He didn’t believe what he was saying. Astrid was out there somewhere. Darkness was coming. The endgame was being played. And he had no plan.
He had no plan.
Sam looked up. The sun was now beginning to appear as it rose above the edge of the stain. Way, way too high in the sky. But the light was welcome. Welcome and heartbreaking when he contemplated the fact that he might never see it again.
The water sparkled. The white hulls brightened. The village, the little campground, and nearby woods lit up.
Edilio was watching one of the boats through his own binoculars. “It’s Sinder,” he reported. “She wants permission for her and Jezzie to go ashore and harvest their veggies.”
“Yeah. It makes sense.” He raised his voice to a shout. “Breeze! Dekka! On deck!” Then in a normal speaking voice to Edilio he said, “Sinder will need someone watching her back.”
Brianna appeared seconds after the sound of her nickname died. Dekka came up a few moments later.
“It’s light enough for you, Breeze,” Sam said.
“Yeah, it’s Florida in July,” Brianna said, rolling her eyes at the strange tea-stained light.
“I thought you wanted to go back out,” Sam said tersely.
“Dude. Of course I do. Chill. I was just making a joke.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, teeth still gritted. His jaw hurt. His shoulders were knots of pain. “Soon as Sinder gets near shore you meet her. Stay on her until she and Jezzie are done.”
“I don’t have to sit right on top of them,” Brianna said with faux innocence. “I mean, I can go in and out, you know? Check on them, run down the road a ways, see what’s what....”
Before Sam could answer Edilio said, “We need a strategy, not a lot of people running off in different directions. Astrid’s probably in PB by now. If Drake attacks us here, we’ll need you, Brianna. But if you run into him without Sam, the best you can get is a draw.”
It made perfect logical sense. But it did nothing to address Sam’s desperate desire to do. To do. Not to talk, or watch, or worry, but to do.
The mission to grab the missiles had done little to ease his desire for action. Without thinking about it he held his palms up before his face. How long since he had fired the killing light rather than just hanging lights?
He realized Edilio and Dekka were both watching him with solemn expressions. Brianna was smirking. All three of them had read his thoughts.
“Well, we can eat some big-ass radishes, at least,” Sam muttered lamely.
“All this is just coping,” Dekka said. “None of it is about winning.”
“Drake is here. Somewhere. The gaiaphage is … no one knows exactly where,” Edilio said. “We don’t even know what’s happening in Perdido Beach. We don’t know what Albert is up to. We don’t know where Caine stands in all this. We don’t know why Taylor hasn’t bounced in to tell us what is going on.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Sam said bitterly. “Astrid’s right to try to reach Perdido Beach. And meanwhile we’re stuck. Tied down. Flies on one of those sticky strips.”
Sam’s palms felt itchy. He squeezed his fists tight.
There was logic. And then there was instinct. Sam’s instinct was screaming that he was losing a fight with each passing, passive, patient second.
The rising sun cast deep shadows on Astrid’s soul. It was one thing to know it was going to happen. It was a very different thing to see it.
The sky itself was disappearing. This would be the last daylight of the FAYZ.
She looked around, trying to orient herself. The result was near panic. The road from the lake to Perdido Beach went in a southwesterly direction along the western slope of the Santa Katrina Hills. Then it intersected the highway.
But she’d lost sight of the road. And she’d somehow managed to wander into a gap between two hills.
The Santa Katrinas weren’t the biggest hills, though up close they could be imposing. They were dry, of course, without rainfall in the FAYZ. She remembered seeing them from the highway long ago after December rain, when they had suddenly turned green. But now they were just rock and desiccated weeds and stubby, struggling trees.
The road was presumably straight back to the west. But that could be miles, and she might find herself hitting the road no more than a mile or two from Lake Tramonto. That would be humiliating if Sam had sent Brianna out to find her. It would make Astrid’s mission to warn Perdido Beach look a lot less like Paul Revere and a lot more like the harebrained scheme of an incompetent girl.
Already she’d been delayed. The dawn—such as it was—had come. People in Perdido Beach could see it without any help from her.
Which meant that all she could do now was hope to send a message of solidarity and to offer Sam’s services as a light bringer.
Even that relied on speed. She was sure some kids at least would already be on their way out of Perdido Beach.
If she wanted speed, she’d have to go through the hills. If this pass went all the way through in a more or less straight line, then no problem. If it dead-ended against some hill she’d have to climb, that would be a problem.
Astrid set off at a trot. She was very fit after her months living in the woods and could move at this half-run, half-walk pace for hours so long as she had water.
The hills rose on either side. The one on the right began to seem oppressive, steep and glowering. The peak was exposed rock where some long-ago storm or earthquake had stripped the thin topsoil away. And that exposed rock looked like a grim-faced head.
The trail continued to be pretty easy. Once upon a time there’d been running water, but now the narrow streambed was choked with dried-out weeds.
Astrid saw something move up to her right, up the sheer slope of what she was thinking of as Mount Grimface. She didn’t stop, but kept moving, looked and now saw nothing.
“Don’t get spooked,” she told herself. That kind of thing had happened a lot in the forest: a noise, a sudden movement, a flash of something or other. And inevitably she’d been afraid it was Drake. Just as inevitably it had been a bird or a squirrel or a skunk.
Now, though, the sense that she was being watched was hard to shake. As if Mount Grimface really was a face and it was watching her and not liking what it saw.
Ahead the path curved away to the left, and Astrid welcomed the chance to move away from the sinister mountain, but at the same time, as she took that curve, she had an almost overpowering sense that whatever had been watching her was now behind her.
And coming closer.
The urge to break into a full-on run was hard to resist. But she couldn’t look as if she was fleeing, panicking.
She came around a blind corner and almost plowed into him.
Astrid stopped. Stared. Screamed.
Screamed so that she forgot to draw her gun until she was already screaming and backing away, and finally out came the shotgun and her fingers fumbled for the trigger. She raised the gun to her shoulder, sighted down the barrel.
She aimed for the eyes. Those awful marble-size eyes in bloody-black sockets.
It was a boy. That fact took a few long beats to penetrate her consciousness. Not some giant monster, a boy. He had strong shoulders and a deep tan. There were cuts on his face, like the claw marks of a wild animal. They seemed fresh. And she saw blood on his fingernails.
His expression was impossible to read—the eyes, those awful chickpea-size eyes—made any emotion impossible to guess.
“Don’t move or I’ll blow your head off,” Astrid said.
The boy stopped walking. The eyes seemed unable to locate her, looking up and left and everywhere but straight at her.
“Are you real?” the boy asked.
“I’m real. So is this shotgun.” Astrid heard the quaver in her voice, but her grip on the gun was steady and she was keeping it on target. One squeeze of her right index finger and there’d be a loud noise and that horrifying head would explode like a water balloon.
“Are
you… Are you Astrid?”
She swallowed hard. How did it know her name? “Who are you?”
“Bradley. But everyone calls me Cigar.”
The gun lowered several inches of its own accord. “What? Cigar?”
The boy’s mouth made a sort of grin. The grin revealed broken and missing teeth.
“I see you,” Cigar said. He stretched out a bloody hand to her, but like a blind person feeling for something he couldn’t quite locate.
“Stay back,” she snapped, and the gun went to her shoulder again. “What happened to you?”
“I…” He tried another smile, but it twisted into a grimace and then a terrible groan, a cry of agony that stretched on and on before ending in a wild burst of laughter.
“Listen, Cigar, you need to tell me what happened,” Astrid insisted.
“Penny,” he whispered. “She showed me things. My hands were…” He raised his palms to look at them, but his eyes were elsewhere, and a moan came from deep in his throat.
“Penny did this?” Astrid lowered the gun. Halfway. Then, hesitantly, all the way down. But she did not sling it back over her shoulder. She kept her grip tight and her finger resting on the trigger guard.
“I like candy, see, and I did a bad thing and then the candy was in my arm and then I was eating it and oh, it tasted so good, you know, and Penny gave me more, so I ate it up and it hurt and there was blood, maybe, lots of blood, maybe, maybe.”
The tiny eyes swiveled suddenly to look past Astrid.
“It’s the little boy,” Cigar said.
Astrid glanced over her shoulder, just quick, just a glance, almost involuntary because she wasn’t ready to lower her guard yet, not ready to turn around. Her head was already turning back toward Cigar when she realized what she had seen.
Seen? Nothing much. A distortion. A twisting of the visual field.
She looked back. Nothing.
Then back to Cigar.
“What was that?”
“The little boy.” Cigar giggled and placed his hand over his mouth like he’d said a dirty word. Then in a low whisper, “The little boy.”
Astrid’s throat was tight. The flesh on her arms rose into goose bumps. “What little boy, Cigar?”
“He knows you,” Cigar said, very confidential, like he was telling a secret. “Screaming yellow hair. Stabby blue eyes. He knows you, he told me.”
Astrid tried to speak and couldn’t. Couldn’t ask the question. Couldn’t accept what the answer might be. But at last, strangled words came from her mouth.
“The little boy. Is his name Pete?”
Cigar reached to touch his own eye, but stopped. He looked for a moment as if he were listening to something, though there was nothing but the sounds of gentle breeze and grating grasshoppers. Then he nodded eagerly and said, “Little boy says: ‘Hello, sister.’”
OUTSIDE
SERGEANT DARIUS ASHTON was very good with a truck engine. This did not mean he was necessarily good with an air compressor. But his lieutenant said a mechanic was needed at a site around the far side of the dome.
“That’s the air base, Lieutenant,” Darius protested. “They don’t have an HVAC mechanic over there?”
“Not one with your security clearance,” the lieutenant said.
“A security clearance for an air conditioner?”
The lieutenant wasn’t a bad guy, young but not arrogant. He said, “Sergeant, I would have thought by now, with your long experience in uniform, you’d know better than to expect everything to make sense.”
Darius couldn’t argue with that. He saluted and turned on his heel. A cheerful female driver, a corporal who knew the drive well, was waiting behind the wheel of a Humvee. Darius loaded his tools in the back. How was he supposed to know what to bring if he didn’t even know what he was supposed to be fixing?
The corporal had done a tour in Kabul, something she and Darius had in common, so they talked about that on the long, circuitous drive. And they talked about this supposedly great new Cuban pitcher who had reached the United States on a raft. The Angels were going to sign him.
The drive went up the highway, then onto a series of gravel side roads. There was another way to reach the Evanston Air National Guard base, but it would mean going all the way to I-5, then back south. This path was bumpy and dusty but it was quicker.
Much of the drive was within sight of the bowl. Darius had gotten used to it. Ten miles high, twenty miles across. It looked like someone had dropped a small, smoothly polished moon down on the Southern California coastline.
But there was no crater, no fracture lines. It hadn’t landed; it hadn’t exploded; it had just suddenly existed. A gigantic terrarium.
“Been here long?” Darius asked, nodding at the dome.
“Just transferred in last month,” the corporal said. “I saw it on TV, like everyone else. But it’s something in person.”
“It is that.”
“Weird thinking there are kids in there.”
They pulled up at a facility that had obviously been recently built. It had all the usual obsessive military neatness and order. A dozen buildings in ruler-straight rows. A barracks, an officers’ quarters, a number of command trailers, a communications building bristling with dishes and antennae.
The base was a hive of activity. Men and women bustling back and forth with very busy expressions on their faces. No one was lounging or grabbing a smoke or chatting on the phone. There was a self-conscious sense of Very Important Stuff Happening.
The facility was ringed with chain link topped with extremely serious-looking razor wire. The gate was guarded by unsmiling military police. IDs were checked against a manifest showing that yes, they were both expected.
One of the MPs accompanied them to one of the trailers. The corporal peeled off and Darius stepped into a blast of air-conditioning.
A sergeant asked him again for his ID. Then he handed Darius a paper to sign. The paper required him to reveal nothing of the purpose of his visit, of the existence of the facility, of the work there, of any of the personnel assigned there.
There was a great deal of official-ese and some decidedly threatening language.
“You understand, Sergeant, that you are governed by this security protocol?”
“Yes, Sergeant. I do.”
“You understand that any violation will result in criminal prosecution?”
The word “will” had been emphasized, and not subtly.
“I believe I’m getting the message, Sarge.”
The sergeant smiled. “They keep a very tight lid. Report to building oh-one-four. Your driver will know where it is.”
The driver did.
Building 014 was half a mile from the rest of the camp, which put it a full mile away from the dome wall. It was a vast, hangar-style tin structure. Huge and imposing. It was painted the color of the surrounding desert.
Darius hefted his tool bag and was met at the door by an MP. One more ID check. Then Darius stepped inside the hangar.
What he saw made him stare. A half dozen trucks filled with dirt. A tower that looked like it had been assembled from leftover bits and pieces of a suspension bridge or maybe the Eiffel Tower.
The MP took him to a civilian in a construction worker’s helmet and handed him off. The civilian shook his hand and identified himself as “Charlie. Just Charlie. Sorry to drag you out here, but our head HVAC mechanic is on maternity leave, and her assistant managed to break an ankle surfing. You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
The question surprised Darius. “Why?”
“Because we are going deep. The unit we need you to look at is a blower at kilometer six.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means we’re going two miles down, my friend. Two clicks straight down and four clicks south. Kilometer six.”
Darius felt cold. “That would put you … up against the dome. Why… I mean, what…”
Charlie shrugged and said, “My friend, the first
thing you learn working here is don’t ask questions.”
The elevator ride down seemed endless.
And yet quicker than the narrow-gauge train that carried Darius along an impressive and oppressive tunnel, wide enough to accommodate two rail lines with space on either side. The tunnel was shored up at regular intervals with railroad ties.
Kilometer six turned out to be a cavern bigger than the hangar. The far end was formed by the barrier. Here it was black, not pearly gray.
“It was good luck finding this cave,” Charlie said. “Would have been a long, hard job carving it out. You know, usually we’d have a hundred guys down here. But as you can probably smell, the air is getting a bit thick.”
“That’s why I’m here, right?”
In the cave stood a tall scaffolding tilted at a strange, Leaning Tower of Pisa angle. Darius knew enough about machinery to recognize a drilling platform.
From this spot they were drilling farther still, down below the dome. Not a tunnel for humans. Just a round shaft into which a bomb could be lowered to the lowest point beneath the dome.
Charlie must have seen the look in Darius’s eyes. He gripped Darius’s arm and pulled him aside. They were alone, but Charlie whispered anyway. “Okay, you’re not a fool. You know what’s going on here. But you need to know that security watches everyone who comes in or out of this place. I mean, from now on your cell phone will be monitored, and your room may be bugged. Word to the wise.”
Darius nodded.
“What really happened to your HVAC guy?”
Charlie laughed mirthlessly. “Opened his mouth in a bar. Thirty minutes later the FBI picked him up as he was getting into his car.”
TWENTY-FOUR
14 HOURS, 2 MINUTES
ASTRID HAD MANAGED to get Cigar to follow her off the path. She worried that someone might come along—if she could get lost en route from the lake to Perdido Beach, so could others.
She found a place beside what had been the stream, hidden by a huge, dying rhododendron bush. She asked Cigar to sit down. She helped to move him into position to do so on a dirt ledge that almost formed a bench.