Too late.
He spun and shouted, “Look out!” Three of the coyotes, unobserved as the people all fixated on Pack Leader, attacked the rearmost kids.
There were screams of pain and terror. Screams that made Sanjit feel as if his own flesh were being torn.
Sanjit ran toward the back, but this was the signal for Pack Leader and two others to attack the front.
Everyone bolted, kids knocking one another down, stepping on one another, being knocked down in turn to cries and screams and pleas and the awful growls of the coyotes as they went after slow, defenseless children.
Sanjit fired. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
If the coyotes even noticed, they gave no sign.
He saw Mason going down beneath two growling beasts. The older girls were already far up the road. Keira turned, stared, her mouth wide in horror, and ran away.
Sanjit jumped in the air and landed with both feet on one of the coyotes. The animal rolled away and was on its feet again while Sanjit was still absorbing the landing. A kid or a coyote, he didn’t see which, knocked him down and a coyote was on him in a heartbeat, fangs snapping in his face.
BLAM!
The coyote’s right eye exploded outward and the beast collapsed atop Sanjit.
Two coyotes were fighting over Mason, like dogs fighting over a toy. Dead. Dead by now, dead.
He aimed, but badly, hands shaking, chest heaving.
BLAM!
One of the coyotes ran off with a child’s leg in its mouth.
Kids from the front, other kids from the back were being torn at by the coyotes. And the crowd, the herd—because that’s what they were now, a terrified herd no different from antelope panicked by a lion attack—ran as fast as they could.
There was nothing Sanjit could do.
Pack Leader stood with his legs braced wide. Something awful was in his jaws. He stared at Sanjit and growled.
Sanjit ran.
Diana glanced up at the sky. It was a habit now. A fearful habit.
It was a sphincter at the top of a black bowl. A fitting commentary on the FAYZ, Diana thought. A giant sphincter.
Justin held on to her as they walked, and she to him.
Which is worse? she wondered. To reach the mine shaft before darkness falls? Or not?
She had dragged her feet and stalled every step of the way on the theory that whatever the gaiaphage wanted, she was for the opposite. But then Drake reemerged and any slight delay meant pain.
He drove them forward with his whip. Like some ancient slave master. Like some long-ago Egyptian beating a Hebrew, or a not-so-long-ago overseer whipping a black slave.
But she saw that he, too, glanced up at the sky. He, too, was afraid of the coming darkness.
They had reached the ghost town. There wasn’t much to it anymore. Some sticks and boards. Suggestions of places where a saloon and a hotel and a stable might once have been. There was a better-maintained building set apart from the others, and it was from this building, through a creaky door, that Brianna stepped.
Diana almost fainted with relief.
“Hey, guys,” Brianna said. “Out for a walk?”
“You,” Drake hissed.
“Weren’t you expecting me?” she asked. She made an embarrassed face. “Wasn’t I invited?”
Drake snapped his whip and wrapped it around Justin. He jerked the terrified boy through the air and held him over his head.
“Move and I smash his brains out,” Drake said.
“And then what?” Brianna asked in a silky whisper.
“Then Diana.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so, Drake Worm Hand; I don’t think you brought her all this way to kill her.” Then, to Diana: “What do you think, Diana? Has he told you what he wants?”
She was stalling. Diana knew it, but did Drake? And if someone as headlong and impetuous as Brianna was stalling for time it meant she had an ally. Someone obviously slower than herself.
“It’s my baby he wants,” Diana said.
Brianna made a fake astonished face. “Is that true, Drake? Is it because you love babies?”
Drake shot a look to the path that led from town up the hill and to the mine shaft. He was only a few hundred yards away from the opening. He would be confident about finding his way that far in the dark. But he couldn’t be sure that Brianna would care about Justin. Even slowed down by darkness, Brianna could probably outrun him and cut him up.
“If you trip in the dark, Brianna, it’ll be all over for you. Trip at a hundred miles an hour, hit a rock? It’ll kill you. If it doesn’t, I will.”
He still held Justin aloft.
“Let me down,” the boy cried pitifully. “Please let me down. I’m scared up here.”
“Hear that, Brianna? He’s scared. He’s scared I might let him down too fast. Ouchie.”
Brianna nodded like she was considering this. Stalling. She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Stalling.
Diana saw her eyes dart to her right. Who was coming? Who was she waiting for? Brianna must have passed them on her way here. She must have chosen not to take Drake on alone and instead moved to block his path while reinforcement was on its way.
That indicated someone a bit wiser than her. Sam. Or maybe Dekka. Not Orc. Sam or Dekka, they were the only two who could help Brianna in a fight with Drake and be smart enough and carry enough influence to convince her to wait like this.
Diana dared to hope. If it was Dekka, she could stop Justin from falling. If it was Sam maybe, at long last, he would rid the universe of Whip Hand.
There came a sound.
Coming from the gloom on the ghost town’s long-forgotten main street.
Diana saw the wicked smile of triumph on Brianna’s face.
Brianna drew her machete.
And from the darkness walked—limped—a small, barefoot girl in a sundress.
OUTSIDE
“PROFESSOR STANEVICH?”
“Yes.” The voice was clipped. Annoyed. Heavily accented. “Who are you? This is a private number.”
“Professor Stanevich, listen to me, please,” Connie Temple begged. “Please. We appeared on CNN together once. You probably don’t remember. I’m one of the family members.”
A pause on the other end. She was at an ancient, graffiti-tagged pay phone outside a gas station minimart in Arroyo Grande. She couldn’t use her own cell phone for fear of betraying Darius. She hadn’t used Stanevich’s office phone number for fear that it, too, might be tapped.
“How did you get this number?” Stanevich asked again.
“The internet can be very useful. Please listen to me. I have information. I need you to explain something to me.”
Stanevich sighed heavily into the phone. “I am with my children at the Dave and the Buster. It is very noisy.” Another sigh, and sure enough, Connie could hear the sounds of video games and clattering dishes. “Tell me your information.”
“The person who gave me this information is in very serious trouble if it gets back to him. The army has dug a secret tunnel; it’s on the eastern edge of the dome. It’s very deep. And security is very, very tight.”
“They are presumably drilling to see the extent of this recent change in the energy signature—”
“No, Professor, with all due respect. There are nuclear response teams here. And the tunnel they’ve drilled is thirty-two inches in diameter.”
Nothing but the sounds of Dave & Buster’s.
Connie pressed on. “They don’t need a shaft that size to send down a probe or a camera. And my source says there is a rail descending.”
Still no response. Then, when she was sure he’d decided to hang up: “What you are suggesting is impossible.”
“It’s not impossible, and you know it. You’re one of the people who warned that breaching the dome might be dangerous. You’re one of the reasons people are so scared of this thing.” Connie held her breath. Had she pushed too far?
“I was discussing various theoretical pos
sibilities,” Stanevich huffed. “I am not responsible for the nonsense from the media.”
“Professor. I want you to discuss the theoretical possibilities of this. Of a nuclear weapon… Please. If it will release the children, then that’s one thing. But—”
“Of course it will not release the children.” He snorted a laugh into her ear. “It will do one of two things. Neither of them involves peacefully releasing the children inside.”
“The two things. What are they?” A highway patrol car pulled in and she gripped the phone hard. The car slid into a parking place. The patrolman looked at her. Recognizing her from TV?
“It depends,” Stanevich equivocated. “There are two theories of the so-called J waves. I won’t bore you with the details—you wouldn’t understand anyway.”
The patrolman got out. Stretched. Locked his car and went into the minimart.
“A nuclear device would release a great deal of energy. Which might overload the dome, might blow it up. Think of it as a hair dryer, let us say, yes, a hair dryer that runs on one-hundred-and-ten-volt electricity. And suddenly it is plugged into ten thousand volts.”
He sounded as detached as if he was lecturing a room full of undergraduates. Pleased with his hair dryer analogy.
“It would be blown apart. Combust.”
“Yes,” Connie said tersely. “Wouldn’t that also blow up everything nearby?”
“Oh, certainly,” Stanevich said. “Not the device itself, you understand, not if it is buried deep. But a twenty-mile-wide sphere that suddenly overloads? It would likely obliterate everything inside. And perhaps, depending on various factors, destroy an area around the dome.”
Connie’s stomach was in her throat. “You said two possibilities.”
“Ah,” Stanevich said. “The other is more interesting. It may be that the barrier is not overloaded. It may be that it can convert the energy. It may take the sudden release of energy and essentially store it. Soak it up like an incredibly efficient battery. Or, let us say, a sponge.” He made a dissatisfied sound. “It’s not a perfect analogy. No, far from it. Ah, here it is: the barrier’s energy signature is changing, yes? Weakening. So imagine a starving man who at last gets a good, healthy meal.”
“If this happens, the absorbing thing. What does that do to the barrier? Maybe it makes it easier to get through.”
“Or it strengthens it,” Stanevich said. “Alters it in ways we cannot yet predict. It will be fascinating, though. More than one PhD dissertation will result.”
Connie hung up the phone. She walked quickly to her car.
Her head was buzzing. Stanevich was as much an ass as when he’d been on CNN with her. But now his willingness to speculate was welcome, even if the details were horrifying.
There was time to stop this. She would make a public stink. She just had to figure out how to do it. Talk to the media, surely, but how to best bring pressure on the army and the government to stop this reckless madness?
She drove up the 101 and practically ran into a column of army vehicles coming toward her. Trucks. Flatbeds loaded with trailers.
Two miles from Perdido Beach she saw the flashing lights of police cars. A roadblock. They were diverting traffic off the highway, onto a side road, and sending it back south.
Connie pulled onto the shoulder and stopped, breathing hard. Of course they saw her. She couldn’t outrun them; the CHP would pull her over and wonder why she had run, and then there would be explanations demanded.
She pulled up to the roadblock. Highway patrol and army MPs were running the roadblock together. She knew the MPs.
She leaned out of the window. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Mrs. Temple,” the corporal said, “there’s been a bad chemical spill up the road. A truck carrying nerve agent.”
Connie stared into the young face of the corporal. “That’s your story?”
“Ma’am?”
“This road’s been closed for almost a year. And your story is that some trucker carrying deadly chemicals did what? Took a wrong turn and crashed?”
The MP’s lieutenant stepped up. “Mrs. Temple, it’s for your own safety. We’re pulling everything back until we figure out how to contain the spill.”
Connie laughed. This was their cover story? Was she supposed to believe them? It would be a strain to even pretend to believe them.
“Just take the side road here,” the lieutenant said, and pointed with a sort of karate-chop hand. Then, in a voice that was at once compassionate and hard, he added, “It’s not optional, ma’am. You know the Oceano County Airport? That’s the rendezvous. I’m sure the soldiers there will fill you in on all the details.”
TWENTY-NINE
10 HOURS, 27 MINUTES
SAM LEAPED FROM the top deck straight down onto the dock and raced toward the onrushing refugees.
None too gently he pushed them aside and ran on through, up past the Pit, up to the gravel road, up to where he could hear snarling and a gun being fired.
Sanjit plowed into him and for a second Sam didn’t know who he was. He held him out at arm’s length, said, “Stay out of the way,” and took off for the scene of slaughter.
That he was too late was apparent. The coyotes weren’t killing at this point; they were feeding and dismembering.
He raised his palms and a beam of searingly intense green-white light shot forth. The beam caught part of a body and the head of a coyote. The coyote’s head ballooned like a time-lapse video of a burning marshmallow.
Sam swept the beam up the road to where coyotes were already racing away, dragging bodies or pieces of bodies along through the dirt. He caught a second coyote in the hindquarters, which erupted in flame. The coyote howled in pain, fell, tried to keep running with just its two front legs, and lay down on its side to die.
The rest were out of range by then, some even abandoning their meat.
Sanjit came running up to stop beside a heaving, panting Sam.
A boy, maybe twelve, unrecognizable but alive and crying pitiably, lay in two pieces in a bush off the road.
Sam took a deep breath, marched to him, took careful aim, and burned a neat hole in the side of his head. Then he widened his beam and played it over the corpse until there was nothing but ashes.
He shot an angry look at Sanjit. “Anything you have to say about that?”
Sanjit shook his head. He couldn’t form a complete thought. Sam wondered if he’d be sick. He wondered if he himself would be.
“If it was me,” Sanjit began, and ran out of words.
That blunted Sam’s anger. But only a little. This was his fault. It was his job to protect.... Why hadn’t he sent Brianna off months ago to exterminate the last coyotes? Why hadn’t he thought to send a patrol up the road to meet the inevitable refugees?
He now faced the task of cremating the rest of the dead. There was no way he could let brothers and sisters and friends see what the coyotes had left behind. These mangled, barely recognizable slabs of meat could not be what loved ones carried with them in memory for the rest of their lives.
“Why are you here?” Sam demanded as he began his grisly work. “Did you bring these kids here?”
“Lana sent me.”
“Explain.” He didn’t know Sanjit well. Just knew that he had pulled off something close to a miracle in flying a helicopter from the island to Perdido Beach.
“Bad stuff in Perdido Beach,” Sanjit began. “Penny somehow managed to cement Caine. They’re going to try to free him, but last I saw Caine he was crying and having his cemented hands beaten on with a hammer.”
Sam’s reaction surprised him: his first feeling was worry, and even outrage, on Caine’s behalf.
Caine had been an enemy from the start. Caine was responsible for battle after bloody battle. He had come close to killing Sam on more than one occasion. Maybe, Sam reflected, he was reacting to the fact that Caine was, after all, his brother.
But no. No, it was that Caine was strong. And however much of a power
-mad jerk he was, Caine would have tried to keep some kind of order. He would have—probably—worked to avoid panic. Always for his own reasons, but still…
“So, Albert’s in charge,” Sam said thoughtfully, and burned a foot resting almost comically upright.
“Albert bailed,” Sanjit said. “Quinn talked to him as he was heading to the island with three girls.”
This was worse news than the incapacitation of Caine. A lot worse. There were three major powers in the FAYZ: Albert, Caine, and Sam. Three people whose combination of power and authority and skills might have kept things together for a few days or a week until … until some kind of miracle happened.
Albert, Caine, and Sam. That was the foundation of the stability and peace of the last four months.
“Did you see Astrid?” Sam asked.
“Astrid? No. I don’t even know if I would recognize her; I’ve only seen her once, months ago.”
“She went to warn you guys about the stain. And offer my … my light-hanging services.”
“Well, I guess I’m relieved that I’m not the only one off on a wild-goose chase.”
Sam looked sharply at him. There was some steel in this kid. He had been the last one to run from the coyotes. And judging by the fat pistol in his hand and the discarded weapons lying along the road, he’d been the only one to really give them a fight.
And he hadn’t quibbled when Sam did the hard but merciful thing.
“Sanjit, right?” Sam said. He held out his hand.
Sanjit took it. “I know who you are, Sam. Everyone does.”
“Well, you’re with us for now.” He jerked his head up at the sky.
“I have a family,” Sanjit said. “I have to get back.”
“Brave is good,” Sam said. “Stupid is another thing. Those coyotes don’t need light to find you. You’re a friend of Lana’s, right?”
Sanjit nodded. “Yeah. We live at Clifftop with her.”
“The Healer has you living with her?” he asked incredulously. “I’m learning all kinds of things today.”