“Shut up,” Penny snapped.
“No,” Brittney chided in a voice dripping with sincerity. “We mustn’t fight amongst ourselves.”
“We mustn’t?” Penny mocked her. “Shut up until Drake comes back.” Then, not happy with the silence from Brittney, silence that sounded like disapproval, Penny said, “I don’t take orders from anyone. Not you. Not Drake. Not even the whatever you call it.” But she licked her lips nervously as she said it.
“The gaiaphage,” Brittney said. She laughed, not cruelly, but with a knowing condescension. “You’ll see.”
Penny was already “seeing.” Not that she could see anything, not even a finger held right up to her eye, but she could feel the power of it. They had reached the entrance to the mine shaft. The darkness, already absolute, was now tight around them.
It was easier to find their way, just to feel for the timbers along the side. But harder to breathe.
A low moan escaped from Diana.
Penny had a fleeting impulse to give her something to be scared of. But that was the problem: fear was the very air they were breathing now.
“There are some hard places,” Brittney warned. “There’s a big, big drop. It will break your legs all up if you fall.”
Penny shook her head, a gesture no one could see. “No way. No way. Done that, not doing it again.”
Brittney’s voice was silky. “You could always leave.”
“You think I …” Penny had to struggle to take the next breath. “You think I won’t?”
“You won’t,” Brittney said. “You’re going to the place you always wanted to be.”
“No one tells me—” Penny snarled. But the defiance died in midsentence. She tried again. “No one…”
“Careful,” Brittney said smugly. “This next section is all jumbled-up rock. You’ll have to crawl over it.” Then, in that weird singsong voice she got from time to time, she said, “Crawl on our knees, on our knees we crawl to our lord.”
Brianna was breathing hard without moving.
The darkness, it was her kryptonite. Couldn’t use super-speed when you couldn’t see where you were going.
So dark. It was actually worse than the images Penny had put in her head. Those had been cool in a way. This, though, this was just nothing.
Just nothing nothing nothingness.
Well, not total nothing, now that she thought about it. When she held the machete up in front of her face there was the tangy smell of steel. She drew her shotgun and there was the feel of the short stock and the smell of gunpowder residue.
She could imagine the muzzle flash. It would be loud.
Bright, too.
Now there was a thought. She had what? Twelve rounds?
Yeah. Interesting.
There were sounds, too. She could hear them all up the path. Probably at the mine shaft entrance by now.
Brianna could feel the dark presence of the gaiaphage. She wasn’t immune to that dark weight on her soul. But she wasn’t paralyzed by it. She felt the gaiaphage, but it didn’t frighten her. It was like a warning, like a terrible deep voice saying, “Stay away, stay away!” But Brianna didn’t scare worth a damn. She heard the warning; she felt the malice behind it; she knew it wasn’t a fake or a joke; she knew it represented a force of great power and deep evil.
But Brianna wasn’t wired the way most people were. She’d known that about herself—and about other people—for some time. Since even before the FAYZ, but much more now since she had become the Breeze.
She remembered once when she was young. How old was she then? Maybe three? Her and some older kids, that boy and his stupid sister who used to live three houses down. And they said, “We’re going to sneak into the old restaurant that burned up.”
It was a big old Italian restaurant. It looked half-normal from the outside except there was yellow police tape across the charred front door.
The two kids, she had no idea what their names were, tried to get little Brianna to be spooked. “Oh, look, that’s where some guy burned up. His ghost is probably haunting this place. Boo!”
She hadn’t been scared. Actually she’d been disappointed when she realized there was no ghost.
Then came the rats. There must have been two dozen of them, at least. They came scurrying out like they were being chased, rushing from the burned-out kitchen into the smoke-stinking dining room where the three kids were and the Olafsons—that was their name, Jane and Todd Olafson; no wonder she didn’t remember it—those two had screamed and run for it. The girl, Jane, had tripped and cut her knee pretty badly.
But Brianna had not run. She’d stood her ground with her talking Woody doll in one hand. She remembered one of the rats had stopped and cocked its rat face to look at her. Like it couldn’t believe she wasn’t running. Like it wanted to say, “Hey, kid, I’m a huge rat: why aren’t you running?”
And she had wanted to say, “Because you’re just a stupid rat.”
She felt her way step by step now. Way too slow for a normal person, let alone the Breeze.
“Oh, I feel you, old dark and scary,” she muttered. “But you’re just a stupid rat.”
Sam could look back and see a string of ten lights behind him. The line they made wobbled a bit but it was basically straight. Of course, he could no longer see the lake or its firefly lights.
He wondered about all the others out in this terrible darkness. Some maybe had flashlights going slowly dim. Some might have built fires. But many were just walking into darkness. Scared. But not stopping.
Walking into darkness.
His feet were going up a hill. He allowed it. Maybe he would see something from higher up. It was strange. He wished Astrid was here to talk to about how strange it was to move like this, blind, feeling a hill but not seeing it, not knowing was he near the top or not even close?
Everything was about feel now. He felt the slope with his ankles rather than seeing it with his eyes. He felt it in his forward lean. When the angle increased he was caught by surprise and stumbled. But then it would lessen and that, too, would catch him by surprise.
He hung a Sammy sun. It took him a while to make sense of his immediate surroundings. For one thing, there was an old rusted beer can.
For another he was less than six feet from what might be a sheer drop. It might have killed him if he’d gone off. Then again, maybe it was only a two-foot drop. Or six. He stood at the edge and listened hard. He could almost hear the emptiness of that space. It sounded big. It felt huge. And maybe he could develop those senses someday. But not now, not right now at the edge of a one- or ten- or hundred-foot drop.
He picked up the rusted beer can and dropped it over the edge.
It fell for perhaps a full second before it hit something.
And then it fell some more.
Stopped.
Sam breathed and the sound of his own breath seemed dramatic in the darkness.
He was going to have to backtrack down this hill. Or risk taking a long fall. He turned carefully, slowly, a one-eighty. He was pretty sure that the lake was blocked from view by the bulk of the hill. But he wasn’t absolutely sure. A single point of light appeared. It was as small as a star, much dimmer, and orange, not white.
A single distant point of barely visible light. Probably a bonfire in Perdido Beach. Or out in the desert. Or even out on the island. Or maybe it was just his imagination.
The sight of it wrung a sigh from Sam. It didn’t make the dark less dark; it made the dark seem vast. Endless. The tiny point of light served only to emphasize the totality of the darkness.
Sam started back down the hill. It took all his willpower to turn left when he reached the lowest light on the hill and move toward the ghost town.
Or where he thought, hoped, pretended the ghost town might be.
“Aaaahhh, aaaaahhh, aaaahhhh.”
Dekka cried into the dirt. A despairing sound. She cried and gasped in air mixed with dirt and cried again.
Penny had taken her
most terrible fear—that the bugs could return—and she had doubled it. Dekka would rather die than endure it. Rather die a thousand times. She would beg for death before she would live through it again.
She heard someone crying and then screaming and then babbling, all three mixed up together, all of it coming from her own mouth.
Trapped and eaten alive.
Eaten from the inside out, forever, no end, trapped inside seamless white stone, alabaster, a tomb that went inside her, immobilized her so that she couldn’t even lash out, couldn’t move as they ate her insides…
Never let it happen again.
Never.
Would kill herself first.
She clutched dirt in her hands, squeezed it like she was holding on to reality. The dirt ran through her fingers and she gathered more and again it got away and she grabbed at more and more, needing something to hold on to, and something to hurt. Needing to feel her body move and not be in that terrible blank white stone prison.
She was just a girl. Just some girl. Just this girl with the stupid name of Dekka. She had fought enough. And what for? For emptiness. For loneliness. All of it came to here. To this nothing. To clutching at sand and jibbering like a crazy person, beaten.
Die here, Dekka. It’s okay if you do. It’s okay to just lie here in the dark and let your eyelids close, because there’s nothing more to see, Dekka; do you hear me? Do you, Dekka, because there’s nothing for you but fear. And death is better because death is the end of fear, isn’t it?
Quiet. Peace.
It wouldn’t be suicide. That was the thing you could never do, right? Never kill yourself. But let yourself go? Where was the sin in that?
“You want me to explain how I could wish for that, God? Tell you what, hit the back button and play the last hour … no, no, the last, what’s it been, almost a year?
“Not even enough. Come on, God, you want to see, right? Have a good laugh. See what you did to me. Make me brave and then break me. Make me strong and leave me weeping in the dirt.
“Make me love and then … and then…
“Just kill me, okay? I give up. Here I am. You can see in the dark, right, God? Don’t you have night-vision goggles? You know, the ones that make everything green and glowing? Well, strap them on, oh, Lord, oh, God, oh, big-bearded guy in the sky, you strap on your goggles like some divine commando, and you look down at me, okay? You take a good long look at what you did.
“See? See me here facedown in the dirt?
“Can you hear me? Can you hear the sounds my brain is pushing out of my mouth, all that nonsense? I sound like a madwoman pushing a shopping cart down the street, don’t I?
“Can you smell me? Because when the fear had me I made a mess all over myself. Fear does that, you know; did you know? Well, probably not, being God and all and not afraid of anything.
“Just. One favor. Okay? Just kill me. Because as long as I live she might do it to me again, she might cover me like that, and it might squeeze me like it did, and then I might feel those… I might know what they were doing, you know, because it’s not like I didn’t see them pouring out of my guts as Sam cut me open.
“So, I beg of thee, all right? Oh, most high Lord: kill me. Do I have to beg? Is that it? You get off on that? Okay. I beg you to kill me.”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
Dekka laughed. In her fevered mind she thought for a second there she’d heard an actual voice. The voice of God.
She waited, silent.
Something was there. She could sense it. Something close.
“Is that you, Dekka? It sounds like you.”
Dekka said nothing. The voice was familiar. It probably did not belong to God.
“I was out here. I heard you crying and yelling and praying and all,” Orc said.
“Yeah,” Dekka said. Her lips were coated with dirt. Her nose was blocked by it. Her body was damp with sweat.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Like you was wanting to die.”
He couldn’t see that she was facedown in the dirt. He couldn’t see that she was finished. Beaten.
“You can’t kill yourself,” Orc said.
“I can’t…” Dekka began, but then she couldn’t form any more words without spitting the dirt out of her mouth.
“If you kill yourself, you go to hell.”
Dekka snorted, a derisive sound, as she spit dirt. “You believe in hell?”
“You mean, like, it’s a real place?”
Dekka waited while he thought it out. And suddenly she wanted to hear the answer. Like it mattered.
“No,” Orc said at last. “Because we’re all children of God. So he wouldn’t do that. It was just a story he made up.”
Despite herself Dekka was listening. It was hard not to. Talking nonsense was better than remembering. “A story?”
“Yeah, because he knew our lives would be really bad sometimes. Like maybe we’d be turned into a monster and then our best friend would get killed. So he made up this story about hell, so we could always say, ‘Well, it could be worse. It could be hell.’ And then we’d keep going.”
Dekka had no answer to that. He had completely baffled her. And she was almost angry at him, because baffled was a different thing from despairing. Baffled meant she was still … involved.
“What are you doing out here, Orc?”
“I’m going to kill Drake. If I find him.”
Dekka sighed. She stuck out her hand and eventually encountered a gravelly leg. “Give me a hand up. I’m a little shaky.”
His massive hands found her and propped her up. Her legs almost gave way. She was drained, empty, weak.
But not dead.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” she said.
“Me neither,” Orc said.
“I’m…” Dekka stared into the darkness, not even sure she was looking in his direction. She paused until a sob subsided. “I’m afraid I won’t ever be me again.”
“Yeah, I get that, too,” Orc said. He sighed a huge sigh, like he’d walked a million miles and was just so weary. “Some of it is stuff I did. Some of it is stuff that just happened. Like the coyotes eating on me. And then, you know, what happened after that. I never wanted to remember that. But none of it goes away, not even when you’re really drunk or whatever. It’s all still there.”
“Even in the dark,” Dekka said. “Especially in the dark.”
“Which way should we go?” Orc asked.
“I doubt it matters much,” Dekka said. “Start moving. I’ll follow the sound of your footsteps.”
“Aaaahhh,” Cigar screeched. His hand in Astrid’s squeezed with incredible strength.
It was not the first time he’d suddenly cried out. It was a fairly regular thing for him. But in this case there were other sounds. A rush of wind, a stink like rotting meat, and then a snarl.
Cigar was torn away from Astrid.
She instinctively dropped into a crouch. A coyote missed its attack as a result and rather than closing its jaws around her leg just plowed into her with enough force to knock her on her back.
She fumbled in the dark for her shotgun, felt something metallic, not sure which way it was pointing, fumbled, and was brushed aside by a rushing coyote, fur over muscles.
They could hunt in the dark, but the close-in killing work was harder without sight.
Astrid rolled over, flat, stretching her arm, trying to find the shotgun. One finger touched metal.
Cigar was screaming now in that despairing, beaten voice of his. And the snarling was intensifying. The coyotes were frustrated, too, it seemed, unable to pinpoint their prey, snapping blindly where their ears and nose told them the prey would be.
Astrid rolled toward the gun and now she was on top of it, feeling with trembling fingers, searching for—yes! She had the grip. She pushed it forward, probably filling the barrel with sand, probably jamming the trigger. She tried to tell where Cigar was, rolled once more, pulli
ng the shotgun on top of her, and fired.
The explosion was shocking. A jet of light so much bigger than it had ever seemed before.
In the split-second flash Astrid saw at least three coyotes, and Cigar mobbed by them, and a fourth just a few feet away, lips back in a snarl, all of it freeze-framed for the duration of the flash.
The noise was awesome.
She pushed herself to one knee, aimed at the place where the fourth coyote had been standing, and pulled the trigger again. Nothing! She’d forgotten to jack another round in. She did it, aimed shakily at blank space, and fired again.
BOOM!
This time she was expecting the flash and saw that the coyote she’d aimed at was no longer there. Cigar was no longer mobbed by the beasts. His terrible, white marble eyes stared.
Something had happened to the coyotes. They had exploded.
The flash wasn’t enough to show more. Just that their insides were where their outsides had been.
Silence.
Darkness.
Cigar panting. Astrid, too.
The smell of coyote guts and gunpowder.
It was a while before Astrid could master her voice. Before she could reassemble her shattered thoughts into something like coherence.
“Is the little boy here?” Astrid asked.
“Yes,” Cigar said.
“What did he do?”
“He touched them. Is it… Is it real?” Cigar asked tentatively.
“Yes,” Astrid said. “I think it’s real.”
She stood with her smoking shotgun in her hands and looked at nothing. She was shaking all over. Like it was cold. Like the darkness was made of wet wool wrapped all around her.
“Petey. Talk to me.”
“He can’t,” Cigar said.
Silence.
“He says it will hurt you,” Cigar said.
“Hurt me? Why doesn’t it hurt you?”
Cigar laughed, but it wasn’t a joyful sound. “I’m already hurt. In my head.”
Astrid took a breath and licked her lips. “Does he mean it will make me…” She searched for a word that wouldn’t hurt Cigar.
Cigar himself was beyond worrying about euphemisms. “Crazy?” He said. “My brain is already crazy. He doesn’t know how to do it. Maybe it would make you crazy.”