It had taken them two hours to deal with the first two houses. It was going to be a while before every home in Perdido Beach had been searched and rendered safe.
“You want to do the hammer?” Sam asked, deferring to Quinn.
“I live for the hammer, brah.”
Quinn hefted the hammer and swung it against the door, just below the doorknob. The wood splintered, and Quinn pushed the door back.
The smell hit them hard.
“Oh, man, what died in here?” Quinn said, like it was a joke.
The joke fell flat.
Just inside the door, on the hardwood floor lay a baby’s pacifier. The three of them stared at it.
“No, no, no. I can’t do this,” Brooke said.
The three of them stayed on the porch, no one willing to go in. But no one was willing to close the door and just walk away, either.
Brooke’s hands were shaking so badly, Sam reached for them and held them in his. “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to go in.”
She was chubby, freckled, with straw-dry reddish hair. She wore the Coates uniform and had seemed, up until this moment, almost a cipher. She never joked or played around, just did what she was supposed to do, following Sam’s lead.
“It’s just, after Coates…,” Brooke said.
“What about Coates?” Sam asked.
Brooke flushed. “Nothing. Just, you know, all the adults disappearing.” Then, feeling like she had to explain some more, she said, “It’s, like, I don’t want to see any more creepy stuff, okay?”
Sam shot a significant look at Quinn, but Quinn just shrugged and said, “There’s, like, a dead little kid in there. We don’t have to go inside to know that.”
Sam yelled, “Is there anyone in there?” as loud as he could. Then to Quinn, “We can’t just ignore this.”
“Maybe we should just report it to Caine,” Quinn said.
“I don’t see him going house-to-house,” Sam snapped. “He’s sitting on his butt acting like he’s the emperor of Perdido Beach.”
When no one took the bait, Sam said, “Give me one of the big garbage bags.”
Quinn peeled one off.
Ten minutes later Sam was done. He dragged the bag with its sad contents across the carpet to the front door. He hefted it by the drawstrings and carried it out to the wagon.
“Like taking out the trash,” Sam said to no one. His hands were shaking. He felt so angry, he wanted to hurt someone. He felt angry enough that if he could have gotten his hands on whoever caused all this, he would have choked the life out of them.
Mostly Sam was angry at himself. He had never really known this family. It was a one-parent home, the mom and various boyfriends. And the little boy. The family weren’t friends, or even acquaintances, but still, he should have thought to check on the baby. That should have been his first thought. He should have remembered, but he hadn’t.
Without looking back at Quinn and Brooke, Sam said, “Open some windows. Let some air in there. We can come back when it’s not so…when the smell is gone.”
“Brah, I’m not going in there,” Quinn said.
Sam quickly closed the distance between them. Seeing his face, Quinn took a step back. “I picked the baby up and stuffed him in a trash bag, all right? So go in there and open the windows. Do it.”
“Man, you really need to step off,” Quinn said. “I don’t take orders from you.”
“No, you take them from Caine,” Sam said.
Quinn stuck his hand out, almost taunting. “I’m sorry, am I annoying you? Why don’t you just burn my hand off, magic boy?”
Sam and Quinn had had many arguments over the years. But since the coming of the FAYZ, especially since Sam had told Quinn the truth about himself, simple disagreements had turned quickly poisonous. They were in each other’s faces now like they might both start swinging. Sam was mad enough to.
Brooke said, “I’ll do it, Sam.”
Sam, his face still just inches from Quinn’s, said, “I don’t want it to be this way between us.”
Quinn relaxed his muscles. He forced a grin. “No big thing, brah.”
To Brooke, Sam said, “Open the windows. Then go tell Edilio to dig another hole. I’ll go do my house. It would be nice if you could pull the wagon downtown. But if you can’t, I’ll understand.”
Without another word to Quinn he stormed off but stopped short at the end of the walkway. “Brooke, see if you can find a picture of him and his mom, okay? I don’t want him to be buried alone. He should have…”
He couldn’t say any more. Eyes half blinded by unexpected tears, he marched down the street and stumbled up the steps to his own home, the house he hated, and slammed the door behind him.
It took a while before he even noticed his mother’s laptop computer was gone.
He went to the table. He touched the tabletop, right where the laptop had been, as though to reassure himself he wasn’t imagining things.
Then he noticed the open drawers. The open cabinets. The food hadn’t been taken, just tossed around, some of it ending up on the floor.
He bolted for his room. The light was still there. His weak attempt at camouflaging it had been torn down.
Someone knew. Someone had seen.
But it didn’t stop there. In his mother’s bedroom the drawers and the closet had been ransacked.
His mother kept a locked, flat, gray metal box in her closet. Sam knew because she’d pointed it out to him on more than one occasion. “If anything ever happens to me, this is where my will is.” She was very serious, but then she’d said, “You know, in case I get hit by a bus.”
“We don’t have any buses in Perdido Beach,” he’d pointed out.
“Hmm. I guess that explains why they’re never on time,” she’d said, and then laughed and hooked him in for a hug.
Holding on to him she had whispered, “Sam, your birth certificate is in there, too.”
“Okay.”
“It’s up to you whether you want to see it.”
He had stiffened against her embrace. She was offering him a chance to know what it said on the birth certificate. There would be three names listed: his, his mother’s, and his father’s.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he had said.
She held him tightly, but he gently disengaged and stood apart from her. He wanted then to say something. To apologize for what had happened to Tom. To ask her whether he had also, somehow, scared off his true father.
But his was a life with secrets. And even though his mother had made the offer, Sam knew she didn’t want him to violate the code of secrecy.
For months Sam had known about the box. Known where he could find the key.
Now the box was gone.
He had very little doubt who had taken it, who had searched the house.
By now, Caine knew that Sam had the power.
He retrieved his bike. Right now he wanted desperately to be with Astrid. She would make sense of everything.
Most kids now got around on bikes—not always their own—or skateboards. Only the prees walked. And as he crossed through the plaza on his way to Astrid’s home there was a procession of them walking right across the street. Brother John was in the lead. Mother Mary was pushing a two-seat stroller. Some girl in a Coates uniform was carrying a toddler on her hip. Two other kids, drafted for the day, were shepherding the line of some thirty or so preschoolers. They were solemn for a group of little kids but there was at least some horseplay, enough that Mary had to yell, “Julia and Zosia, get back in line.”
The twins, Emma and Anna, brought up the rear. Sam knew them fairly well, having actually gone out with Anna on a date once. Emma had a single stroller, and Anna was pushing a Ralph’s grocery store cart loaded with snacks and diapers and baby bottles.
Sam stopped and waited for them to cross the street. They stuck to the crosswalk, which, he supposed, was a good thing. Best for the prees to learn to cross the street like there might be traffic. Some kids had
been doing some driving, often with bad results. Caine had the rules on that too, now: no one was allowed to drive, except for some of Caine’s people and Edilio, who theoretically might have to drive the ambulance or the fire truck. If he ever figured out how.
“T’sup, Anna?” Sam asked politely.
“Hi, Sam. Where have you been?”
He shrugged. “Fire station. I kind of live there now.”
Anna pointed at the littles marching ahead of her. “Baby duty.”
“Drag,” Sam said.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind it.”
“And she’s great at it, too,” Mary called back encouragingly.
“I can change a diaper in under sixty seconds,” Anna said with a laugh. “Less, if it’s number one.”
“Where are you guys all going?”
“The beach. We’re going on a picnic.”
“Cool. See you later,” Sam said.
Anna waved over her shoulder as she passed.
“Hey, wish Anna and me happy birthday, Sam,” Emma called back.
“Happy birthday to both of you,” Sam said. He stood up on the bike’s pedals and picked up speed, heading for Astrid’s.
He felt a little sad thinking back on his one date with Anna. She was a nice girl. But he wasn’t all that interested in dating back then, that was the truth. He’d only gone out because he felt like it was required. He didn’t want kids to think he was a dork. And his mother kept asking about whether he was going out, so he had taken Anna to a movie. He remembered the movie, in fact: Stardust.
His mother had driven them. It was her night off. His mom had dropped them at the theater and picked them up afterward. He and Anna had gone to the California Pizza Kitchen and split a barbeque chicken pizza.
Birthday?
Sam jerked the bike into a sharp turn and pounded the pedals back, back toward where he’d passed the prees. It didn’t take long to catch them. They were just reaching the beach, all the toddlers toddling over the low seawall, laughing now as they took off their shoes and ran onto the sand and Mother Mary, sounding just like a teacher, yelled, “Hang on to your shoes, don’t lose your shoes, Alex, pick up your shoes and carry them.”
Anna and Emma had parked the shopping cart full of snacks and diapers and bottles. Emma was unbuckling her charge from the stroller.
“Check his diaper,” Mother Mary reminded her, and Emma did.
Sam threw his bike down and ran, breathless, to Anna.
“What’s up, Sam?”
“What birthday?” he panted.
“What?”
“What birthday, Anna?”
It took a while for her to absorb his fear. It took a while for the reason for his fear to dawn on her.
“Fifteen,” Anna said in a whisper.
“What’s the matter?” Emma asked, sensing her twin’s mood. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t,” Anna whispered.
“You’re probably right,” Sam said.
“Oh, my God,” Anna said. “Are we going to disappear?”
“When were you born?” Sam asked. “What time of day?”
The twins exchanged scared looks. “We don’t know.”
“You know what, no one has blinked out since that first day, so it’s probably—”
Emma disappeared.
Anna screamed.
The other older kids took notice, the littles, too.
“Oh, my God!” Anna cried. “Emma. Emma. Oh, God!”
She grabbed Sam’s hands and he held her tight.
The prees, some of them, caught the fear. Mother Mary came over. “What’s going on? You’re scaring the kids. Where’s Emma?”
Anna just kept saying, “Oh, my God,” and calling her sister’s name.
“Where’s Emma?” Mary demanded again. “What’s going on?”
Sam didn’t want to explain. Anna was hurting him with the pressure of her fingers digging into the backs of his hands. Anna’s eyes were huge, staring holes in him.
“How far apart were you born?” Sam asked.
Anna just stared in blank horror.
Sam lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “How far apart were you born, Anna?”
“Six minutes,” she whispered.
“Hold my hands, Sam,” she said.
“Don’t let me go, Sam,” she said.
“I won’t, Anna, I won’t let you go,” Sam said.
“What’s going to happen, Sam?”
“I don’t know, Anna.”
“Will we go to where our mom and dad are?”
“I don’t know, Anna.”
“Am I going to die?”
“No, Anna. You’re not going to die.”
“Don’t let go of me, Sam.”
Mary was there now, a baby on her hip. John was there. The prees, some of them, watched with serious, worried looks on their faces.
“I don’t want to die,” Anna repeated. “I…I don’t know what it’s like.”
“It’s okay, Anna.”
Anna smiled. “That was a nice date. When we went out.”
“It was.”
For a split second it was like Anna blurred. Too fast to be real. She blurred, and Sam could almost swear that she had smiled at him.
And his fingers squeezed on nothing.
For a terribly long time no one moved or said anything.
The littles didn’t cry out. The older kids just stared.
Sam’s fingertips still remembered the feel of Anna’s hands. He stared at the place where her face had been. He could still see her pleading eyes.
Unable to stop himself, he reached a hand into the space she had occupied. Reaching for a face that was no longer there.
Someone sobbed.
Someone cried out, other voices then, the prees started crying.
Sam felt sick. When his teacher had disappeared he hadn’t been expecting it. This time he had seen it coming, like a monster in a slow-motion nightmare. This time he had seen it coming, like standing rooted on the railroad tracks, unable to jump aside.
TWENTY
131 HOURS, 03 MINUTES
“IT JUST HAPPENED,” Drake announced.
Caine sat in his over-large leather chair, the one that had formerly belonged to the mayor of Perdido Beach. It made him look small. It made him look very young. And to make matters worse, he was chewing on his thumbnail, which made it almost seem that he was sucking his thumb.
Diana was on the couch, lying back reading a magazine and barely paying attention. “What happened?”
“The two girls you had me following. They both just took the big jump. They poofed, as that idiot Quinn says.”
Caine jerked to his feet. “Just as I predicted. Just like I said.” Caine did not seem to be happy to have been proven right. He came around from behind his desk and to Drake’s great enjoyment, snatched the magazine out of Diana’s hand and threw it across the room. “You think maybe you could pay attention?”
Diana sighed and sat up slowly, brushed a piece of lint from her blouse. “Don’t get pissy with me, Caine,” she warned. “I’m the one who said we needed to start collecting birth certificates.”
Drake had made time to check out Diana’s psych file the day after the FAYZ came. But her file had been missing by then. In its place she had left Drake’s file lying open on the doc’s desk and drawn a little smiley face beside the word “sadist.”
Drake had already hated her. But after that, hating Diana had become a full-time occupation.
To Drake’s disgust, Caine accepted Diana’s back talk. “Yeah. That was a good idea,” Caine said. “A very good idea.”
“Diana’s boy Sam was there,” Drake said.
Diana did not respond to the provocation.
“He was holding the one girl’s hand when she bugged,” Drake added. “Looking right into her eyes. See, the first girl goes and they all know what’s coming at that point. The second girl, she was weepy over it. I was too far off to hear what she sai
d, but you could tell she was basically wetting herself.”
“Sadism,” Diana said. “The enjoyment of another person’s pain.”
Drake stretched his shark grin. “Words don’t scare me.”
“You wouldn’t be a psychopath if they did, Drake.”
“Knock it off, you two,” Caine said. He slumped back in the oversized chair and started biting his thumb again. “It’s November seventeenth. I have five days to figure out how to beat this.”
“Five days,” Drake echoed.
“I don’t know what we’d do if you bugged out, Caine,” Drake said. He sent Diana a look that said he knew exactly what he would do if Caine wasn’t around anymore.
Computer Jack came bursting into the room in his usual flustered, goggle-eyed way, carrying an open laptop.
“What?” Caine snarled.
“I hacked it,” Computer Jack said proudly. When he got blank looks in reaction, he said, “Nurse Temple’s laptop.”
Caine looked nonplussed. “What? Oh. Great. I have bigger problems. Give it to Diana. And get out.”
Computer Jack handed the laptop to Diana and scuttled from the room.
“Scared little worm, isn’t he?” Drake said.
“Don’t mess with him. He’s useful,” Caine warned. “Drake. What did you see exactly when the girl…vacated?”
“The first one, I wasn’t looking right at her when it happened. The second one, I kept my eyes on her. One minute there, the next gone.”
“At one seventeen?”
Drake shrugged. “Close enough, anyway.”
Caine slammed his hand down on the desk. “I don’t want close enough, you idiot,” he shouted. “I’m trying to figure this out. You know, it’s not just me, Drake. We all get older. You’ll be there someday too, waiting to disappear.”
“April twelfth, just one minute after midnight, Drake,” Diana said. “Not that I’ve memorized the exact day, hour, and minute or…” She fell silent, reading the computer screen.
“What?” Caine asked.
Diana ignored him but it was clear that she had found something of great interest in the diary of Connie Temple. Diana rose with swift, feline grace and yanked open the file cabinet. She pulled the gray metal box out and placed it almost reverently on Caine’s desk.