Gone Series Complete Collection (137 page)

Astrid had figured her job was to bring order out of chaos when the night of horror was finally over. And now was the time for her to step up. Now was the time for her to show that she could do what needed doing.

Where was Sam?

It hit her full force then, the shocking realization. Was this how Sam felt? Was this how he’d been feeling since the beginning? All eyes on him? Everyone waiting for a decision? Even as people doubted and criticized and attacked?

She wanted to be sick. She had been there for so much of it. But she hadn’t been
the one
. She hadn’t been the one making those choices.

And now . . . she was.

“I don’t know what to do,” Astrid said. “I don’t know.”

Diana leaned far out over the side of the boat and dipped her head into the water. She kept her eyes closed at first, intending to come straight back up once her hair was wet.

But the flow of cool water around her ears and scalp was so very pleasant that she wanted to see and wanted to stay there. She opened her eyes. The salt water stung. But the pain was a new pain and she welcomed it.

The water was green foam, swirling down the side of the boat. She wondered idly if Jasmine would come floating up toward her, face bloated, pale . . .

But no, of course not. That was a long time ago. Hours. Hours like weeks when you’re hungry and sunburned and now thirst is screaming at you to drink, drink the lovely green water like punch, like Mountain Dew, like refreshing mint tea, so cold all around your head.

All she had to do was let go. Slip into the water. She wouldn’t last long. She was too weak to swim very long and then she would slide down into the water like Jasmine had done.

Or maybe she could just hold her head down here and take a deep breath of water. Would that do it? Or would she just end up choking and puking?

Caine wouldn’t let her drown, of course. Then Caine would be all alone. He would raise her up out of the water. She couldn’t drown until Caine was gone, and then she might as well because, as sad as it was to realize, he was all she had.

The two of them. Sick puppies. Twisted, arrogant, cruel and cold, both of them. How could she love someone like that? How could he? Process of elimination? Neither of them could find anyone else?

Even the nastiest, ugliest species found mates. Flies found mates. Worms, well, who knew? Probably. The point being . . .

Sudden panic! She yanked her head back up and gasped at the air. Choked, gasped, and started crying with her face in her hands, sobbing without tears because you needed something inside you to produce tears. The water running down from her hair felt like tears.

No one noticed. No one cared.

Caine was watching the shore of the island as it passed on their left.

Tyrell was checking the gas gauge nervously every two seconds. “Dude, we’re on empty. I mean, we are way in the red.”

The cliffs were sheer and impossible. The sun beat down on Diana’s head and if someone had magically appeared beside her and said, here, Diana, press this button and . . . oblivion . . .

No. No, that’s what was amazing as she thought about it. No. She still wouldn’t. She would still choose to live. Even this life. Even though it meant spending her days and nights with herself.

“Hey!” Penny said. “Look at that. Isn’t that, like, an opening?”

Caine shielded his eyes and stared hard. “Tyrell. In there.”

The boat turned lazily toward the cliff. Diana wondered if they were going to just ram the wall. Maybe. Nothing she could do about it.

But then, she saw it, too, nothing more than a dark space in the buff, sun-blasted rock. An opening.

“Probably just a cave,” Tyrell said.

They weren’t far out from the cliff and it didn’t take long for them to see that what at first looked like a cave was actually a gash in the rock face. At some point a part of the cliff had collapsed in on itself, creating a narrow inlet, no more than twenty feet wide at the base, but five times that wide at the top. But the base of the inlet was choked with rock. There was no sandy beach awaiting them, no place to land the boat.

And yet, if a boat could be landed, a person could climb up the back of that rock slide to the top of the cliff.

The engine caught and missed several strokes, sending a shudder through the hull.

Tyrell cursed furiously and said, “I knew it, I knew it!”

The boat kept moving toward the gap. The engine died. The boat lost way.

It drifted and the opening fell slowly away.

Only twenty feet. So close.

Then thirty feet.

Forty.

Caine turned cold eyes on his little crew. He stretched out his hand and Penny rose from her place in the boat. He flung her toward shore. She flew, tumbling and yelling through the air and landed with a splash just feet from the nearest of the tumbled boulders.

No time to see whether she made it. Caine reached and threw Bug, who disappeared halfway through his flight but created a splash so close to the rocks Diana wondered if he had smashed his head.

The boat kept drifting.

What was Caine’s range for throwing a fifty- or seventy-five- or one-hundred-pound person with any accuracy? Diana wondered. That most be close to his limit.

Diana’s eyes met Caine’s.

“Protect your head,” he warned.

Diana locked her fingers together behind her neck and squeezed her arms in tight, covering her temples.

Diana felt a giant, invisible hand squeeze her tight and then she was hurtling through the air.

She didn’t cry out. Not even as the rocks rushed toward her. She would hit them head on, no way would she survive. But then gravity had its way and her straight line became a downturned arc.

The rocks, the foamy water, all in the same blink of an eye, and the plunge. Deep and cold, the water filled her mouth with salt.

There was a hard sharp pain as her shoulder hit rock. She kicked her legs and her knees scraped against an almost-vertical wet slurry of gravel.

Her clothing weighed her down, wrapped tight around her, seized her arms and legs. Diana struggled, surprised by how hard she struggled, how much she wanted to reach the bright, sunlit surface, which was a hundred million miles away.

She came up, was caught by the soft swell, and tossed like a doll against a lichen-slicked boulder. She scrabbled with both hands as she choked. Fingernails on rock. Feet plowing crumbling pebbles beneath her.

Suddenly she was up and out of the water from the waist up. On a little shelf of rock, gasping for air.

She waited there for a moment, catching her breath. Then, she pushed on, oblivious to scrapes and rips, to a drier spot. She stopped there, all energy spent.

Caine had already reached shore. He slumped, exhausted, wet, but at the same time, triumphant.

Diana heard voices crying his name.

She blinked water and tried to focus on the boat. It was already so far away. Tyrell and Paint, standing up in it and yelling, “Get me! Get me!”

“Caine, you can’t leave us out here!”

“Can you reach them?” Diana asked in a hoarse croak.

Caine shook his head. “Too far. Anyway . . .”

Diana knew the “anyway.” Tyrell and Paint had no powers. They would do nothing useful for Caine. They were just two more mouths to feed, two more whiny voices to heed.

“We better start climbing,” Caine said. “I can help at the rough spots. We’ll make it.”

“And there will be food and everything up there?” Penny asked, gazing wistfully up the cliff.

“We had better hope there is,” Diana said. “We have nowhere else to go. And no way to get there.”

THIRTY-TWO

8
HOURS
, 11
MINUTES

ASTRID
HAD
GONE
to look at the burn zone. Doing the right thing.

Kids had yelled at her. Demanded to know why she had let it happen. Demanded to know where Sam was. Deluged her with complaints and worries and crazy theories until she had retreated.

She’d hidden out after that. She’d refused to answer the door when kids knocked. She had not gone to her office. It would be the same there.

But through the day it had eaten at her. This feeling of uselessness. A feeling of uselessness made so much worse by the growing realization that she needed Sam. Not because they were up against some threat. The threat was mostly past now.

She needed Sam because no one had any respect for her. There was only one person right now who could get a crowd of anxious kids to settle down and do what needed to be done.

She had wanted to believe that she could do that. But she had tried. And they hadn’t listened.

But Sam was still nowhere to be seen. So despite everything it was still on her shoulders. The thought of it made her sick. It made her want to scream.

“We have to go out, Petey. Walkie, walkie. Let’s go,” Astrid said.

Little Pete did not respond or react.

“Petey. Walkie, walkie. Come with me.”

Little Pete looked at her like she might be there and might not. Then he went back to his game.

“Petey. Listen to me!”

Nothing.

Astrid took two steps, grabbed Little Pete by the shoulders, and shook him.

The game player went flying across the carpet.

Little Pete looked up. Now he was sure she was there. Now he was paying attention.

“Oh, my God, Petey, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Astrid cried and reached to draw him close. She had never, ever shaken him before. It had happened so suddenly, like some animal in her brain had seized control of her and suddenly she was moving and suddenly she’d grabbed him.

“Ahhh ahhhh ahhhh ahhhh!” Little Pete began shrieking.

“No, no, no, Petey, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do it.”

She wrapped her arms around him but she could not touch him. Some force kept her arms from making physical contact.

“Petey, no, you have to let me—”

“Ahhh ahhh ahhhh ahhh!”

“It was an accident! I just lost control, it’s just, I just, I can’t, Petey, stop it, stop it!”

She ran to retrieve his game. It was warm. Strange. She carried it back to Little Pete, but for just a moment her step faltered. The room seemed to warp and wobble around her.

Little Pete’s frantic shrieks snapped her back.

“Ahhhh ahhh ahhhh ahhh!”

“Shut up!” Astrid screamed, as confused and unsettled as she was furious. “Shut up! Shut up! Here! Take your stupid toy!”

She stepped back, stepped away, not trusting herself to be near him. Hating him at that moment. Terrified that the enraged thing inside her head would lash out at him again. A voice inside her rationalized it even now. He is a brat. He does these things deliberately.

It was all his fault.

“Ahhh ahhh ahhh ahhh!”

“I do everything for you!” she cried.

“Ahhh ahhh ahhh ahhh!”

“I feed you and I clean you and I watch over you and I protect you. Stop it! Stop it! I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand it!”

Little Pete did not stop. Would not stop, she knew, until he chose to, until whatever crazy loop that was in his head had played itself out.

She sank into a kitchen chair. Astrid sat with her head in her hands running through the list of her failures. Before the FAYZ there hadn’t been very many. She’d gotten a B+ once when she should have gotten an A. She’d inadvertently been cruel to people on a couple of occasions, memories that still bothered her, even now. She’d never learned to play an instrument. . . . Wasn’t as good as she would like to be with Spanish pronunciations . . .

“Ahhh ahhh ahhh ahhh!”

Before the FAYZ the ratio of success to failure in her life had been hundreds to one. Even in coping with her little brother, back then she’d been as successful as anyone could be.

But since the FAYZ the ratio had reversed. On the positive side she was still alive, and so was her brother. On the negative side there were too many failures to list, though she could recall them all, each and every one in painful detail.

“Ahhh ahhhh ahhh ahhh!”

She had intended to do so many good things. She had wanted to restart therapy and lessons for Little Pete. Failure. She had wanted to get the church fixed up and find some way for kids to attend on Sunday mornings. Failure. She had wanted to write a constitution for the FAYZ, create a government. Failure.

She had tried to stop Albert from making everything about money. She had failed. And just as bad, Albert had succeeded. He’d been right, she had been wrong. It was Albert feeding Perdido Beach now, not her.

She’d wanted to find a way to stop Howard from selling booze and cigarettes to kids. Wanted to reason with Zil, get him to act like a decent human being. Failure and failure.

Even her relationship with Sam had come apart. And now, he’d run away, abandoned her. Had enough, she supposed. Had enough of her and Little Pete and all of it.

Someone had heard it from someone else that Hunter had seen him leaving town. Leaving. Going where? The gossip machine had no answer to that. But the gossip machine was sure who was to blame: Astrid.

She had wanted to be brave and strong and smart and right.

And now she was hiding out in her home because she knew if she went out, they would all look to her for answers she didn’t have. She was the head of the town council in a town that had come close to burning to the ground.

It had been saved. But not by Astrid.

Little Pete fell silent at last. His blank eyes were focused on the game again. Like nothing had happened.

She wondered if he even remembered her loss of control. She wondered if he knew how terrified she was, how hopeless and defeated. She knew he didn’t care.

No one cared.

“Okay, Petey,” she said, her voice shaky. “We still have to go out. Walkie, walkie. Time to go and talk to my many friends,” she said sardonically.

This time he followed her meekly.

She’d meant to visit the burn zone again. To visit the basement hospital. To find Albert and find out how soon he would have food.