Sam felt his body pulling in opposite directions. It squeezed the air from his lungs. It was as if two giant hands had each taken a rough grip on him and were tearing him apart.
He heard his bones cracking.
Felt the sharp pain of ribs separating from cartilage.
The baby was bringing him closer now. Like she wanted to see better. Like she wanted to be sprayed with his very blood as he was ripped in—
Diana stumbled forward. She plowed into her child and both fell, but without hitting the ground.
Sam fell to earth. But he, too, did not quite smash onto the concrete.
Dekka!
She was panting like she’d just run a marathon. She stood in the middle of the road, glaring furiously, hands raised. She looked, Sam thought, like she’d taken a trip to hell. But she had shown excellent timing.
Sam did not hesitate. As soon as his feet touched the ground he jumped up, ignoring the bone-shattering pain in his body.
Penny had dropped and rolled, the fire was out, but her skin was the color and texture of a well-glazed ham.
Sam ran to where she lay gasping with pain, real pain, no illusion, and straddled her and aimed his hands down at her.
“You’re too dangerous to live,” Sam said.
His own flesh suddenly caught fire, but he was too close, too ready. He was already there and all he had to do now was to think and—
—and a chunk of pavement, a slab of concrete two feet across and shedding the dirt from which it had been ripped, smashed down on Penny’s head with such force that the ground bounced beneath Sam’s feet.
Her body ceased moving instantly. Like a switch had been thrown.
Caine stood over her, breathing hard. “Payback,” he snarled. He kicked the slab of cement for emphasis.
Drake’s melted face had begun to repair itself, but he still looked like a microwaved action figure. His whip, however, was in perfect working order.
He struck and Sam cried out in pain.
Caine raised the rock he’d used to kill Penny and readied it to smash down on Drake.
“No, Daddy,” said Gaia.
THIRTY-EIGHT
15 SECONDS
“IT BLOWS UP and kills us all,” Connie said quietly, weirdly calm. “Or it does … something else.”
Abana took her hand. The two of them.
And other vehicles were coming down the highway. Not police—there were no sirens. The police and soldiers had been withdrawn to a safe distance.
These were a handful of private cars and vans. Parents. Friends. People who had gotten the emails and tweets and were rushing to stop what could not now be stopped.
Connie and Abana looked at each other. A look full of fear and sadness and guilt: they had brought these people here to die.
Connie looked at the MPs. The chopper pilot, a woman with blond hair and captain’s bars, had joined them after roundly cursing the damage to her craft.
“I’m sorry,” Connie whispered. “I’m sorry I did this to you.”
She heard a cracking sound. Like slow-motion thunder, or like a world-size eggshell breaking open. Everyone fell silent and listened. It went on for a long time.
“It’s opening,” Abana whispered. “The barrier, it’s cracking open!”
Too late, Connie thought. Too late.
Connie went to Darius and they waited, side by side, for the end.
The baby. It was no longer in Diana’s arms. It stood. All on its own, a glowing, naked two-year-old, by all appearances.
Caine flew back. He was pressed against the barrier, in full contact, yelling at the pain, then barely making a sound at all as the pressure grew stronger, relentless.
Sam could see him being squashed; he could quite literally see Caine’s body flatten as if a truck were pushing against him, squashing him like a bug against the barrier.
“Make her stop!” Sam yelled at Diana.
“I…” Diana looked stricken. Like she was coming out of a nightmare into a worse reality.
“She’s killing him!”
“Don’t,” Diana said weakly. “Don’t kill your father.”
But there was a determined look on the child’s face. Her cherub lips drew back in a weird snarl.
Sam raised his hands, palms out.
“Get back, Diana,” Sam said.
Diana did not move.
Sam glanced at Caine. A bug against a windshield.
Sam fired. Twin beams of murderous light hit the child dead center.
And the entire world exploded in blinding light.
Caine slid to the ground. Diana reeled back, covering her eyes. Drake used his tentacle to cover his eyes.
Sam was blinded by it. It was not the light of his hands. It was not the light of the baby.
Sunlight.
Sunlight!
Brilliant, blazing, Southern California midday sunlight.
No sound. No warning. One second the world was black, with only the pitiful light of a few Sammy suns. And the next instant it was as if they were staring into the sun itself.
Sam squeezed open one eye. What he saw was impossible. There were people. Adults. Four, no five, six adults.
A wrecked helicopter.
A Carl’s Jr. The same flash of the world outside Sam had seen for only a millisecond once before. But now the vision lingered.
The barrier was gone!
Drake cried out in a sort of ecstatic fear. He ran straight at the barrier, his whip swishing at his side.
Caine, groggy, injured, stood up.
But something was wrong about it. Caine was leaning on something, propping himself up, then pulling his hand sharply away.
From the barrier.
Drake hit the wall. He ran with his whip hand lashing straight into something unyielding but invisible.
The adults, the women, the soldiers, all stared, mouths open.
They were seeing!
Seeing Diana screaming.
Seeing Drake lashing viciously in every direction with his whip.
Seeing the brutally pulverized head and face of a young girl named Penny driven half into the pavement.
Seeing a little girl, a toddler, untouched, unharmed by Sam’s now-extinguished light.
Faces everywhere. They pressed closer; they tried to walk, but Sam could see them touching, then jumping back from the barrier.
The barrier was still there. But now it was transparent.
Sam’s heart seemed to stop. One face suddenly came into focus.
His mother.
His mother mouthing some unhearable words and looking at him as Sam aimed his palms toward the defenseless little girl.
He couldn’t stop. He had stopped once before. No: he couldn’t stop.
Sam’s light burned.
His mother’s face, all the faces, all of them screaming soundlessly. No! Noooo!
The little girl’s hair caught fire. It flamed magnificently, for she had her mother’s lush dark hair.
Sam fired again and the little girl’s flesh burned at last.
But all the while the girl, the gaiaphage, its face turned away from onlookers, stared at Sam in undiminished fury. The blue eyes never looked away. Her angelic mouth leered in a knowing grin even as it burned.
Until at last, the gaiaphage was a pillar of flame, all features obscured.
Sam stopped firing.
The baby, the child, the monster, the devil, turned and ran back down the highway.
Diana, her face a twisted mask, ran after her.
Drake, eyes hollow and vacant, horrified, turned and ran, lashing impotently at nothing.
Sam and Caine were left standing side by side, bruised and battered, to stare over Penny’s sickening corpse, at the face of their mother.
LATER
A HELICOPTER HAD arrived overhead. It was decorated with the logo of a news station out of Santa Barbara. It made no sound, of course—the dome was still impervious to noise—but Astrid could see faces in the cockpit, and could
guess at the telephoto camera lens aimed down at them.
The helicopter’s view was slightly hampered now by the fact that outside, out there beyond that diamond-hard, glass-clear barrier, it was raining. The drops splatted on the dome and then ran down in streams.
Along the inside of the barrier, on both sides of the highway, kids stood as close as they could get to the outside. Three or four dozen kids had come so far, rushing from Perdido Beach. At first all they saw were the soldiers and the state cops who had raced up with lights flashing, the helicopter, and a handful of parents.
But more parents were arriving in cars and SUVs from their new homes in Arroyo Grande, Santa Maria, and Orcutt. The parents who had found new places to live farther away, in Santa Barbara or Los Angeles, would take a while longer to get here.
Some of the parents were holding up signs.
Where is Charlie?
Where is Bette?
We love you! With the ink bleeding from the rain.
We miss you!
Are you okay?
There wasn’t much paper left in the FAYZ, and kids had come at a run, not even waiting to grab anything. But some found pieces of wallboard or tattered windblown scraps of cardboard, and used bits of gravel to write back.
I love you, too.
Tell my mom I’m okay!
Help us.
And all of this was watched by the TV camera on the helicopter, and the people, the adults—parents and cops and gawkers. Half a dozen smartphones were snapping pictures and shooting video. Astrid knew that more, many, many more, would come.
There were boats beginning to appear on the ocean outside the dome. And they, too, stared with binoculars and telephoto lenses.
An old couple came running from a motorhome, scribbling as they ran. Their sign read, Can you check on our cat, Ariel?
No one would answer that, because the cats had all been eaten.
Where is my daughter? And a name.
Where is my son? And a name.
And whose job was it, Astrid wondered bitterly, to write the answers? Dead. Dead. Died of carnivorous worms. Died of a coyote attack.
Murdered in a fight over a bag of chips.
Dead of suicide.
Dead because she was playing with matches and we don’t exactly have a fire department.
Killed because it was the only way we could deal with him.
How did one explain to all those watching eyes what life was like inside the FAYZ?
Then a familiar car that almost rear-ended a parked police cruiser. A man jumped out. A woman moved slowly, unsteady. Astrid’s mother and father came to the barrier. Her father was holding her mother up, as though she might collapse.
The sight of them tore Astrid apart. The adults and older teens who had been in the FAYZ area when Petey had performed his mad miracle had obviously made it out. How many thousands of hours had Astrid spent trying to figure it out, trying to walk through each possible outcome? Parents dead, parents alive, parents all off in some parallel universe, parents with all memory rewritten, parents erased from past as well as present.
Now they were back, crying, waving, staring, carrying loads of emotional baggage and demanding explanations that most kids—Astrid included—could not somehow reduce to a few words scratched on a piece of plaster, or gouged with a nail on a piece of wood.
Where is Petey?
Astrid’s mother held that sign. She’d written it with a Magic Marker on the side of a canvas bag, because now the rain was too intense to allow for paper.
Astrid stared at it for a long time. And in the end she could manage no answer better than a shrug and a shake of her head.
I don’t know where Petey is.
I don’t even know what Petey is.
Sam was beside her, not touching her, not with so many eyes watching. She wanted to lean against him. She wanted to close her eyes and, when she opened them again, be with him up at the lake.
Desperate months had gone by when all Astrid had wanted was to be out of this place and back in her old life as her parents’ loving daughter. Now she could barely stand to look at them. Now she sought desperately for an excuse to leave. They were strangers. And she knew, as Sam had always known, that they would in the end be accusers.
They were a stab in her heart when she just could not take any more, when she just could not start to feel any more. Too much. She couldn’t switch suddenly from one despair to a different despair.
Dekka stood behind Sam with her arms crossed, almost as if she were hiding. Quinn and Lana stood a little apart, just marveling at the sight of the outside world, but having as yet no faces to connect with.
“We’re monkeys in a zoo,” Sam said.
“No,” Astrid said. “People like monkeys. Look at the way they look at us. Imagine what they’re seeing.”
“I’ve been picturing it since the beginning.”
Astrid nodded. “Yeah.”
“You want to know what they see? What my mother sees? A boy who fired light from his hands and tried to incinerate a baby,” Sam said harshly. “They saw me burn a child. No explanation will ever change that.”
“We look like savages. Filthy and starved, dressed like street people,” Astrid said. “Weapons everywhere. A girl lying dead with a rock crushing her brains.” She looked at her mother and oh, there was no avoiding her mother’s look of … of what? Not joy. Not relief.
Horror.
Distance.
Both sides, parents and children, now saw the huge gulf that had opened up between them. Astrid’s father seemed small. Her mother looked old. They both were like ancient photographs of themselves, not like real people. Not as real as her memories of them.
Astrid felt as if their eyes were looking through her, searching for a memory of their daughter. Like they didn’t want to see her, but some girl she had long since ceased to be.
Brianna came zooming up, a welcome distraction that caused silent faces on the other side to form round circles with their mouths: Ooh. Ahh. And hands to point and cameras to swivel. Brianna gave a little salute and a wave.
“She’s ready for her close-up,” Dekka said dryly.
“Is it bright in here, or is it just me?” Brianna said. Then she drew her machete, whirled it at ten times human speed, stopped, sheathed it again, and executed a little bow to the baffled and appalled onlookers. “Yes. Yes: I will play myself in the movie. The Breeze is way beyond special effects.”
Astrid breathed for what felt like the first time in a long while. She was thankful Brianna had broken at least some of the tension.
“By the way, back to business: they’re headed into the desert,” Brianna announced to Sam. “A happy little crew, Mom and daughter and Uncle Whip Hand. I got a little too close and that baby nearly buried me under about a ton of rock. That is one bad baby.”
Brianna nodded, satisfied. “That can be my tagline. ‘That is one bad baby.’”
“No, no,” Dekka said. “Just: no.”
Astrid smiled, and her mother thought it was meant for her and smiled back.
“I saw someone recording it,” Sam said. “Me burning that … that creature. You know what they’ll see? You know what people out there will think?”
Astrid knew he was jumping out of his skin. She could see—anyone could see—the look of horror on Connie Temple’s face every time she looked at her son.
“Son,” singular, for Caine had taken one long look at his mother, turned, and walked away, back to town.
“You’ve been afraid of this for a long time, Sam,” Astrid said in a low voice. “You’ve been afraid of being judged.”
Sam nodded. He looked down at the ground, then at Astrid. She had expected to see sadness there. Maybe guilt. She almost cried out with relief when she saw the eyes of the boy who had never backed down. She saw the eyes of the boy who had first stepped forward to fight Orc and later Caine and Drake and Penny.
She saw Sam Temple. Her Sam Temple.
“Well,” Sam sai
d, “I guess they’ll think what they want to think.”
“It’s getting dark out there,” Dekka said. “When night comes, we’d better get Penny out of there. Bury her. Everyone who shows up stares at—”
Dekka fell silent, because Sam was moving. He walked purposefully to the spot where Penny’s body lay, her head crushed beneath a rock, like some grotesque parody of the Wicked Witch of the East.
Cameras tracked Sam’s movement.
Eyes—many of them hostile, condemning—traced his every step.
Sam looked straight at the cameras. Then he looked at his mother. Astrid held her breath.
Then Sam systematically, thoroughly, incinerated Penny’s body. Until nothing but ash was left.
Connie Temple stood still as a statue, refusing to look away.
When Sam was finished, he nodded once at his mother, turned his back, and walked over to Astrid. “She will not be buried in the plaza with good kids who died for no good reason. If we’re looking for people to bury, we’ll find what’s left of Cigar and Taylor.”
Lana shook her head just slightly. “I can’t say for sure that Taylor is dead. Or that she’s alive.”
Sam nodded. “That’s the kind of thing all those people out there are going to have a hard time understanding. But anyway, there they are, and you know what? We still have kids to feed and a monster to kill.” He reached his hand toward Astrid. “You ready to go?”
Astrid looked past him, over his shoulder, to her mother’s worry-etched face. Then she took Sam’s hand.
“There’s a lot to do,” Sam said to the kids within earshot. His back was turned to the outside. “A lot to do, a lot to work out, and this war is a long way from over. They will be back.” He jerked his head toward the north, where Gaia had fled.
“Quinn,” Sam said. “You want to be in charge of business down here in Perdido Beach? Take over Albert’s job? I think Caine would agree.”
“Absolutely not,” Quinn said. “No. Nooo. No.”
Sam looked a little taken aback. “No? Well, I guess they’ll work something out. Caine and Lana and Edilio and Astrid.”
“I hope they do,” Quinn said fervently. He gave Sam a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Thanks for saving our butts. Again. But me? Dude: I am going fishing.”