Gone Series Complete Collection (208 page)

FIFTEEN

22
HOURS
, 16
MINUTES

MOHAMED HAD
SET
out from the lake on the tedious walk to Perdido Beach as soon as he could get a water bottle and a little food in his belly.

He carried a pistol and a knife, but he wasn’t really worried. Everyone knew he was under Albert’s protection. And no one messed with Albert’s people.

For most of the time since the coming of the FAYZ, Mohamed had lain low, stayed out of the way of all the big wheels who were busy killing and being killed.

As crazy as things were in the FAYZ, the smart move was to just do the minimum to get food and shelter. And not even shelter some of the time.

He was thirteen, a man. He was thin and starting to get taller, a growth spurt that had left his shorts too short and his shoes too tight. His family had just moved to Perdido Beach when his mother got a job at the power plant. The school was supposed to be better than the one he’d been at in King City. His dad still worked there, working ten hours a day at the family’s Circle K, selling gas and cigarettes and milk to a mostly Hispanic population. It was a really long commute, and some nights his dad hadn’t come home, which made everyone feel strange and abandoned.

But that was the way it was, his father had explained. A man worked. A man did what he had to do to take care of his family. Even if it meant he saw less of them.

Sometimes Moomaw—Mohamed’s paternal grandmother—would talk about going back to Syria. But Mohamed’s father would shut that down right away. He had left Syria when he was twenty-two and didn’t miss it at all, not even a little, no, sir. Yes, he’d been a medical student there and sold hot dogs to farmhands now, but it was still better.

Was it tough sometimes being the only Muslim at the Perdido Beach school? Yeah. He’d been pushed around by Orc a few times. Kids made fun of him for praying. For refusing the pepperoni pizza at lunch. But pretty soon Orc had lost interest and most kids didn’t even think twice about where his parents came from or how he prayed.

Fortunately Mohamed’s family had never been all that strict about the dietary laws. He hadn’t eaten pork since the coming of the FAYZ, but he would have in a heartbeat if anyone had some. He’d eaten rat, cat, dog, bird, and fish and slimy things he didn’t have a name for. He’d have jumped all over a pepperoni pizza if anyone had one. Staying alive was not a sin: Allah saw all; Allah understood all.

Someday this would all end; Mohamed was sure of that. Or tried to be. Someday the barrier would come down and his father and mother and brothers and sister would be waiting for him.

How would he get along with his brothers? They would ask him all the questions his parents wouldn’t. They’d ask him what he had done. They’d ask him if he represented. They’d ask him if he had stood up or wimped out. That was what brothers were like, at least his.

Whenever the barrier came down there would be all kinds of people talking to the media and telling all kinds of stories. And pretty quick people would realize they hadn’t just all sat around catching up on their homework.

People would realize it had been more like a war. And then all those questions. Were you scared, Mohamed? Were you picked on? Did you ever run into all these insane freaks we hear about on TV?

Did you ever kill anyone? What was it like?

He hadn’t killed anyone. He’d had a couple of fights; one of them was pretty bad. He’d had a nail driven into his butt cheek and broken his wrist.

Mohamed figured he’d change that story a little. Nail in the butt sounded funny. It hadn’t been, but if he ever got out, yeah, he’d change that story.

As for freaks, the only one he’d spent any time with was Lana. She had healed his butt and his wrist.

So, yeah, don’t diss all the freaks, not to Mohamed.

When it came time for the Big Split, Mohamed had been forced to commit, one way or the other. He had gone to Albert and asked his advice. Until then Mohamed had stuck to working in the fields, but Albert had seen something in him.

Albert had liked him for the fact that he had no real friends. No family inside the FAYZ. He liked the way Mohamed had managed to stay under the radar. All those things—plus Mohamed’s basic intelligence—made him just right for the job Albert had for him: representing AlberCo at the lake.

Mohamed still had no friends. But he had a job. An important one. Albert would want to know details of Astrid’s return. He’d want to know that she was measuring some kind of stain on the dome. Maybe he’d want to know about some weird, mutant animal Astrid had supposedly killed. And he would definitely want to hear what Mohamed knew about the secret mission Sam and Dekka had gone out on.

Mohamed walked down the familiar, dusty road.

He walked alone.

Howard was already en route to Coates. He had a long day of work ahead of him. Hopefully his contractors would have run some corn and assorted other vegetables and fruits up to Coates and locked them in the rat-proof steel cupboards in the kitchen.

Howard would have to chop the produce up as small as he had patience for, then carry it to the still. He had a little firewood in place, hopefully enough to get the cooker started. Then while the batch was cooking he would have to hack around the woods looking for fallen trees, which he would then have to cut.

All of this used to be Orc’s job. Orc could haul a lot of bottles. Orc could haul a lot of firewood. Orc swinging an ax was a whole different story from Howard’s doing it. Orc was like two swings and snap, the log would be cut through. For Howard the same job could take fifteen minutes.

This bootlegging thing was getting to be a lot less fun. It was a lot more like real work. In fact, Howard realized with a sudden shock, he was now working harder than just about anyone else. Kids picking veggies in the fields didn’t even work like Howard did.

“Gotta get Orc to be normal again,” Howard muttered to the bushes. “Boy needs to take a drink or six and start feeling it again.”

After all, Orc and him were friends.

Drake stood atop the rise. He’d just returned after a Brittney episode and was surprised to find that she had kept moving along with the coyotes.

“Human,” Pack Leader said.

Drake followed the direction of the animal’s intense gaze. A kid—Drake couldn’t tell who it was—was down below, walking steadily along the dirt-and-gravel road. “Yep,” Drake said. “There’s your lunch.”

SIXTEEN

22
HOURS
, 5
MINUTES

“SO. WHAT
IS
it?” Sam asked.

The “it” in question had been carried to a picnic table not far from the Pit. A plastic tarp had been spread out over and under it—after all, kids still used these tables sometimes. The picnic area was inconveniently far from town but still had a nice view of the lake.

“It’s a coyote, mostly,” Astrid said. “With a human face. And back legs.”

He glanced at her to see if she was really as calm as she seemed. No. She was not calm, but Astrid could do that, seem totally in control when she was freaking out inside.

She’d managed to seem calm when she came back from her quick trip with Edilio. She’d been calm when she said, “The sun may come out tomorrow. But it may not. And unless something changes that will be the last sunrise.”

And he had put on a pretty good show of looking calm himself. He’d given Edilio orders to come up with a list of places where he could hang a Sammy sun. They’d had a very calm discussion of other ways to prepare: start food rationing, test the effect of Sammy suns on growing plants—after all, maybe his own personal light could trigger photosynthesis. Move to more use of nets for fishing; maybe a hovering Sammy sun would bring fish to the surface.

Plans they all knew were bull.

Plans that were about nothing but prolonging the agony.

Plans that would fall apart as soon as the kids in Perdido Beach realized the only light they were likely to see was up here at the lake.

Sam was going through the motions. Pretending. Putting on a brave face to delay the inevitable total social meltdown.

In the back of his mind the gears spun like mad. Solution. Solution. Solution. What was it?

Astrid had laid out a large chef’s knife, a meat cleaver—borrowed from a seven-year-old who carried it for protection—and an X-Acto knife with a less-than-perfect blade.

“It’s beyond creepy,” Sam said.

“You don’t have to be here, Sam,” she said.

“No, I love watching autopsies of disgusting mutant monsters,” Sam said. He felt like throwing up and she hadn’t even started.

Solution. Solution. Solution.

Astrid was wearing pink Playtex gloves. She rolled the creature onto its back. “You can see the line where the human face stops and the fur starts. There’s no human hair, just coyote. And look at the legs. There’s no blurring. It’s a clean line. But the bones inside? Those are coyote bones. It’s articulated like a coyote leg covered with human skin and probably muscle, too.”

Sam had run out of useful things to say or energy to say them. He was fighting the surge of bile into his throat, hoping not to puke. A sudden gust of wind bringing the smell of the Pit did not help. Plus the creature itself smelled. Like wet dog and urine and sticky-sweet decay.

And throughout it all: solution. Where was the solution? Where was the answer?

Astrid took the cleaver and slammed it into the creature’s exposed belly. It made a six-inch cut. There was no bleeding; dead things didn’t bleed.

Sam braced himself to burn anything that suddenly emerged,
Alien
-like, from the cut. But nothing popped or squirmed out. He had terrible memories of what he’d had to do with Dekka. He’d burned her open to get the bugs out of her. It had been the most gruesome thing he’d ever done. And now as Astrid used the big knife to saw away and widen the cut, it was all coming back.

Astrid turned away from the smell to compose herself. She pulled out a rag and tied it over her mouth and nose. Like that would help. She looked like a very pretty bandit.

Incredibly a second line of thinking was forcing its way into his consciousness. He wanted her. Not here, not now, but soon. Soon. The endless, hopeless brain merry-go-round that sang the solution song sang a much nicer tune, too. Why couldn’t he just crawl into his bunk with Astrid and let someone else break his soul searching for a nonexistent solution?

Astrid now cut vertically, opening the animal up along its length. “Look at this.”

“Do I have to?”

“You can see organs attached to each other that just don’t fit. It’s bizarre. The stomach is the wrong size for the large intestine. It’s like a really bad plumber tried to attach different-size pipes together. I can’t believe this thing lived as long as it did.”

“So it’s a mutant?” Sam asked, anxious to reach some kind of conclusion and then bury the carcass and do his best to forget about it and get back to the twin thought streams of “solution” and “sex.”

Astrid didn’t answer. Her silent staring went on and on. At last she said, “Every mutant so far has been survivable. You shoot light out of your hands and never get burned. Brianna runs at a hundred miles an hour but her knees don’t break. The mutations haven’t harmed anyone yet. In fact, the mutations have been survival tools, really. Like the goal was to build a stronger, more capable human being. No. No, this is something different.”

“Okay. What?”

She shrugged, pulled off her gloves, and tossed them onto the open wound. “This is bits of human—probably the missing girl—and coyote. Mix and match. Like someone just randomly took parts from one and swapped them for parts from the other.”

“Why would—” Sam began.

But Astrid was still talking, to herself more than to him. “Like someone tossed two different DNAs into a hat and drew out this and that and tried to fit them together. It’s . . . it’s stupid, really.”

“Stupid?”

“Yeah. Stupid.” She looked at him as if she was surprised to be talking to him now. “I mean, it’s something that makes no sense. It serves no purpose. It’s obvious it wouldn’t work. Only an idiot would think you could just randomly plug pieces of human into a coyote.”

“Wait a minute. You’re acting like this is someone doing it. A person. How do you know it isn’t just something natural?” He thought about that for a moment, sighed, and added, “Or at least what passes for natural in the FAYZ.”

Astrid shrugged. “What’s happened so far? Coyotes evolved limited powers of speech. Worms developed teeth and became aggressive and territorial. Snakes grew wings and developed a new form of metamorphosis. Some of us developed powers. So far there’s been a lot of strange, but not a lot of stupid. This, though, this”—she aimed her finger at the carcass of the monstrosity—“is just stupid.”

“The gaiaphage?” Sam asked, feeling in his gut it was the wrong answer.

Astrid held his gaze for a moment but her brain was somewhere else. “Not stupid,” she said.

“You just said it was—”

“I was wrong. It’s not about stupid. It’s ignorant. Clueless.”

“Is there—” He wasn’t surprised when she interrupted him as if he hadn’t even been talking.

“Unbelievable power,” Astrid said. “And absolute ignorance.”

“What does that mean?” Sam asked.

Astrid wasn’t listening. She was slowly turning her head, eyes aimed all the way to the right, as if she thought someone was sneaking up on her.

It was so compelling that Sam followed the direction of her gaze. Nothing. But he recognized the movement: how many times in the last months had he done the same himself? A sort of paranoid, sidelong glance at something that wasn’t there?

Astrid shook her head slowly. “I’m . . . I have to go. I’m not feeling well.”

He watched her walk away. It was irritating, to put it mildly. Infuriating.

In the old days he’d have called her out on it, demanded to know what she was thinking.