“But you didn’t . . . Did you bury . . .” He couldn’t finish the thought.
“Listen, Brianna kept Gaia from finishing us all off, but we couldn’t stay there. We had to run. We had wounded kids. Everyone was scared; we couldn’t stay and search.”
Edilio nodded dully. He had to put this reality in a box, like he had done so many times with so many tragedies.
But this was too big: it wouldn’t go; it couldn’t be put aside for quiet grief at a more convenient time. A sound of anguish rose from Edilio. Astrid put her arms around him, and he cried into her hair.
“I should have been there,” Edilio whispered.
“You couldn’t have stopped her,” Astrid said. “Did Brianna and Dekka and the rest make it here?”
Edilio pulled away, wiping tears from his cheeks. “Brianna’s hurt bad, but she’s alive. Her and Dekka are up at Clifftop.”
“Don’t ever let me say anything bad about that girl again,” Astrid said. “Everyone who made it out alive owes their life to Brianna. Edilio, it was . . . Gaia would have . . . She was enjoying it . . . floating kids into the air and then . . .”
Edilio nodded bleakly. “What do we do now, Astrid? Did you see Sam? He should be here, but I . . . didn’t work. It’s my fault.”
“Edilio, nothing is your fault.” Astrid called Diana over. Orc had taken it upon himself to fetch water in a big five-gallon plastic tub. Kids were drinking greedily while Orc watched in satisfaction.
“Listen to me, Edilio.” Astrid took his face in her hands, forced him to see, to pay attention. “We don’t have time to grieve. There are things you need to understand.”
Edilio nodded, but he wasn’t there: he wasn’t tracking.
“Diana, tell Edilio what you know about Gaia.”
Diana did, but Edilio needed it repeated. It was impossible to focus. Mental images of Roger dead . . . floating on the lake. Or maybe only terribly injured, lying somewhere.
Had Roger even had a chance to think? Had he seen it coming? Had he seen Justin die before his eyes? That by itself would have killed him. Justin had become a little brother to Roger.
“Listen, Edilio. Gaia’s going to kill everyone,” Astrid said. “The only good news is that we took Drake down. Well, Brianna did. Again, Brianna.”
“What?” Edilio asked, confused. He hadn’t followed anything they’d told him.
Astrid and Diana exchanged a look. “Diana . . .,” Astrid said, and nodded at Edilio.
“Come with me, Edilio; we’re just going to have a seat over on the steps,” Diana said.
“What was the scream about?” Sam demanded, checking Caine for injuries. “Are you hurt?”
Caine was breathing hard, bent over, like he’d been kicked in the belly. “She got me.”
The air smelled of smoke. Something was burning.
“Where?” Sam asked. “Where did she get you?”
Caine straightened slowly. His face was grim. “Here,” he said, jabbing a finger angrily against his temple.
“What’s that supposed to mean? We had her!”
“We had nothing!” Caine yelled. To Sam’s amazement it almost seemed he had tears in his eyes.
Sam decided to take a less confrontational tack. He didn’t need a fight with Caine. “Listen, dude, whatever is going on, you need to tell me. You’re supposed to watch my back.”
Caine brushed dirt from his knees and avoided looking Sam in the eye. “The gaiaphage owned me, okay? Back a long time ago, back after our first big fight, the one in Perdido Beach. I imagine you remember.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Sam snapped. “You and Drake tried pretty hard to kill me.”
“After that I went to the mine shaft. You know all this. And the gaiaphage . . . Look, it’s not something I can explain, okay, or at least not something you can understand.”
“But you fought against the gaiaphage later.”
“It was already weakening. And it was focused on Lana and Little Pete. It’s stronger now. Much stronger.”
Sam frowned. “Why Lana? Why would it care about Lana?”
“It . . . she . . . hates Lana. Lana lost it, Lana was taken, same as me, but Lana shut it down. I don’t know if it’s because of Lana’s healing power or what, but Lana . . . the girl is tough and strong. The gaiaphage doesn’t like that.”
“Okay,” Sam said, not knowing what else to say. It had cost Caine to admit vulnerability. It cost him more to admit that Lana could do what he couldn’t.
Smoke stung Sam’s eyes. All this smoke couldn’t be from the one rotted limb he’d torched.
Caine was trying to explain. “It’s like, like, we’re all here in this world, but there’s some other place, some other connection. I can’t see it, but I can kind of see it. Like something you see out of the corner of your eye, only when you turn to look at it, it’s not there. And the gaiaphage can reach me through there.”
“What happens when it reaches you?”
“Pain.”
“Bad?”
Caine gritted his teeth and had to squeeze the words out. With his hand he held an imaginary knife and slowly twisted it into the side of his head. “Like someone took a white-hot knife and stabbed it into your head and twisted it back and forth, again and again.”
Sam had felt pain. He had wept and cried under Drake’s lash. He had felt helpless. He had lost control of himself. He understood what it meant and what pain like that did to you. He was about to reach out and put a hand on Caine’s shoulder but caught himself. The gesture would not be appreciated.
Instead he jumped up onto a low branch and pulled himself up to get a better view. Fire had definitely taken hold in the trees. At least three were burning. A year without rain had left the forest dry and vulnerable. It would spread, Sam had little doubt. And there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
“Any time we throw down with Gaia she can do this to you?” Sam asked, dropping back to the dry pine-needle floor.
Caine shrugged. “It’s been a long time. I thought I had it beat. Like Lana. But the gaiaphage is growing more powerful now in this body. It’s up out of the mine shaft. And Little Pete, well, he’s dead or whatever the hell he is.”
“Astrid thinks he’s still alive in some form.”
“Some form.” Caine laughed bitterly. “Seems like one minute we were talking about getting out, all hugs and burgers. Now we’re back deep in the crazy.”
Sam looked curiously at his estranged brother. They’d been born minutes apart to the same mother. Sam had never been a hundred percent sure how that had happened. Did they share a father? Or was their mother a bit more . . . adventurous than he wanted to think about?
And why had she kept him and not Caine?
The crazy had started earlier than all of this: that much was clear.
“I don’t think I can beat her without you,” Sam said after a while. “And now I’m not sure you aren’t just a big weak spot.”
Caine did not react angrily; he knew it was true.
“Don’t try to save me if she hits me again,” Caine said. “She’ll expect you to; that’s why she did it this time. We had her in trouble, so she lashed out at me and got you to back off.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. Fair enough. But what’s her next move? That’s what I don’t see.”
Caine thought it over for a minute. Then his face went slack. “She’ll attack. She didn’t get everyone at the lake; Brianna got in the way. And we’re on her tail, and now she knows she’s not invulnerable. So she has to force us into defending; she can’t have us just chasing her, because we might get lucky.” He nodded at the smoke that now stung their noses and throats. “That’s why the fire. She’s done being cocky. She’s fighting scared, which is bad, really bad for us. She’s accelerating things. Whatever time we thought we had? It’s used up. You want to talk endgame? This is it.”
“Yeah,” Sam said tightly. “She’s going for Perdido Beach.”
The head named Drake had spoken to Alex.
>
The head had told him that it served Gaia.
Gaia would reward Alex if he brought Drake to her. Gaia would give him back his arm, better than ever.
So Alex had taken out all the heavy stones but left the head in its convenient carrying case. The cooler was heavy, but he could just manage it with his one arm.
As they traveled to find Gaia, Drake and the other person, the one called Brittney, taught him all about Gaia, so that Alex would understand where he fit in. He would understand the truth. He would understand that he served a true goddess.
And when Gaia emerged triumphant—and could there really be any doubt?—Alex would walk triumphant beside her. So Brittney said. So Drake later agreed.
They were the three apostles, Brittney said: Drake, Brittney, and Alex Mayle.
Alex set out after Gaia to bring her the head of Drake Merwin. He didn’t think much about what Gaia would do with the head of her lieutenant.
Drake, however, seemed to have a pretty good idea.
Connie Temple had arrived the previous afternoon at the place Dahra had sent her. There was a lake, there was a marina, and across the lake, over in the FAYZ, there was a similar marina, almost a mirror of the one she was in.
She had seen kids over there, but none had approached the barrier. And Dahra had not shown up. So Connie had stuck on a note on a sapling that was quite near the barrier and found a motel for the night. She had worried that Dahra might show up late and wonder where she was, but it was almost dark and she didn’t know the area at all well. She found a motel ten miles away, made a dinner of convenience-store fare—crackers, cheese slices, a bottle of wine, and a 3 Musketeers bar—then fell asleep watching Jon Stewart.
The next morning, not at all well rested, and somewhat hungover, she made her way back to the rendezvous armed with convenience-store coffee and donuts. She had little hope that Dahra or Astrid would show up.
Connie climbed from the car, armed with stale coffee and staler donuts. She found the note she’d left, crumpled it, and looked toward that distant, unreachable shore.
Thin trails of black smoke rose from several spots around that second, barely visible marina. In the distance, off to the south, a larger pillar of smoke rose, an ominous sight.
She walked into the marina and out onto the dock to get a closer look, wishing she had a boat to take her closer still.
“All hell broke loose over there last night.”
Connie spun and faced a tall man, slightly stooped, older, with white hair and a weathered face.
“What do you mean?”
The man nodded toward the distant shore. “I been watching since the thing cleared up. I have a grandson in there. At least, I hope he’s still in there, somewhere.”
“Are there kids staying over there?” Connie asked.
“Seemed like there was a camp or settlement or whatever you might choose to call it. They didn’t have any electricity, so there weren’t many lights, but at night you’d see glimmers of candles. And the other day some of them brought one of the boats close up and traded messages with us.” He shrugged. “Didn’t say anything about my grandson; everyone said they didn’t know him. But there were some grim expressions when I mentioned his name.”
Connie nodded sympathetically. “I’m Connie Temple. My son—”
“I recognize you, Ms. Temple. From TV. My name is Merwin. The boy is named after me: Drake.”
Connie did her best to conceal her reaction. She had heard the name, and not in a good way. There were stories . . . terrifying stories. “What happened last night?”
The elder Drake Merwin shrugged again; it seemed to be a habit with him. “Well, it’s going to sound crazy.”
Connie waited.
“It was like someone shooting lasers around. And there were explosions. This morning I kept expecting someone from over there to row over and explain. No one showed up. I’ve been watching. I have a good set of binoculars on my boat; the problem is my eyesight isn’t that great anymore. Good till I hit sixty-five, then . . .” Another shrug.
“Can I look through your binoculars?”
He led her onto his boat, docked at the end of the pier. The binoculars were big and mounted on a stand. She had to crouch to see through, and then it took a few tries to get them focused.
Suddenly the scene leaped into view.
“If you’d tell me what you see . . .,” Merwin suggested apologetically.
“There’s a sailboat, all upended. There’s a burning trailer, like a camping trailer . . .” She swallowed hard. “There are more burned things, cars, boats . . . Can we take your boat closer?”
Merwin looked grim. “I’ve been worried what I might see up close.”
She understood that, and without thinking put a comforting hand on his arm.
She cast off the lines while he manned the wheel. It was a big boat for the lake, and with the lake much reduced in size it seemed almost absurd. But he maneuvered it with practiced skill and brought it within ten feet of the barrier.
The two of them were on the flying bridge with the binoculars.
“Are those . . .,” he asked in a pained and fearful voice.
“Yes.” Yes, there were bodies in the water. They were bumping softly against the barrier.
She spotted movement, a single individual. She swung the binoculars toward him and saw what looked like a man, not a child, carrying a blue-and-white container, a cooler, and moving away from the lake, threading his way through coals and tendrils of smoke.
No one would be meeting her here today.
“You said you saw what looked like lasers?” Connie asked, fighting the tremor in her voice.
“I know what you’re thinking, Ms. Temple,” he said. “I saw the video of your boy with that light coming out of his hands. But best not to draw any conclusions about any of this.”
“No,” she agreed.
“There’s a coffeemaker down in the galley. A little cream is all for me.”
Connie went below, grateful for the suggestion. She started the coffee and then found herself gripping a cup so hard the handle broke. She found another and filled a cup for each of them and carried them back up.
Merwin took his and drank, easily holding the boat on its station with slight turns of the wheel and little thrusts of the engines.
“I’m seventy-four years old,” he said, and shrugged again, this time like he was trying to get that fact to roll off his shoulders. “I was drafted into Vietnam. Way before your time, but it was a nasty war, that one.”
“I guess wars usually are.”
He smiled and laughed a little. “Yes, they are, generally. Well, there was this kid, just been bumped to corporal on account of the regular corporal was dead. Nice enough fellow. Only one day, after he’d had no sleep for three days, and no hot food in five days, and had two buddies shot . . .” He stopped then for a moment, breathed hard, and looked away.
She waited.
“As it happened, they captured an NVA—sorry, North Vietnamese Army regular. This NVA was injured, so he couldn’t keep up when his compadres retreated. So, corporal decides to question him. The NVA spits in the corporal’s face. Long story short, the corporal shot him in the neck.”
Silence.
“War crime, that was, shooting a helpless prisoner. Court-martial offense. At least it would have been if anyone had ever reported it.”
“You didn’t report it?”
Merwin shrugged, heavily this time. “No, ma’am. No one reported me for shooting that man in the neck. Because we were all of us hungry and tired and scared and very, very angry. And the oldest of us was just twenty years old.”
“Sam wouldn’t . . .,” she started to say.
“Oh, well, Ms. Temple, there are genuine saints in this world: I married one. But there aren’t many. I like to think Drake—my grandson, Drake, not that old corporal—I like to hope, anyway, that he found the strength to . . . But he was always a troubled boy. Especially after my son died. The s
tepfather . . . young Drake’s stepfather . . .” He blew out a breath. “But I don’t know and you don’t know.”
“What happens when we do know?” she asked in a small voice.
“I suppose we’ll behave like a bunch of holier-than-thou hypocrites. Because the alternative is to look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we are capable of dark and terrible things.”
They were quiet on the ride back to the dock. Connie shook his hand.
“Thanks for taking me and for talking with me. That must be a very hard thing to carry all these years.”
The old man smiled, and there was a glint of steel in his eyes. “Not the way you think, though, Ms. Temple. See, what’s hard is knowing I took pleasure in that act of revenge. And knowing if I had to do it all again, I’d still pull that trigger.”
She slowly released his hand and stared, stricken, into eyes that were cold and cruel, as he said, “Dark and terrible things. And the joys they bring.”
EIGHTEEN
27 HOURS, 13 MINUTES
GAIA WAS MOVING faster, almost at a normal walking speed. The leg was healing. It would have healed altogether if she’d been able to sit and focus on it. But the two mutants were on her trail, and in addition to that she had to keep moving to stay ahead of the fire, which had quickly burned to the edge of the forest and merely awaited some encouragement to spread farther.
It had occurred to Gaia that inhabiting a body meant she, too, was vulnerable to smoke and fire. She had run through her mental inventory of powers that would save her from smoke inhalation. Nothing.
At least the pain was under some control now. The music in her ears helped distract her. The song was called “When All the Lights Go Out.” There was a lot of yelling. Gaia decided she liked yelling music best.
She walked straight down a gravel road, counting on the fact that she had a small lead and was in open ground now where she would see Sam and Caine before they caught up to her. They were a manageable threat. What worried her far more was the knowledge that Little Pete was looking at her. She could feel him watching her. And while Nemesis was fading fast, he wasn’t dead yet.