“Brilliant observation, there, Marmaduke.” It was true: Brianna was not a coyote. She couldn’t smell him or even hear him unless he was pretty loud. He just needed a way to stay out of sight. “Okay, get me a place where I won’t be seen until dark.”
“High place with deep cracks.”
“Let’s make it quick, before they get around to sending your friend Swift Girl after us.”
The coyotes did not dawdle. They took off at a quick lope, moving with a sort of relentless fluidity around obstacles. It was uphill at first until they topped a rise. There Drake saw the barrier within a quarter mile.
He stopped and stared.
It was as if his master was reaching up from far underground with black claws. Like he was reaching to grab and then envelop this unnatural world with thousands of fingers.
It should have been inspiring. But it made Drake uneasy. This was the same black stain he had seen begin to spread into the gaiaphage itself.
It was a reminder that maybe not everything was right with the Darkness. It was a reminder that this mission was not born out of the gaiaphage’s ambition alone, but out of fear.
“Move,” Pack Leader urged anxiously. They were partially silhouetted atop the bluff. Drake ducked low. He could see the lake spread out below. If he could see, he could also be seen.
Drake hurried along behind Pack Leader, disappearing quickly amidst a maze of fallen rock and rain-etched bluff.
He had to suck in his breath to squeeze through the crack they’d found for him. One of the advantages of hanging out with coyotes: no one knew the terrain better.
There was no room to sit, barely room to stand. But Brianna wouldn’t find him; he was confident of that.
And he could see a narrow slice of the lake, a few boats, and a sliver of the sky.
Night was coming on.
OUTSIDE
NURSE CONNIE TEMPLE swallowed the Zoloft. It worked better than Prozac for her, left her less tired.
She chased it with most of a glass of red wine. Which would make her feel tired.
She turned on the TV and clicked without any real interest through the movies on demand. She wasn’t in her trailer. She was at the Avania Inn in Santa Barbara. It was where she regularly met Sergeant Darius Ashton.
They had started going out months earlier. He had shown up at one of the Friday cookouts. And soon after that they had realized that they would need to keep their relationship secret.
Connie heard the familiar knock. She let Darius in. He was short, only a couple of inches taller than she was herself. But he had a thick, hard body decorated with tattoos and scars he’d brought home from Afghanistan.
He had a six-pack of beer in one hand and a sheepish grin. Connie liked him. She liked the fact that he was smart enough to know that part of the reason she was with him—not all, just part—was that she was using him for information. He had lost most of the sight in one eye, so Darius was never going back to combat. His current assignment was to Camp Camino Real. He had been assigned to maintenance. He had no direct access to anything classified, but he heard things. He saw things. He hated his job, and if he couldn’t be a combat soldier he was determined to leave the service when his enlistment was up.
Basically Sergeant Darius Aston was killing time. He liked killing that time with Connie.
Connie sat on the bed drinking red wine. Darius drank his third beer and flopped in the chair with his feet up on the end of the bed, toes occasionally playing with hers.
“Something is up,” he said without preamble. “I hear the colonel threatened to resign.”
“Why?”
Darius shrugged.
“Is he out?” Connie asked.
“Nah. The general choppered in. They had a chat that could be heard from some distance. Then the general choppered out, and that was that.”
“And you have no idea what it was about?”
He shook his head slowly. He hesitated before he went on, and Connie knew there was something big coming. Something he was leery of telling her.
“My sons are in there,” Connie said.
“Sons? Plural?” He looked sharply at her. “I’ve only heard you talk about your boy Sam.”
She took a deep pull at the wine. “I want you to trust me,” she said. “So I’m telling you the truth. That’s how trust works. Right?”
“That’s what I hear,” he said dryly.
“I had twins. Sam and David. I guess I liked the biblical names back then.”
“Good strong names,” Darius said.
“They were fraternal, not identical. Sam was a few minutes older. He was the smaller one, though, by seven ounces.”
She started again and was surprised to find that her voice betrayed her with a wobble. She powered through it, determined not to get weepy. “I had postpartum depression. Pretty bad. You know what that is?”
He didn’t answer but she saw that he did not.
“Sometimes a woman, after she gives birth, her hormones go seriously off-kilter. I knew this. After all, I’m a nurse, although not much lately.”
“So there are pills and all,” Darius suggested.
“There are,” she confirmed. “And I kept it together. But early on I formed this … this fantasy, I suppose. That something was wrong with David.”
“Wrong?”
“Yes. Wrong. I don’t mean physically. He was a beautiful little baby. And smart. It was so strange, because I worried that I would prefer him to Sam because he was bigger and so alert and so beautiful.”
Darius set aside his now-empty beer. He popped another.
“Then the accident. The meteor.”
“Heard about that,” Darius said with interest. “Like, twenty years ago, though, wasn’t it?”
“Thirteen years ago.”
“Must have been something to see. A meteor smashes a nuclear power plant? People must have freaked.”
“You could say that,” Connie said dryly. “You know they still call Perdido Beach ‘fallout alley.’ Naturally they told us everything was fine.... Well, they didn’t tell me that. In fact, what they told me was that my husband, the father of my two little boys, was the only person killed.”
Darius sat up, tilting his head, and leaned in. “The fallout?”
“No, the actual impact. He never suffered. Never even knew what was coming. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Killed by a meteor.” Darius shook his head. Connie knew he had seen death in Afghanistan.
“After that the depression came back. Worse than ever. And with it this conviction, this powerful belief that there was something wrong with David. Something very, very wrong.”
The memory of those days swept over her, making it impossible to speak. The madness had been so real. What had begun as a symptom of postpartum depression came to be something like a psychotic symptom. Like there was a voice in her head, whispering, whispering that David was dangerous. That he was evil.
“I was afraid I might harm him,” Connie said.
“Harsh.”
“Yeah. Harsh. I loved him. But I was afraid of him. Afraid of what I would do to him. So.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I gave him up. He was adopted immediately. And for a long time he disappeared from my life. I gave all my attention to Sam and told myself I had done the right thing.”
Darius frowned. “I’ve read through the Wiki. There’s no David Temple. I would have noticed because of the last name.”
Connie smiled slightly. “I never knew who had adopted him. I never knew where he was. Until one day I was at work, at Coates. I wasn’t even employed there at the time; I was filling in while their regular nurse was on maternity leave. And this boy was brought in. I knew immediately. Never any doubt. I asked him his name. He said he was Caine.”
“How had he turned out? I mean, you had this idea he was going bad....”
Connie lowered her head. “He was still beautiful. And very smart. And so charming. You should have seen the g
irls flock to him.”
“He got his looks from his mom,” Darius said, trying to be gallant.
“He was also cruel. Manipulative. Ruthless.” She spoke the words with great care, considering each one. “He scared me. And he was one of the first to begin the mutation. The same time as Sam, actually, but Sam was a totally different person. Sam lashed out with his power, lost control of himself, and was devastated by it. But Caine? He used his power without the slightest concern for anyone but himself.”
“Same mother, same father, and so different?”
“Same mother,” Connie said, her voice flat. “I was having an affair. I never had a DNA test, but it is possible that they had different fathers.”
She could see that this shocked Darius. He didn’t approve. Well, why should he? She didn’t approve of herself.
The room suddenly felt cold.
“I’d better get going,” Darius said. “You cooking some ribs on Friday?”
“Darius. I told you my secret,” Connie said. “I gave you everything. What is it you aren’t telling me?”
Darius stopped at the door. Connie wondered if he would ever come back. He’d seen a side of her he had never expected.
“I can’t tell you anything,” Darius said. “Except that the military loves acronyms. Just saw a new one the other day I didn’t recognize on some vehicles that came into camp. NEST. Sounds innocent, huh?”
“What’s NEST?”
“Look it up. See you Friday if I can.”
He left.
Connie opened her laptop and tied into the hotel’s wi-fi. She opened Google and typed in NEST. It took a few seconds to find that NEST stood for Nuclear Emergency Support Team.
They were the scientists, technicians, and engineers who were called in to deal with a nuclear incident.
A nuclear response team.
And the colonel threatening to quit.
Something was going on. Maybe some controversial new experiment. Something dangerous. Something involving a possible radiation spill.
Which may have been how this whole thing had started to begin with.
EIGHTEEN
18 HOURS, 55 MINUTES
FULL NIGHT.
Sam had recalled Brianna when the sun went down. The darkness was deadly to her. One stumble and she’d be a bag of broken bones.
Brianna raged and demanded to be turned loose again. But she knew better. Sam sent her below to take one of the unused bunks and get some sleep. Mere seconds later he heard her snoring.
The guards were changed. Edilio sat blinking sleep away. Dekka brooded. Sam hadn’t seen Astrid in a while. He assumed she was down in his bunk. Maybe she was mad at him. Probably. And maybe he deserved it. He’d been curt with her.
He wanted to go down there and be with her. But he knew if he gave in to that need, if he found peace and forgetfulness, he might not have the strength to come out again.
The light was dying. But the moon—or an illusion of it—was rising. This was not yet true darkness. But it was coming.
“Where is he?” Sam wondered for the millionth time. He scanned the beach, already dark. He scanned the woods and the bluff. Drake could be in either place. Beneath those dark trees. Or somewhere up in those rocks.
He sank into a canvas chair.
“You awake enough to keep your eyes open?” he asked Dekka.
“Catch some z’s, Sam.”
“Yeah,” he said, and yawned.
Astrid was waiting for him.
He said, “Sorry I snapped at you before.”
She didn’t say anything but kissed him, holding his face with her hands. They made love slowly, silently, and when they were finished, Sam drifted into sleep.
When Cigar looked at Sanjit he saw a dancing, twirling, happy creature that looked like a greyhound walking erect. The one called Choo looked like a sleepy gorilla with a slow-beating red valentine of a heart.
Cigar knew he wasn’t seeing what other people saw. He just didn’t know whether what he was seeing was a result of having his new eyes, or whether it was madness that turned everything so strange and incredible.
Strange eyes. Strange brain. Some combination of the two?
Even objects—the beds, the tables, the steps at Clifftop—had an eerie glow, a vibration, a streaming light as though, rather than being fixed in place, they were moving.
Mad eyes, mad brain.
Memories that made the screams rise in his raw throat.
When that happened Sanjit or Choo or the little one, Bowie, who looked like a spectral white kitten, would come to him and speak soothing words. At those times he seemed to see something like dust in a strong beam of sunlight, and that … that … he didn’t know what to call it, but that … stuff … would calm the panic.
Until the next panic.
There was another thing, very different from the sparkly sunlit dust, that reached tendrils through the air, passing through objects, rising sometimes like smoke from the floor and other times like a slow, pale green whip.
When Lana came the green whip would follow her, reaching to touch her, sliding away, reaching again, insistent.
And sometimes Cigar felt it was looking for him. It had no eyes. It couldn’t see him. But it sensed something … something that interested it.
When it came close to him he would have visions of Penny. He would have visions of himself doing terrible, sickening things to her.
Making her suffer.
He wondered if the rising smoke, the slow green whip, this stuff, could give him power over Penny. He wondered if he said yes—Yes, reach me; here I am—if then he would be able to get revenge on Penny.
But Cigar’s thoughts never lasted for very long. He would put together pictures in his head; then they would fly apart like an exploding jigsaw puzzle.
At times the little boy would come.
It wasn’t easy to see the little boy. The little boy always stayed just to the side. Cigar would sense his presence and look toward him, but no matter how quickly he moved his head, Cigar could never see the little boy clearly. It was like seeing someone through a narrow opening in a door. It was a glimpse, and then the little boy would be gone.
More madness.
If you had inhuman eyes and a shattered mind, how could you ever know what was real and what was not?
Cigar realized he had to stop trying. It didn’t matter, did it? Did anyone ever really see what was there around them? Were regular eyes so perfect or normal minds so clear? Who was to say that what Cigar saw wasn’t as real as what he had seen in the old days?
Weren’t regular eyes blind to all sorts of things? To X-rays and radiation and colors off beyond the visible spectrum?
The little boy had put that thought in his head.
There he was now, Cigar realized. Just outside of view. A suggestion of a presence. Right there where even Cigar could not see.
Cigar’s thoughts fell to pieces again.
He stood up and made his way to the door that vibrated and pulsed and called to him.
There was a knock on Penny’s door.
Penny did not fear a knock at the door. She opened it without even checking the peephole.
Caine stood framed by silvery moonlight in the door.
“We have to talk,” Caine said.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
He came in without waiting for an invitation. “First things first: if I see anything I don’t like, even so much as a flea, anything that comes from your sick imagination, Penny, I won’t hesitate. I’ll throw you through the nearest wall. And then I’ll drop the wall on top of you.”
“Hello to you, too. Your Highness.” She closed the door.
He was already sitting, flopping down in her favorite chair. Like he owned the place. He had brought a candle. He lit it with a Bic and set it on the table. So very Caine: he would arrange to be dramatically lit, even though candles were rarer than diamonds in the FAYZ.
King Caine.
Penny swal
lowed the rage that threatened to boil over. She would make him crawl. Make him scream and scream!
She said, “I know why you’re here.”
“Turk said you were ready to get real, Penny. He said you wanted to negotiate some terms. Fair enough. So spit it out.”
“Look,” Penny said, “I screwed up with Cigar. And I know what happens if the food supply dries up. I’m not as pretty as Diana, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously.
“So, like I told Turk to tell you, I’m going to leave town. I already packed a few things.” She gestured to a backpack lying in one corner. “I just don’t think it should look like you made me go, because then it’s like Quinn won. I think I should make it be like I just chose on my own to leave.”
Caine stared at her, obviously trying to figure out what she was up to.
Penny showed a little anger then. “Hey, I’m not happy about it, all right? But I’ll get by. Believe it or not I can survive without you, King Caine.”
“Take all the food you want,” he said.
“How generous of you,” she snapped. “The deal is I leave, but you have to make sure I don’t starve. Once a week I’ll meet Bug out on the highway, right by the overturned FedEx truck. If I need something he brings it. That’s my demand for leaving and making it easy for you.”
Caine relaxed a bit. He tilted his head sideways and looked at her, considering. “Fair enough.”
“But we have to talk about how to make it look good. Let’s face it, Caine: you and I can still be useful to each other in the future, right? So I need you to stay in charge. Better than the alternative.”
“What do you have in mind?”
She sighed. “Right now I have in mind some hot cocoa. Taylor brought me some from the island. Have a cup with me and we’ll work something out.”
Caine didn’t ask why Taylor would have brought her something as precious as cocoa from the island. Taylor no doubt used Penny’s fantasy-making powers for something.
Penny saw the look of distaste on his face as he worked it out. She went to the kitchen, to the little Sterno stove she used to heat the water and the cocoa.