Gone

  “Why that direction?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sam bit his lip and considered. “Keep your head down, Astrid.”

  “Sam…,” she began.

  “I know,” he said. “Me too.”

  He started walking fast, not running. Running would look like panic. To Edilio, he said, “I figured they’d come in the same way they did the first time. It’s the clearest path into the center of town.”

  “I thought they might take over Ralph’s and make us come after them,” Edilio said.

  “I don’t get it,” Sam admitted. They reached the plaza and Edilio ran ahead to the town hall to check on his troops.

  Taylor appeared a dozen feet away, looking in the wrong direction.

  “Taylor. Here.”

  “Oh. They’re going toward the school. And Caine is definitely with them. Caine and Diana. I didn’t see Drake. Maybe he’s dead.” She said that last part with unmistakable relish. Then, just in case Sam had missed it, she added, “I hope he’s dead, that evil piece of—”

  “Did they see you?”

  “No. They can’t touch me, anyway. I’m too good at this now. I could bounce right into the school, see what they’re up to.”

  Sam pointed a finger at her. “Don’t get cocky. I don’t want to lose you. Keep your distance. Go.”

  Taylor winked and blinked out.

  Astrid on the walkie-talkie. “They’re getting out of their cars, going into the school.”

  Sam looked up at the steeple. She was right up there, so close, he could yell up to her, but her gaze was drawn to the school, not down at him. Sam spotted Quinn running by with his machine gun over his shoulder.

  “Good luck, brah,” Sam said.

  Quinn stopped dead. “Thanks. Look, Sam…I…”

  “No time for that now,” Sam said firmly, but gently.

  Sam stood alone in the plaza, leg propped on the edge of the fountain. The school. Why? And why come in daylight, why not wait till night fell?

  Albert came trotting out of the McDonald’s. He handed Sam a bag. “Some nuggets, man. In case you’re hungry.”

  “Thanks, dude.”

  “We have faith in you, Sam.” Albert took off.

  Sam munched a nugget and tried to think. The move to the school was unexpected. Was it an opportunity? If Caine was out of the car, on foot, in a school building that Sam knew a lot better than he did…

  He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Is there any sign they’re leaving the school?”

  “No. They have one guy standing outside as a guard. I think it’s Panda. I definitely did not see Drake.”

  He could end this, maybe. Right now, one-on-one with Caine. It would mean none of these kids would have to be involved. It would mean no one would have to pull a trigger.

  Dekka was running toward him. “Sam. Sorry, I couldn’t find you.”

  Maybe just the two of them, Sam and Dekka. It would double his chances. It would be right: one from Perdido Beach, one from Coates, side by side.

  “Caine’s at the school,” Sam said. “I’m thinking maybe we take it to them.”

  “Is Drake there?” Dekka asked.

  “No one has seen him. He may be…he may be not showing up.”

  “Good,” Dekka said bluntly.

  “We haven’t had much time to get to know each other,” Sam said. “And now, well, I don’t have much time, period. How much control do you have over your power?”

  Dekka blew out some air and considered this question. She looked at her hands as if they would give her the answer. “I have to be pretty close. I can rattle a wall pretty good, or send someone flying, but only from a few feet away.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m up for it,” she said.

  Taylor popped in. “They’re all inside the school. One guard, as far as I can see. And definitely no Drake.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Here’s what we do. Dekka and I are going after them. Taylor, I need you to go tell Edilio. Then I need you to climb up the steeple, up where Astrid is. If Dekka and I get in trouble, we may need a distraction.”

  “Dude. I don’t climb. I pop. And I’m on it.” Taylor disappeared.

  “I’ll probably get used to her doing that someday,” Sam muttered.

  He took a deep, shaky breath. It was his first big tactical decision of the coming battle. He hoped it wasn’t a mistake.

  Jack had kept the SUV hidden in a patch of trees all through the day. He had slept fitfully, crunched in the driver’s seat, all the doors locked, too scared to think about stretching out more comfortably in the back.

  Jack didn’t care how big a hurry Diana was in for him to reach Sam, he wasn’t going to die for her.

  Only when the sun set at last did he turn the key and creep from his shady hiding place.

  Down dirt roads with no signposts, lights off, moving at a crawl. Around blind corners, up, down, left, right. The SUV had a compass built in to the rearview mirror, but the directions never seemed to make sense. One second it would read south and the next minute east even though he hadn’t turned.

  It was impossible to know where he was going. He could drive with the lights on and see the road, but then others could see him as well. So he drove in the dark at little more than walking speed. Even at such low speed, the SUV bounced and lurched so badly that Jack felt like he’d been beaten up.

  That he absolutely had to get to Sam was clearer than ever. Caine would never forgive Jack for this betrayal. His only salvation lay with Sam. But only if Sam survived the poof. If Sam stepped outside, Caine would win. And then the FAYZ would be too small a place for Jack to hide from Caine and Drake.

  Jack checked the dashboard clock. He knew the day and hour of Sam’s poof. Just over two hours left.

  The moon rose and the road straightened so that he motored along at a somewhat higher speed than before, anxious to reach safety. A rabbit darted in front of him. Jack jerked the wheel and missed the rabbit but bounced off the road into a field.

  He yanked the wheel hard and swerved back onto the road just as a pickup truck shot by coming from the other direction.

  Jack cursed and turned in his seat to look back. Brake lights flared and the pickup screeched to a stop.

  Jack stepped on the gas. The SUV leaped forward. But now the truck was turning around and coming up fast.

  In the darkness it was impossible to see who was driving the truck, but in Jack’s mind it could be only one person: Drake.

  Weeping, Jack accelerated. The gas tank needle edged closer to empty. But still the pickup truck came on.

  The only escape would be to drive into the field where the truck might not be able to follow. Jack slowed just slightly and steered into the fallow field. The ground was plowed up, soft, and the SUV bounced madly across the rows.

  The truck kept pace.

  In the field ahead of him, powerful headlights snapped on. A tractor was moving with surprising speed to cut him off. Beyond the tractor a dark, dilapidated farmhouse was set far back from the road.

  Jack was sick inside. They had him. Somehow, impossibly, they had him trapped.

  Jack never saw the dry creek bed. The SUV went airborne for a few feet, he felt weirdly weightless, and then the SUV hit the far bank of the creek and stopped hard. There was a loud bang, the air bag deploying, and a sickening crunch, and Jack found himself lying flat on his back in the dirt, not hurt but too stunned to move.

  The SUV’s headlights illuminated the field where he lay. Two kids, a boy and a girl, were silhouetted by the glare. Neither of them was Drake Merwin.

  Jack dared to breathe. He didn’t dare stand up.

  “We saw you driving around out here with your lights off,” the girl said accusingly.

  Jack wondered how she could have seen him on a pitch-black night. He didn’t ask, but she provided the answer, anyway.

  “Even if you have your headlights off, your brake lights still come on. I guess you didn’t think of that.”

&
nbsp; “I’m not very experienced at driving,” Jack said.

  “Who are you?” the boy, who looked to be Jack’s age, asked.

  “Me? I’m…Jack. People call me Computer Jack.”

  The girl had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed the barrel at Jack’s face.

  “Don’t shoot me,” he begged.

  “You’re on our land, and we protect our land,” the girl said. “Why shouldn’t we shoot you?”

  “I have to…if I don’t…Listen, if I don’t get to Perdido Beach, something awful is going to happen.”

  The girl had an odd combination of pigtails and a hard face made even harder by the harsh white light from the SUV. She seemed unimpressed. She was maybe eleven or twelve and it occurred to Jack that there was so much resemblance that the boy had to be her brother.

  The boy said, “He doesn’t look dangerous.” To Jack, he said, “How come they call you Computer Jack?”

  “Because I know a lot about computers.”

  The boy thought awhile and said, “Can you fix a Wii?”

  Jack nodded violently, digging dirt into his hair. “I could try. But really, really, I have to get to Perdido Beach. It’s really important.”

  “Well, my Wii is important to me. So if you fix my Wii, I won’t let Emily shoot you. I guess not getting shot would be as important as you getting to Perdido Beach, huh?”

  “Hi, Mary,” Quinn said. She met him at the door of the day care classroom. “I’m heading up top.”

  Mary closed the door quickly behind her. “I don’t want the kids to see the guns,” she said. She herself was staring at the weapon.

  “Mary, I don’t want to see it my own self,” Quinn said.

  “Are you scared?”

  “Pee-less.”

  “Me too.” She touched Quinn’s arm. “God bless you.”

  “Yeah. Let’s hope so, huh?” He wanted to stay and talk to her. Anything to avoid climbing up on the roof with a machine gun. But Mary had her duty, and he had his. He was ashamed to realize that he yearned to go into that day care room and just hide in there with Mary.

  He went through the day care to the alleyway in back. He slung the machine pistol carefully and climbed the rickety aluminum ladder.

  The day care and the hardware shared a roof. It was flat, gravel and tar, adorned only by several vertical pipes and two ancient air-conditioning units. The roof was encircled by a parapet, a three-foot-high wall topped with cracked Spanish tile.

  Quinn went to the corner facing the church and town hall. He watched as Sam and Dekka marched off.

  “Don’t screw up today,” Quinn told himself. “Just don’t screw up.”

  The ladder rattled, and something blurred over onto the roof. Quinn swung his gun around. The blur resolved itself into the figure of Brianna.

  “You have got to stop doing that, Brianna,” Quinn said.

  Brianna smiled and said, “The Breeze. My name is the Breeze.”

  “You are way too into this,” Quinn grumbled. “I mean, what are you, ten?”

  “I’m eleven. I’ll be twelve in a month.” Brianna pulled a claw hammer from her belt and brandished it. “Caine and Drake had me starving to death with a cinder block on each hand. I wasn’t too young for Caine and Drake to almost kill me.”

  “Yeah.” Quinn wished she would go away and leave him in peace, but it was her assignment to move between Quinn and Edilio and Sam and anyone else, carrying messages. “So. How fast can you go, Brianna?”

  “I don’t know. Fast enough that people almost can’t see me.”

  “Doesn’t it kind of wear you out?”

  “Not really. But it kind of tears up my shoes.” She raised one foot to show him a worn sole on her sneakers. “And I have to keep my hair in pigtails or it whips around and stings my eyes.” She gave her braided pigtails a toss.

  “Must be weird. Having powers.”

  “You don’t have any?”

  He shook his head. “No. Nothing. I’m just…me.”

  “You know Sam real well, right?”

  He nodded. It was a question he got a lot from Coates kids.

  “Do you think he’ll win?” she asked.

  “Guess we better hope so, huh?”

  Brianna looked at her hands, the hands that had been imprisoned in concrete. “That’s why it doesn’t matter that I’m just eleven: we have to win.”

  Sam fought a sense of doom as he walked with Dekka toward the school. He wasn’t afraid of getting hurt, mostly; after all, he expected to end the day by poofing, and then…well, he didn’t know what.

  The dread was fear of failure. Whatever happened to him, he had Astrid to think about. And Little Pete, because Astrid would be shattered if anything happened to Little Pete. Not to mention the fact that Little Pete might be the only one in all of existence who could end the FAYZ.

  He had to beat Caine for her. For them. For all of them, all the kids. And that weighed him down like he was carrying an elephant on his back.

  He had to win. Had to make sure Astrid was safe. Then he could blink out if that had to be.

  But the closer he got, the more he doubted his decision. He was deviating from the plan, which meant no one would really know what role they were supposed to play. Caine going to the school had thrown everything off.

  They stopped a block from the edge of the school grounds. Sam keyed the walkie-talkie.

  “Has anything changed?”

  “No,” Astrid said. “The cars are parked. Panda is by the front door. The light’s fading fast, so I can’t be totally sure. Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think Panda has a gun.”

  “Okay.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Uh-huh.” He signed off. He wanted to tell her one more time that he loved her, but that seemed almost like tempting fate. He was already thinking too much about Astrid and not enough about Caine.

  “Okay, Dekka, there’s no way to sneak up. I have to be within sight before I take Panda down.”

  Dekka nodded. Her mouth was tight, like she couldn’t open it at all. She was breathing hard, tense. Scared.

  “I’m going to count to three. On three we go. All out. As soon as I can, I try to nail Panda. You do your thing when we get to the door. Ready?”

  She didn’t answer. For what felt like a very long minute she just stared at emptiness. Then at last she croaked, “I’m ready.”

  “One. Two. Three.”

  They burst from cover and started running, flat out. They closed the distance to the edge of the school grounds and were pounding across the turf before Panda spotted them and yelped.

  “Don’t do it, Panda,” Sam warned, yelling as loud as he could while running.

  Panda hesitated, hefting the gun, not quite raising it to fire.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Sam shouted.

  Fifty feet away.

  Panda aimed and fired.

  The bullet flew wide.

  Panda gaped at the weapon like he was seeing it for the first time.

  “No,” Sam yelled.

  Thirty feet.

  Panda raised the gun again. His face was a fright mask of fear and indecision.

  Sam dropped to the ground, rolled, and came up in a squatting position as Panda fired again.

  Sam extended his arm, fingers splayed. The green-white light missed Panda and burned a hole in the brick beside his head.

  Panda threw down the gun, turned, and ran.

  Ten feet.

  “Dekka, get the door.”

  Dekka raised her hands high and gravity beneath the door was suspended. The whole wall, including the door frame, lurched suddenly, as if struck by a truck from the other side. The door swung slowly open. Loose dirt and fallen mortar shot straight up toward the sky.

  Dekka dropped her hands and the dirt fell back to earth, the bricks slumped and cracked, the door jamb sagged and splintered.

  Sam fired into the dark interior through the open door. He and Dekka barreled th
rough and slammed back against opposite walls, panting and ready. Paper signs and once-colorful posters on the walls burned and curled from Sam’s blast.

  There was no sound.

  Sam glanced at Dekka. She looked as scared as he felt.

  They edged along the hallway, nerves taut, eyes searching each doorway.

  The office was on the right side, fronted by a reinforced glass wall. Sam crept closer. Peered inside. Nothing. Lights still on from the day of the FAYZ.

  Should he move on without checking the office thoroughly? If one of Caine’s people was in there, Sam and Dekka could end up surrounded. Sam made a motion to Dekka: go in.

  Dekka shook her head violently.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “I got it.”

  He crossed the hallway quickly and opened the door himself. Something large flew at him, he ducked instinctively, but he’d been hit, smacked a glancing blow that spun him around.

  A boy with dark hair was crouched atop the school secretary’s desk. He held a wooden club, short and thick, in one hand. The boy grinned. Then he leaped again, fast as a jungle cat.

  Sam was caught off guard and landed hard, banging his head on the floor. He saw stars.

  He rolled over, but the move was sluggish. The boy had jumped away to safety and was gathering himself for another assault.

  Suddenly the boy, the papers and mementos on the desk, and the desk itself lifted off the floor, flew straight up, and smashed into the low ceiling.

  The boy had just long enough to register surprise and pain before Dekka restored gravity and he dropped like a rock. Sam reached him before he could recover, knelt with one knee on his chest, and grabbed his head with both his hands.

  “Twitch and your head’s a cinder,” Sam said.

  The boy went limp.

  “Good decision,” Sam said. “Dekka, get his club. Find some duct tape.” To the boy he said, “Who are you? And where’s Caine?”

  “I’m Frederico. Don’t burn me up.”

  “Where’s Caine?”

  “Not here. They all went out the back as soon as we got here. They left me and Panda.”

  Sam’s insides twisted. “They left?”

  Frederico read the fear in Sam’s eyes. “You can’t beat Caine. Him and Drake, they have it all scoped.”