Gaia seemed startled. She raised one hand and froze them in place. “Look at this,” Gaia marveled. “Are they brave or stupid, Sam Temple?”
Sam blinked tears from his streaming eyes.
“Let them—” he started to say, but began to cough.
“I couldn’t quite hear that,” Gaia taunted.
Sam closed his eyes. Through his eyelids he saw a flash of green light. There were no cries. Just the wet-sandbag sound of bodies hitting the ground.
“Open your eyes, Sam Temple,” Gaia said. “I cut them in half. With your light. With your power.”
She pushed him with her foot to send him rolling.
“On to the rest. On to—” She fell silent suddenly. He opened one soot-streaked eye and saw that Gaia was looking around, nervous. Like she felt someone watching her.
“Where is the whip hand with my hostage?” she asked aloud. Then to Sam, as if he might have the answer: “Where is Drake with the sister of Nemesis?”
“Astrid!” Sam gasped.
“Hear me, Nemesis!” Gaia cried, choking then recovering. “Hear me! I have your sister!”
“I don’t see her,” Sam said.
“Never worry, Sam Temple: Drake will get her.” But Gaia chewed at her thumbnail, a very Caine gesture Sam had seen before.
“You seem scared,” Sam said.
Gaia snarled at him and raised her own hands as if ready to kill him herself. Then she laughed shakily. “Ah-hah. Trying to provoke me?”
But she was rattled. She had felt something. She had felt something she didn’t like.
“Nemesis?” Sam asked her.
Gaia didn’t answer. She was done playing games. She was done enjoying herself. She grabbed Sam’s chain and began dragging him down the road, then broke into a run.
Caine and Diana docked the boat at the marina. The fire, which had been to the north, now seemed to be everywhere at once. Bursts of sparks rose high from the direction of the highway. The air was filled with ash, hard to breathe, hard to keep your eyes open. Impossible to believe that somewhere the sun was still shining.
“Should I tie off the boat?” Diana asked.
Caine didn’t answer. He levitated himself from the boat to the dock. Then, with equal ease, he lifted the missiles in their crates and landed them safely on the wood planks.
“Give me a hand,” Diana said. She held her hand up to him.
He looked down at her. “I don’t think so, Diana.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He raised one hand and pushed the boat gently away from the dock.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Going out in style,” he said.
“Caine. Caine. What are you doing?”
“There’s no good reason for both of us to die.”
“Caine, you’re being silly,” she said as firmly as she could. “You know this is the end. I want to be with you. I don’t want our monster child hunting me down and finding me at the end all alone.”
He shrugged. “I know you asked Little Pete to take you. I know you offered yourself up.”
“How? How did you know?”
He shrugged.
“But he didn’t,” Diana said. “He didn’t, which—”
“Yeah. Well. He had a better offer.”
“What?” The word came out as a sob. “Caine . . . No. No. We do this together.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” he said with strained nonchalance. “I think it will be like it is with Gaia. I think when Little Pete does his thing, well, I don’t think I’ll be around then. So I don’t see how we do this together.”
“Don’t, Caine. Don’t you do this,” Diana pleaded.
“You have to understand, Diana: I’m not trying to be noble. It’s just the only way I have to beat it. The gaiaphage. It thinks it has me. It thinks it owns me. It thinks it cracks the whip and I have no choice but to obey. And the pain . . .” He shrugged again. “So. So, we want old green-and-evil to be surprised when it finds out, right?”
“Caine, this is not what we . . . No. No.”
He stretched out his hand and she rose through the air, almost as if she was flying to him.
They were in each other’s arms, Diana shaking, Caine strangely calm.
“Sam’s probably out there somewhere being his usual heroic self,” Caine said. “I can’t let that boy save the world all alone. I’d never live it down.”
“Don’t do this, baby, don’t do this,” Diana begged as she stroked his face.
“Listen to me. I wrote something, back on the island. Two somethings, actually. One is for you to give to Sam, if he makes it out somehow, or Astrid, or someone, you know, trustworthy. And the other is for you. If you get a chance, you know, go and get them from the desk in that room.”
“We’re not beat yet, Caine,” she pleaded. “We haven’t lost yet.”
“I was a king for a while. I wasn’t a very good one. I wanted all kinds of things. I wanted, well, you know. Power. Glory. To be feared. All that good stuff. But you know what? When the gaiaphage did it to me, when she made me cry and grovel and beg for mercy, I realized: There’s no end to this for me. There’s no end to the FAYZ. If we get out alive, there’s still no end. And what happens to me out there in the world?”
“No, you’re wrong: they can’t blame you for everything that happened.”
He laughed. “Yeah, well, actually, they can. A king, a warrior, whatever I was, I want to go out in a blaze of glory. I’ve risen as high as I’m ever going to. And if I survive, I’m just going to end up as prisoner number three-one-two-whatever. You coming to see me on visiting days.”
“But I will come see you. And I will wait for you.”
“No,” he said firmly. “I get my big finish. And you get your life. Move on, Diana.”
“You’re not fooling me,” she said. “I know why you’re doing this—”
“Because I want to win,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And because I want to write the end of my own story.”
“Yes. And because you want redemption,” she said raggedly.
He shrugged. “If that’s what you want to believe.”
“And because you love me.”
Suddenly Caine was unable to say more. He waited, trying to master his emotions. They kissed, with Diana’s tears running down his cheeks. Then, using the power he had, he pried her loose and gently deposited her in the boat, now drifting out of reach of the dock.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone about those last two, okay? You tell anyone who ever asks: right to the end, Caine was in charge.”
He turned away quickly, lifted the deadly cargo, and trudged toward a burning Perdido Beach.
“Not yet, Little Pete,” he whispered, touching his cheeks and feeling her tears on his fingertips. “Not just yet.”
TWENTY-NINE
42 MINUTES
GAIA BURNED AND killed the length of the access road before turning right on Sheridan Avenue. Heading for the town plaza. At the corner of Golding she paused to attack the school.
She burned it in detail, firing the deadly light through long-shattered windows. She burned until the smoke began to billow and terrified kids who had sheltered there came running out.
Some made it.
Others did not.
She turned on Alameda, still carrying Sam by his chains, dropping him when she wanted both hands free to spread destruction.
“You definitely got the most useful power, Sam,” she said. “I’m very glad you’re still alive.”
Many of the houses in the area were already burned, others had been knocked down, but a few still stood, and these Gaia burned out. People fled like rats, leaping over fences, piling over mounds of rubble, and for Gaia it was almost a game, a shooting gallery.
People screamed and died. Or just died.
The counterattack came at the corner of San Pablo and Alameda.
Guns fired from the roof of the tow
n hall.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Carefully aimed, but it was a hard shot in the smoke, with cinders in the air. Gaia fired back but was no more successful.
Gaia grabbed Sam in one hand and raised him over her head like a human shield. The firing from the rooftop stopped.
“Keep shooting! Keep shooting!” Sam cried.
“Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” Edilio’s voice. Sam couldn’t see him. Was he behind the fountain?
Now again the firing started, but from a different angle, from the center of the plaza. Bullets whizzed past. Bullets pinged off concrete.
Gaia fired back with her free hand, but she wasn’t hitting anyone, either.
It was a melee, a madness of guns blazing and light beams searing and all of it swathed in swirling smoke.
Edilio had cleared the streets—there were no cars for Gaia to toss around, nothing to grab and use . . . except for the rubble of the church. She dropped Sam, ran to her left, and as she ran . . . disappeared.
Sam knew immediately what had happened. Bug. Somehow Gaia had learned about Bug. Had she been saving up for this moment? No, that would be insane. She’d have used the power earlier if she’d known. Someone had to have told her.
Drake?
But Drake was dead. Wasn’t he?
With invisibility Gaia would regain the edge she’d lost with Brianna’s death. Invisibility would leave Edilio’s people baffled and—
“Paint!” Edilio roared before losing his voice to a fit of coughing. Then, recovering: “Hit her!”
Two kids hidden in the church’s rubble threw balloons of paint. They splattered ineffectually on the ground. More were thrown from rooftops, and then from nothingness came the green light, killing one kid, burning the belly of the other. The wounded boy broke and ran.
But the deadly beams had revealed Gaia’s location.
“Jack!” Edilio managed to gasp, and Jack rose from behind the fountain and bounded in a single jump from the fountain to the steps of the church. He spun, two spray-paint cans flowing, and yes, there! Just a swatch of red and a patch of white that gave away an arm and an impression of a torso.
The guns didn’t need an order. They blazed. From the day care, from the McDonald’s, from the roof of the town hall.
But now Gaia had broken timber and slabs of plaster and steel support beams to work with. Using her telekinetic power she threw a whirlwind of debris at the fountain. There were cries in the dark, and the firing from there stopped.
Then a bullet fired from the roof of the town hall caught her ankle, and she bellowed in rage and pain. The blood that sprayed was all too visible.
She snatched up a crossbeam that weighed hundreds of pounds and played her laser fire down its length, let it go, grabbed it with her telekinetic grip, and threw it through the front door of the town hall.
The firing continued.
Sam saw it and heard it from his position in the middle of the street.
Suddenly Jack was beside him. He lifted Sam in his arms and ran.
It was a bullet that caused Jack to fall. One misdirected bullet hit him in the lower back. His legs went out from under him. He dropped Sam, then fell atop him.
“Jack!”
“I’m okay. It’s just . . . my legs. I can’t move my legs.”
Sam saw fear in Jack’s eyes. Jack, who had never wanted the power he was given.
Jack who had never wanted anything but to play with his computers.
“Oh, man,” Jack said.
He seemed to pass out for a moment, but then rallied. “Let me get you out . . .,” he said, and blood was in his mouth now, cutting off speech.
Jack, Computer Jack, as he had long been known, gripped the chains around Sam and pulled with all of his incredible strength.
He coughed blood onto Sam’s chest.
A single link in the chain snapped.
And Jack was gone.
Sam squirmed, trying to work free of the broken chain. He saw Gaia, nothing but a creature poorly outlined in paint and blood, a human-shaped swirl within the smoke, raise high a steel support beam, ready to hurl it with Jack’s strength.
Her arms bent, the beam fell, and she leaped out of the way and ran, as bullets flew, into the church.
Drake screamed. The sound of it, the wind from it, was in Astrid’s face. She bit down as if she was hanging on to life itself by her teeth. She was.
Drake punched her in the side of the head.
She blocked him, softening the blows with one battered hand.
He tried to wrap his whip hand around her throat, but she was too close and he couldn’t pull away, and her teeth were not just holding, they were cutting into flesh, ripping at him like a dog.
He tried to stand up, tried to get leverage, but he couldn’t get distance, and now instead of blocking his blows she gripped his head with both hands and forced her thumbs into his eyes.
Drake bellowed and squirmed and beat at her, and her mind was swimming, the blows were taking a toll, bashing her temple; his whip was trying to lash at her exposed legs, but no, no, she wasn’t going to let go, and her jaw was clenched with all the strength she had and her top teeth and bottom teeth were getting closer, closer, and Drake screamed curses, but he couldn’t get away.
Her thumbs pushed his eyeballs, hard-boiled eggs, dug past them, dug around them, dug fingernails into the space between eyeball and skull.
And she was screaming, too: the words weren’t clear, her mouth was full, and her jaw was clenched painfully, but it sounded just a bit like, “Die! Die!”
All at once, with a shake of her head, his nose ripped off.
Her thumbs were up past the knuckle; she felt the fragile bone cage crack.
Then, in one convulsive move, she pushed him off her. He rolled onto the floor, stood, and she backed away. She spit out the nose.
One of his eyes dangled from a thread.
The other oozed something like jelly from a split in the pupil.
Between them the lizard’s tail whipped madly.
He swung his own whip, lashed the air, but blindly. He caught the chandelier, ripping loose some of the Barbies hung there.
He wasn’t dead. She didn’t have the power to kill him. He would regenerate: he would come for her again.
And then, there was Taylor.
The appearance of the golden-skinned girl, the anomaly-amongst-anomalies, just froze Astrid. It was utterly incongruous.
Taylor looked down at the lashing, screaming, losing-it Drake and said to Astrid, “Peter. He sent me. To save you.”
“Thanks,” Astrid gasped, and picked bits of Drake’s nose out of her teeth.
“He’s very weak. I think he only has minutes—”
“Little Pete? I asked him to take me,” Astrid said.
Taylor shook her head, a too-slow, reptilian move. She seemed to be enjoying the way her hair flowed across her neck and forehead. “Not you. He is scared of you. Peter is scared of you. But he likes you.”
“I get that sometimes,” Astrid said. “Tell him thanks.”
Taylor disappeared from the room. Astrid turned to flee, hesitated, picked up a chair, and slammed it down on Drake’s head as hard as she could, breaking one of the heavy legs in the process.
Then she fled.
Somewhere close by, guns were firing.
The plan, such as it was, had worked.
Gaia was in the church. The idea had been that she would be drawn to the only debris she could use as weapons. The hope would be that she’d go all the way in.
And now Dekka sprang her trap.
Gaia stood, bleeding, visible now as she relinquished Bug’s power of invisibility. She stood gasping from the pain, seething in rage, frustrated again, and surrounded, literally surrounded, by all the heavy, hard, sharp-edged debris of the semi-collapsed church.
Dekka was at the altar.
“You murdered someone I love,” Dekka said, and raised her hands high. Thousands of pounds of wood and steel, plaster
and glass, pews, roof tiles, and accumulated filth rose in a rush, a pillar of swirling junk.
Up and up, and Gaia rose with it.
Forty feet up and Gaia had recovered her wits well enough to take aim at Dekka, and then, just as Gaia began to fire, Dekka dropped it all.
WHOOOOMPF!
It fell and bounced and crashed and splintered with a noise like the end of the world.
Dekka jumped back to avoid being hit, but she still took a dozen small impacts from flying debris. She couldn’t see Gaia, but she wasn’t taking chances. She raised high the debris and dropped it again.
And raised it and dropped it again. Hammer blows.
On the fourth attempt Dekka saw Gaia floating above it all, bloodied, bruised, her clothing torn, her hair filthy, but not dead, very much not dead.
Gaia looked down at her, aimed, held Dekka directly in her line of fire, and laughed. “Very clever,” Gaia said. “It almost worked. But I won’t kill you. Not yet.”
Gaia floated calmly down as the mess settled around her, slowly, under her control now.
Dekka drew a pistol. Gaia flicked it easily from her grip and sent it flying away.
“Anything else?” Gaia asked.
“You’re getting weaker,” Dekka blustered.
“Mmmm. So are all of you.”
“You can’t afford to kill me.”
“No. But I can do this.” Gaia used her father’s power to raise a pew, a long, heavy oak bench, and blast it into Dekka’s chest, pinning her against the altar.
Dekka lay still.
Gaia turned away, limping and in pain. Why was this proving so hard? She’d lost speed, now she’d lost Jack’s strength, and worst of all, most dangerous of all, she’d lost control of Sam. He had gotten away, and he might come for her again. Or he might take his own life. Either way . . .
She had to heal herself and quickly.
Little Pete was doing something . . . something . . . she could feel it. She could feel his resolution. She could feel his anticipation. But she could also feel his ebbing strength.