Gone Series Complete Collection (252 page)

The highway was an eerie graveyard of cars wrecked at the moment the FAYZ occurred, and of course others that had been vandalized or burned out since. Every single one had been broken into by kids searching for food or drugs or alcohol. The batteries were all long since dead, gas tanks evaporated or drained off.

Dahra weaved her way through the wrecks and around debris and drifting trash. From Perdido Beach to the lake was just about the maximum distance you could go in the FAYZ. A full day’s walk for sure, but not quite as bad by bike, although sticking to the roads made it less direct.

She passed the turnoff to the power plant, the center point of the FAYZ and more or less the halfway mark for her. The Santa Katrina hills rose off to the right, shadowed by the rising sun, and now she had to choose which road to take. The nearest was gravel and dirt, which would be hard with a bike.

If she rode on into the Stefano Rey National Park she’d find a better-paved but steeper road—at least that’s what kids said; Dahra had never been. The wooded part would be shadier, too, and that sounded good. It was hot and she was out of shape. She had spent most of the last year in the basement of the town hall, down in the so-called hospital, reading medical books and doling out the dwindling supply of medicine.

She had taught herself to bandage, to attach splints, to suture wounds—Lana wasn’t always available. And she had with great misgiving taken on a bit of dentistry. At least as much dentistry as could be accomplished with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a small vise grip.

Well, maybe if they ever got out she could look into medical school. Of course, first she’d have to go back to being a kid. Three more years of high school, then college, and then medical school, maybe.

She had “spoken” with her mom at the barrier. Her mother had wondered if she was keeping up with her school subjects. How were you supposed to even answer a question like that? She hadn’t slept a full night since . . . forever. She had been up just about every night of the last year applying cold compresses to bring down fevers, holding puke buckets, wiping up diarrhea . . . until the great plagues had come, the killing cough and the murderous insect infestation.

That had broken her. For a while. But she had come back.

Yes, she had.

Dahra rested, drank some water, wished she had some food, told herself they’d feed her at the lake, and rode on.

The sign for the Stefano Rey was still in place. Not enough people got up this way to properly vandalize it, like every other sign had been. There was even an unvandalized stop sign, a rarity in the FAYZ, where bored kids with spray paint had painted suggestions for just what you should stop: breathing, wetting yourself, and things a bit cruder.

Why was she doing this? Dahra asked herself. She was taking a risk, why? Because she hadn’t before? Because she’d stayed out of the battles, out of the wars, except to tend the wounded? Because she wanted, just once, to play the hero and not the person who bandaged the hero?

Stupid.

It was cool under the trees, but the steepness of the road soon brought back the sweat. She—

She hit the branch before she saw it. The bike yanked out from under her, and Dahra went flying. She hit the pavement hard, facedown, hands too slow to cushion more than a little of the impact.

Dahra lay there, stunned, panting into the blacktop. She tasted blood. Gingerly she checked her extremities. Legs moved. So did her arms. Her palms and knees were bloody but not broken; that was a relief. Her jaw felt funny, like it was off center, but it moved okay. She climbed slowly and only then felt the stab of pain in her ankle. She tested it, and yes, oh, definitely, it hurt.

The bike’s front tire was no longer round. It wasn’t going to be any use—not that she could have ridden it with a sprained ankle.

She fought down the panic. She was still at least four miles as the crow flies, more like five in reality, from the lake. That was a long way to hop on one leg.

She glanced around for a stick to use as a crutch. “You’d think there would be more sticks in a forest,” she said aloud, wishing the sound of her voice made her feel braver instead of emphasizing her aloneness. Her abrasions stung, and she’d have liked to wash the wounds at least, although she doubted there were too many terrible bacteria living on the surface of the road.

“You’ll be okay,” she told herself.

The dark trees and her own inner voice said otherwise.

She had felt it when she’d panicked, when she’d broken down in the aftermath of the plagues. When the plagues hadn’t killed her, she had felt then as if she had used up the last of her luck. Yet now she had tempted fate again, and now, with the end of the FAYZ perhaps in sight, here she was.

Why?

“Just to deliver a message?” Dahra asked herself, bewildered.

She sat by the side of the road and cried.

TWELVE

44
HOURS

GAIA HAD
SLEPT
in, seeming to both age and heal while asleep. She had gone to sleep still burned and perhaps seven or eight years old, and had awakened healed and closer to ten.

Diana had not tried to wake her.

Let sleeping monsters lie.

Alex had raved through much of the long night, had awakened several times after sunrise to cry out in pain, and then had fallen back into a restless, disturbed sleep.

Diana had tried not to look at the cooked arm, now mostly eaten but not entirely, which lay by the softly snoring Gaia.

Finally, with the sun already past its peak, Gaia had snapped awake, stood up without preamble, and stepped behind a tree to take care of necessary business. Then she had eaten the rest of the arm, down to bare bone, while Alex watched in some disturbing mix of awe and horror and hatred.

He’s going off the deep end, Diana thought. She could see it in his eyes. Too much, too fast.

“I’m hungry,” Gaia said. “Growing this body at an accelerated rate demands a lot of nutrition.”

“Gaia, no,” Diana said.

Alex made a gurgling sound and tried to run. Gaia raised a finger, and he found himself running in place, feet slipping helplessly on stony earth. “I have a . . . I . . . Wait! Wait! I have a granola bar!”

“What is a granola bar?” Gaia asked.

“It’s food! Food!” Alex cried. He let the backpack slip from his intact shoulder.

The mere mention of a granola bar made Diana’s mouth water. Hunger pains stabbed at her insides. If Gaia took Alex’s other arm, she would let Diana have the granola bar.

Take it, kill him, eat him
;
I don’t care.

Diana lifted the pack. It was small, more a runner’s pack than anything meant for camping. She spilled it out on the ground. A small tube of lotion. A knife. A water bottle. An iPhone with headphones and some sort of solar charger. The granola bar. A map.

Gaia moved in. “Which is the food?”

Diana stared at the bar. Unimaginable luxury in the FAYZ. Oats and raisins and dates, it brought tears to her eyes. All she had to do was say, “Take
him
!” and the bar would be hers.

“There it is! Eat it!” Alex cried.

Gaia stooped, picked it up, frowned at it, and finally realized it was meant to be unwrapped. She ate it like Cookie Monster scarfing a chocolate chip cookie.

Diana breathed. Decision made.

“What is that?” Gaia pointed at the iPhone.

“It’s his cell phone,” Diana said. “They don’t work in here.”

“I’ve got my tunes on there,” Alex said eagerly. “Want to hear some, Gaia? Do you want to hear some music?”

“Music,” Gaia said. “What is it?”

“See, you listen to it. You stick the white things in your . . .” He had grabbed the headphones with his remaining hand and was trying to proffer them to Gaia.

Gaia took them.

“Gaia, I know how to get to the lake from here,” Diana said. “I can get you food there.” And some for myself.

Gaia laughed as she toyed with the white earbuds. “Once we go to the lake we’ll have plenty to eat.”

“You’re going . . . I mean, wait,” Diana said, confused. “You’re going to the lake? I mean, we’re deliberately going there?”

“Of course, stupid Diana,” Gaia said. Her blue eyes were merry. “Once it’s dark. How else can I kill them all?”

“Kill them all?” Diana echoed blankly.

“Any human that
Nemesis
can use. I thought that was obvious, Diana. I can’t allow
Nemesis
to find a host; do you know how powerful he would be? No, he must die. First the people at the lake. It will be easier. Then Perdido Beach. There are many hiding places in Perdido Beach. I know.” She nodded smugly. “How many humans are alive in this small universe of ours?”

“Gaia, you can’t—”

Diana felt herself slammed to the ground, hard enough to knock the wind out of her. Then she was hurled straight up into the air, flying, arms windmilling, screaming in terror.

She began to drop. The drop onto hard stone would surely kill her.

Please, yes, let me die.

But Gaia stopped her fall just two feet from impact. Gaia’s child’s face was twisted into a sneer. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do, Mother.”

She let Diana go so that she would fall the last two feet.

“See, she’s the one causing trouble,” Alex cried, pointing at Diana with his one hand. Spittle flew from his lips. His eyes were wild. “Eat her! Eat her! Hah hah hah! Yeah!”

Diana wasn’t even offended. The red-haired man was traumatized. He’d fallen into a nightmare, unprepared. His eyes were rimmed in red. Madness was moving in to claim him.

Wait until he’s hungry enough that the smell of his own cooked flesh begins to . . .

Gaia laughed. It was a jarring sound, strange and out of place. “You don’t want to feed your god?” she asked Alex. She moved close to him, and as he recoiled in fear she took him by his ear and drew him close. It was an act of pure sadism, Diana realized. Gaia wasn’t simply ruthless; she enjoyed causing fear. Gaia whispered to Alex, “You have hope still. You think you might escape me. Stupid man. Don’t you understand? You only live to feed me. You have to
hope
you can feed me. Beg to feed me. Because when you can’t, you die.”

Alex shook so badly he fell to his knees. Urine stained his pants.

Gaia laughed, delightedly. “See?” she asked Diana. “Now he worships me on his knees.”

“Are you killing them all or humiliating them?” Diana asked bitterly.

“Can’t I do both?”

“Why do you need to do this, Gaia? What . . . Just, why? Why?”

Gaia was suddenly matter-of-fact, businesslike. “Nemesis may take a body for himself. And then where will I be? I need Nemesis to die, Diana. When he dies, the barrier will fall. When he dies, I will be free to emerge. I am ready. I am seeing this place and realizing that it is small. Look at the world out there.” She waved her arm grandly toward the transparent barrier, toward the desert beyond. “It goes on and on, doesn’t it? How big is it, Diana?”

“What, the whole country? Earth?”

“All of it. Is the earth all of it? Then the earth. How big is the earth?”

Diana shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly honor roll. Astrid would know, down to the mile, I’m sure.”

Gaia turned to her, eyes lit with excitement. “But it’s big. How many humans?”

“Billions.”

That seemed to take Gaia aback. Her mouth dropped open.

“Even you can’t kill them all,” Diana said, enjoying Gaia’s look of consternation.

But Gaia had absorbed the new information. “I won’t need to kill billions, Diana. When Nemesis is gone, there will be no other like me. Just me alone. I will grow and spread, one body and then another, and soon there will be so many of me that it will be impossible to eradicate me. Eventually all will be me, and I will be all.”

“Won’t that be boring?” Diana asked. “You’d be dating yourself. You’ll have no one to discuss your evil plans with. No one left to terrorize.”

Gaia nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. Yes, you make sense. I will leave some free so that I can teach them fear and pain.”

Diana stared at her, seeing not the fast-growing girl but the monster beneath. Only now did she truly understand. How had she not realized it before? The sadism. The game playing. The irrational fears and grandiose visions of godhood.

Diana had seen enough of it in the FAYZ; how had she not seen it in this creature? Madness. Lunacy.

The gaiaphage was insane.

Gaia was going to kill everyone: that was her plan. Kill the good and the bad, all of them. Diana grasped the truth of it now. That was Gaia’s mad endgame. The gaiaphage couldn’t allow Little Pete to find a body and survive, and that meant killing every living person in the FAYZ.

And it wouldn’t be a simple act of survival. She would enjoy it. She would enjoy watching people run from her. She would enjoy hunting them down and killing them. Gaia wasn’t ruthless and self-serving like Caine; she was evil, like Drake. A psychopath. A mad and terrible beast.

For some reason Diana’s mind went to Orc. Not a regular kid by any stretch. He’d been a bully, a thug, a drunk, and a killer. Then he’d been a penitent. Like Diana he had come to regret what he’d done. He had irritated her with his Bible reading and his endless questions, but he had found a way to redemption.

Could Orc’s life story simply end in Gaia’s flames, just to feed Gaia’s psychotic ego?

Sinder, who was so devoted to her garden.

Dahra, who had worked herself into a breakdown caring for sick kids.

Computer Jack? He’d been confused and aimless, and in her time Diana had used and manipulated him, but to actually die? To be killed by this . . . this abomination?

Astrid, that sanctimonious bitch . . . and Brianna, who Diana had actually come to like. And Dekka, who had never liked Diana but had forgiven her in her own snarling way. And Lana.

And Caine.

Yes, above all, Caine.

All their battles, hers and Caine’s, all their rages? All of it to end in death so this evil creature could walk out to trouble the wider world?