“Where to?” Jamal asked.
“Going to see . . .” He’d been about to say, “a friend.” But friend wasn’t the right term. Not a friend. Much more.
“My master,” Drake said, self-conscious about the word. But when Jamal didn’t laugh, Drake repeated it, more confidently. It felt good. “Going to see my master.”
Sanjit found flowers easily enough. A lot had been picked for eating, but there were still untended gardens behind abandoned houses where it was possible to pick a small rose or a marigold or whatever. He didn’t really know what flowers they were. Some were probably just weeds.
When he had a half dozen he stopped to check in on Bowie, who was being watched by Virtue. Bowie was better today. Maybe a permanent improvement, maybe not. Sanjit never counted his chickens before they’d hatched.
Virtue stared at him and at his flowers. He stared like Sanjit had lost his mind.
“What are those?”
“These?” Sanjit looked in mock surprise at the bouquet. “I think these may be flowers.”
“I know they’re flowers,” Virtue said. “Why are you carrying flowers?”
“I’m bringing them to someone.”
“That girl?”
“Yes, Choo. They are for that girl.”
“You should stay away from her. She’s a very scary girl.”
“Hot, though, don’t you think?”
Virtue stared at him. “Don’t you know there’s a quarantine? Where have you been? No one is supposed to go out.”
“A what?”
“A quarantine. That flu going around. Everyone is supposed to stay inside.”
“I’ve had flu before, big deal,” Sanjit said dismissively.
“Look, if they put on a quarantine they have good reasons. You don’t know these people, I think most of them are crazy. You don’t know what they might do if they catch you out.”
“I’ll be back,” Sanjit said with a jaunty wink. “Unless I get really lucky.”
“Or she shoots you with that big gun of hers.”
“That’s also a possibility,” Sanjit said cheerfully.
He patted Bowie on the head and checked on the others. Then he headed out into the sunlight.
The streets of Perdido Beach had never exactly been busy. It wasn’t New York or Bangkok. But they were particularly quiet now. Not a soul in sight.
Maybe Virtue was telling the truth about a quarantine after all. But hey, who better to be with than Lana, the Healer?
He reached Clifftop without seeing anyone.
He pushed through the lobby doors. He knew that Lana had the best room on the highest floor, a room with a balcony that looked down at the cliff and the beach and out at the ocean.
He was confronted with a confusing hallway full of doors, some closed, many showing signs of having been kicked open or battered down so kids could raid the minibars.
He found what he thought was the right door. He straightened his clothes and his flowers and knocked. From inside Patrick erupted in loud barking.
He saw the peephole go dark as someone looked out.
He smiled and waved.
Soft cursing from inside. Then, “It’s okay, Patrick, it’s just some idiot.”
The door opened. Lana had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She had her pistol in her hand.
“What?” she snapped at Sanjit.
“Flowers,” Sanjit said, and held them out to her.
Lana stared at the flowers. “Are you kidding me?”
“I would have brought candy, but I couldn’t find any.”
“Are you retarded? There’s a quarantine on. No one is supposed to be outside.”
He had hoped for a little smile. He detected no smile. Instead he smelled alcohol on her breath. Although she didn’t seem drunk, her words weren’t slurred, and her eyes focused the full intensity of her incredulity quite effectively.
“May I come in?” Sanjit asked.
“In?” Lana echoed. “Here?”
“Yes. May I come in?”
Lana blinked.
“Okay,” she said, and her eyebrows shot up like she was amazed the word had come out of her mouth. She stepped back and Sanjit stepped through.
The room had once been a sterile, anonymous hotel room.
It still was. Lana had hung no pictures, collected no precious possessions. No stuffed animals lay on the bed. The room was filthy, of course, but so was just about every room in Perdido Beach.
It smelled of cigarette butts, whiskey, and dog. A huge shotgun leaned against one wall. Patrick seemed almost as agitated as his owner. Neither Lana nor Patrick was used to receiving guests.
There was a small Sammy sun in the closet so that when the closet door was left open there would be light, and when closed less light.
Sanjit crossed to the glass door. “Great view.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to get to know you,” Sanjit said.
“Why?”
“You’re interesting.”
“Yeah,” Lana said. “But not in any way you’re going to like.”
Sanjit sat down on the desk chair. He laid the flowers on the hutch next to the TV set. He noticed a scratch from a thorn. It was bleeding a little, no big deal.
“No,” Lana said, “I’m not going to heal your scratch.”
“Good,” Sanjit said.
“Good? Why good?”
“Because when you hold my hand, I don’t want it to be work for you.”
“Hand holding?” Lana barked out a laugh. “That’s what you want? Hand holding?”
“Well, we would work up to that. If we like each other.”
“We don’t.”
Sanjit smiled. “You seem awfully sure of that.”
“I know me, and I’ve met you,” Lana said. She sighed. “Okay, look, I get it. You’re one of those people who thinks they have to help screwed-up people. Or maybe you’re attracted to dangerous, unbalanced people. But listen up: I’m not Edward and you’re not Bella.”
“I don’t understand what that means,” Sanjit said.
“You’re not going to get some kind of contact cool off me, okay? You’re a normal kid, I’m a crazy freak, it’s not really the basis for true love.”
“Oh. You think I’m normal.”
“Your mom and dad are movie stars.”
“My mom was a teenage prostitute who died of pneumonia after a bout of hepatitis. My father was any one of maybe a thousand guys. If you know what I’m saying.” Sanjit made a fake perky smile. “Up until I was adopted half of everything I ever ate was stolen, and the other half came from some charity.” He let this sink in for a moment. “Oh, and see this?” He opened his mouth and pointed to a gap where two molars should have been. “Got beaten up really bad by a pimp who wanted to sell me to some old dude from Germany.”
Lana glared at him. Sanjit met her gaze and refused to look away.
Finally, she said, “Okay. You want to talk, okay. I’ll talk, then you get it through your head and you leave.” Lana lit a new cigarette, puffed it, and looked at him through the smoke. “I went up there to kill it. The gaiaphage. I drove a tank of propane up there, let it flow into the mine shaft, and all I had to do was light a match. The coyotes came after me. I shot them. I still could have set off the explosion, but I didn’t. Is that the story you want?”
“Is that the story you want to tell?”
“It was inside my head. I couldn’t kill it. Instead it made me crawl to it. Hands and knees. Like a worm. I gave myself to it. I became part of it.”
Sanjit nodded because he felt like he should.
“It made me shoot Edilio. Bang.” She pantomimed it.
“He survived.”
“Sam and Caine knocked the gaiaphage pretty hard. I was freed.”
“And you saved Edilio. But you don’t want to talk about that, right?”
“You know, it’s not a big wonderful thing when you save someone you just shot.”
/>
“You didn’t shoot him, this monster did. You cured him. That was you.”
Lana’s eyes were so penetrating he almost couldn’t meet her gaze. But he held steady. She was looking for weakness in him. Or maybe she expected disgust.
“You went up there on your own to kill it,” Sanjit said.
“And failed.”
“But tried. If you were a guy, I’d say you had a big brass pair.”
Lana laughed, caught herself, laughed again. Then she kept laughing, stopping, trying not to laugh again, and failing.
“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” she said, almost apologizing and definitely puzzled.
Sanjit smiled.
“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” Lana said again.
“You’re probably a little stressed,” Sanjit said dryly.
“You think?”
Lana laughed again and Sanjit realized he was really enjoying her laugh. It wasn’t silly or hysterical. It was, like everything about this strange girl, wise, sardonic. Profound. Mesmerizing.
“Oh, dude,” she said, sobering. “Is that what you’re here for? Laughter is the best medicine? Is that it? Am I your act of charity or whatever? Heal the Healer with the power of laughter?”
The full force of her cynicism was back on display.
“I don’t think I want to heal you,” Sanjit said.
“Why not?” she snapped. “I mean, let’s not lie, huh? I’m about as screwed up as a girl can be. I am a monument to screwed up. Why don’t you want to heal me? I’m a freaking mess!”
Sanjit shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You think I’m so messed up, it will be easy to get into my pants, is that it? I’m an easy target?”
“Lana,” Sanjit said, “you carry a pistol and look like you’ll use it. You have a dog. You tried to kill a monster all on your own. Trust me when I say, no one. No. One. No one looks at you and thinks, ‘She’ll be easy.’”
Lana sighed wearily, but Sanjit didn’t believe the sigh or the weariness. No. She wasn’t tired of him.
He said, “I saw you. I heard your voice. I connected. It’s not very complicated. I just had a feeling. . . .”
“Feeling?”
Sanjit shrugged. “Yeah. A feeling. Like the whole point of my life, from the alleys in Bangkok, to the yachts and private island, to coming here like a crazy person trying to fly a helicopter, like all of it, from birth to here, point A to point Z, was all some big cosmic trick to get me to meet you.”
“Whatever,” she said dismissively.
He waited.
“The other day you said I was the second bravest girl you ever met. Who was number one?”
Sanjit’s smile disappeared. In the space of a heartbeat he was back there, in that filthy alley smelling of rotten fish, curry, and urine.
“The pimp who knocked my teeth out? He was going to finish me off,” Sanjit said. “You know? To send the message that you couldn’t refuse him. He had a knife. And man, I was already half dead. I couldn’t even move. And this girl was there. No idea where she came from. I never saw her before. She, uh . . .”
Suddenly, to his own amazement, he couldn’t talk. Lana waited until he found his voice again. “She came up to the guy and just said, ‘Don’t hurt him anymore.’”
“So he let you go? Just like that?”
“Not quite. Not quite. She was a pretty girl, maybe eleven, twelve years old. So, you know, a nice-looking young boy is worth some cash to a pimp. But a pretty young girl, well, she was worth more.”
“He took her?”
Sanjit nodded. “I was sick for about a week, I guess. Thought I was going to die. Crawled as far as a pile of garbage and just . . . Anyway, when I was able to move again I looked for her. But I didn’t find her.”
The two of them sat there looking at each other. It seemed to go on for quite a while.
“I have to go to town,” Lana said finally. “I can’t seem to cure the flu thing. So much for being the Healer. But I can at least deal with the usual broken bones and burns and so on.”
“Of course,” Sanjit said and stood up. “I’ll let you go.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t come with me,” Lana practically snarled.
Sanjit suppressed the smile that wanted badly to break out across his face. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Chapter Seventeen
33 HOURS, 14 MINUTES
“DEKKA. WAKE UP.”
Her eyes opened. She blinked up at Sam. It was full daylight. Not even early morning, later. She had slept a long time.
A sharp intake of breath. She jumped up and began patting her body, probing, pushing, feeling for anything that shouldn’t be there.
The divot in her shoulder burned like fire.
Her stomach growled. Her feet ached. Her scraped shins hurt. So did her back from sleeping on a rock.
“I hurt all over,” Dekka said.
Sam looked concerned.
“I mean, that’s good. Hunter couldn’t feel much of anything, right?”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. So I guess burning a hole in you was actually a good thing?”
“Not quite ready to find that funny, Sam. Where’s Jack?”
Sam pointed toward the top of a hill. They were in a very dry and empty place. The hill wasn’t much more than two hundred feet high and was more of a dirt mound than a mountain.
Jack was at the top, shading his eyes and looking to the northeast.
“What do you see?” Sam yelled to him.
“There’s a place over that way that looks like it’s all burned.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. The hermit’s shack. What else?”
“Bunch of rugged-looking hills, all rocky and stuff,” Jack yelled. He started to climb down but the dirt was loose, so he slid and slipped and fell. Then he stood up again and jumped.
He jumped thirty feet and landed very near Sam.
“Dude,” Sam said.
“Huh,” Jack said. “I never realized I could do that.”
“There might be other ways you can use that strength, too,” Sam said.
“I wish I could use it to find some water.”
“Dekka, what do you think? We climb those mountains or go through the burned zone?”
“I kind of hate climbing.”
“The mine shaft isn’t too far from the shack,” Sam pointed out.
“Yeah. I remember where it is,” Dekka said. “We just don’t go there.”
It wasn’t far to the shack. Or more accurately the few charred sticks that marked Hermit Jim’s shack. Sam pulled out the map again. He measured with his fingers. “It looks like six or seven miles to the lake. I guess we’ll all get a drink when we get there.”
The Santa Katrina Hills were on their left now. They were bare stone and dirt, and some of the rock formations looked as if they’d been shoved right up out of the earth, like the dirt was still sliding off them. Off to the right there was the taller mountain, and the cleft in that mountain, which hid the ghost town and the mine shaft.
None of them spoke of that place.
It was an hour’s thirsty walk across very barren land before they reached a tall chain-link fence. The dirt was the same on either side of the fence. As far as they could see there was nothing that needed fencing.
There was a dusty, rusty metal sign.
“‘Warning, restricted area,’” Jack read aloud.
“Yep,” Sam said. “We are subject to search.”
“How great would it be if someone did come and arrest us?” Dekka said wistfully.
“Jack. Rip down the fence.”
“Really?”
“The barrier’s that way.” Sam pointed. “We should hit the barrier and follow it to the lake. And like Dekka says: if there was anyone around here to arrest us, it would be great. They’d have to feed us and give us something to drink.”
Sam wasn’t sure quite what he expected to find at the Evanston Air National Guard base. He wasn’t s
ure quite what he’d been hoping for. Maybe a barracks full of soldiers. That would have been excellent. But failing that, maybe a giant tank of water. That would have been nice, too.
What they found instead were a series of underground bunkers. They were identical on the outside: sloping concrete ramps leading down to a steel door. Jack kicked the first one open.
Sam provided illumination. Inside was a long, low room. Completely empty.
“Probably kept bombs here or something.”
“Nothing here now,” Jack said.
They opened four more of the bunkers before admitting that there was nothing to be found.
Wandering through the bunker field they came upon a truck with the keys in the ignition. The battery was dead. But there was a liter bottle of Arrowhead water, half full.
The three of them rested in the shade of the truck and shared the water.
“Well, that was disappointing,” Sam acknowledged.
“You wanted to find bombs?” Dekka asked.
“A giant supply of those meals soldiers eat, what are they called?”
“MREs,” Jack said. “Meals ready to eat.”
“Yeah. Some of those. Like, maybe a million of those.”
“Or at least the truck could have worked so we could drive and not walk,” Dekka grumbled.
They started walking again. Already the half liter of water seemed like a distant memory. They began to notice the blankness of the barrier looming ahead. It rose sheer from the sand and scrub.
“Okay, so we hang a left. Let’s go find this lake and get back to town,” Sam said.
They kept the barrier on their right. The terrain was getting more difficult, with deep gullies, like dry riverbeds, cracks in the desert smoothness.
Ahead, shimmering like a mirage, was a low building that reminded Sam of the kind of “temporary” building schools sometimes resorted to. There were few windows and these showed the horizontal slats of ancient blinds. Air-conditioning units poked out of the walls in several places.
In a parking area there were more sand-colored camouflaged trucks. A couple of civilian cars. All neatly squared away between white lines.
A tall antenna stabbed at the sky. And beyond the building a tumbled mess of huge rust- and ochre- and dust-colored blocks.
“Hey, that’s a train!” Jack said.