He laughed softly.
“You want to know the truth, Sam?” She pulled his face to her. “No, it wasn’t suicide when Jesus did it. It was fake. If he really was the son of God, then he was risking nothing and he knew it. He knew he had a couple of bad hours but then it was going to be all over and he’d pop back into heaven and have a really amazing story to tell all his friends.”
“He has friends?”
She would not be distracted with jokes. “You? If you die you’re dead. We’ve seen dead now, Sam, we’ve seen a lot of it, and it’s ugly and permanent.”
He turned to her and she saw the tortured look on his face. “That light, Astrid? That light I shoot out of my hands? It’s like it’s mine. It’s like I invented it. Or at least I own it. And that light killed Brianna. And it’s going to kill a bunch of other kids. You know it and I know it.” He ran a hand back through his hair, slowly, like it mattered that he felt each hair.
“No,” she said. “They’re going to die because Pete won’t talk to me.”
There was a long silence after that.
“I wondered if you would try that,” he said at last.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, brushing it off. “Nothing. I was talking to air.”
Now Sam was mad. “You should have talked to me about it first. What if he had done it? What if Little Pete had taken over your body and your mind?”
“He didn’t, so—”
“What do you think happens if he does it? Whoever does it ends up like her, like Gaia, except that Gaia was just a baby and didn’t even know. What do you think happens if Little Pete does this? What do you think happened to that baby girl when the gaiaphage—”
“We don’t know if it would be like that.”
“You don’t know it wouldn’t,” Sam snapped. “You’re a hypocrite, you know. You tell me to keep myself alive. Well, for what? So I can know that you gave your life instead?”
His words brought no answer. A silence fell between them. A rat ran by. It didn’t scare either of them. In fact it made their mouths water just a bit. Both had eaten rat and been glad for the chance to do it. The bad old days of the FAYZ, back before Albert took over.
“Like these are the good times,” Sam said without explanation. But Astrid knew what he was thinking.
“Don’t go out in a blaze of glory, Sam.”
“Don’t nail yourself to a cross,” he said.
“Listen to us,” Astrid said, and laughed.
He shook his head. “I lost Brianna, Astrid. And she wasn’t the first.”
“Who made you responsible?” He didn’t answer, so she said it. “I did. Didn’t I?”
“Astrid . . .”
“I did,” she said more definitely, accepting the truth of it. “I pushed you to lead. I made it your business. I used you to protect my little brother, and then in the end I was the one who sacrificed him. Now I’m trying to make good on all that. I’m trying for redemption, too, Sam, and instead there you go, once more unto the breach, Sam to the rescue even if he dies doing it.”
“You didn’t make me responsible. You don’t have that power. This”—he held up his hands, and light glowed from his palms—“this made me responsible. Having power made me responsible. I had the power and you had the brains. So we were chosen. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? People who can have to help those who can’t. The strong defend the weak from the strong. I don’t think you invented that, Astrid; all you did was make me see it. Well, I see it. There it is. The FAYZ gave me this light, and the FAYZ made it necessary. And now the light isn’t helping, is it? Now that monster is going to walk into town and kill people I care about and people I love.”
Astrid stood up. She was shaking. “I can’t . . .,” she said.
Sam stood and tried to hold her, but she pulled away. “If one of us is getting out of here, it has to be you, Astrid. If I get out, it’s trouble anyway, you know that. The world out there is waiting for a scapegoat.”
“You promised me,” she said. “You’ve always kept your promises to me, Sam. Keep this one. I’m holding you to it. You swore. You swore to me.”
From outside there came the sounds of yelling. Someone was crying, “Fire! Fire!”
“Go,” Astrid said, dismissing him. “And keep your word to me, Sam, or you’re a damned liar.”
He left, not sure how to respond to that. He was relieved to have something tangible to do.
It felt good to be running free down the beach. Lying in a box at the bottom of the lake Drake hadn’t expected to ever have it all back. A body. Not his, but his now, and it was in good shape and strong.
And so much more important, he had his whip. He had his whip hand!
Whip Hand!
No one was watching the beach. They were all huddled in terror in town. And the best thing was, they weren’t expecting him, were they? Astrid would have bragged all over town how she had looked down at a helpless Drake and laughed and laughed. She must have thought she was safe from him at last. No more Drake. All Drake’s threats were nothing now, hah hah.
What he would do to her.
The longing for that moment almost made him weak. He wanted it so badly. Had he ever wanted anything as badly as he wanted to hear Astrid beg for mercy?
But no, he couldn’t kill her. He had to keep her alive, which was better. Life meant pain. If there was one thing Drake had learned his entire life—well, at least since his mother had remarried—it was that life was pain. And there was such joy in causing pain.
He had seen the pleasure his stepfather had taken in beating Drake’s mother. And his mother must have almost enjoyed it, too, right? She kept doing things that pissed her husband off. Like she expected it. Like she wanted it. Law of the jungle, his grandfather told him once. The big and strong kill and eat the small and weak. And Drake knew his grandfather was speaking from experience. He could see it in the old man’s eyes. That old man had brought the pain in his life.
Drake climbed over the rocks that separated Town Beach from the much smaller Clifftop beach. He would climb the cliff, sneak past Clifftop, and come into town from the last direction Astrid would expect.
As he climbed, he felt the strength in this new body. He felt the power in his regrown whip hand as it lashed up, finding bushes and ledges and hauling him upward as swiftly as any rope.
Spider-Man! Hah!
Whip Hand!
As he climbed, he looked north and saw the fire. The fires of hell. Hah hah! Perfect. Let it all come down in pain and fire! He felt his ambitions broaden.
He was resurrected. He was resurrected to kill.
He was Jesus with a whip, an unkillable Satan coming with smoke and fire to destroy! In his mind it was a lurid comic-book panel: Drake Whip Hand, wreathed in fire, with Astrid and Diana cowering, whipped and begging for mercy.
And at some point he forgot all about Gaia.
TWENTY-SEVEN
1 HOUR, 29 MINUTES
ASTRID WATCHED SAM go and tried to calm the wild emotions she felt.
He wasn’t wrong. That was the hell of it. He wasn’t wrong. It would be his own light that killed. It was his light that had burned a hole in Brianna’s heart.
But this could not be the answer. Not after everything that had happened. This could not be the answer.
It is the answer, Astrid. You know it.
She followed him out as far as the door—well, the wreckage of a doorway—and saw him rushing across the plaza to where a fire had caught somehow in a drifted pile of trash.
A couple of kids were already taking care of it, and Sam wasn’t necessary. The truth was, the cries of “Fire!” almost served as a distraction, something to—
The whip was around her throat. She screamed but no sound emerged. She tried to breathe, but nothing came.
She reached for a standing pillar of stone; her fingernails clawed at it. She kicked at a piece of wood, hoping it would make some sound to draw Sam’s attention. The buildings around the plaza
were supposed to be full of Edilio’s people: one of them must see!
Sam had only to turn around . . .
Astrid dropped, putting all her weight on the tentacle arm, hoping to pull him off balance. But he was too strong.
Drake drew her back into the shadows of the church. She was kicking, trying to scream, her lungs already burning from lack of oxygen.
“Hello, Astrid,” Drake said.
And she lost consciousness.
“We need a bucket brigade,” Sam said to Edilio. “There must be some kind of air current up high in the dome. It’s picking up sparks from the forest fire and dropping them all around.”
“I’ll get all my spare people on it right away,” Edilio snapped. Then, “Sorry.”
“I know you’re stretched thin, man.”
“Thin? I’m stretched invisible, Sam. There are maybe two, three dozen kids in the fields. I have maybe twelve left actually holding guns. And the rest? You know where they are.”
“It’s the waiting,” Sam said, looking to the northwest, the direction of the highway. “Why doesn’t she just attack?”
“Maybe she knows we’re panicking. Or maybe she’s waiting for the fire to do her work for her.”
Sam looked up. The sky was still afternoon blue, but there was a gray tint to the air. “If she’s out there to the northwest of town like we think, then she’s closer to the fire than we are. Maybe we’ll get lucky and—”
He stopped when he saw Edilio’s skeptical look.
“Yeah,” Sam said. Then: “I have to go after her. If I wait, then she uses my own power to kill kids. I have to try to take her down myself.”
Edilio spread his hands as if to say, But . . . There was no but. It was the truth, and they both knew it.
“The only other alternative is, you know, to, um . . . deprive her of my power. It may give me a chance, her needing to keep me alive. That may give me an edge.”
Again Sam was waiting to hear the counterargument. He was waiting to hear Edilio explain how wrong he was to believe that he had to die to stop Gaia. But that wasn’t what he heard, or what he saw in Edilio’s eyes.
“She’s stronger than you are, Sam. It’s like fighting yourself and Caine and Jack and Dekka, all at once.”
“Yeah.”
“Talk to Astrid about it.”
“I already talked to Astrid.”
“And she’s okay with a suicide mission? Because I’m not. You go out there, go to win, huh? Don’t go out there thinking you’re doing us a favor by getting killed.”
Sam sighed. “It’s the endgame, my friend.”
“Sam . . .,” Edilio began, but that was all he had, that one word, that one-word plea for a different solution.
“Take care of Astrid for me. Try to keep her safe and don’t let her follow me.”
“I haven’t been very good at keeping people safe,” Edilio said.
“No, man, what happened to Roger is not your fault or your failing. The grief is enough. It’s enough. You don’t need guilt on top of it.”
Edilio looked grateful, but not like he believed it.
“Listen, Edilio, if she gets past me, she won’t have the light anymore,” Sam said. “You understand? But she will still be very dangerous. When I’ve fought Caine, the worst thing wasn’t him dropping stuff down, because you see the arc of it going up then coming down, right? Him throwing stuff horizontally: that was worse because it was faster. Look out for that when . . . if . . . she gets here.”
Edilio put out his hand and Sam took it.
“It’s been interesting, hasn’t it?” Sam said, trying for a smile.
“It’s been a great honor to stand with you,” Edilio said.
“Tell her I’m sorry I broke my promise,” Sam said, so softly Edilio almost didn’t hear. “Tell her I love her.”
Sam didn’t hurry. He knew where he was going. He wasn’t happy about going there. No rush.
He walked the highway. How many times before had he made this walk? How many times had he passed this wrecked car and that overturned truck?
Someday if, when, the barrier came down, someone would clean it all up. The tow trucks would come. Beep-beeping as they backed up to slip their lift beneath some battered hulk of a car. Maybe there were a few car windows that hadn’t been broken, but not many. All the tires were partly or completely deflated. The gas tanks were long-since siphoned. Many of these cars had kept running until the gas was gone.
In some of these cars babies in car seats had died of starvation. In some of these cars kids had died when the driver poofed at seventy miles an hour. Would the CSI types have to come in and reconstruct it all? Would they identify the unidentified bones?
Someday families would try to come back only to find their home ransacked, torn up, sometimes reeking of human feces. There would be graffiti on their walls and trash stuffed in their toilets. And in many cases they’d find their homes burned down. Zil’s fire had taken something like a quarter of the town, and other houses had been knocked down to make firebreaks.
People would marvel at the destruction and tut-tut and shake their heads because they wouldn’t know what people had lived through in this place.
Those people returning to Perdido Beach wouldn’t understand what desperate battles had been fought.
Yeah, sorry about pulling fuel rods out of the nuclear power plant and tossing them down a mine shaft. Why did we do that? Well . . . hah. You’re never going to believe why we did that.
You say Coates Academy looks like it’s been through an artillery duel? Well, in a way it has been.
Yes, there is at least one whisky still in the woods.
Yes, there are unburied corpses.
Those cat and dog bones? The ones that are charred as if someone cooked and ate a beloved household pet? Well . . . we got a little hungry.
Sorry about the graveyard in the town plaza. So damned sorry you can’t begin to understand how sorry.
Sorry.
He was walking toward fire, into thickening smoke.
That was how he had crossed the line the very first time, so long ago, when an apartment off the town plaza had burned and he’d heard a cry for help. No one else had gone running toward the fire, so he had.
“All downhill after that,” he said to no one.
That was the first burial in the town plaza. Sam had stepped up to try and save the nameless girl, and when he had failed, it was Edilio who had finally dug the grave and placed the marker. Edilio cleaning up after Sam’s failures. That hadn’t changed.
Battles avoided and battles joined. He had seen the rise of Caine and his fall. He had seen the threat from Zil’s antimutant bigots grow and nearly destroy them all, and he’d seen Zil lying dead.
He’d seen Mary, good, sweet, decent Mary who looked after the littles, lose her mind under the influence of demons both internal and external.
He’d seen the zekes consume poor E.Z. He’d seen kids cough their own lungs out. He’d seen the bugs explode from a body half-eaten.
And how many dead? The little girl from the fire, she had been just the first. His first failure to save a life.
Duck. Good old Duck.
Thuan.
Francis.
How many of them? More than he could remember.
He’d seen the unknowns become pillars of strength. What a cliché that phrase was, but how else to describe Edilio? When the barrier came down he would probably be deported to Honduras.
Thanks for your heroism; now get out of the country, kid.
He had seen the weak become strong as granite. Quinn.
And Lana, what hadn’t that girl been through?
Dekka, fearless, passionate Dekka, his right hand, his companion in battle, the sister he’d never had.
Through it all there had been Astrid. Difficult as always. Complicated as always. Superior, condescending, thoughtful, manipulative, beautiful, and passionate Astrid. The love of his life.
All worth it, just to have loved
and been loved by her.
Coming down the road toward him was a flatbed truck. It was moving slowly but steadily. He could see that its wheels were not touching the road. It trailed smoke. The flatbed was piled with burning trees and tires and debris. It was an inferno that would have roasted any driver.
Gaia walked beside it, a hand raised to focus Caine’s power and lift the massive truck.
She stopped, and the burning truck stopped as well. Gaia smiled.
“So,” she said. “You’re ready to die.”
“Well, it was a short life. But it was a pretty good one,” he said.
“I don’t really want to kill you,” Gaia said.
“I know. And I know why. But I’m not giving you a choice.”
“Why fight me, Sam?” She had to shout to be heard above a sudden roar of the fire as a log collapsed on the others. Sparks exploded, fireflies to come drifting down on parched fields or continue to draft upward and maybe fall on the town.
Finishing Zil’s work.
“Because you’re going to kill my friends,” Sam said.
Gaia shrugged. “They’re a threat to me. I have a right to survive. Don’t I? Don’t all living things have a right to survive?”
“We’re not here for a conversation.”
“You know how many there are of me, Sam?” Gaia held up one finger. “One. Just one. I am the first and only like me. I am unique in the universe. Your friends? There are billions just like them.”
She moved the truck forward and began to walk.
“There’s no one like any of them,” Sam said. “I doubt you can understand.”
“Do you even know what I am?” she asked, mocking with a wry smile. “I was created to bring life. I was a seed sent out into the galaxy. But when I took root here, on this planet, all that changed. Is that my fault?”
Sam found himself taking a step back. He knew better than to argue. He hadn’t come here for a debate. But he knew where this fight was going. And when the end is there, right there in front of you, is it so weak to want to drag it out for a few extra seconds?
“You’re a killer. Killers lose their rights.”
“Hah!” Gaia laughed. “Of course humans don’t kill. You haven’t slaughtered other species for food. Or wiped them out just for sport. You don’t eat other creatures. Don’t be ridiculous. What if I told you that you could join me, Sam? That you don’t have to die.”