Gone Series Complete Collection (199 page)

“What about me, boss?” Edilio asked.

“Deputy mayor is a heavy burden sometimes, dude.” Sam smiled. He felt a rush from the idea of a daring nighttime mission. Edilio was right: running the lake had been boring after the first frantic month. Sam basically hated handling all the little details and decisions. Most of his day was taken up dealing with stupid fights over nothing—kids fighting over ownership of a toy or some food, people slacking off on work they owed to the town, crazy ideas for getting out of the FAYZ, unhappiness over accommodations, violations of sanitary rules. Increasingly—not without a feeling of guilt—he had turned most of it over to Edilio.

It had been months since Sam had been involved in any serious craziness. And this mission had just enough craziness without any real danger.

The meeting broke up. Sam stood up, stretched, and noticed Sinder and Jezzie running along the shore from the eastern end, where they were tending a small, irrigated plot of vegetables.

Something about their body language spelled trouble.

Sam’s houseboat was tied up at the end of the surviving dock. (It had doubled as the stage for the Friday Fun Fest.) He waited until Sinder and Jezzie were below him on the dock.

“Sam!” Sinder gasped. She was in her modified Goth stage—it was hard to find makeup, but she could still manage to find black clothing.

“T’sup, Sinder? Hi, Jezzie.”

Sinder gathered her wits, took a steadying breath, and said, “This is going to sound crazy, but the wall . . . It’s changing.”

“We were weeding the carrots,” Jezzie said.

“And then we noticed this, like, black stain on the barrier.”

“What?”

“The barrier,” Sinder said. “It’s changing color.”

SIX

43
HOURS
, 17
MINUTES

QUINN LEFT
HIS
crews to unload the catch at the dock. Normally he went straight to Albert to report the day’s haul, but he had a more pressing concern today. He wanted to check on Cigar.

It was still an hour or so to sundown. He wanted to at least yell some encouragement to his friend and crewman.

The plaza was empty. The town was mostly empty—the pickers were in the fields still.

Turk lounged on the steps of town hall. He was asleep with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and his rifle between his crossed legs.

A girl walked across the square with hurried steps. She glanced fearfully toward town hall. Quinn knew her a little, so he gave a small wave. But she glanced at him, shook her head, and scurried off.

Feeling worried now, Quinn headed into the building.

He climbed the stairs to the detention room where Cigar would be.

He found the door easily enough. He listened and heard nothing from inside. “Cigar? You in there?”

The door opened, revealing Penny. She was still wearing a summer dress, and she was still barefoot. She blocked the door.

“It’s not time yet,” Penny said.

There was blood on her dress.

Blood on her narrow feet.

Her eyes were feverish. Lit up. Ecstatic.

Quinn took it all in at a glance. “Get out of my way,” Quinn said.

Penny looked at him. Like she was trying to see something inside his head. Considering. Measuring.

Anticipating.

“What have you done, you witch?” Quinn demanded. His breath was coming short. His heart was pounding. The skin on his sunburned arms was cracking, turning deathly white and cracking like dried mud. Deep cracks.

“You’re not threatening me, are you, Quinn?”

The eruption on Quinn’s arm stopped, reversed itself, and his skin was back to what it should be.

“I want to see Cigar,” Quinn said, swallowing his fear.

Penny nodded. “Okay. Okay, Quinn. Come on in.”

Quinn pushed past her.

Cigar was in a corner. He seemed at first to be asleep. But his shirt was soaked with blood.

“Cigar, man. You okay?”

Cigar did not move. Quinn knelt by him and raised his head. It took Quinn a few terrible seconds to make sense of what he was seeing.

Cigar’s eyes were gone. Two black-and-red holes stared from the front of Cigar’s face.

Then Cigar screamed.

Quinn jumped back.

“What have you done? What have you done?”

“I never touched him,” Penny said with a happy laugh. “Look at his fingers! Look at his wrists! He did it all himself. It was funny to watch.”

Quinn’s fist was drawn back before he knew it. Penny’s nose exploded. Her head snapped back hard and she fell on her behind.

Quinn grabbed Cigar’s bloody forearm in a strong grip. Over Cigar’s screams, Quinn said, “We’re going to Lana.”

Penny snarled and all at once Quinn’s flesh caught fire. He bellowed in terror. The flames quickly burned away his clothing and ate at his flesh.

Quinn knew it wasn’t real. He knew it. But he couldn’t believe it. He could not refuse to feel the agony of the illusion. He could not help but smell the smoke of burning, popping flesh and—

He aimed a desperate kick.

His sneaker caught Penny in the side of her head.

The fire went out instantly.

Penny rolled over, got to her feet, trying to get control of her scattered mind, but Quinn was behind her now and had his powerful arm around her neck.

“I will snap your neck, Penny. I swear to God, I will snap your neck. Nothing you can do will stop me.”

Penny went limp. “You think the king will let you get away with this, Quinn?” she hissed.

“Anyone messes with me, Penny, you or anyone else, and I go on strike. See how well you enjoy life without me and my crews. Without food.”

Quinn shoved her away and took Cigar’s arm again.

Some jobs were tougher than others. Blake and Bonnie had the worst job you could have: maintaining the septic tank. Also known as the Pit.

Dekka had used her powers to help dig the pit, although it had still taken twenty other kids to clear the levitated dirt away. The result was a hole in the ground ten feet deep, twelve feet long, and three feet across. Give or take: no one had exactly used a tape measure.

It was basically one long slit trench. The trench had been covered with an entire side of one of the Nutella train’s steel boxcars. Sam had cut it free and Dekka and Orc had hauled it the miles from the train crash site.

Sam had then burned five two-foot holes in the steel.

And that was where Blake and Bonnie came in. Alone neither of them had any special talent for building, but somehow the two of them joined had a strange sort of genius, recognized by Edilio, their direct supervisor. Together (with some help from Edilio) they had taken on the job of creating five outhouses perched above those holes. This they had done by taking shipping crates, removing the tops, and sawing out a sort of doorway. The end result was an open-topped wooden crate with a narrow door covered with a shower curtain to provide some privacy.

The open top had the disadvantage that the heads of tall people could be seen. The advantage, however, was that the smell of the septic tank wasn’t trapped in a closed space.

The individual outhouses had benches made of desk tops brought from the Air National Guard base. Sam had burned holes in each of these, and Blake and Bonnie had thoughtfully attached actual toilet seats to these.

There was something pleasant—once you got used to it—about relieving yourself under the stars or sun. Except for the lack of toilet paper.

Blake and Bonnie solved this problem—partly—by selling various leaves, official reports and records from the Air National Guard facility, and out-of-date reference books.

And, of course, the two Bs were responsible for keeping the facility clean. This wasn’t terribly hard usually, because Bonnie in particular had no reluctance to call someone out for making a mess.

And the hours weren’t bad. Since absolutely no one wanted their jobs, Blake and Bonnie were given plenty of time off. And since they were seven and six years old, respectively, they spent their time off swimming, collecting rocks, and playing a more or less continuous game of war that involved various action figures, the severed heads of Bratz dolls and interesting insects.

That was what they were doing, playing war in the sandpit they’d excavated a hundred feet or so away from the Pit. In fact, they were arguing over whether a battered Bratz head had or had not gotten the drop on a group of three mismatched beetles.

Two of the outhouses were occupied: number one by Pat and number four by Diana. Diana was there frequently as a consequence of being pregnant.

Blake grabbed the Bratz doll head angrily and said, “Okay, if you won’t play by the rules—” This happened about six times a day. There weren’t really any rules.

Bonnie was just about to hotly deny that she was cheating, when her face smeared. Like her face was a still-wet painting and someone had dragged a brush through it.

Blake stared at the most familiar face in his world and saw it flatten, like it was suddenly just two-dimensional. And something that was transparent, but not somehow invisible, pierced her through.

Bonnie jerked to her feet like a puppet on a string. Her eyes went wide and her face smeared again as her mouth dripped down her chin.

A finger made of air, as big as a tree, swept over her, came back to touch her, and then disappeared.

Bonnie gave a single terrible spasm, then stopped moving, fell over, and landed atop her army.

Blake stood staring at something that was no longer Bonnie. No longer anything he had ever seen before. What lay there in the dirt had one arm and half a face, and the rest—no more than two feet long—looked exactly like a rotted dead log.

Blake started screaming and Diana and Pat moved as fast as they could, but Blake was not one to just stand and scream; he took action. He grabbed the log with half a human face by its one arm and threw it as hard as he could toward the Pit.

It didn’t go far, so he grabbed it again, screaming all the while at the top of his lungs, and dragged it toward the number five as Diana and Pat both shouted for him to stop, stop, stop, but he couldn’t stop; he had to get rid of it, this thing, this monster that had replaced his friend.

Diana almost reached him. But not quite.

Blake threw the thing into the hole of the number five outhouse.

“What is going on?” Pat demanded, rushing up.

Blake was silent.

“He had some kind of . . .” Diana began. She made a face, then added, “I don’t know what it was.”

“It was a monster,” Blake said.

“Jeez, dude, you scared me half to death,” Patrick said. “I mean, enjoy your game or whatever, but don’t be screaming when I’m doing my business.” He stomped off down the hill toward the lake.

Diana didn’t yell at Blake. “Where’s the other one of you? What’s her name? The girl?”

Blake shook his head dully. A veil went down over his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess she’s gone.”

Orc sat reading.

That fact, the sight of Orc sitting on a rock with a book in his hands, was still inexplicable to Howard.

Orc and Howard had gone with Sam to Lake Tramonto during the Big Split. Sam was a pain in the butt, but he wasn’t likely to decide to throw you through a wall, like Caine might.

The only problem with the lake was that most of the drinking and drugging population had stayed in Perdido Beach. Howard operated a whiskey still at Coates, but traveling from Coates to the lake was not exactly an easy trip. And Howard couldn’t do it with more than about a dozen bottles in a backpack.

Orc could carry far more, of course. But Orc wasn’t helping anymore. Orc was reading. He was reading the Bible.

Orc drunk was depressed, dangerous, unpredictable, and occasionally murderous. But Orc sober was just useless. Useless.

Orc had been given the job of guarding Sinder’s little farm. Mostly this involved sitting on a rock outcropping and reading.

Sinder’s farm wasn’t much bigger than a good-size backyard, a wedge-shaped piece of land that had once been a streambed back when rain still fell in the mountains and sent streams to replenish the lake. Orc had helped them dig a web of shallow canals that brought lake water in to water the neat rows.

Sinder and Jezzie spent all day, every day, planting and tending. Orc spent as much time. In fact, he had set up a little tent just beside the rock and he slept there most nights.

Howard had spent a couple of nights there as well, trying to keep alive his friendship with Orc, trying to get Orc past this whole newfound sobriety thing.

It wasn’t that Howard liked Orc drunk. (Orc had no money, so whatever he drank came straight out of Howard’s profits.) It was just that sober, Bible-reading Orc was useless to Howard. Useless for intimidation and debt collection, and useless for hauling booze.

“What’s ‘meek’ mean?” Orc asked Howard. Then he spelled it, because he wasn’t sure if he was saying it right. “M-E-E-K.”

“I know how to spell ‘meek,’” Howard snapped. “It means wimpy. Weak. Pathetic. Pitiful. A sucker. A victim. A stupid, Bible-reading, monster-looking fool, that’s what it means.”

“Well, it says here they’re blessed.”

“Yeah,” Howard said savagely, “because that’s the way it always works out: wimps always win.”

“They’re gonna inherit the earth,” Orc said. But he seemed doubtful about it. “What’s that mean, ‘inherit’?”

“You are sucking the life right out of me; you know that, Orc?”

Orc shifted and turned his book to get better light. The sun was going down.

“Where are the girls? Farmer Goth and Farmer Emo?”

“Went to get Sam.” Orc grunted.

“Sam? Why didn’t you tell me, dude?” Howard glanced around for a place to hide his backpack. He was on a delivery run. And while Sam didn’t go out of his way to try to shut down Howard’s business, he could get it into his head to confiscate Howard’s product.

“I think ‘inherit’ means take over, like,” Orc said.

Howard slung his pack behind a bush and stepped back to see if it was still visible. “Yep. Take over. The meek. Just like rabbits take over from coyotes. Don’t be an idiot, Orc.”