Gone Series Complete Collection (198 page)

Fear of that psychopath was part of the reason she had needed to manipulate Sam. She had needed Sam’s protection for herself and even more for Little Pete. Drake wasn’t Caine. Caine was a heartless, ruthless sociopath who would do anything to increase his power. But Caine didn’t revel in pain and violence and fear. However amoral, Caine was rational.

To Caine’s eyes Astrid was just another pawn on the chessboard. To Drake she was a victim waiting to be destroyed for the sheer pleasure it would bring him.

Astrid knew she couldn’t kill Drake with the shotgun. She could blow his head off his shoulders and still not kill him.

But that image brought her some sense of reassurance.

She slung the gun over her shoulder. The gun’s weight and length, along with the pack that was loaded down with water bottles, made her a bit slower and more awkward than when she was running free down the familiar trail.

Astrid had never measured the distance from her camp to Lake Tramonto, but she guessed it was six or seven miles. And if she was going to follow the barrier so as to avoid getting lost, it would mean traveling over rough terrain, up steep hills without trails. She’d have to keep up a pretty good pace to get there before night and see Sam.

Sam.

The name made her stomach tense. He would have questions. He would make accusations. He would be angry. He would resent her. She could deal with all of that. She was strong.

But what if he wasn’t mad or sullen? What if he smiled at her? What if he put his arms around her?

What if Sam told Astrid he still loved her?

She was far less prepared to deal with that.

She had changed. The sanctimonious girl with so many certainties in her head had died with Little Pete. She had done the unforgivable. And she had seen the person she truly was: selfish, manipulative, ruthless.

She was not a person Sam could love. She was not a person who could love him back.

Probably it was a mistake going to him now. But whatever her failures and foolishness, she still had her brain. She was still, in some attenuated way, Astrid the Genius.

“Yeah. Right. Genius,” she muttered. That was why she was living in the woods with fleabites in her armpits, smelling of smoke and carrion, hands a mass of calluses and scars, eyes darting warily to identify every sound in the woods around her, tense, practicing the smooth unlimbering of a shotgun. Because that was definitely the life of a genius.

The trail led closer to the barrier now. She knew this trail well; it would disappear through the barrier. There would be some rough terrain for half a mile before another trail would appear. Or maybe it was the same trail doubling back; who could tell.

Here, suddenly, she noticed that the dark part of the barrier had crept higher. Two tall spikes of black on the barrier, like fingers reaching up out of the earth. The taller of the two stretched up for maybe fifteen or twenty feet.

Astrid steeled herself for a necessary experiment. She stuck out one finger and touched the black portion of the barrier.

“Ahhh!” She cursed under her breath. It still hurt to touch. That hadn’t changed.

As she threaded her way through dense bushes and emerged into a blessed clearing, she considered the problem of measuring the advance of the stain. Here, too, she saw rising fingers of darkness, not as high as the others she’d seen, and thinner. She watched one of the stains closely for half an hour, anxious at wasting time but wanting to have some kind of observation. The scientifically inclined part of her brain had survived intact where other aspects had diminished or disappeared.

It was growing. At first she missed it because she’d been waiting for the stain to rise higher and instead it had thickened.

“Still remember how to calculate the surface area of a sphere?” Astrid asked herself. “Four pi
r
squared.”

She did the math in her head as she walked. The diameter of the barrier was twenty miles, which made
r
half that. Ten miles.

“Four times pi is roughly twelve point six;
r
squared is a hundred. So the surface area is twelve point six times a hundred. One thousand two hundred and sixty square miles. Of course, half that is underground or underwater, so six hundred and thirty square miles of dome.

“It’s all a question of how fast the stain is spreading,” Astrid told herself, taking pleasure from the precision of numbers.

How long until the dome was dark? Astrid wondered.

Because Astrid had very little doubt that the stain would continue spreading.

Into her head came a memory from long ago: Sam admitting to her that he was afraid of the dark. It was in his room, in his former home, the place he’d shared with his mother. It was perhaps the reason that in a sudden panic he had created the first of what would come to be known as Sammy suns.

Sam had many more terrible things to be scared of now. Surely he was over that ancient terror.

She hoped so. Because she had a terrible feeling that a very long night was coming.

The baby would not look at her. Diana looked at him even though doing so filled her with sick dread.

He could already walk. But this was a dream, so of course things didn’t have to make sense. It was a dream; she knew that for sure because she knew the baby was not able to walk.

It was inside of her. A living thing inside of her own body. A body within a body. She could picture it in there with its eyes closed, all twisted so that its tiny legs were drawn up to its barrel chest.

Inside her body.

But now in her head, too. In her dream. Refusing to look at her.

You don’t want to show me your eyes
, she said.

He was holding something now. Tiny, webbed fetus fingers clutched a doll.

The doll was black and white.

No
, Diana begged.

The doll had a pouting, dissatisfied mouth. A small red mouth.

No
, Diana begged again, and she was afraid.

The baby seemed to hear her voice and it held the doll out to her. Like it wanted her to take it. But Diana couldn’t take it, because her arms were like lead and so terribly heavy.

Noooo
, she moaned.
I don’t want to see it.

But the baby wanted her to look; it insisted she look, and she couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t look away, could not move or turn or run, and oh, God, she wanted to run.

What is it, Mommy?
The voice had no character, just words, not a voice, not a sound, like someone was typing them onto a keyboard so that she could kind of hear but also see the words in letters,
bam
,
bam
,
bam
, each letter thudding in her brain.

What is it, Mommy?

The baby held the black-and-white plush toy in her face and asked again,
What is it, Mommy?

She had to answer. No choice now. She had to answer.

Panda,
she said, and with that word the full deluge of sadness and self-loathing burst in her mind.

Panda
, the baby said, and smiled without teeth, smiled with the panda’s own red mouth.

Diana woke. Opened her eyes.

Tears blurred her vision. She rolled out of the bed. The trailer was tiny, but she kept it clean and neat. She was lucky: the only person other than Sam at the lake to have a place without a roommate.

Panda.

The baby knew. It knew she had eaten part of a boy with the nickname Panda. Her soul was bare to the baby. It could see inside her.

Oh, God, how was she going to be a mother carrying that terrible crime in her soul?

She deserved hell. And she had the terrible suspicion that the baby inside her was the demon sent to conduct her there.

“I don’t like the idea of leaving those missiles just lying there,” Sam said.

Edilio said nothing. He just shifted uneasily and glanced back at the dock to make sure no one was standing around listening for gossip.

Sam, Edilio, Dekka, and Mohamed Kadeer were on the top deck of the houseboat everyone called the White Houseboat. It wasn’t white, exactly, more of a dirty pink, actually. And it looked nothing like the real White House. But it was where the leaders met, up on the open top deck. So White Houseboat it was.

It was also Sam’s home, a home he shared with Dekka, Sinder, Jezzie, and Mohamed.

Mohamed was a nonvoting member of the Lake Tramonto Council. But more important, he was Albert’s liaison at Lake Tramonto.

Some said “liaison.” Some said “spy.” There wasn’t much difference. Sam had decided early on not to try to keep secrets from Albert. Albert had to know what was going on. In any case he would find out: Albert was the FAYZ’s closest thing to a billionaire, although his wealth was measured in the FAYZ currency called ’Bertos, McDonald’s game pieces, food, and jobs.

On the White Houseboat there were two cabins aft, each with a single bunk above a double bed. Sinder and Jezzie shared one of those cabins; Mohamed and Dekka shared the other. Sam had the relatively roomy bow cabin to himself.

“If Caine’s people find out . . . ,” Dekka said.

“Then we may have a problem,” Sam said, nodding. “But we won’t ever use the things. We’ll just be making sure Caine doesn’t use them, either.”

“Yeah, and Caine will buy that explanation because he’s so trusting,” Dekka said mordantly.

The missiles had been part of a desperate ploy to get from the Evanston Air National Guard base to the coast. Dekka had been able to use the crate as a platform that, cut off from gravity by Dekka’s power, would scrape along the barrier.

The plan was decidedly imperfect. It had almost worked. Kind of worked. Worked just well enough. But it had also moved the weapons into a place where they might be found.

Found and used.

The fifth person on the deck was not a part of the council. He was a boy called Toto. Toto had been found in a desert facility—or part of a facility with the rest beyond the barrier—that had kept him imprisoned in order to study the mutations occurring in the Perdido Beach area.

The facility had been set up before the coming of the FAYZ. The government had known of, or at least suspected, the very odd things beginning to occur in the months before the barrier.

Toto was probably close to being clinically insane. He’d been alone—all alone—for seven months. He still had a tendency to talk to Spider-Man. No longer his old Styrofoam Spider-Man bust—which Sam had incinerated in a moment of irritation—but the ghost of that former bust. Which was decidedly crazy. But crazy or not, he had the power to instantly determine truth from lie.

Even when it was inconvenient.

Now Toto said, “Sam is not telling the truth.”

“I have no intention of using the missiles,” Sam said heatedly.

“True,” Toto said blandly. “But not true when you said you won’t ever use them.” Then, in a furtive aside, he added, “Sam thinks he may have to use them.”

Sam gritted his teeth. Toto was extremely useful. Except when he wasn’t.

“I think we might have all guessed that, Toto,” Dekka said.

Dekka had recovered her strength after the shocking ordeal she’d endured from the infestation of bugs. She had not entirely recovered from what she’d thought was her deathbed confession to Brianna. Even now the two girls could barely be in the same room together without awkwardness.

Dekka had never told Sam exactly what she’d whispered into Brianna’s ear. But he was pretty sure he knew. Dekka was in love with Brianna. And Brianna had evidently not felt the same way.

“Yes, she might have guessed it,” Toto said, speaking now to his sleeve.

“Mohamed, what is Albert’s feeling about this?”

Mohamed had a habit of taking a long pause before answering any question. Even “How are you?” It was probably one of the things that endeared him to Albert, who had grown suspicious, some might even say paranoid, about secrecy.

“Albert has never spoken to me about this. I don’t know whether he knows about these missiles or not.”

“Uh-huh,” Dekka said, and rolled her eyes. She held her palm out to Toto. “Don’t even bother, Toto; we all know that’s baloney.”

But Toto said, “He’s telling the truth.”

Mohamed took another long pause. He was a good-looking kid with the barest beginning of whiskers on his upper lip. “But, of course, now that I know, I’ll have to tell him.”

“If we leave them where they are, sooner or later someone’s going to find them,” Sam said.

Edilio said, “Dude, all due respect, you’re trying to talk yourself into this.”

“Why would I do that?” Sam demanded. He sat forward in his chair and widened his arms and legs, sending the message that he had nothing to hide.

Edilio smiled affectionately. “Because we’ve had four months of peace, my friend. And you’re bored.”

“That’s not—” Sam began, but with a glance at Toto fell silent.

“Still, if the missiles have to be somewhere, better with us,” Edilio said reluctantly.

Sam felt a little embarrassed by how eager he was to grab onto that rationale. Okay: so he was bored. It still made sense to secure those weapons.

“Okay,” Sam said. “We grab them. Dekka, it’ll be on you and Jack to move them. We’ll have Brianna check out the area, make sure no one’s around. They’re just inside Caine’s borders. We’ll need to get them across our line as quick as possible. Get them loaded onto a pickup.”

“Burn gas?” Mohamed asked.

“It’s worth the gas,” Sam said.

Mohamed spread his hands apologetically. “Gas is under Albert’s control.”

“Look, if Albert gives us the gas he’s supporting us,” Sam said. “So how about if this once we just do it? It won’t be more than a couple of gallons. We’ll skim from several different tanks so it won’t show on your books.”

Mohamed took an even longer pause than normal. “You never said that, and I never heard you.”

“That’s not true,” Toto said.

“Yeah,” Dekka said, rolling her eyes, “we know.”

“Okay. Tonight,” Sam said. “Breeze out front; Dekka, Jack, and me in the truck. We park the truck and the three of us head to the beach. Hopefully we’re back by morning.”