Gone Series Complete Collection (148 page)

And where Astrid had expected to see small, crumpled bodies, children huddled together on the rocks.

Astrid, tears in her eyes, gave Dekka a small wave.

Dekka did not notice her and did not wave back. She slowly lowered her arms and lay there, a picture of exhaustion.

Mary was nowhere to be seen. Her fifteenth birthday had come, and she had gone. Astrid made the sign of the cross and prayed wordlessly that somehow Mary was right and that she was in her mother’s arms.

“Petey?” she called.

“He’s over there,” someone answered.

Little Pete had come to a stop near the FAYZ wall. He was just bending down.

“Petey,” Astrid called.

Little Pete stood up with his game player, shattered screen dribbling fragments of glass from his hand.

His eyes found Astrid.

Little Pete howled like an animal. Howled like a mad thing, howled in a voice impossibly large.

“Ahhhhhhhh!” A cry of loss, a mad tragic cry.

He bent into a backward “C” and howled like an animal.

Suddenly, the FAYZ wall was gone.

Astrid gaped in amazement at a landscape of satellite trucks and cars, a motel, a crowd of people, regular people, adults, behind a security rope, staring.

Little Pete fell on his back.

And in a flash it was all gone.

The wall was back.

And Little Pete was silent.

FORTY-FOUR

THREE DAYS LATER

“HOW
IS
IT
going?” Sam asked Howard.

Howard looked at Orc to answer.

Orc shrugged. “Good. I guess.”

Howard and Orc had been relocated, given a new home. It was one of the few houses in Perdido Beach that had a basement. There were no windows in the basement. No electricity of course, so Sam had left a small light of his own burning there.

The only way in or out of the basement was down a flight of steps from the kitchen. There, at the bottom of the steps, they had nailed two-by-fours across and up and down, forming a thick grid work. The spaces between the two-by-fours was just three inches.

At the top of the stairs the door had been strengthened by having Orc shove a massive armoire against it.

Twice a day Orc would shove the armoire aside. Then he would stump down the stairs and peek inside. Then he would come back up and replace the barricade.

“Was it Brittney or Drake when you went down last?” Sam asked.

“The girl,” Orc said.

“Did she say anything?”

Orc shrugged. “Same thing she always says. Kill it. Kill me.”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“How long you think we can keep this up?” Howard asked Sam.

It was not a great solution, keeping the undead thing locked in this basement to be guarded by Orc. But the alternative was destroying it. Him. Her. And that felt a little too much like murder for Sam.

Astrid and Edilio had worked for a couple of long days to try and make sense of the disaster that had come to the FAYZ. All the individuals who’d had direct contact with the Darkness, had touched the mind of the gaiaphage, had been used like pawns in a chess match.

Orsay’s power had been subverted. Her empathy and kindness had been turned against her as the gaiaphage filled her dreams with images drawn from her own imagination. She had shown kids a path that seemed to lead to freedom but led instead to death.

Little Pete had been tricked into believing he was playing a game. And it was his own powers that had been used to create Nerezza, the gaiaphage’s main player.

Nerezza had guided Orsay and, when the opportunity arose on that last terrible evening, pushed Zil to attack.

Lana still refused to admit that the gaiaphage had been able to tap her own healing powers to bring Brittney and Drake back to life.

Drake, the Whiphand, was in a sense, Lana’s creation. The Darkness had used her to give Drake his whip. And he had used her to give Drake a second life. It was no wonder, Sam thought, that Lana refused to acknowledge that.

Lana had spent days healing the wounded. And then she and Patrick had walked out of town. No one had seen her since.

Sam and Astrid had talked honestly about their mistakes. Astrid berated herself for being arrogant and dishonest, and too slow to understand what was happening.

Sam knew all too well how he had failed. He had been terrified by his own weakness and had reacted by mistrusting his friends. He had become paranoid and finally, indulging in self-pity, had run away. Abandoned his post.

But the gaiaphage had underestimated Brittney. It had needed her power, her immortality as well as Lana’s healing power, to bring Drake back from the grave.

Brittney had fought him every step of the way. Not knowing what she was fighting she had nevertheless resisted Drake’s takeover of the body they shared. Even when the gaiaphage had filled her shattered mind with visions of her dead brother, Brittney’s faith and willpower had kept the demon she sensed inside her from escaping completely.

The gaipahage had wanted to break the will of the kids of Perdido Beach. It had wanted them to give up, to abandon hope. Only then would the kids of the FAYZ become its slaves.

It had failed in the end. But it had been a matter of milliseconds. Had Zil managed to delay Dekka just a little longer, or had Drake not been slowed by Edilio’s heroism, the children who jumped with Mary would have died.

That would have been the fatal blow for the struggling little society of Perdido Beach.

They had survived, but barely.

And maybe they had done better than just survive: Astrid’s laws were in effect. They’d been voted in by all the kids assembled the day after Mary’s Big Jump, as Howard had dubbed it.

It was a bitter thing, to Sam, to think that after all she had done, Mother Mary was to be known for her final madness. Sam hoped she really was alive, somehow, on the outside.

There would be no grave in the plaza for Mary. There was one now for Orsay.

They might never know whether that brief glimpse of a world just outside the FAYZ wall was real or just a last trick of the Darkness. The one person who might know was talking even less than usual: Little Pete had fallen into something almost like a coma since he’d held his shattered game player. He would eat. But that was all he would do.

If Little Pete died, God only knew what would happen to this universe that he had created. And if kids ever really guessed how powerful Little Pete was, and yet how vulnerable, how long would he be left to live?

“I asked how long you think we can keep this up?” Howard repeated.

“I don’t know, man,” Sam said. “I guess we take it day by day.”

“Like everything,” Howard agreed.

There came the faint sound of Drake’s voice. A muffled howl of fury.

“He does that when he gets control,” Howard said. “That and a lot of threatening. Mostly, ‘I’ll kill you all!’ That kind of thing. I’m kind of getting used to it.”

“It wants us to be afraid. It wants us to give up,” Sam said.

Howard formed his sly grin. “Yeah, well, we don’t want to do that, do we?”

“No. No, we don’t.”

But that mad, screaming voice, even muffled as it was, still sent a chill up Sam’s spine.

“You guys need anything?” Sam asked.

Howard answered. “You mean, aside from a hamburger, a peach pie, a bucket of ice cream, a DVD, a TV, a phone, a computer, and a one-way ride out of crazy-town?”

Sam almost smiled. “Yeah. Aside from that.”

He went back outside. The street was empty. The unreal sun shone high overhead. He doubled over and coughed. The flu that was still going around had finally caught up with him.

But he was alive. And that was all you could ever ask from the FAYZ.

PRAISE
FOR THE GONE SERIES

Gone

“This intense, marvelously plotted, paced, and characterized story will immediately garner comparisons to
Lord of the Flies
, or even the long-playing world shifts of Stephen King, with just a dash of
X-Men
for good measure. A potent mix of action and thoughtfulness—centered around good and evil, courage and cowardice—renders this a tour de force that will leave readers dazed, disturbed, and utterly breathless.”

—ALA
Booklist
(starred review)

“If Stephen King had written
Lord of the Flies
, it might have been a little like this novel. Complex issues, from peer pressure to the science of nuclear power, are addressed with the teen audience in mind.”

—
VOYA
(starred review)

Hunger

“Like
Gone
, this novel is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Nonstop action.”

—
School Library Journal

“Readers will be unable to avoid involuntarily gasping, shuddering, or flinching while reading this suspense-filled story. The tension starts in the first chapter and does not let up until the end. The story is progressing with smart plot twists, both in actions and emotions.”

—
VOYA
(starred review)

CREDITS

Cover art and design © 2014 by M-80 Design/Wes Youssi

Cover design by Joel Tippie

COPYRIGHT

Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

LIES: A GONE NOVEL
. Copyright © 2010 by Michael Grant. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.epicreads.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grant, Michael.

Lies : a Gone novel / Michael Grant. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

Summary: As conditions worsen in the FAYZ, where supernatural forces have trapped children under the age of fifteen and resources are running out, it becomes tempting to heed the words of a prophet who says that only death will set them free.

ISBN 978-0-06-144911-6

EPub Edition February 2014 ISBN 9780062001474

[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Good and evil—Fiction. 3. Survival—Fiction. 4. Prophecies—Fiction.]I. Title.

14 15 16 17 18
LP/RRDH
20 19 18 17 16 15 14

Revised paperback edition, 2014

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