Gone Series Complete Collection (195 page)

But they were clean, at least. Much cleaner than they’d been back in Perdido Beach almost a year ago. The move to Lake Tramonto had given them a seemingly endless supply of freshwater. Soap was long gone, as was detergent, but freshwater did wonders all by itself. It was possible to be in a group of kids now without gagging on the stink.

Here and there as the sun sank and the shadows grew Sam could make out the flare of cigarette butts. And despite all they’d tried to do there were still bottles of booze—either original or moonshine—being passed around the small gaggles of kids. And probably, if he’d bothered, he could have caught a whiff of marijuana.

But mostly things were better. Between the food they raised and the fish they caught in the lake and the food they traded for from Perdido Beach, no one was starving. This was an accomplishment of epic proportion.

And then there was the Sinder project, which had amazing potential.

So why did he have this itchy feeling that something was wrong? And more than just a feeling. It was like something half-seen. Less than that. Like a feeling that there was something he should have seen, would have seen if he just turned around quickly enough.

It was like that. Like something that stood just outside the range of his peripheral vision. When he turned to look it was still in his peripheral vision.

It was looking at him.

It was doing it right now.

“Paranoia,” Sam muttered. “You’re going slowly nuts, dude. Or maybe not so slowly, since you’re talking to yourself.”

He sighed and shook his head and formed a grin he hoped would spread from without to within. He just wasn’t used to so much . . . peace. Four months of it. Good grief.

Sam heard footsteps on the rickety stairs. The door opened. He glanced back.

“Diana,” he said. He stood up and offered her his chair.

“Really not necessary,” Diana said. “I’m pregnant, not crippled.” But she took the chair anyway.

“How are you doing?”

“My boobs are swollen and they hurt,” she said. She cocked her head sideways and looked at him with a degree of affection. “Really? That makes you blush?”

“I’m not blushing. It’s . . .” He couldn’t really think of what else it might be.

“Well, then, I’ll spare you some of the more disturbing things going on with my body right now. On the good side I no longer throw up every morning.”

“Yes. That is good,” Sam said.

“On the downside, I have to pee more or less all the time.”

“Ah.” This conversation was definitely making him uncomfortable. In fact, even looking at Diana made him uncomfortable. She had a definite, noticeable bulge beneath her T-shirt. And yet she was no less beautiful than she’d ever been and still had the same knowing, challenging smirk.

“Shall we discuss the darkening of areolae?” she teased.

“Please, I’m begging you: no.”

“The thing is, it’s early for some of this,” Diana said. She tried to make it sound casual. But she failed.

“Uh-huh.”

“I shouldn’t be this big. I have all the books on pregnancy, and they all say I shouldn’t be this big. Not at four months.”

“You look okay,” Sam said with a certain desperate edge in his voice. “I mean good. You look good. Better than good. I mean, you know, beautiful.”

“Seriously? You’re hitting on me?”

“No!” Sam cried. “No. No, no, no. No. Not that . . .” He let that trail off and bit his lip.

Diana laughed delightedly. “You are so easy to mess with.” Then she grew serious. “Have you ever heard of the quickening?”

“Like for taxes?”

“No. No, Sam, that would be Quicken. The quickening is when the fetus starts to move.”

“Oh. Yeah. That.”

“Give me your hand,” Diana said.

He was absolutely sure he did not want to give her his hand. He had a terrible premonition what she would do with his hand. But he could not think of a way to refuse.

Diana looked at him with an innocent expression. “Come on, Sam, you’re the one who can always find a way out of a life-or-death crisis. Can’t you think of a way to refuse?”

That forced a smile from him. “I was trying. Brain freeze.”

“Okay, then, give me your hand.”

He did and she placed his palm against her belly.

“Yep, that’s a, um, a definite belly,” he said.

“Yeah, I was hoping you’d agree that that is a belly. I needed a second opinion. Just wait . . . There!”

He had felt it. A small movement in her tight-stretched bulge.

He made a sickly smile and withdrew his hand. “So, quickening, huh?”

“Yes,” Diana said, no longer kidding. “More than that, really. I would call it a kick. And guess what? It started about three weeks ago, which would be my thirteenth week. Now, you might think, pfff, no big deal. But here’s the thing, Sam: human babies all grow at basically the same rate. It’s clockwork. And human babies do not start kicking at thirteen weeks.”

Sam hesitated, not sure if he should acknowledge the use of that word, “human.” Whatever Diana feared or suspected or even was just imagining, he didn’t want it to be his problem.

He had plenty of problems already. Distant problems: down on a deserted stretch of beach there was a container-load of shoulder-fired missiles. As far as he knew, his brother, Caine, had not found them. If Sam tried to move them and Caine found out, it would likely start a war with Perdido Beach.

And Sam had problems nearer to his heart: Brianna had discovered Astrid’s haunt in the Stefano Rey. Sam had known Astrid was still alive. He’d had reports of her staying near the power plant for a few days after the great bug battle and the Big Split that had separated the kids of the FAYZ into Perdido Beach and Lake Tramonto groups.

He’d also learned that she had slept for a while in an overturned Winnebago on a back road in the farm country. He had waited patiently for her to come back. But she never had, and then he’d heard nothing about her for the last three months.

Now, just yesterday morning, Brianna had located her. Brianna’s super-speed made her an effective searcher on roads, but it had taken her longer to thread her way through the forest; it was not a good idea to trip over a tree root at seventy miles an hour.

Of course, searching for Astrid was not Brianna’s main mission. Her main mission was to find the Drake-Brittney creature. Nothing had been seen or heard of Drake, but no one believed he was dead. Not truly dead.

Sam came reluctantly back to the problem of Diana. “What’s your reading on the baby?”

“The baby is a three bar,” Diana said. “The first time I read? Two bar. So, still growing.”

Sam was shocked. “Three bar?”

“Yes, Sam. He, she, or it is a mutant. A powerful one. Growing more powerful.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

Diana shook her head. “I’m not stupid, Sam. Caine would come after it if he knew. He would kill us both if he had to.”

“His own child?” Sam had a hard time believing that even Caine would be that depraved.

“Maybe not,” Diana said. “He made it very clear when I told him that he wanted nothing to do with it. I would say the idea sickened him. But a powerful mutant? Very different story. He might just take us. Caine might want to control the baby, or he might want to kill it, but for him there’s no third choice. Anything else would be . . .” She searched his face as if the right word might be written there. “Humiliating.”

Sam felt his stomach churning. They’d had four months of peace. In that time Sam, Edilio, and Dekka had taken on the job of setting up a sort of half-aquatic town. Well, mostly Edilio. They had parceled out the houseboats, sailboats, motorboats, campers, and tents. They’d arranged for a septic tank to be dug, well away from the lake to avoid disease. Just to be safe they had set up a system of hauling water from halfway down the shore to the east in what they called the lowlands, and forbidden anyone to drink the water where they bathed and swam.

It had been amazing to watch the quiet authority Edilio brought to the job. Sam was nominally in charge, but it never would have occurred to Sam to worry so much about sanitation.

The fishing boats, with crews trained by Quinn down in Perdido Beach, still brought in a decent haul every day. They had planted carrots, tomatoes, and squash in the low patch up by the barrier, and under Sinder’s care they were growing very nicely.

They had locked up their precious stash of Nutella, Cup-a-Noodles, and Pepsi, using those as currency to buy additional fish, clams, and mussels from Perdido Beach, where Quinn’s crews still fished.

They also had negotiated control over some of the farmlands, so artichokes, cabbage, and the occasional melon could still be had.

In truth Albert managed all the trade between the lake and PB, as they called it, but the day-to-day management of the lake was up to Sam. Which meant Edilio.

Almost from the beginning of the FAYZ, Sam had lived with fantasies of a sort of personal judgment day. He pictured himself standing before judges who would peer down at him and demand he justify every single thing he had done.

Justify every failure.

Justify every mistake.

Justify every body buried in the town plaza in Perdido Beach.

These last few months he had begun to have those imaginary conversations less frequently. He’d started thinking maybe, on balance, they would see that he had done some things right.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Sam cautioned Diana. Then he said, “Have you thought about . . . Well, I guess we don’t know what the baby’s powers might be.”

Diana showed her ironic smirk. “You mean have I thought about what might happen if the baby can burn things like you can, Sam? Or has his father’s telekinetic power? Or any number of other abilities? No, Sam, no, I haven’t even thought about what happens when he, she, or it has a bad day and burns a hole in me from the inside out.”

Sam sighed. “He or she, Diana. Not it.”

He expected a wisecrack answer. Instead Diana’s carefully controlled expression collapsed. “Its father is evil. So is its mother,” she whispered. She twisted her fingers together, too hard, so hard it must be painful. “How can it not be the same?”

“Before I pass judgment,” Caine said, “does anyone have anything to say for Cigar?”

Caine did not refer to his chair as a throne. That would have been too laughable, even though he styled himself “King Caine.”

It was a heavy wooden chair of dark wood grabbed from an empty house. He believed the style was called Moorish. It sat a few feet back from the top stair of stone steps that led up to the ruined church.

Not a throne in name, but a throne in fact. He sat upright, not stiff but regal. He wore a purple polo shirt, jeans, and square-toed black cowboy boots. One boot rested on a low, upholstered footstool.

On Caine’s left stood Penny. Lana, the Healer, had fixed her shattered legs. Penny wore a sundress that hung limply from her narrow shoulders. She was barefoot. For some reason she refused to ever wear shoes since regaining use of her legs.

On his left stood Turk, supposedly Caine’s security, though it was impossible to imagine a situation Caine couldn’t deal with on his own. The truth was that Caine could levitate Turk and use him as a club if he chose. But it was important for a king to have people who served him. It made one look more kingly.

Turk was a sullen, stupid punk with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun over his shoulder and a big pipe wrench hanging from a loop on his straining belt.

Turk was guarding Cigar, a sweet-faced thirteen-year-old with the hard hands, strong back, and tanned face of a fisherman.

About twenty-five kids stood at the foot of the stairs. In theory everyone was supposed to show up for court, but Albert had suggested—a suggestion that had the force of a decree—that those who had work to do could blow it off. Work came first in Albert’s world, and Caine knew that he was king only so long as Albert kept everyone fed and watered.

At some time in the night a fight had broken out between a boy named Jaden and the boy everyone called Cigar because he had once smoked a cigar and gotten spectacularly sick.

Both Jaden and Cigar had been drinking some of Howard’s illegal booze, and no one was exactly clear what the fight had been about. But what was clear—witnessed by three kids—was that a fight had started and gone from angry words to fists to weapons in a heartbeat.

Jaden had swung a lead pipe at Cigar and missed. Cigar had swung a heavy oak table leg studded with big nails and he had not missed.

No one believed Cigar—who was a good kid, one of Quinn’s hardworking fishermen—had meant to kill Jaden. But Jaden’s brains had ended up on the sidewalk just the same.

There were four punishments in King Caine’s Perdido Beach: fine, lockup, Penny, or death.

A small infraction—for example, failing to show proper respect to the king, or blowing off work, or cheating someone in a deal—merited a fine. It could be a day’s food, two days’ unpaid labor, or the surrender of some valuable object.

Lockup was a room in town hall that had last imprisoned a boy named Roscoe until the bugs had eaten him from the inside out. Lockup meant two or more days with just water in that room. Fighting or vandalism would get you lockup.

Caine had handed out many fines and several lockups.

Only once had he imposed a sentence of Penny.

Penny was a mutant with the power to create illusions so real it was impossible not to believe them. She had a terrifyingly gruesome imagination. A sick, disturbed imagination. The girl who had earned thirty minutes of Penny had lost control of her bodily functions and ended up screaming and beating at her own flesh. Two days later she had still not been able to work.

The ultimate penalty was death. And Caine had never yet had to face imposing that.

“I’ll speak for Cigar.” Quinn, of course. Once upon a time Quinn had been Sam’s closest friend, his surfer-dude buddy. He’d been a weak, vacillating, insecure boy, one of those who had not handled the FAYZ very well.

But Quinn had come into his own as the head of the fishing crews. Muscles bunched in his neck and shoulders and back from pulling at the oars for long hours. He was the color of mahogany now.