Gone Series Complete Collection (20 page)

None of which changed the fact that right now, with the smell of fresh-turned earth in his nostrils and disquiet boring holes in his brain, he would have loved to be watching one of his mother’s favorite gruesome crime shows and sneaking popcorn out of the bowl on her lap.

The big issues in the FAYZ—the what and the why and the how—didn’t bother Albert much. He was a practical person, and, anyway, those were things for someone like Astrid to ponder. As for the events of this night, the killing of Bette, that was for Sam and Caine and those guys to work out.

What had Albert worried was something entirely different: No one was working. No one but Mary and Dahra and occasionally Edilio. Everyone else was moping or wandering or fighting or else just sitting around and playing video games or watching DVDs. They were all like rats living in an abandoned house: they ate what they found, messed wherever they liked, and left things dirtier and more rundown than they found them.

It couldn’t last. Everyone was just killing time. But if all they did was kill time, time would end up killing them.

Albert believed that. Knew that. But he couldn’t explain it to anyone and make them listen. He couldn’t talk with the smooth assurance of a Caine, or the knowing detachment of an Astrid. When Albert spoke, people didn’t pay attention the way they did to Sam.

He needed someone else’s words to explain what his instincts told him must be true.

Albert dropped his keys into his pocket and marched up the street with a determined stride that echoed off dark storefronts. The smart thing to do would be to head home, get a few hours of sleep. It would be dawn soon. But he wasn’t going to sleep, he knew that. Sam and Caine and Astrid and Computer Jack all had their things they did, their things they knew, but this was Albert’s.

“We can’t be rats,” he muttered to himself. “We have to be . . .” But even trying to explain it to himself, he didn’t know the right words.

The county library branch in Perdido Beach wasn’t an impressive place. It was a dusty, gloomy, low-ceilinged storefront that hit him with a whiff of mildew when he swung the door open. He had never entered the place before and was a little surprised to find it unlocked with the overhead fluorescent tubes still flickering and buzzing.

Albert looked around and laughed. “No one’s been here since the FAYZ,” he said to a rack of yellowed paperbacks.

He looked in the librarian’s old oaken desk. You never knew where a candy bar might be hiding. He found a can of peppermints. They looked like they’d been there quite a while, treats to be handed out to kids who never came.

He popped one in his mouth and began to walk the meager stacks. He knew he needed to know something, but he didn’t know what he needed to know. Most of the books looked like they’d been there, undisturbed, since before Albert was born.

He found a set of encyclopedias—like Wikipedia, but paper and very bulky. He plopped down on the ratty carpet and opened the first book. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew where to start. He slid out the volume for “W” and turned to the entry for “work.” There were two main entries. One had to do with work in terms of physics.

The other entry talked about work as the “activities necessary for the survival of society.”

“Yeah,” Albert said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

He started reading. He jumped from volume to volume, understanding only part of what he was reading, but understanding enough to follow another lead and then another. It was exactly like following hyperlinks, only slower, and with more lifting.

“Work” led to “labor,” which led him to “productivity,” which led to someone named “Karl Marx,” which led to another old guy named “Adam Smith.”

Albert had never been much of a serious student. But what he had learned in school had never mattered much from his point of view. This mattered. Everything mattered now.

Albert drifted slowly off to sleep and woke up with a start feeling eyes watching him.

He spun around, jumped to his feet, and heaved a huge sigh of relief when he saw that it was just a cat. The cat was a yellow tabby, a little fat, probably old. It had a pink collar and heart-shaped brass tag. It stood with perfect confidence and self-possession in the middle of the aisle. The cat stared at him from green eyes. Its tail twitched.

“Hi, kitty,” Albert said.

The cat disappeared.

Gone.

Albert recoiled in shock, his face suddenly ablaze with pain. The cat was on him, on his face, digging razor-claws into his head. The cat hissed, needle-teeth exposed by a fierce scowl a millimeter from Albert’s eyes.

Albert yelled for help, yelled at the cat. The cat dug its claws deeper. Albert still had a volume of the encyclopedia in his right hand—the “S” book. He slammed it down on his own head.

The cat was gone. The book knocked Albert silly.

And now the cat was clear across the room, sitting calmly atop the librarian’s desk.

It was impossible. Nothing moved that fast. Nothing.

Albert drew a shaky breath and began backing toward the door to the street.

Without any movement that Albert’s eyes could detect, the cat went from the desk to the back of Albert’s neck. It was on him like a mad thing, clawing, scratching, tearing, hissing.

Again, Albert swung the heavy book and again the blow landed on his own flesh because now the cat was perched atop a stack, peering down at Albert, mocking him with cool, green-eyed contempt.

It was going to attack him again.

Instinct made Albert swing the book up to protect his face.

He felt the book jump violently in his hands.

The cat’s face, distorted by rage, was an inch from Albert’s own face.

But the book was still in place.

And the cat was in the book.

No,
through
the book.

Albert stared in shock as the cat’s eyes darkened and its animal soul fled.

He dropped the encyclopedia on the floor.

The book, the heavy blue leather-bound volume, bisected the cat just behind the front paws. It was as if someone had cut the cat in half and sewed it in two pieces to the book. The back of the cat stuck out from the back cover.

Albert was panting as much from terror as exertion. The thing on the floor, that thing wasn’t possible. The way the cat had moved, not possible.

“Nightmare. You’re having a nightmare,” he told himself.

But if it was a dream it was a dream with a lot of the texture of reality. Surely he wouldn’t dream the smell of mildew. Surely he wouldn’t dream the way the cat’s bladder and bowels emptied messily in death.

Albert remembered seeing the librarian’s large shoulder bag at her desk. With shaking hands he emptied the contents out onto the desk: lipstick, wallet, compact, a cell phone all scattered.

He picked up the encyclopedia. It was heavy. The weight of the cat added to the book had to be twenty pounds. And the cat-in-the-book was bulky, too big to fit easily into the bag.

But he had to show this to someone. This was an impossible thing. Impossible. Except that it was real. Albert needed someone else to tell him that it was real, someone to confirm that he wasn’t dreaming or crazy.

Not Caine. Sam? He would be at the firehouse, but this wasn’t a Sam thing, it was an Astrid thing. Two minutes later he was on Astrid’s well-lit stoop.

Astrid opened her door cautiously and only after checking the peephole.

“Albert? It’s the middle of the . . . oh, my God, what happened to your face?”

“I could use some Band-Aids,” Albert said. He’d forgotten what he must look like. He’d forgotten the pain. “Yeah. I could use some help. But that’s not why I came here.”

“Then . . .”

“Astrid. I need . . .” His words failed him, then. Now safe in Astrid’s entryway, the fear took hold and for a minute he just could not form a word or make a sound.

Astrid drew him inside and closed the door.

“I need . . . ,” he began again, and again couldn’t say more. In a strangled voice he said, “Just look.”

He dumped the cat and the book onto the Oriental rug.

Astrid went completely still.

“It was so fast. It attacked me. I couldn’t even see it move. It was like it was in one place, right? And then it was on me. I mean, it didn’t jump, Astrid. It just . . . appeared.”

Astrid knelt to push gingerly at the book. She tried to make the book fall open, but the body of the cat went through each page and held them together. Not like the cat had made a hole: like the cat had fused together with the paper.

“What is it, Astrid?” Albert pleaded.

She said nothing, just stared. Albert could all but see the wheels turning in her brain. But she gave him no answer, and Albert accepted after a while that no answer would be forthcoming. No explanation was possible for a thing that could not be.

But she had seen the thing, the impossible thing. He wasn’t crazy.

After what felt like a very long time Astrid whispered, “Come on, Albert, let’s do something with those scratches.”

Lana lay in the dark in the cabin listening to the mysterious sounds of the desert outside. Something made a soft, slithery sound like a hand stroking silk. Something else emitted rapid percussive bursts, a tiny insect drummer who slowed after a few seconds and lost his way and fell silent before starting all over again.

The windmill squeaked infuriatingly. Never for long, never in any kind of pattern. There was no real breeze, just whispers that turned the weathered wooden blades a quarter turn . . . squeak . . . or a half turn . . . squeak, squeak . . . or barely nudged them to produce a sound like the shrill peep of a baby bird.

Against all that was the reassuring snore from Patrick. He would snore and stop and snore again and every now and then give up a low yipping sound that Lana found endearing.

Lana’s body was well. Her injuries were all miraculously healed. She had washed away the caked-on blood. She had water and food and shelter.

But Lana’s brain was an engine revved to breakneck speed. It turned over and over, swirling through memories of pain, memories of terror, flashes of her grandfather’s empty seat, the tumble down the slope, the buzzards, the lion.

But as lurid as all those images were, they were just fresh paint splashed on more permanent images. The pictures that lingered were of home. School. The mall. Her dad’s car and her mom’s van. The community pool. The sizzling fantasy skyline of the Las Vegas strip visible from her bedroom window.

Taken all together, the pictures churning and churning in her head fed a constant slow burn of rage.

She should be home, not here. She should be in her room. She should be with her friends. Not alone.

Not alone listening to eerie noises and a squeak and a snore.

If she had been a little more careful. . . . She had tried to stuff the bottle of vodka into her shoulder bag, the cute one with the beadwork she liked. The bag was too small, but the only bag big enough was her book bag and she hadn’t wanted to carry it because it didn’t work with her outfit.

For that, she had been caught. For a stupid question of fashion, of looking cool.

And now . . .

A tidal wave of fury at her mother swept across her. It felt like she would drown in all that rage.

Her mother, that’s who she blamed. Her father just did what her mom told him to do. He had to back her up even though he was the nicer one, not as strict or as snipey as her mother.

What was the big deal if she gave Tony a bottle of vodka? It’s not like he was driving a car.

Lana’s mother just didn’t understand Las Vegas. Vegas wasn’t Perdido Beach. There were pressures on her in Las Vegas. It was a city, not a town, and not just any city. Kids grew up faster in Vegas. Demands were made, even of seventh graders, eighth graders, let alone a ninth grader like her.

Her stupid mother. Her fault.

Although it was kind of hard to blame her mother for the blank, intimidating wall in the desert. Kind of hard to blame her for that.

Maybe it was aliens and right now some creepy monsters were chasing her mother and father through the streets of Las Vegas, like in that movie,
War of the Worlds
. Maybe.

Lana found that thought strangely comforting. After all, at least she wasn’t being chased by aliens in giant tripods. Maybe the wall was some kind of defense put up against the aliens. Maybe she was safe on this side of the wall.

The bottle of vodka wasn’t the only time she’d snuck something for Tony. Lana had palmed some of her mother’s Xanax for him. And she had shoplifted a bottle of wine once from a convenience store.

She wasn’t naïve: She never thought Tony loved her or anything. She knew he was using her. But she was using him too, in her own way. Tony had some status in the school, and some of that had been transferred to her.

Patrick snorted and raised his head very suddenly.

“What is it, boy?”

She rolled from the narrow cot and crouched silent and fearful in the dark cabin.

Something was outside. She could hear it moving. Faint sounds of padded feet on the ground.

Patrick stood up but in a strange, slow-motion way. His hackles were raised, the fur on his back bristling. He was staring intently at the doorway.

There was a scratching sound, exactly like a dog might make, trying to get inside.

And then Lana heard, or thought she heard, a garbled whisper. “Come out.”

Patrick should be barking, but he wasn’t. He was rigid, panting too hard, staring too fixedly.

“You’re just imagining things,” Lana whispered, trying to reassure herself.

“Come out,” the gravelly whisper called again.

Lana discovered that she had to pee. Had to go very badly and there was nothing like a bathroom in the cabin.

“Is someone there?” she cried.

No answer. Maybe it had just been her imagination. Maybe it was just the wind.

She crept to the door and listened intently. Nothing. She glanced at Patrick. Her dog was still bristling, but he had relaxed a bit. The threat—whatever it had been—had moved away.

Lana opened the door a crack. Nothing. Nothing she could see, anyway, and Patrick was definitely no longer worried.