It was warm: that was the surprise. It was warm and it made him sigh. It was like . . . well, not exactly like anything he’d felt, but maybe closest to the way he’d felt after he made love to Diana, and lay beside her, and smelled her, and felt her breath on his cheek, and she would put a hand on his cheek and . . .
You’re giving me a good memory to go out on, aren’t you, Pete?
Well, good choice, Caine thought.
Huh. I can’t feel my body, Caine thought.
Huh.
I . . .
Diana was wet and cold. She had finally jumped into the water and swum to the dock and pulled her battered self out of the water.
She had run as well as she could through smoke, through the streets toward the sounds of panic and death. She’d run into Sam. He was in the plaza calling for Astrid.
“Astrid! Astrid!”
He spotted Diana.
“Have you seen her? Have you seen Astrid?”
“No, Sam. Have you seen—”
They had heard the swoosh of the missile. And they had listened hopefully for the explosion.
For a second’s time they had held on to hope. And then had come the sound of screams.
Sam looked half dead, but he took her hand, and she took his, and they ran toward the sound. Whether he was her protector or she was his, it didn’t really matter. They were two scared kids, running the wrong way, running toward the sound of death, while fire chased them through the streets.
Gaia still stood. She still lived.
A million years in the blackness of space.
Fourteen years in a hole in the ground, growing, mutating, becoming the gaiaphage.
Not dead yet. The body it inhabited was beyond agony, but the gaiaphage lived, and it could still kill.
And there before her was Caine, somehow smiling. Not a cynical smirk: a genuine, happy smile.
And there, rushing up the road, Diana yelling, “No, Caine. No!”
Even Sam, still alive, excellent: her powers would be undiminished.
“Hello, Darkness,” Caine said.
Gaia’s face fell. Her bloody, feral grin faded to be replaced by lips drawn tight in fear. Her killer blue eyes widened as she looked at Caine who was no longer Caine.
“Nemesis,” Gaia said.
THIRTY-ONE
11 MINUTES
A MILLION YEARS ago, and a bit more, a lifeless moon had been infected with a carefully structured virus. That moon had then been exploded, sending out countless fragments, seedlings, like the seeds of a dandelion, blowing across the billions of miles of space.
It was to bring life where no life existed. It was an optimistic gesture. But in one place, that hopeful experiment went terribly wrong. One seedling hit a nuclear pile on the planet Earth, and dragged shattered bits of human DNA into the crater.
Slowly the virus and the chromosomes and the radiation cooked up a monster. The virus spread, but instead of creating life it began to infect the very fabric of reality. It spawned mutations. It created its own unhinged version of evolution.
Some living things were affected, and others were spared.
One was especially vulnerable: a strange little boy whose own brain made him a prisoner, whose own mind made life painful and terrifying. Unbearable.
It would be a while before the gaiaphage began to suspect that it had unwittingly created its own nemesis. When the warping of physical laws sent the nuclear plant spiraling into a meltdown, that little boy, overwhelmed by sensory input he could not understand, sirens blaring and screens flashing warnings, created the barrier. In a flash of inconceivable power Peter Ellison simply removed all the noisy, troublesome grown-ups, silenced all that overload, and protected himself as best he could.
The gaiaphage’s malignant effect was contained. The world had found its defense against alien infection. The antibody was a then-four-year-old boy with powers made possible by the gaiaphage virus.
Nature had found the way to defend itself.
And now, at last, gaiaphage and Nemesis stood facing each other.
“Why didn’t you just . . . fade?” Gaia demanded plaintively.
“You hit me,” Nemesis said. It was a little boy’s voice coming from Caine’s mouth. “And that’s not okay.”
Sam let go of Diana’s hand, seeing Astrid ahead. He saw her blond hair from the back and almost wept with relief. But then he saw that she had been hurt.
“Astrid!” he cried.
But she held up her hand, silencing him. He looked past her then and saw Caine and Gaia, no more than a hundred feet apart.
Diana stepped closer.
“Diana, move back.” Edilio, trying to get her to a safe distance.
Diana shook her head. “I don’t think so, Edilio. He wanted a blaze of glory. He deserves an audience.”
Gaia raised her hands, fury and fear on her blood-red face. Blistering green light blazed from them.
At the same moment, Nemesis returned fire, but his light came from every direction at once. It was a white light that shifted into blue and purple and red. It came down as lightning from the sky, a thousand thunderstorms.
The entire FAYZ burned as bright as a star.
Gaia’s light hit Nemesis as she herself absorbed the awesome fire.
The girl and the boy burned bright and yet still fired.
And burned and still fired.
Their hair and clothing were gone.
Their flesh crisped.
Their eyes boiled out of their skulls.
And still the terrible light.
Their legs melted beneath them like candles. Holes appeared in their torsos. And only when they fell, each into a heap of glowing ash, did the light die.
“Well,” Diana said, with tears running down her cheeks. “That was a blaze of glory.”
There was a moment, a frozen, eternal moment, when no one breathed, and no one spoke.
Then: a sudden rush of wind. Wind! There had been no wind since—
“RUN!” Sam cried. “The fire! Run!”
Wind blew in like the leading edge of a hurricane, rushed into the disturbance created by the sudden disappearance of the barrier. The wind fed the flames, set small fires roaring to new heights, turned bigger fires into pillars of flame that shot high into the sky.
The population of the FAYZ, choked, terrorized, and battered, rushed in a wild panic down the highway. It was a stampede, and Sam was nearly swept along. But he held on to Astrid, held on to her and looked at her face and saw the bruises.
“Who?” he demanded.
“Sam, it doesn’t matter; it’s over,” Astrid shouted to be heard above the roar of wind and fire.
“Who?” he demanded again.
“Drake. He wasn’t dead. He may still not be dead. But Sam, there are police now, and—”
But Sam had broken free. He walked into the swirling smoke.
Astrid could barely breathe, but she would not let him walk away. Not when the end was this close. It was Edilio who left her no choice. He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her bodily down the highway until she stopped struggling.
“He told me to take care of you,” Edilio said.
Those were the last words they could speak, as the smoke thickened, choking them, blinding them. They staggered on together, seeing nothing but glimpses of people rushing by, just following the ribbon of concrete beneath their feet.
Then the smoke lessened. The wind was blowing itself out, and a countervailing breeze now flowed from the south.
And then, there they were, Astrid and Edilio, standing at the edge, at the very end of the FAYZ wall.
And then through.
Out.
One hundred and seventy-one people—babies in arms, toddlers, kids—ran and stumbled into the arms of waiting parents. They ran to be scooped up by waiting paramedics.
Some kids ran, ran down the road, down the highway, screaming past the TV trucks, past the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, pushing and shoving through th
e well-meaning and the ill-intentioned alike because there was no safe distance for them, not until they could no longer hear or see any part of the place.
THIRTY-TWO
0 MINUTES
SAM FELT THE heaviness in his lungs lessen. His eyes were still on fire, but he was able to open them.
He didn’t know where to look, only the person he was looking for.
“Drake!” he yelled. “Come out and fight me, Drake!”
The person who appeared was not Drake. Lana and Patrick stepped out of the smoke.
“The barrier is down,” Sam said. “Fire’s coming fast. Have you seen Drake?”
“Last I heard he was dead. But in this place . . .” She shook her head and looked somewhere between amused and resigned. “Sam, if the barrier’s down, you don’t have to do this.”
“He hurt Astrid,” Sam said. “She’s alive. But he took her. He hurt her.”
“And here you are the tragic hero, after all,” Lana said dryly. She was unusually droll for Lana. The world was ending and she was being witty. “You may find you need this. And you know what? I think I’m done with it.”
She slipped something heavy into the waist of his jeans, and then walked away with her dog.
Sam felt the butt of Lana’s automatic pistol. Was it true? True that he didn’t have to do this? True that he needed the gun?
“Drake!” he yelled.
He heard the town burning. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The heat was intense, right on the line between barely tolerable and not. It was like standing too close to a fireplace, feeling it dry your skin, and knowing that another five degrees and you’d no longer be dry: you’d be burned. There were sparks everywhere in the air. The whole town would burn.
“Drake!”
The whip slashed his back, a pain like being branded by a hot iron.
He spun, and Drake’s fist smashed him in the face.
Sam went down on one knee, aimed his hands, and fired.
Nothing happened.
Drake seemed as shocked as Sam. He made a single, sudden laugh. “Not so dangerous now, are you, Sam?”
Drake struck again, and the whip burned across Sam’s shoulders. Sam lurched forward.
“I had fun with your girlfriend, Sam,” Drake said.
Sam tried again. But the light did not come. He was powerless. He drew the pistol.
“Come on, you know better than that, Sam, Sam, the hero man. You know bullets don’t kill me.”
“Gaia’s dead. The FAYZ is ended,” Sam said, and leveled the pistol at Drake’s face. “So I don’t know what will work and what won’t. Why don’t we find out?”
But a line had appeared around Drake’s neck. It was blood red, like a gruesome smile. Like the mark a hanged man might bear. It was widening, a gap forming between what had been Drake’s neck and Alex’s neck.
Drake hadn’t noticed yet. He grinned and slashed Sam hard, landing the whip’s blow again across his shoulder, curling around to tear at his back.
But when he retracted his whip arm, it was shorter. A foot-long segment had broken off. It lay like some nightmare worm on the sidewalk.
“No,” Drake said, but the sound of his voice was weakened by air sucking in through his neck.
Drake tried to strike again, to bring Sam down, but his whip arm was limp; it barely moved. It was curling from the end, seeming to crisp like parchment held too close to the fire.
“I’ll get out of here,” Drake said in a fading whisper. “I will find her. And I will make it last for days, Sam. I’ll make her scream, Sam. I’ll make her—”
Sam’s finger tightened on the trigger. It would be good to pull it. Drake was disintegrating before his eyes, and yet still, still, it would be good to pull that trigger. To feel the gun buck in his hand. To see the impact.
At that moment, as Sam stood poised between shooting and not, Drake’s head toppled off its grafted body and hit the ground.
One. Two. Three. Four. And the body collapsed.
The terrible whip arm looked like the skin a snake sheds during molting.
Sam picked up Drake’s head. The eyes fluttered, as though there might still be life.
Sam walked stiffly up the steps to the church, where the fire burned hot. He forced himself forward into the heat, feeling the hair on his head turn crisp, eyes so dry he couldn’t blink. And tossed Drake’s head into the flames.
“Okay,” he said to no one at all. “Now, I can get the hell out of here.”
THE TOLL
THREE HUNDRED AND thirty-two kids between the age of one month and fourteen years had been confined within the FAYZ.
One hundred and ninety-six eventually emerged.
One hundred and thirty-six lay dead.
Dead and buried in the town plaza.
Dead and floating in the lake or on its shores.
Dead in the desert.
In the fields.
Dead of battles old and recent. Of starvation and accident, suicide and murder.
It was a fatality rate of just over 40 percent.
AFTERMATH 1
SAM TEMPLE WAS taken by helicopter to a hospital in Los Angeles, where there were specialists there in burn injuries. He wasn’t consulted: he was found on his knees, obviously in shock, extensively burned. EMTs took over.
Astrid Ellison was taken to a hospital in Santa Barbara, as was Diana Ladris.
Other kids were shared out among half a dozen hospitals. Some specialized in plastic surgery, others in the effects of starvation.
Over the next week all were seen by psychiatrists once their immediate physical injuries were addressed. Lots of psychiatrists. And when they weren’t being seen by psychiatrists, they were being seen by FBI agents, and California Highway Patrol investigators, and lawyers from the district attorney’s office.
The consensus seemed to be that a number of the Perdido survivors, as they were now known, would be prosecuted for crimes ranging from simple assault to murder.
First on that list was Sam Temple.
Astrid tried many times to phone him from her hospital room, but calls to his hospital were being blocked. No, the nurses explained each time, they could not get him to the phone. No, they could not deliver a message. Not their fault. Talk to the district attorney’s office.
Astrid was able to visit Diana, who she found out was being cared for in the same hall, just three doors down.
Astrid walked slowly, cautiously, her body stiff from bruises and stiffer still from the bandages on her whip burns. They’d given her a cane to use.
She was not going to walk with a cane.
They’d offered her heavy-duty painkillers.
She’d rejected them, restricting herself to a few ibuprofen. The last thing she wanted was to be out of her mind, off in la-la land, when shrinks and cops and family were forever questioning her.
She had not told her parents about her own role in her brother’s death. She had only told them that he had died a very good death.
Astrid had seen their pain. She had also seen their hidden but still-visible relief. They would not have to readjust to their out-of-control autistic son. That had hurt the most. But who was she to judge?
She found Diana’s room. Diana was sitting in her bed using a remote control to idly flip through the channels on the wall-mounted TV.
“You,” Diana said by way of greeting.
“Me,” Astrid said.
“Can’t believe it,” Diana said. “All this time. And there’s still nothing on.”
Astrid laughed and lowered herself slowly into a chair. “You know how they say hospital food is so awful? Somehow I’m not having that reaction.”
“Tapioca beats rat,” Diana said.
“I never minded rat as much as that dog jerky we were getting for a while. The stuff Albert had them flavor with celery salt? That was the culinary low point for me.”
“Yeah, well, I had a lower low point,” Diana said, sounding angry. Or maybe not angry, maybe hurt.
A
strid put a hand on Diana’s arm, and Diana did not shake it off.
“How is Sam?” Diana asked.
“They won’t let me talk to him. But they’re going to release me in a couple of days. I’ll find him.”
“Won’t your parents try to stop you?”
Astrid considered this, then barked out a laugh. Diana joined in.
“Oh, my God, we have parents again,” Astrid said, wiping away a tear. “We’re kids. We’re teenagers again.”
A nurse poked her head in. “Listen, ladies, it’s not visiting hours, but there’s someone here to see you.”
“Who?” Diana asked.
The nurse looked left and right like she was afraid to be overheard. “It’s a young woman. She seems very determined. In fact, I almost called the police because she scared me.”
Astrid and Diana exchanged a look.
“Black or white?” Astrid asked.
“She happens to be white.”
“Lana!” Astrid and Diana said in unison.
“You’d better send her in,” Diana said. “You don’t want to say no to Lana. That would be, um, reckless.”
“And she’s saved more lives than every doctor and nurse in this hospital,” Astrid said.
Lana arrived a moment later, looking strangely clean, with her hair cut, and wearing clothing that was not stained or filthy or cut or patched together. She did not have a pistol. She did not have a cigarette.
“Oh, my God,” Diana said to Astrid. “Lana’s a girl.”
“Yeah, hysterical. Cracking me up,” Lana said with her very familiar, very hard-core snarl. “What, there’s only one chair?”
“Who have you seen?” Astrid asked.
“I saw Dekka. She’s with her folks. And if I said she wasn’t happy about things, that wouldn’t really begin to cover it. She wants to see Sam. Everyone wants to see Sam. Talked to Edilio on the phone. He’s in hiding. Worried about la migra coming for him and his family.”
“Edilio is in hiding,” Astrid snapped. “Edilio has to worry about being kicked out of the country. Our Edilio.”