Drake as well, no doubt. It knew all their strengths and all their limits. And if it became what it wanted to become, then what?
He was missing something.
But what else was new? Soon, it would be someone else’s problem. He was going surfing.
He didn’t need waves, not really. He could just paddle his board out and lie there. Just lie there. That would be fine.
But first…
Sam crossed the parking lot to the door of the turbine room. He expected to be challenged. He expected to be shot. But he reached the door and found it unguarded.
A relief. But not a good thing. Caine would have someone watching the door. If he was still inside.
He stepped through into the eerie and unexpected silence. The plant was shut down. The turbines were no longer turning. Normally you couldn’t hear anything. Now he could hear his own footsteps.
He found the passageway to the control room with the door forced inward. It took him a moment to make sense of the tools driven into the floor and bent back.
The control room itself was empty and darker than usual. Emergency lights glowed. The instruments and computer screens were all still on. But there was no sign of life.
A puddle of sticky, drying blood had been tracked all over. Red footprints.
It was not what he expected, this silence. Where was Caine? Where was Drake?
The power plant was a vast complex and they might be anywhere. They could wait for him in a hundred different locations, wait in ambush until he stumbled onto them. Caine could hit him before he had a chance to react.
Sam stood poised, uncertain. What was going on? He wished he had asked Edilio to send Brianna here. She could search the entire plant in two minutes.
Think it through, he ordered himself. They were here to steal uranium. They were going to take their prize to the mine. So how would they do it? Where would they be?
The reactor, of course. That’s where the deadly metal was.
“Not a happy thought,” Sam said to the empty room.
He headed down the hallway, following the helpful wall signs.
A massive steel door guarded the entry to the reactor. Caine had not bothered to close it behind him.
Down a long, echoing, dimly lit, long hallway. A second massive steel door, this one open as well, though there was
a security keypad beside it and surely it must normally be kept closed and locked.
It had been deliberately left open, Sam realized. For him. Was it because Caine had released radioactivity into the area? Was that it? Was his body already absorbing a fatal dose?
No. Caine wouldn’t be shortsighted enough to contaminate the whole place so that the power could never be turned back on. The one thing he was sure of was that Caine would want the electricity back on someday, if only so that he could control it.
That made sense. It did not, however, put an end to Sam’s fears. If Caine had contaminated the place, then Sam was a dead kid walking.
He stepped into the reactor room. It was hot and airless despite the vast, arching dome overhead. It was impossible not to be frightened by the reactor core itself, that too-blue swimming hole full of pent-up power. Impossible not to know what it represented.
He walked around it, poised, ready, alert. He came around the far side of the reactor, and there, waiting, was Drake Merwin, his whip hand waving lazily at his side. He was leaning calmly against an instrument panel.
“Hey, Sam,” Drake said.
“Drake,” Sam said.
“You know what’s cool, Sam? I never paid that much attention in school, but that’s because I never saw how I was going to use any of that stuff.” Drake pulled what looked like an oversized remote control from his pocket. He tapped a button.
An urgent alarm blared.
“Walk away, Drake,” Sam yelled over the sound of the klaxon.
“I’m going to hurt you, Sam. And you’re going to take it.”
“What are you doing, Drake?”
“Well, the way I understand it, Sam, there are these control rods. Stick them in, and the reactor goes dead. Pull a few out, and it starts up. Pull them all out at once, and you get a meltdown.”
Something was rising from the ominous blue of the pool. Dozens of narrow poles that hung from a glowing circular collar.
“You’re bluffing, Drake.”
Drake grinned. “Keep thinking that, Sam. What do you think pretty Astrid will look like after her hair starts falling out in clumps?”
He turned the remote around so that Sam could see. “This button right here? It drops the control rods back in. And everyone lives. If no one hits the button…well. According to Jack, we’ll die pretty quick. Everyone else in the FAYZ dies slow.”
“You’d die, too,” Sam said, knowing he was just stalling, mind whirring crazily, trying to figure out a way to stop this. Was Drake crazy enough to…Yes. Of course he was.
The alarm redoubled in volume and intensity. It was an electronic scream now.
“I’m not worried, Sam, because you won’t let it happen,” Drake shrieked to be heard over the alarm.
“Drake…” Sam raised his hands, palms facing Drake.
Drake held his hand out over the glowing, throbbing pool. Held the remote now with just two fingers.
“If I drop it…,” Drake warned.
Slowly Sam lowered his arms to his side.
The alarm filled his brain. How many minutes? How many seconds? The control rods rose with majestic inevitability. How long until it was too late?
One more failure, Sam thought dully.
“Don’t you want to know what I want, Sam?” Drake cried.
“Me,” Sam said dully. “You want me.”
“That’s the idea, Sam. And you’re going to stand there and take it. Because if you don’t…”
Astrid was with Little Pete, doing one of the long-neglected exercises. This one involved separating balls by color. There was a blue box, and a yellow box; blue balls, yellow balls. Any normal five-year-old could do it. But Little Pete was not any normal five-year-old.
“Can you put the ball where it belongs?” Astrid asked.
Little Pete stared at the ball. Then his eyes wandered.
Astrid took his hand and placed it on a yellow ball. Too hard. She was hurting him.
“Can you put this where it belongs?” Her voice was shrill, impatient.
They were on the floor in Little Pete’s room, sitting in a corner on the carpet. Little Pete was gone in his head, not there, indifferent.
Sometimes she hated him.
“Try again, Petey,” Astrid said. She stopped herself from twisting her fingers together. She was sending signals of being tense. Not helpful.
She should be running exercises like this every day. Several times a day. But she didn’t. She was only doing it now because she couldn’t stand waiting. She needed something to take her mind off Sam.
“Sorry,” she said to Little Pete, who was as indifferent to her apology as to everything else.
Someone knocked at the bedroom door, and she jumped.
The door swung in; it wasn’t closed.
“It’s me, John.”
Astrid climbed to her feet, relieved it was just John. Disappointed it was just John.
“John, what is it?” They wouldn’t send John with bad news. Would they?
“I can’t find Mary.”
A flood of relief, instantly replaced by more worry. “She’s not at the day care?”
He shook his head. His red curls went everywhere, a counterpoint to his serious expression. “She was supposed to come in hours ago. She’s almost never late. I couldn’t leave to look for her because we’re shorthanded and we have so many kids sick. I came as soon as I could. I looked in her room. I didn’t find her there.”
Astrid glanced at Little Pete. He had stalled with his hand on a yellow ball, and seemingly no interest in doing anything with it.
“Let me look,” Astrid said.
They entered Mary’s room. It was as neat and organized as ever. But the bed was unmade.
“She always makes her bed,” Astrid said.
“Yeah,” John agreed.
“What’s that sound?” There was a steady hum. Coming from the bathroom. The fan. Astrid tried to open the bathroom door, but it was blocked. She leaned into it and pushed it open enough to see inside.
Mary was on the floor, unconscious. She was wearing a robe that exposed her calves.
“Oh, my God,” Astrid cried. “Mary!”
“Help me push,” Astrid said. Together they forced the door open enough to let them slip inside. Astrid immediately noticed the smell of vomit.
“She must be sick,” John said.
The toilet water was slightly discolored. There was a thin trail of vomit running from Mary’s mouth.
“She’s breathing,” Astrid said quickly. “She’s alive.”
“I didn’t even know she was sick.”
Then Astrid saw the little zipper bag, a little Clinique cosmetics bag lying with its contents half spilled onto the bathroom tile.
She picked it up. She dumped the contents out on the floor. A mostly empty bottle of ipecac. And several different types of laxatives.
“John, close your eyes for a minute.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to open Mary’s robe.” She pulled the knot on the robe’s tie and, feeling vaguely squeamish, opened the robe.
Mary was wearing only panties. Pink. Strange, Astrid thought, that she even noticed. Because the thing most noticeable about Mary was her ribs. They could be easily counted. Her stomach was hollow.
“Oh, poor Mary.” Astrid breathed, and closed the robe again.
John opened his eyes. They were wet with tears. “What’s wrong with her?”
Astrid leaned over to reach Mary’s face. She gently pushed her lips back to see her teeth. She tugged at a lock of Mary’s hair. Strands came loose.
“She’s starving,” Astrid said.
“She’s getting as much food as the rest of us,” John protested.
“She’s not eating. Or when she does eat, she vomits it back up. That’s what the ipecac is for.”
“Why would she do that?” John wailed.
“It’s a sickness, John. Anorexia. Bulimia. Both, I guess.”
“We have to get
her some food.”
“Yes.” Astrid didn’t explain that just getting Mary food might not be enough. She’d read about eating disorders. Sometimes, if kids didn’t get treatment, they died.
“Nestor, Nestor, Nestor, Nestor.” It was Little Pete, chanting at the top of his lungs. “Nestor, Nestor, Nestor, Nestor.”
A wave of hopelessness swept through her. Astrid closed her eyes, not wanting to let it get the better of her. She did not need this. Did not need Mary passed out, maybe near death. She already had the autistic brother, and the depressed boyfriend in the middle of some battle. “God forgive me for that,” she chastised herself. “Come on, John, we have to get Mary to Dahra.”
“Dahra just has a medical book. She’s not an expert.”
“I know. Look, I don’t know how to take care of someone with anorexia. At least Dahra’s been reading about medicine.”
“We have to get her some of that deer meat,” John said. “We have to feed her.”
“What deer meat?”
“Zil has a deer,” John said. “He’s going to share it this evening. At dinnertime.”
Despite everything, Astrid’s stomach rumbled. The idea of meat was more compelling than anything else. But even hunger couldn’t quiet the warning bells in her head. “Zil? Zil’s got a deer?”
“Everyone is talking about it,” John said. “Turk is telling everyone that Zil caught Hunter. Hunter had this deer and was keeping it all for himself. Anyone who wants some meat just has to come and help them punish Hunter.”
“At least,” he added, “any normal. No freaks allowed.”
Astrid stared at him. John showed no sign of really understanding what he had just said.
“Is Mary going to be okay?” John asked. “I mean, if we get her to eat some deer meat? Will she be okay?”
“Ahhhhh!” Sam yelled as Drake struck again.
Again and again.
Sam on his knees now. Crying.
Crying like a baby. His shrieks of pain melding with the harsh lunatic blare of the siren.
If only there was some way to record this, Drake thought. If only he could tape this moment so he could watch it again and again.
The great Sam Temple, bleeding and cringing and screaming out in pain as Drake brought his whip hand down again and again.