To almost no one’s surprise, Astrid said, “Dune, by Frank Herbert. ‘I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.’”
She and Lana together spoke the last phrase of the incantation. “‘Only I will remain.’”
There was a collective sigh that was almost a sob.
Sam pulled Astrid to him and they kissed. Then Sam pushed her away and said, “I love you. All my heart. Forever. But get the hell out of here, because I can’t be watching out for you.”
“I know,” Astrid said. “And I love you, too.”
Lana took a furious, defiant look down the highway. Sam knew what was in her heart.
“Lana. What you’ve got won’t kill him. What you’ve got may save a bunch of others. Go. Now.”
Then it was just the three of them, Sam, Caine, and Quinn, watching the dim light advance. Seeing now that it was three indistinct shapes. It was as if the one in the middle was carrying a Sammy sun of a different hue. Sam couldn’t make out faces. But he was sure he saw a tentacle twisting, twisting.
“Three of them,” Caine said. “That means most likely Penny is one of them.” Caine took a deep breath. “Get outta here, Quinn.”
Quinn said, “No. I don’t think I will.”
“Hey. I’m letting you off the hook, fisherman, okay? I’m being a good guy. You can go tell everyone the last thing I said was, ‘Just get out of here, Quinn, and try to stay alive.’”
“Quinn,” Sam said. “You’ve got nothing to prove, man.”
They had found Quinn a pistol. A revolver. It had three bullets.
“I’m in this,” Quinn said shakily.
“You have a plan, Sammy boy?” Caine asked.
“Yeah.” He extinguished the nearest Sammy sun, plunging them into darkness. The next one back was a hundred yards down the road. “Quinn, you start walking backward toward the last light. They won’t have any depth perception, no more than we do in this light. They’ll keep coming toward you. Caine, you drop left; I drop right; we hit them when they’re fifty feet out. Hopefully before Penny can find a target.”
“Great plan,” Caine said a little sarcastically. But he melted into the darkness on the left-hand side of the road.
“Quinn. My friend. What Caine said before. Save one bullet.” With that Sam plunged into the deep, enveloping darkness.
He watched Quinn begin to walk backward. It would mean Quinn was in darkness until he neared the next Sammy sun back. If Drake had seen them at all, he probably hadn’t been able to tell how many there were. But he would eventually be able to see Quinn. At that point he would fixate, anxious to take whoever it was standing in his way.
There might be an opportunity there. A few confused seconds where Caine and Sam could strike unexpectedly. If they were fast and lucky they could take out at least one of the three and reduce the odds.
Who was that third person?
Drake. Penny. And someone—or something—glowing like an old headlight.
Whoever it is, he told himself, first go for Penny.
Penny was the one to fear.
“Dada,” Gaia said.
Diana stared down at her bright, glowing child. She was already the size of a two-year-old. There were teeth in her mouth. There was hair—dark like her parents’—on her head. Her movements were already deliberate and controlled, no more wild lack of coordination. Diana wondered if she could already walk.
“Did you say ‘Dada’?”
Gaia was looking fixedly at the dark off to the right. Straight ahead a lone figure stood beneath the light of a Sammy sun. Beyond him at least two fires could be seen, one fairly close and dramatic.
Gaia was in her head again, not straining to use her child mouth, but reaching straight into Diana’s memories. Pictures of Caine. And suddenly it was clear.
“It’s an ambush!” Diana said.
“Shut the—” Drake said, and was hurled bodily onto his back with such sudden force that he skidded clear out of sight.
A beam of terrible green light shot from the other direction.
Penny had reacted faster to Diana’s warning. She was already moving to hide behind Diana when the light split the night. Half of Penny’s hair frizzled and burned, leaving a terrible smell.
A roar from the dark behind them and Drake was rushing forward, his terrible whip at the ready, searching for a target. Light sliced deep into his side. He spun and fell. But even as he fell the burn was healing.
Diana saw Sam rush from the darkness. He yelled, “Diana, get down!” and fired at the spot where Drake had been a split second earlier.
Suddenly, revealed by the flash of light from Sam’s palms: Caine.
It had been four months since she had seen him. Just a little longer since together they had made Gaia.
Their eyes met. Caine froze. He stared at Diana. A look of pain creased his brow.
That moment’s hesitation was too long.
Caine reeled back, slapping at his body with hands weirdly encrusted on their backs. Slapping and yelling, and then Sam was yelling, “It’s Penny, it’s just Penny, Caine!”
Caine seemed to get control of himself, though barely, and for only a moment as he raised his hands and, with a wild sweep of both hands, flung Penny into the dark.
It was a mistake. An invisible Penny was even more dangerous.
Sam saw it and swept his killing beam around in a semicircle, searching for her. A flash of Penny, running. But when the beam pursued her, burning up the shrubbery, turning sand to bubbling glass, she wasn’t there.
Penny was not there. Astrid was.
Astrid in flames. Running, screaming toward Sam. Her skin was crisping. There was a smell of burned meat. Her blond hair was like a single flame and the edges of that fire ate at her forehead and cheeks.
“Astrid!” Sam cried, and ran to her. He was already whipping off his shirt to smother the flames when she suddenly ballooned, like a marshmallow dropped into a fire. She swelled and her skin turned charcoal and her eyes were just smears and…
The vision was gone.
Sam was in the dark. Panting. Staring.
He turned and saw the glow of the child in Diana’s arms. They were marching calmly toward Quinn.
Caine? Where was he?
Sam heard the sound of a whip. He ran toward that sound, but now the darkness had closed in and he had to toss Sammy suns profligately in order to see.
“Quinn! Run! Get out of there!” Sam yelled.
He watched as Quinn started to make a brave show of it, then he realized it wasn’t so much brave as stupid.
It was several minutes before Sam found Caine. He was breathing, but just now returning to consciousness. There was a livid red mark around Caine’s throat.
He sat up, then accepted Sam’s extended hand.
“Drake?”
Caine nodded and rubbed his neck. “But it was Penny who distracted me. You?”
“Penny,” Sam confirmed.
“Okay, next time we have to take Penny out before we do anything else,” Caine said.
The little procession—Drake, Penny, and Diana, with a baby in her arms—kept walking on down the road.
“So she had the baby,” Sam said. “Congratulations?”
“We lost the element of surprise,” Caine said. “They’ll be ready.”
As if to make the point, Drake, now even with the next Sammy sun, turned to look back at them, laughed, and snapped his whip. The laugh carried. So did the crack.
“Why didn’t they finish us?” Sam wondered.
“If I tell you something crazy, will you just accept it?” Caine said.
“It’s the FAYZ.”
“It was the baby. The baby stopped Drake. I was choking and he was behind me so I couldn’t get at him. Anyway, as good a hold as he had o
n me, if I’d thrown him or pushed him I’d have ripped my own head off. I saw the baby. Looked right at me. And Drake let me go.”
Sam wasn’t sure if he believed it or not. But the days of doubting a story just because it sounded crazy were over.
“They’re heading for the barrier.”
“Maybe it really will open?”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “But they’re going through town. Tearing up your people, King Caine.”
A scream reached their ears.
“Well, I guess we’d better give Quinn a good story,” Caine said dryly. “My legacy and all.”
“Penny first,” Sam said, and started running.
THIRTY-SEVEN
3 MINUTES
GAIA LAUGHED AND Diana couldn’t help laughing, too. They’d passed a burning house with kids lurking as near as they could get to the light without burning.
Penny had done something to make them run into the burning house.
Diana was horrified until Gaia laughed. And then Diana couldn’t help but laugh, too. It was funny, in a way.
Gaia had a sense of humor. How amazing to see it in an infant. Diana credited herself, her genes. Gaia had gotten that from her mommy.
Down the street, and the light that shone from Gaia was enough to draw people like moths to the flame. They would come creeping or cavorting, needing that light, needing it after so long in the hopeless pitch-black.
They came, and when they did Drake would whip them until they ran away again, or danced just out of his range.
Gaia laughed and clapped her hands. Amazing how fast she learned.
The barrier would be broken and Diana and her baby girl would be free. They could go to the zoo. Or what was that place kids went for pizza and games? Chuck E. Cheese’s! Yes, they could play the games and eat pizza. And watch TV in… They would find a house. Who could stop them, really? With Drake and Penny as their servants. Hah! Servants.
Who could stand against them? They had brushed Caine and Sam aside like they were nothing.
And Gaia had yet to even reveal the extent of her own power.
Diana wanted to laugh aloud and dance around with her baby. But even as the high of joy washed through her, Diana felt the falseness of it. The strained edginess of it. She wanted to shout for joy and scream for joy and then stab the baby, her baby, her beloved little daughter, stab her with a knife. For joy.
Gaia was looking at her. Her eyes held her. Diana couldn’t look away. They cut right through her and saw the truth. Gaia could see the fear inside Diana, the fear of Gaia.
Gaia laughed and clapped her hands and her blue eyes shone and Diana felt weak inside, and sick, and all the suffering her body had been through all felt as if it was still there and only concealed from view. She was hollow. An empty nothingness tottering along on stick-figure legs that would snap and collapse.
Screams of burning children pursued Diana as she held her baby close and looked fearfully into her glittering eyes.
There was no way the suspension on Connie’s car was built for this road. The Camry kept bottoming out with a sound like chain saws ripping through steel.
But the time for hesitation was over. Now was the time for her to behave like a mother. A mother whose child—whose children—were in danger.
In the rearview mirror she saw Abana keeping pace. Her SUV was doing a little better. Fine: if they survived this day they could drive home in that.
If Abana ever talked to her again.
The road came perilously close to the highway when they were just half a mile from the barrier. The dust trail they were putting up would be obvious.
Sure enough, as the awful blank monstrosity that was the Perdido Beach Anomaly filled the entire field of view, Connie heard a helicopter overhead.
A loudspeaker blared, audible even over the chop-chop-chop of the rotors.
“You are in a dangerous, restricted area. Turn around immediately.”
This was repeated several times before the helicopter sped ahead, pivoted neatly, and began to land in the road a quarter mile away.
In the rearview mirror Connie saw Abana’s SUV take a sharp, bouncing, crazy veer into the rough terrain. She was angling toward the highway where it met the barrier. It would lead straight through the remains of the hastily moved camp.
There were still a few trailers there. Still a satellite dish array. Dumpsters. Porta Pottis.
Connie swore to herself, apologized to her car, and veered after Abana.
It was no longer a case of the car just bottoming out. Now the car was flying and crashing, flying and crashing. Each impact jarred Connie’s bones. She hit the ceiling so many times she quickly lost count. The steering wheel tore itself from her grip.
Then suddenly she was on tarmac, blistering through the remains of the camp.
The helicopter was after them again and it blew overhead.
It executed a daring, almost suicidal maneuver, and landed way too hard in the final feet of pavement before the intimidating wall of the barrier.
Two soldiers jumped out, MPs with guns drawn.
Then a third soldier.
Abana slammed on her brakes.
Connie did not stop. She aimed the battered, disintegrating car at the helicopter and stood on the accelerator.
The Camry hit the helicopter’s skids. The air bag exploded in her face. The seat belt jerked back against her. She heard something snap. She felt a jolt of pain.
She jumped out of the car, stumbled over the twisted metal remains of the skid, saw that the rotor had plowed into concrete and stuck fast.
And Connie ran, staggered, realized she’d broken her collarbone, ran on toward the barrier. If she could reach it, if they couldn’t stop her, couldn’t drag her away, then she could stop it all from happening.
One of the soldiers snagged Abana as she ran, but Connie dodged, and only as she ran past him, only when he called out, “Connie! No!” did she realize that the third soldier was Darius.
She reached the barrier.
Reached it. Stopped. Stared at it, at the eternal gray wall.
Darius was behind her, breathless. “Connie. It’s too late. It’s too late, babe. Something’s happened to the device.”
She turned on him, somehow believing he was reproaching her, too emotional to understand what he was saying. “I’m sorry,” she cried. “It’s my boys in there. It’s my babies!”
He took her in his arms, squeezed her tight, and said, “They tried to stop the countdown. It worked, the message got out, and they tried to stop it.”
“What?”
Abana came running up then. The MPs had given up holding her back. The soldiers wore identically strained expressions. Neither seemed interested in the two women anymore.
“Listen to me,” Darius said. “They can’t stop it. It’s this place. Something went wrong and they can’t stop the countdown.”
At last his words penetrated.
“How long?” Connie asked.
Darius looked at the MPs. And now Connie understood the passive, strained look on their faces. “One minute and ten seconds,” the larger of the two MPs, a lieutenant, said. And he knelt on the pavement, folded his hands, and prayed.
Sam was torn between spreading light with abandon and being seen coming, or going without light and moving much more slowly. He chose a compromise. He tossed off Sammy suns at a run as he and Caine made their way to the beach, and then along the beach until they were hidden from view beneath the cliffs.
The ocean had a faint, very faint phosphorescence that seemed almost bright. It could be seen not as particular waves or even ripples, but as a fuzzy mass that was only dark as opposed to utterly black.
“Here,” Sam said, hanging a sun. He pointed at the forbidding wall of stone to their left. “The climb isn’t too bad.”
“You don’t need to climb.”
Sam felt himself lifted off his feet. He rose through the air with the cliff face just within reach. In the eerie light, the rock face lo
ok like the blades of broken knives.
Sam scrambled to get from Caine’s grip onto solid ground. Did he dare hang a light? No. Too near the highway. He could sense—at least, he hoped he could—Clifftop off to his right. If he was where he thought he was, he could easily cross the driveway, the access road, a sand berm, and then descend at the point where the highway ran into the barrier.
Caine landed beside him.
“You going to light up?”
“No. Let’s try for surprise number two.”
They stumbled across rough ground, tripping, falling, silencing their curses.
They were just beside the sand berm, a sand wind barrier that ran within fifty feet of the road, when they heard a crack. It was like a peal of thunder, but with no lightning.
It seemed to go on forever and ever.
“It begins,” a strange, childlike, but beautiful voice said. “The egg cracks! Soon! Soon!”
“She speaks!” Diana cried.
“We’re getting out,” Drake cried. “It’s opening!”
“Now,” Sam hissed.
He and Caine motored up the side of the sand. As soon as Caine could see his target he swept his hands down and literally threw himself into the air. The swoosh gave him away, and Penny saw him in an instant.
Sam aimed carefully, but Diana moved between him and Penny. Calm, fluid, as if she’d known he was there.
“Get her!” Caine screamed in despair as a horrific vision left him plummeting, screaming, to the ground.
Sam ran straight for them. He fired once, hitting Drake full in the face. It didn’t kill him, but it would keep him from talking for a while.
Sam shouldered Diana roughly aside, seeing tiny blue eyes follow him.
Penny spun.
Sam fired wildly.
Penny’s left leg caught fire. She screeched and ran in panic, spreading the flames to her clothing.
“No, Sam!” Diana cried.
An unimaginably powerful force threw Sam spinning into the air. It was like someone had set a bomb off under him. And then he stopped spinning. He stopped falling back to earth.
He looked down and saw the baby looking up at him and laughing and clapping her hands. Then the baby took her chubby little fingers and made a motion like she was stretching dough.