“I guess she’s my girlfriend,” Sanjit said.
Sam fired at what looked like a chunk of hamburger wearing a part of a T-shirt.
“If you’re with Lana, then your family is as safe as anyone. You getting killed won’t help them. You’re with us now. Just one thing: talk freely to Edilio, but no one else. Clear? If kids hear that Albert has bailed…” He shook his head. “I thought better of Albert than that.”
It left a bad taste in his mouth, Albert running away. No doubt it made good business sense. But the word “treason” was on the tip of his tongue.
Backstabber.
Coward.
Astrid was on her way to offer an alliance with a beaten and humiliated “king” and a cowardly “businessman.”
He shoved away the image of the coyotes finding her before she could reach town. There were thoughts too painful to allow.
He had to think, and think clearly, not let his mind be seized and paralyzed by lurid images of Astrid brought down in some lonely place by coyotes, or zekes, or Drake.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Are you okay?” Sanjit asked.
“Okay?” Sam shook his head. “Nope. I’m not. The guys I was counting on to be with me aren’t. It was already hopeless. Now?”
“Lana’s still there,” Sanjit said. “And Quinn.”
“Quinn?” Sam frowned. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“Lana put him in charge. He’s got his people with him.”
Sam nodded, distracted. He was seeing a chessboard in his mind. Most of the pieces he might have played, the powers that might have helped, his bishop sand knights and rooks, were all down or missing. Dekka, Brianna, Jack, Albert, possibly Caine, all down or missing. His steady knight, Edilio, would have to watch over the lake. Which left Sam with pawns.
On the other side Drake. Maybe Penny. The coyotes.
And the opposing king, the gaiaphage, who was so well protected he might be impossible to reach, let alone destroy.
“What was that TV show?” Sam asked, rubbing his face to clear away the smoke of burning bodies. “The one where they vote you off the island?”
“Survivor?”
“Yeah. ‘Outwit, Outplay, Outlast.’ Right?”
“I guess,” Sanjit said doubtfully.
“Outwitted and outplayed. That’s me, Sanjit. You just joined the losing team. I’ve got nothing left. And pretty soon? I’ll be blind.”
“No. Not you, Sam. You’re the only one who won’t be.”
“Sammy suns?” Sam laughed derisively. “They might as well be candles.”
“In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,” Sanjit said.
“In the dark the one guy with a candle is an easy target,” Sam countered.
One thing was crystal clear to Sam: his job was not to sit here and protect his charges at the lake. That was a losing move. That was him waiting for the enemy to gather its forces to come for him. Maybe he’d been outwitted and outplayed. He had not yet been outlasted.
Without another word to Sanjit he headed back to the lake.
Diana saw Penny and her knees gave way. She sat down hard in the dirt. She couldn’t breathe.
No, she mouthed soundlessly.
Penny looked at Drake first. At his terrible tentacle. At the little boy suspended in the air. She glanced curiously at Brianna, like she wasn’t quite sure who she was.
Then she looked at Diana, and her eyes widened with pleasure. Her smile started small and grew and grew and became a laugh of pure delight. She clapped her hands together.
“Too good,” Penny said. “Too, too good.”
Diana’s mind had stopped working. Thoughts would not form. Reactions would not take shape. Fear took her. A low keening sound came from deep in her throat.
This was no longer about pain: terror was here.
Drake shot a look at Penny. “Who are you?”
“I’m Penny,” she said. “You used to push me out of your way back at Coates. I was nobody to you.”
“You have a beef with me?” Drake asked, just a little worried.
Penny smiled. “Oh, you were just a jerk, Drake. Nothing special. Whereas Diana…” She laughed her demented, delighted laugh. “I absolutely love Diana. She took such good care of me on the island.”
“Leave me alone,” Diana heard herself beg, like hearing someone else, not like the words were coming from her, because she had no words in her brain; she could see what was coming; she knew what was coming.
God save me, Diana begged, God save me, save me, save me.
“How’s the baby, Diana?” Penny asked, her voice slithering, her eyes bright. “Do you want a boy or a girl?”
And suddenly the baby woke up, and its claws came out like the claws of a tiger, and its insect face with saber mandibles ripped at her insides, tearing through the flesh of her belly, tearing out of her, a wild animal, nothing human there, but no, that wasn’t true; it had Caine’s face, his face but smeared across a soulless ant face and the claws and the pain, and she screamed and screamed.
Diana was facedown in the dirt. Penny’s bare feet—one of them crusted with bloody mud—were in front of her.
There was no monster baby.
Her belly had not been torn open.
Diana cried into the dirt.
“Cool, huh?” Penny said.
“What did you do to her?” It was Drake, fascinated.
“Oh, she just saw something. She saw her baby as a monster. And she saw it rip her apart from the inside. Felt it, too,” Penny said.
“You’re a freak?” Drake asked.
Penny laughed. “The freakiest of the freaks.”
“Don’t hurt the baby,” Drake warned. He tossed Justin aside, ready to take this interloper on if necessary. The boy landed hard but without breaking anything.
Penny was not intimidated by Whip Hand. “What’s in there?” She indicated the narrow path leading up to the mine shaft.
Drake didn’t answer. His whip was ready to slash at her. But he hesitated, unsure if she was friend or foe.
“I’ve felt it since I got close,” Penny said, looking past Drake up at the path. “I was just wandering. Going nowhere. And then, little by little, I realized I was going somewhere.” She said this in a singsong voice. “I was going here.” Then, like a person waking out of a dream, she said, “It’s that thing Caine went to, isn’t it? The Darkness. The thing that gave you that Whip Hand.”
Drake said, “Would you like me to introduce you?”
“Yes. I would,” Penny said very seriously.
Diana had stolen tear-distorted glances at Brianna, who seemed content to let this go on, so long as it ate up more time. Now Brianna spoke. “I don’t think you two are going anywhere.”
She flew at Drake.
But Diana had been there at times when Brianna moved at top speed. When she moved at top speed you didn’t see her arms or legs; you didn’t see her draw her deadly machete. Diana saw those things now and knew that the Breeze had slowed.
But she was still fast.
The machete swung and Drake’s whip was cut in half. Five feet of flesh-colored tentacle lay in the dirt like a dead python.
Brianna spun, came back around fast, but with her eyes carefully down on the ground, cautious, distracted, and suddenly she cried out, skidded, leaped across something Diana could not see.
Penny had struck!
Drake picked up his severed tentacle and pushed the two stump ends together. He looked less furious than peevish. The injury was at worst a temporary inconvenience.
Brianna was jumping around like a crazy person, leaping from place to place, focused like mad on every move, arms windmilling for balance.
“What is she doing?” Drake asked.
Penny laughed. “Trying not to fall into the lava. And her friend, Dekka? The one she was expecting to show up? She’s out there somewhere....” She jerked her head back toward the night-dark desert. “Trying to get her little
brain back to reality.”
Diana saw wary concern on Drake’s face. It was beginning to occur to him that perhaps Penny might be more than he could handle. “Let’s go. The gaiaphage is waiting.”
“Do you think I’m cute?” Penny asked him.
Drake froze, stood stock-still, and now the look on his face was more than just wary.
“Yeah,” Drake said. “Yeah. You’re cute.”
His tentacle had grown back, the stumps melding quickly together, smoothing as if he was made out of clay and an invisible hand was pinching the edges together, then rolling the whole thing like a Play-Doh snake. He raised the whip high and snapped it in front of Diana’s face.
“Now move,” he said.
Diana watched Brianna, still leaping desperately, trapped in some illusion of danger.
And she saw the little boy, Justin, crawl ahead of her into the darkness.
Dekka lay sobbing in the darkness. She could barely see her hands in front of her face.
She didn’t know what had happened to her. Just that in an instant she had been frozen, completely immobile. Paralyzed.
She’d been covered in a translucent white goo, like clay or Silly Putty. And it had coated every single inch of her body. It had pushed its way into her ears. Like invisible fingers were poking it in there, filling her right up to the eardrums.
So that she could hear nothing but the beating of her own heart.
So that she could hear the gristle in her neck as she squirmed helplessly.
The white putty was pushed into her nose. So deep, up into her sinuses. She had to breathe through her mouth, but as soon as she opened her mouth the white stuff filled her mouth and pushed its way into the space between her teeth and her cheeks, under her tongue, then down her throat. She gagged but it didn’t matter; the stuff filled her mouth and throat and she could feel it cold and dense and heavy in her lungs.
She screamed but no sound came out.
In some panic-free corner of her mind, some small remnant of Dekka knew this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. She knew it was Penny who had done this, who had filled her mind with this vision.
But she could not breathe. Could. Not.
She was buried alive in it, buried alive, and her brain screamed in a way that her body no longer could.
Had to be an illusion. Had to be a trick. But did it really? Was she so sure it wasn’t real in this nightmare world?
She couldn’t breathe, but she realized, too, that she wasn’t dying. Her heart still beat. She was covered and filled with the white stuff, and she should be dying but she wasn’t.
Then she felt the white stuff harden. It wasn’t putty anymore but fast-drying clay. Already her teeth bit on something as hard as porcelain.
Then the bugs were inside of her.
The bugs.
Not real—she knew that in some tiny, cowering corner of her mind—couldn’t be real; the bugs had been eliminated. They’d been made nonexistent. So there was no way they could be inside her again, no way they could be swarming through her guts and no Sam to cut them out and let them out; she was trapped inside this porcelain tomb and they were inside her again.
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
Suddenly, all of it was gone.
She was on dirt. Air was in her nose. Her eyes opened.
A girl had stood there and said, “That’s a new one for me. Did you like it?”
And Dekka, trembling like a leaf ready to fall, said nothing. Just breathed. Breathed.
“Don’t come after me,” Penny had said.
And Dekka had not.
THIRTY
10 HOURS, 4 MINUTES
“RING THE BELL,��� Sam said.
Edilio nodded at Roger, who ran off to ring the bell atop the marina office.
“What are you going to do?” Edilio asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were gay?” Sam demanded.
Edilio looked like he’d been punched. But he recovered quickly, to go to an expression that was half-wary, half-embarrassed. “You got enough stuff to deal with.”
“That’s not something I have to ‘deal with,’ Edilio. My girlfriend lost, the world ending, having to go out there after Drake, that’s stuff I have to deal with. Me finding out you’ve got someone to care about like that? How is that something I have to deal with?”
“I don’t know, I just… I mean, it took me a while to kind of figure it out. You know.”
“Does everyone except me know?” Sam asked. He realized this was a stupid concern; this was hardly the time to worry about seeming out of touch. But no one had been closer to him than Edilio, almost from the first day. It bothered him to think everyone knew something he didn’t. It hurt his feelings.
“No, man,” Edilio reassured him. “No. And it’s not about me being, you know, ashamed or whatever. It’s that … look, I have a lot of responsibility. I have to have people trust me. And some kids are still going to call me a faggot or whatever.”
“Seriously? We’re about to be plunged into eternal darkness and you think those kids out there are going to worry about who you like?”
Edilio didn’t answer. And Sam had the feeling maybe Edilio knew more than he did on the subject. He let it go.
“I gotta tell you the truth, man,” Sam said, shaking his head slowly, side to side, as he spoke. “I don’t see a way out of this. I don’t even see the starting point for a way out of this. I don’t expect us to survive this.”
Edilio nodded. Like he knew this. Like he was ready for it to be said.
“So in case this is it, Edilio, in case I go out there and don’t come back, I want to say thank you. You’ve been a brother to me. My true brother.” Sam carefully avoided looking at Edilio.
“Yeah, well, we’re not done for yet,” Edilio said gruffly. Then, more pointedly, “So you’re going?”
“Everything you said before is right,” Sam said. “We can’t afford me getting killed. Not in the short run. But once I turn on some lights we’re still done for if we don’t find a way to turn this around. We can’t grow crops or fish or survive living in the dark. Next thing that happens is people will start setting fires. Perdido Beach will burn all the way down next time. The forest will burn. Everything. Kids won’t live in the dark.”
He was interrupted by the loud ringing of the bell. When it was finished he said, “I’m not the only one scared of the dark, Edilio. Anyway, this is just part of something bigger. Something is happening. I don’t know what, but something big and … and final. So, yeah, short-term I’m important. But if I want to be important long-term, I need to go out there and find a way.”
“You going to talk to everyone?” Edilio asked.
“Yeah.”
Barely visible in the darkness, mere shadows on the water, the boats rocked and drifted lazily. The Sammy suns shining through portholes were the only light. Bodies could be seen only when they passed before one of those lights.
“Then make sure you tell them the truth.”
“Toto!” Sam yelled down. “Get up here.”
When Toto was on deck Sam lit a Sammy sun just over his head. Like a gloomy spotlight. It revealed him, Edilio, and Toto.
“Toto’s here so you know I’m telling you what I believe is true.” Sam shouted to be heard across the water. “First: I don’t think we have to worry about Drake here at the lake. He’s gone—for now, at least.”
Toto said, “He believes it,” but in a whisper.
“Speak up,” Edilio said.
“He believes it!”
“So you’re all coming back ashore. We have kids who’ve come here from Perdido Beach. They’ve lost people on the way here, and we’re going to take them in and care for them.”
Some grumbling and a couple of defiant, shouted questions came out of the dark.
“Because good people help people who need to be helped. That’s why,” Sam yelled back. “Listen. Things are bad in Perdido Beach. It seems Caine is out of business.
And so is Albert.”
“He believes it!”
“So that’s bad. Astrid is…” Emotion clenched his throat but he pushed forward. He had nothing to hide, he realized. It wasn’t like anyone didn’t know he was worried about her. “She’s out there in the dark somewhere. And so are Brianna and Dekka and Orc. Jack, well, we don’t know if he’ll make it.”
“True,” Toto said. Then, louder, “True!”
“Drake has Diana and Justin, who is just a little kid, and we don’t know for sure what Drake is up to. Whatever it is, I believe it’s connected to this stain that is blotting out the light.”
Toto just nodded and no one seemed to care.
Sam looked up. The stain was no longer blotting out the light. It had finished its work. The small circle of darkening blue had turned flat black.
“So, I don’t have some big plan. I just don’t.” He repeated it, feeling amazed that it was true. “I have a reputation as the guy who comes up with a way out of trouble. Well, I don’t have that now.”
Someone was crying, loudly enough to be heard. Someone else shushed him.
“That’s okay. Cry if you want to cry, because I feel like crying with you.”
“Yes,” Toto said.
“You can be sad and you can be scared. But we built this place and kept ourselves going by hanging in there together. Right?”
No one answered.
“Right?” Sam demanded more insistently.
“Damn right,” a voice called back.
“So we hang together still. Edilio is here. You listen to Edilio.”
“But you’re the leader!” a different voice cried, and others seconded it. “We need you! Sam!”
Sam looked down, not pleased, really, but maybe a little gratified. At the same time, though, he was beginning to realize something. It took a few moments to form coherently in his mind. He had to check it against what he knew, because at first it seemed wrong.
Finally he said, “No. No. I’m a lousy leader.”
There was a pause before Toto said, “He believes it.”
Sam laughed, amazed that he really did believe it. “No, I’m a lousy leader,” he repeated. “Look, I mean well. And I have powers. But it’s Albert who kept people fed and alive. And up here it’s Edilio who really runs things. Even Quinn, he’s a better leader than me. Me? I get pissed off when you need me, and then I pout when you don’t. No. Edilio’s a leader. I … I don’t know what I am, except for being the guy who can make light shoot out of his hands.”