Gone

Lana shook her head. “I don’t know. They took me there. It’s an old gold mine. That’s all.”

  Sam said, “Look, you saved our lives. But we still want to know what’s going on.”

  Lana twined her fingers together around the knife hilt to keep herself from shaking. “I don’t know what’s going on, Sam. There’s something down in that mine. That’s all I know. The coyotes listen to it, they’re scared of it, and they do what it says.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t really want to remember.”

  There was a loud thump at the door and it rattled on its hinges.

  “Edilio, let’s find more nails,” Sam said.

  The dining hall of Coates Academy had always seemed like a strange, unfriendly place to Jack. In terms of design and decor, it was an attempt to be airy and colorful. The windows were tall, the ceiling lofty; the doors were high arches decorated with bright ornamental Spanish tiles.

  The long, heavy, dark wood tables of Jack’s first year at Coates, tables that had accommodated sixty students each, had just this last year been replaced by two dozen smaller, less formal round tables decorated with papier-mâché centerpieces made by students.

  At the farthest end of the dining hall a mosaic had been created of individually painted construction paper squares. The theme was “Forward Together.” The squares had been arranged to form a giant arrow pointing from the floor to the ceiling.

  But the more they tried to brighten the room, the less friendly it seemed to grow, as if the little touches of color and whimsy just accented the crushing size, age, and irreducible formality of the room.

  Panda, his leg not broken but badly sprained, slumped into a chair and looked mournful and resentful. Diana stood to one side, not liking what she was about to witness, and not keeping that feeling a secret.

  “Get up on the table, Andrew,” Caine ordered, pointing to one of the large round tables in front of the arrow mosaic.

  “What do you mean, get up on the table?” Andrew demanded.

  Some kids poked their heads into the dining hall. Drake said, “Shoo.” And they disappeared.

  “Andrew, you can climb up on the table or I can levitate you up there,” Caine said.

  “Get up, moron,” Drake snapped.

  Andrew climbed onto a chair, then onto the table. “I don’t see what…”

  “Tie him up. Computer Jack? Start setting up.”

  Drake pulled rope from the bag he’d retrieved from the car. He tied one end around a table leg, measured out about six feet, cut the rope, then tied the end around Andrew’s leg.

  “Man, what is this?” Andrew said. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s an experiment, Andrew.”

  Jack began setting up lights and tripods for cameras.

  “This is bogus, man. This isn’t right, Caine. It’s not right.”

  “Andrew, you’re lucky I’m giving you a chance to survive the big blink,” Caine said. “Now stop sniveling.”

  Drake tied Andrew’s second leg and then hopped onto the table to tie Andrew’s hands firmly behind him.

  “Dude, I need my hands free for the power.”

  Drake looked at Caine, who nodded. Drake untied Andrew’s hands and glanced at the chandelier above. He tossed the rope end up over the chandelier, an ornate, heavy iron thing that Coates kids joked was the tenth Nazgul.

  Drake cinched the rope up around Andrew’s chest, pulled it up under his armpits, and hauled him up till his feet barely touched the table top.

  “Make sure his hands can’t aim in this direction,” Caine said. “I don’t want that shock wave thing of his knocking cameras over.”

  So Drake suspended each hand by the wrist, leaving Andrew looking like a boy who was trying to surrender.

  Jack watched the LED viewfinder of one of the cameras. Andrew would still be able to move out of frame by swaying one way or the other. Jack didn’t want to say anything, he felt sorry for Andrew, but if the video got messed up…

  “Um. He could still move left or right a little.”

  Drake then ran ropes from Andrew’s neck, four of them leading to tables on four sides. Andrew could move no more than a foot in any direction.

  “What’s the time, Jack?” Caine asked.

  Jack checked his PDA. “Ten minutes.”

  Jack busied himself with the cameras, four of them on tripods, three video, and one a motorized still camera. He had two lights on poles shining down on Andrew.

  Andrew was lit up like he was some kind of movie star.

  “I don’t want to die,” Andrew said.

  “Me neither,” Caine agreed. “That’s why I really hope you can beat the poof.”

  “I would be, like, the first, huh?” Andrew said. He sniffed. Tears were starting to flow.

  “First and only,” Caine said.

  “This isn’t fair,” Andrew said. Jack adjusted the lens to encompass Andrew’s entire body.

  “Five minutes,” Jack said. “I’m going to go ahead and start the video running.”

  “Do what you have to do, Jack, don’t announce it,” Caine said.

  “Can’t you help me out, Caine?” Andrew pleaded. “You’re a four bar. Maybe you and me, if we both used our power at the same time, right?”

  No one answered him.

  “I’m scared, okay?” Andrew moaned, and now the tears were flowing freely. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “Maybe you wake up outside the FAYZ,” Panda said, speaking for the first time.

  “Maybe you wake up in hell,” Diana said. “Where you belong.”

  “I should pray,” Andrew said.

  “God forgive me for being a creep who starves people?” Diana suggested.

  “One minute,” Jack said softly. He was nervous about when to start the still camera. No one figured Andrew’s birth certificate was exact to the minute—Benno’s had been off by weeks. He could disappear early.

  “Jesus, forgive me for all the bad stuff I did and take me to my mom I miss her so bad and please let me live I’m just a kid so let me live okay? In Jesus’ name, amen.”

  Jack switched on the still camera.

  “Ten seconds.”

  The room erupted with a sonic explosion from Andrew’s upraised hands. Waves of shattering sound began to crack the plaster ceiling.

  Jack covered his ears and stared in fascination and horror.

  “Time,” Jack remembered to yell over the barrage of noise. Chunks of plaster were falling from the ceiling like hail. The bulbs in the chandelier all shattered, sending down a snowfall of glass dust.

  “Plus ten,” Jack yelled.

  Andrew was still there, hands high, crying, sobbing, beginning to hope maybe, beginning to hope.

  “Plus twenty,” Jack said.

  “Keep it up, Andrew,” Caine yelled. He was on his feet now, eager, hoping it was true that the blink could be beaten.

  The ceiling was cracking more deeply, and Jack wondered if it would fall.

  The sonic blast ended.

  Andrew stood, exhausted, but still there. Still standing.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh thank—”

  And he was gone.

  The ropes fell, suddenly released.

  No one said a word.

  Jack pushed rewind on one of his high-speed video cameras. He backed it up ten seconds. Then he hit play and watched it on the tiny LCD screen, frame by frame.

  “Well,” Diana was saying, “so much for the theory that you don’t ditch if you have powers.”

  “He stopped blasting,” Caine said. “Then he blinked out.”

  “He stopped blasting and then ten seconds later, he ditched,” Diana said. “Birth certificate records are never going to be a hundred percent, precisely accurate. Some nurse writes down the time, maybe it’s five minutes one way or the other. Some are probably off by a half hour.”

  “Did you get anything, Jack?” Caine asked. He sounded disheartene
d.

  Jack was advancing, frame by frame. He saw Andrew projecting sonic blasts. He saw him stop, worn out from the effort. He saw the nervous half smile, the moment when he opened his mouth, each syllable, and then…

  “We need to play this on a bigger monitor,” Jack said.

  They carried the cameras to the computer center and left the tripods and lights behind. There they found a twenty-six-inch monitor, crystal clear. Jack didn’t waste time downloading, just hooked up the leads and started playing. Caine, Drake, and Diana crowded around over his shoulder, eager faces lit with blue light. Panda limped over to a chair and slumped down.

  “Look,” Jack explained. “Right here. Watch what happens.”

  He advanced the file frame by frame.

  “What is that?” Diana asked.

  “He’s smiling. See?” Jack said. “And he’s looking at something. And what’s weird is that it’s not possible because this frame is, like, a thirtieth of a second but he’s got time to go from this expression…” He backed it up a frame. “To this expression. To this, see here where he’s moved his head again. And right here, the ropes are slipping away, his hands are free. Move it ahead just three frames and he’s completely gone.”

  “What does it mean, Jack?” Caine almost implored.

  “Let me look at the other cameras,” Jack stalled.

  Of the two remaining video cameras only one had a shot of the actual moment. This one, too, showed a blurry picture of Andrew moving in a sudden jerk from one posture to another. In this one too, the ropes were loose and his arms were extended.

  “He’s reaching out for a hug,” Diana said.

  The still camera was unlikely to yield anything useful, Jack knew, but he attached it and fast-forwarded to the right time signature. When the photo loaded up there was a collective gasp.

  Andrew was clearly visible, smiling, happy, transformed, with arms outstretched. The thing he was reaching toward looked like a light flare, a reflection of something, except that it was an almost fluorescent green and all the lights had been white.

  “Zoom in on that green blob,” Caine said.

  “It’s a depth-of-field problem,” Jack said. “Let me try to enhance it.” It took a few seconds for the image to focus into the green cloud. It took several layers of enhancement before they could see what looked like a hole ringed by needle-sharp teeth.

  “What is that thing?” Drake wondered aloud.

  “It looks like…I don’t know,” Jack said. “But it doesn’t look like something you’d be reaching out for.”

  “He was seeing something different,” Diana said.

  “It altered time somehow, accelerated Andrew’s time,” Jack said, thinking out loud. “So for Andrew, it was all lasting a lot longer than it was for us. For him it may have been ten seconds, or even ten minutes, although for us it was less than the blink of an eye. It was just sheer luck we caught any of it.”

  Caine surprised him then and actually patted him on the back. “Don’t sell yourself short, Jack.”

  Diana said, “He didn’t just poof. He saw something. He reached out to it. That green thing, what looks like some kind of a monster to us, must have looked like something else to Andrew.”

  “What, though?”

  “Whatever he wanted it to be,” Diana said. “Whatever he wanted so badly at that moment that he reached for it. If I had to guess? I’d say Andrew saw his mommy.”

  Drake spoke for the first time in a while. “So this big blink thing isn’t just some thing that happens.”

  “No, there is deception involved,” Caine said. “A trick. A lie.”

  “A seduction,” Diana said. “Like one of those carnivorous plants that attracts the bug with perfume and bright colors and then…” She closed her hand around an imaginary bug.

  Caine seemed mesmerized by the frozen image. In a dreamy voice he said, “Is it possible to say no? That’s the question. Can we say no to the bright flower? Can we say no…and survive?”

  “Okay, I get the mommy thing. But I got another question,” Drake said harshly. “What’s that thing with the teeth?”

  THIRTY-THREE

  88 HOURS, 24 MINUTES

  ALL THROUGH THE night the coyotes slammed against the door, trying to break it down. But Sam and Quinn and Edilio had stripped the cabin of everything that could be used to strengthen the door, and it would hold. Sam was confident of that.

  For a while, at least.

  “They’re locked out,” Sam said.

  “And we’re locked in,” Lana agreed.

  “Can you do it?” Astrid asked Sam.

  “I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “I guess. But I have to go out there to do it. If it works, okay. Maybe. If it doesn’t…”

  “More pudding anyone?” Quinn, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Better to stay in here,” Astrid opined. “They’ll have to come through the door. That means one or two at a time. Wouldn’t that be easier, Sam?”

  “Yeah. It’ll be a party.” He held out his tin cup. “Quinn: pudding me.”

  After several long hours the coyotes tired of slamming against the door. The trapped kids grabbed a few hours of sleep each, two at a time, always making sure two were awake.

  The sky began to lighten to pearl gray, not enough to see clearly, but enough for Edilio to find a knothole that gave him a dim view of the front yard.

  “There’s got to be, maybe, a hundred of them out there,” he reported.

  Lana got up from repairing her clothing with a needle and thread and looked for herself. “That’s more than one pack,” she said.

  “You can tell that?” Astrid asked, yawning and rubbing sleep from her eyes.

  “I know a little about coyotes now,” Lana said. “If we see this many, it means there’s at least twice as many around here. Some have to be out hunting. Coyotes hunt day and night.”

  She sat back down and picked up her sewing. “They’re waiting for something.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t see Pack Leader. Maybe he left. Maybe they’re waiting for him to come back.”

  “Sooner or later they’ll lose interest, won’t they?” Astrid asked.

  Lana shook her head. “Normal coyotes, sure. But these aren’t normal coyotes.”

  They waited and every hour or so Sam or Edilio would check the view, and every time they saw coyotes.

  Suddenly there came the sound of a hundred canine voices raised in excited yips.

  Patrick stood up, bristling.

  Sam ran to the peephole. Lana shone the flashlight on him.

  “They have fire,” Sam said.

  Lana pushed past him and climbed up to see for herself. “It’s Pack Leader,” she confirmed. “He has a burning branch.”

  “It’s not just a burning branch, it’s a torch,” Sam said. “It’s not just something he found. It’s only burning at one end, a branch wouldn’t do that. Someone with hands had to have made it. Someone gave it to him.”

  “The Darkness,” Lana whispered.

  “This cabin will burn like a match,” Sam said.

  “No. I don’t want to burn,” Lana cried. “We have to get out, make some kind of a deal with Pack Leader.”

  “You said he’d kill us,” Astrid said. She had her hands over Little Pete’s ears.

  “They want me alive, they want me to teach them human ways, that’s what the Darkness said, he can’t kill me, he needs me.”

  “Try,” Sam said.

  “Pack Leader,” Lana shouted. “Pack Leader.”

  “He doesn’t hear you.”

  “He’s a coyote, he can hear a mouse in its hole from fifty feet away,” Lana snapped. Raising her voice to a scream then, “Pack Leader. Pack Leader. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Sam was back at the spy hole. “He’s right outside,” he whispered.

  “Pack Leader, don’t,” Lana begged.

  “They’re all backing away.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Smok
e,” Edilio said, and pointed a flashlight beam at the door’s threshold.

  Lana hefted a gold brick and began beating at the boards they had nailed over the door. Edilio grabbed her arms.

  “You want to burn alive?” Lana demanded.

  Edilio released her.

  “We’re coming out,” Lana shouted as she banged at the boards. “We’re coming out.”

  But the boards were no easier to remove than they had been to put up. A yellow tongue licked beneath the door.

  Sam pulled back suddenly from the spy hole. “Fire.”

  “I don’t want to burn,” Lana wailed.

  “It’s the smoke that kills you,” Sam whispered, looking at Astrid. “There’s got to be a way out.”

  Astrid said, “You know the way out.”

  From the back wall now, smoke snuck in through cracks and seams.

  Lana hammered at the boards. Smoke was gathering under the rafters. The cabin was burning quickly. Already the heat was becoming intolerable.

  “Help me,” Lana cried. “We have to get out.”

  Edilio sprang into action, helping to pull boards away.

  Sam leaned over Little Pete’s head and kissed Astrid on the mouth. “Don’t let me turn into Caine,” he said.

  “I’ll keep an eye on you,” she said.

  “Okay. Everyone get back from the door,” Sam said, but too quietly for it to register above the panic sounds.

  He grabbed Lana’s hand as she swung with a gold brick. “What are you doing?” she cried.

  “You saved my life with your power,” Sam said. “My turn.”

  Lana and Edilio and Quinn shrank back from the doorway.

  Sam closed his eyes. It was easy to find the anger. He was angry at so many things.

  But for some reason, when he tried to focus on the outrage of this attack, his mind’s eye did not call up pictures of the coyote leader, or even of Caine. The picture in his mind was of his own mother.

  Stupid. Wrong. Unfair of him, even cruel.

  But still, when he reached for his anger, it was his mother he saw.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he whispered to that image.

  He raised his hands. Fingers splayed wide.

  But at that moment the half-burned door burst open.

  Flames and smoke were everywhere, a torrent of choking smoke.