“What did you find, Edilio?”
“If she’s anywhere in Perdido Beach, she’s doing a good job of hiding, Sam,” Edilio said. “We’ve looked. We’ve talked to everyone. Lana’s gone. Her dog is gone. She was in Elwood’s house, then she was gone.”
Sam tossed his music player onto the table. “I have soup. Want some?”
Edilio sagged into a chair. “What’s the song?”
“What? Oh. It’s called ‘A Cry For Help In A World Gone Mad.’”
They shared a mordant laugh.
“Next I’ll dial up that old song, what’s it called?” Sam searched his memory. “Yeah. REM. ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It.’”
“It is that,” Edilio commented. “I been searching for a girl who can heal people with magic, and taking some time to learn how to shoot a machine gun.”
“How’d that go, by the way?”
“I got four boys can more or less handle it, counting Quinn. But, man, we aren’t exactly the marines, you know? Kid named Tom starts shooting and he almost shoots me. I had to dive into a pile of dog poop.”
Sam tried not to laugh, but neither of them could stop once it started.
“Yeah, you think it’s funny. Wait till it’s you,” Edilio said.
Sam was serious again. “I don’t know what’s holding Caine back. It’s been two days. What’s keeping him?”
“What’s the hurry? The more time we have, the more we’re prepared.”
“Dude, tomorrow night I’m out of here,” Sam said.
“You don’t know that for sure, man,” Edilio said, embarrassed.
“I just wish I knew what was going on up at Coates.”
Edilio caught on immediately. “You talking about spying them out?”
Sam pushed his soup away. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, man. I’m halfway thinking we should take it to them, you know? Go up there and do this.”
“We have guns. We have guys who can drive. We got, in addition to you, four other mutants with powers that might be useful. You know, powers you can fight with, not like this one girl where she can disappear but only if she’s really embarrassed.”
Sam smiled despite himself. “You’re kidding.”
“No man, she’s really bashful and all, so you say something like, ‘you have nice hair,’ and suddenly she’s invisible. But she’s still there. You touch her, but you can’t see her.”
“That’s not exactly going to stop Caine.”
“Taylor is working on her teleporting. She can go a couple of blocks now.” Edilio shrugged. “But in terms of useful, we got that kid, he’s nine, he can do like you do with the light, but not as much.”
“Nine. We can’t make a nine-year-old hurt someone,” Sam protested.
“How about an eleven-year-old who can move so fast, you can barely see her?”
“That girl Brianna?”
“She calls herself the Breeze now. Like, as fast as the breeze.”
“The Breeze? Like a superhero name?” He shook his head ruefully. “Great. That’s all we need,” Sam said. It was one of his mother’s favorite phrases, “that’s all we need.” He felt a sharp pang in his chest, but it passed quickly. “What do we have the Breeze do when she’s zipping around?”
Edilio looked uncomfortable. “I guess we give her a gun. She shoots and zooms away and shoots again.”
“Oh, God.” Sam hung his head. “Eleven years old and we’re giving her a gun? To shoot at people? At human beings? It’s sick.”
Edilio didn’t have anything to say to that.
“Sorry, man, I’m not laying this off on you, Edilio. It’s just…I mean, this is nuts. It’s wrong. Bad enough kids our age, but fourth graders and fifth graders?”
There came the clattering of feet on the stairs, and both Sam and Edilio leaped to their feet, expecting the worst.
Dekka, one of the Coates refugees, came barreling into the room and skidded on the waxed floor. Her forehead had been injured, a two-inch gash, and she had refused to let Lana heal it.
“I got that from Drake’s shoe when he kicked me,” she had said. “Heal up my hands from the plastering, but leave my head. I want something to remember it by.”
Sam reflected that that was only the second-most interesting thing about Dekka. Number one would probably be the fact that she seemed to have the power to suspend the force of gravity within a small area.
“What is it, Dekka?” Sam asked.
“That guy Orc. He just walked into town, all raggedy-looking.”
“Orc? Just Orc? No Howard?”
Dekka shrugged. “I didn’t see anyone else. He just walked on in, and that guy Quinn told me I better go tell you. He said he was going to follow Orc home.”
That would be the house Orc had shared with Howard. It wasn’t a long walk.
“Maybe I should bring a gun,” Edilio said darkly.
“I think I can handle Orc now,” Sam said. His own confidence surprised him. He’d never before in his life thought he could handle Orc.
Quinn was waiting outside the house. Sam thanked Quinn almost formally. “I appreciate you sending Dekka to me and keeping an eye on things.”
“I do what I can,” Quinn said, more bitterly than he had probably intended.
Sam and Edilio stood by as Quinn knocked on the door. The bully’s all-too-familiar voice yelled, “Come in, morons.”
Orc was popping the top of a can of beer.
“Let me drink this,” Orc muttered. “Then you can kill me or whatever.”
Orc had lived a bad couple of days. He was scratched, bruised, battered. One eye was swollen and black. His pants were torn and filthy. His shirt was barely recognizable as a shirt. It had been ripped to tatters, then knotted crudely back together.
He was still big, but he looked less threatening than they’d ever seen him before.
“Where’s Howard?” Sam demanded.
“With them,” Orc said.
“With who?”
“Drake. That girl, what’s her name, Lana. And a talking dog.” Orc smirked. “Yeah. I’m crazy. Talking dog. Was the dogs that took me down. Ripped a hole out of my guts. Ate my thigh.”
“What are you talking about, Orc?”
He drank deep. He sighed. “Man, that’s good.”
“Talk sense, Orc,” Sam snapped.
Orc belched loudly. He stood up slowly. He set down his beer. With stiff arms he pulled his ragged shirt up and over his head.
Edilio gasped. Quinn turned away. Sam just stared.
Great patches of Orc’s chest and belly were covered by gravel. The individual rocks were the color of muddy water, green-gray. As Orc breathed, the gravel rose and fell.
“It’s spreading,” Orc said. He seemed bemused by it. He touched it with his finger. “It’s warm.”
“Orc…how did this happen?” Sam asked.
“I told you. The dogs ate out my leg and my guts and some other parts I ain’t telling you about. Then this stuff kind of filled it in.”
He shrugged, and Sam heard a faint sound like footsteps on a wet gravel driveway.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Orc said. “It did. But it doesn’t hurt now. Itches, though.”
“Mother of God,” Edilio said softly.
“Anyway,” Orc said. “I know you all hate me. So either kill me or get out. I’m thirsty and hungry.”
They left him.
Outside, Quinn walked quickly down the street, stopped suddenly, and threw up into a bush.
Sam and Edilio caught up with him. Sam put his hand on Quinn’s shoulder.
“Sorry,” Quinn said. “I guess I’m just weak.”
“Worse is coming,” Sam said darkly. “But all of a sudden a nice easy blink doesn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen, does it?”
“Drake’s been gone for two days,” Diana said. “We need to look at what we have here.”
“I’m busy,” Caine snapped.
They were standing on the front lawn of
Coates. Caine was supervising an effort to repair the hole caused by the earlier power struggle. He teleported bricks, a few at a time, up to where Mallet and Chaz were attempting to cement them in place.
It had all collapsed twice already. It was one thing to pour concrete into a mold in the ground. It was a lot harder to mortar bricks into place.
“We need to make some kind of deal with…with the townies,” Diana said.
“Townies. Carefully avoiding having to say ‘Sam.’ Or ‘your brother.’”
“Okay. You caught me,” Diana said. “We have to make some kind of deal with your brother, Sam. They still have food. We are running out.”
Caine made a show of being distracted as he levitated another stack of bricks out through the front door of the school and up to the second floor, where Mallet and Chaz dodged the arriving load.
“I’m getting better at this,” Caine said. “I’m gaining control. Precision.”
“Goody for you.”
Caine’s shoulders sagged. “You know, you could occasionally show some support. You know how I feel about you. But all you ever do is bust me.”
“What do you want to do, get married?”
Caine reddened, and Diana erupted in an unusually loud laugh. “You get that we’re fourteen, right? I mean, I know you think you’re the Napoleon of the FAYZ, but we’re still kids.”
“Age is relative. I’m one of the two oldest people in the FAYZ. And the most powerful.”
Diana bit her tongue. She had a smart-ass answer ready, but she had tweaked Caine enough for one day. She had bigger issues to deal with than Caine’s puppy love. And that’s all it was. Caine wasn’t capable of real love, the deep kind, the kind that would grow over time.
“Of course, neither am I,” Diana muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She watched Caine as he worked. Not what he was doing, but the boy himself. He was the most charismatic person she’d ever known. He could have been a rock star. And clearly he thought he was in love with her. It was the reason he tolerated her impertinence.
She supposed she liked him. They had been attracted to each other almost from the start. They had been friends…no, that wasn’t quite the word. Accomplices. Yes, that would do: accomplices. They had been accomplices since Caine first discovered his powers.
She had been the first person he showed. He had knocked a book off the table from across the room.
She’d been the one who encouraged him to work at it, develop it, practice it in secret. Each time he reached some new level, he would show it off for her. And when she showed even the slightest kindness toward him, a word of praise, an admiring nod, even, he would puff up and seem to shine with some reflected light.
It took so little to manipulate him. It didn’t require real affection, just the hint of it.
Diana would task Caine to use his power to trip some snob she didn’t like, or humiliate some teacher who had come down on her. And when she reported to Caine that the science teacher had cornered her in an empty lab and tried to feel her up, Caine sent him sprawling down a set of steps and into the hospital.
Diana enjoyed that time. She had a protector who would do her bidding and ask nothing in return. Caine, despite his oversized ego, his looks, his charm, was terribly awkward with girls. He had never even tried to kiss her.
But then he had attracted the attention of Drake Merwin, who had already acquired a reputation as the most dangerous bully in a school with plenty of bullies to go around. And from that point on, Caine had played them off against each other, doing a little for Diana when she asked, and a little with Drake.
As Caine’s powers grew, both relationships changed.
And then the school nurse, Sam’s mother—Caine’s mother too, though none of them knew that then—started to figure out that something was very, very strange about her long-lost little boy.
The bricks collapsed suddenly, a series of thuds as they hit the lawn, and a series of groans and curses from Chaz and Mallet.
Caine seemed almost not to notice. “What do you think it was, Diana?” he said, almost as if he’d read her thoughts.
“I think they didn’t set them straight enough,” she replied, knowing that wasn’t what he meant.
“Not that. Her. Nurse Temple.” He repeated the name, drawing it out to get the feel of it. “Nurse. Connie. Temple.”
Diana sighed. This was not a conversation she wanted to have. “I didn’t really know the woman.”
“She has two sons. One she keeps. The other she gives up for adoption. I was a baby.”
“I’m not a shrink,” Diana said.
“I always had the feeling, you know? That my family wasn’t my real family. They never said I was adopted, but my mother—well, the woman I thought was my mother, I don’t know what to call her now. Anyway, her, she never talked about having me. You know, you hear moms talking about going into labor and all. She never talked about that.”
“Too bad Dr. Phil’s not around. You could tell him all about it.”
“I think she must have been pretty cold. Nurse Temple. My so-called mother.” He was looking at Diana now, head cocked, frowning, skeptical. “Kind of like you, Diana.”
Diana made a rude sound. “Don’t try to get deep, Caine. She was probably just a screwed-up teenager at the time. Maybe she figured she could handle one kid but not two. Or maybe she tried to adopt both of you out, but no one would take Sam.”
Caine was taken aback. “Are you sucking up to me with that?”
“I’m trying to get you to move on. Who cares about your mommy issues? We have enough food for two, maybe three weeks. Then we’re down to beans.”
“See what I mean? I’ll bet she was just like you, Diana. Cold and selfish.”
Diana was about to answer when she heard a rushing sound behind her. She spun and saw a wave, a swarm of rough, shaggy yellow beasts. The coyotes seemed to come from everywhere at once, a disciplined, purposeful invasion that would quickly overwhelm her and Caine.
Caine raised his hands, palms out, armed and ready.
“No,” a voice yelled. “Don’t hurt them, they’re friends.”
It was Howard, marching up toward them, waving his hands. Behind him came the healer girl, Lana, looking shell-shocked.
And behind them, Drake.
Diana cursed. He was still alive.
And then she saw Drake’s arm.
The burned stump, the remains of the arm she had sawed off while Drake screamed and cried and threatened, had been altered.
It was stretched, like it had been turned into dark, bloodred taffy. It wrapped twice around his body.
No.
Impossible.
Howard came rushing up first. “Has Orc shown up here?” But neither Caine nor Diana answered. Both were staring at Drake, who sauntered toward them, all his cockiness restored, no longer the ragged scarecrow who had wept when he saw the melted stump of his hand lying on the tile floor. “Drake,” Caine said. “We thought you were dead.”
“I’m back,” Drake said. “And better than ever.”
The red tentacle unwrapped itself from around his waist, like a python releasing its victim.
“Like it, Diana?” Drake asked.
The arm, that impossible bloodred snake, coiled above Drake’s head, swirled, writhed. And then, so fast that the human eye could barely register the movement, it snapped like a bullwhip.
The sound was a loud crack. A mini–sonic boom.
Diana cried out in pain. Stunned, she stared at the cut in her blouse and the trickle of red from her shoulder.
“Sorry,” Drake said with no attempt at sincerity. “I’m still working on my aim.”
“Drake,” Caine said and, despite the blood, despite Diana’s wound, he grinned. “Welcome back.”
“I brought some help,” Drake said. He extended his left hand, and Caine shook it awkwardly with his right. “So. When do we go take down Sam Temple?”
FORTY
 
; 26 HOURS, 47 MINUTES
“THEY’LL COME TOMORROW evening,” Sam said. “I believe Caine needs to defeat me. I think it’s an ego thing with him.”
They held the final council of war in the church. The same church where Caine had carried out his smooth takeover. The cross had been propped back up against the wall. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but at least it wasn’t on the floor anymore.
From the Perdido Beach kids there were Sam, Astrid, Little Pete, Edilio, Dahra, Elwood, and Mother Mary. Albert had been invited, but he was focusing on his plan for Thanksgiving, and on experimenting with the tortilla-burger. Representing the Coates refugees were three girls: Dekka, little Brianna the Breeze, and Taylor.
“Caine’s a guy who needs to win. He needs to win before he poofs. Or he needs to win before I poof. The point is, he’s not going to just accept us freeing all these kids from Coates and taking over Perdido Beach,” Sam said. “So we need to be ready. And we need to be ready for something else, too: tomorrow is my birthday.” He made a wry face. “Not a birthday I’m exactly looking forward to. But, anyway, we need to decide who takes over for me if…when…I step outside.”
Several of the kids made sympathetic or encouraging noises about how Sam maybe wasn’t going to blink out, or maybe it would be a good thing, an escape from the FAYZ. But Sam hushed them all.
“Look, the good thing is, when I go, so does Caine. The bad thing is, that still leaves Drake and Diana and other bullies. Orc…well, we don’t exactly know what’s going on with him, but Howard’s not with him. And Lana…we don’t know what happened to her, whether she left or what.”
The loss of Lana was a serious blow. Every one of the Coates refugees adored her for the way she had healed their hands. And it was reassuring to think that she could heal anyone who was injured.
Astrid said, “I nominate Edilio to take over if…you know. Anyway, we need a number two, a vice president or vice mayor or whatever.”
Edilio did a double take, like Astrid must be talking about some other Edilio. Then he said, “No way. Astrid’s the smartest person here.”