Gone Series Complete Collection (268 page)

The whip was around her throat. She screamed but no sound emerged. She tried to breathe, but nothing came.

She reached for a standing pillar of stone; her fingernails clawed at it. She kicked at a piece of wood, hoping it would make some sound to draw Sam’s attention. The buildings around the plaza were supposed to be full of Edilio’s people: one of them must see!

Sam had only to turn around . . .

Astrid dropped, putting all her weight on the tentacle arm, hoping to pull him off balance. But he was too strong.

Drake drew her back into the shadows of the church. She was kicking, trying to scream, her lungs already burning from lack of oxygen.

“Hello, Astrid,” Drake said.

And she lost consciousness.

“We need a bucket brigade,” Sam said to Edilio. “There must be some kind of air current up high in the dome. It’s picking up sparks from the forest fire and dropping them all around.”

“I’ll get all my spare people on it right away,” Edilio snapped. Then, “Sorry.”

“I know you’re stretched thin, man.”

“Thin? I’m stretched invisible, Sam. There are maybe two, three dozen kids in the fields. I have maybe twelve left actually holding guns. And the rest? You know where they are.”

“It’s the waiting,” Sam said, looking to the northwest, the direction of the highway. “Why doesn’t she just attack?”

“Maybe she knows we’re panicking. Or maybe she’s waiting for the fire to do her work for her.”

Sam looked up. The sky was still afternoon blue, but there was a gray tint to the air. “If she’s out there to the northwest of town like we think, then she’s closer to the fire than we are. Maybe we’ll get lucky and—”

He stopped when he saw Edilio’s skeptical look.

“Yeah,” Sam said. Then: “I have to go after her. If I wait, then she uses my own power to kill kids. I have to try to take her down myself.”

Edilio spread his hands as if to say,
But . . .
There was no but. It was the truth, and they both knew it.

“The only other alternative is, you know, to, um . . . deprive her of my power. It may give me a chance, her needing to keep me alive. That may give me an edge.”

Again Sam was waiting to hear the counterargument. He was waiting to hear Edilio explain how wrong he was to believe that he had to die to stop Gaia. But that wasn’t what he heard, or what he saw in Edilio’s eyes.

“She’s stronger than you are, Sam. It’s like fighting yourself and Caine and Jack and Dekka, all at once.”

“Yeah.”

“Talk to Astrid about it.”

“I already talked to Astrid.”

“And she’s okay with a suicide mission? Because I’m not. You go out there, go to win, huh? Don’t go out there thinking you’re doing us a favor by getting killed.”

Sam sighed. “It’s the endgame, my friend.”

“Sam . . . ,” Edilio began, but that was all he had, that one word, that one-word plea for a different solution.

“Take care of Astrid for me. Try to keep her safe and don’t let her follow me.”

“I haven’t been very good at keeping people safe,” Edilio said.

“No, man, what happened to Roger is not your fault or your failing. The grief is enough. It’s enough. You don’t need guilt on top of it.”

Edilio looked grateful, but not like he believed it.

“Listen, Edilio, if she gets past me, she won’t have the light anymore,” Sam said. “You understand? But she will still be very dangerous. When I’ve fought Caine, the worst thing wasn’t him dropping stuff down, because you see the arc of it going up then coming down, right? Him throwing stuff horizontally: that was worse because it was faster. Look out for that when . . .
if . . .
she gets here.”

Edilio put out his hand and Sam took it.

“It’s been interesting, hasn’t it?” Sam said, trying for a smile.

“It’s been a great honor to stand with you,” Edilio said.

“Tell her I’m sorry I broke my promise,” Sam said, so softly Edilio almost didn’t hear. “Tell her I love her.”

Sam didn’t hurry. He knew where he was going. He wasn’t happy about going there. No rush.

He walked the highway. How many times before had he made this walk? How many times had he passed this wrecked car and that overturned truck?

Someday if, when, the barrier came down, someone would clean it all up. The tow trucks would come.
Beep-beep
ing as they backed up to slip their lift beneath some battered hulk of a car. Maybe there were a few car windows that hadn’t been broken, but not many. All the tires were partly or completely deflated. The gas tanks were long-since siphoned. Many of these cars had kept running until the gas was gone.

In some of these cars babies in car seats had died of starvation. In some of these cars kids had died when the driver poofed at seventy miles an hour. Would the CSI types have to come in and reconstruct it all? Would they identify the unidentified bones?

Someday families would try to come back only to find their home ransacked, torn up, sometimes reeking of human feces. There would be graffiti on their walls and trash stuffed in their toilets. And in many cases they’d find their homes burned down. Zil’s fire had taken something like a quarter of the town, and other houses had been knocked down to make firebreaks.

People would marvel at the destruction and tut-tut and shake their heads because they wouldn’t know what people had lived through in this place.

Those people returning to Perdido Beach wouldn’t understand what desperate battles had been fought.

Yeah, sorry about pulling fuel rods out of the nuclear power plant and tossing them down a mine shaft. Why did we do that? Well . . . hah. You’re never going to believe why we did that.

You say Coates Academy looks like it’s been through an artillery duel? Well, in a way it has been.

Yes, there is at least one whisky still in the woods.

Yes, there are unburied corpses.

Those cat and dog bones? The ones that are charred as if someone cooked and ate a beloved household pet? Well . . . we got a little hungry.

Sorry about the graveyard in the town plaza. So damned sorry you can’t begin to understand how sorry.

Sorry.

He was walking toward fire, into thickening smoke.

That was how he had crossed the line the very first time, so long ago, when an apartment off the town plaza had burned and he’d heard a cry for help. No one else had gone running toward the fire, so he had.

“All downhill after that,” he said to no one.

That was the first burial in the town plaza. Sam had stepped up to try and save the nameless girl, and when he had failed, it was Edilio who had finally dug the grave and placed the marker. Edilio cleaning up after Sam’s failures. That hadn’t changed.

Battles avoided and battles joined. He had seen the rise of Caine and his fall. He had seen the threat from Zil’s antimutant bigots grow and nearly destroy them all, and he’d seen Zil lying dead.

He’d seen Mary, good, sweet, decent Mary who looked after the littles, lose her mind under the influence of demons both internal and external.

He’d seen the zekes consume poor E.Z. He’d seen kids cough their own lungs out. He’d seen the bugs explode from a body half-eaten.

And how many dead? The little girl from the fire, she had been just the first. His first failure to save a life.

Duck. Good old Duck.

Thuan.

Francis.

How many of them? More than he could remember.

He’d seen the unknowns become pillars of strength. What a cliché that phrase was, but how else to describe Edilio? When the barrier came down he would probably be deported to Honduras.

Thanks for your heroism; now get out of the country, kid.

He had seen the weak become strong as granite. Quinn.

And Lana, what hadn’t that girl been through?

Dekka, fearless, passionate Dekka, his right hand, his companion in battle, the sister he’d never had.

Through it all there had been Astrid. Difficult as always. Complicated as always. Superior, condescending, thoughtful, manipulative, beautiful, and passionate Astrid. The love of his life.

All worth it, just to have loved and been loved by her.

Coming down the road toward him was a flatbed truck. It was moving slowly but steadily. He could see that its wheels were not touching the road. It trailed smoke. The flatbed was piled with burning trees and tires and debris. It was an inferno that would have roasted any driver.

Gaia walked beside it, a hand raised to focus Caine’s power and lift the massive truck.

She stopped, and the burning truck stopped as well. Gaia smiled.

“So,” she said. “You’re ready to die.”

“Well, it was a short life. But it was a pretty good one,” he said.

“I don’t really want to kill you,” Gaia said.

“I know. And I know why. But I’m not giving you a choice.”

“Why fight me, Sam?” She had to shout to be heard above a sudden roar of the fire as a log collapsed on the others. Sparks exploded, fireflies to come drifting down on parched fields or continue to draft upward and maybe fall on the town.

Finishing Zil’s work.

“Because you’re going to kill my friends,” Sam said.

Gaia shrugged. “They’re a threat to me. I have a right to survive. Don’t I? Don’t all living things have a right to survive?”

“We’re not here for a conversation.”

“You know how many there are of me, Sam?” Gaia held up one finger. “One. Just one. I am the first and only like me. I am unique in the universe. Your friends? There are billions just like them.”

She moved the truck forward and began to walk.

“There’s no one like any of them,” Sam said. “I doubt you can understand.”

“Do you even know what I am?” she asked, mocking with a wry smile. “I was created to bring life. I was a seed sent out into the galaxy. But when I took root here, on this planet, all that changed. Is that my fault?”

Sam found himself taking a step back. He knew better than to argue. He hadn’t come here for a debate. But he knew where this fight was going. And when the end is there, right there in front of you, is it so weak to want to drag it out for a few extra seconds?

“You’re a killer. Killers lose their rights.”

“Hah!” Gaia laughed. “Of course humans don’t kill. You haven’t slaughtered other species for food. Or wiped them out just for sport. You don’t eat other creatures. Don’t be ridiculous. What if I told you that you could join me, Sam? That you don’t have to die.”

She moved closer. Her movements were sensual, self-aware, calculated to mesmerize him.

“Look at me. I’m a human, too, aren’t I? This is human.” She gestured at her body.

“You’ve already killed whatever was human there,” Sam said, but he was still talking and he was still moving backward.

“It will be human flesh you burn.”

“It will be you, the gaiaphage, I kill.”

“Do you think you’ll kill me, Sam? I don’t think you expect to. You came here to be killed.”

“If necessary,” he said dully.

“Let’s see if it’s necessary.” Her hand came up, but Sam wasn’t so mesmerized he was unready. He dodged left and the invisible punch only grazed him.

He fired with one hand, still moving fast to his left. But Gaia had learned. She tracked his movement and the beam missed.

He swept the beam of light horizontally and she rose easily above it. Her invisible counterpunch didn’t miss this time. It knocked him twenty feet away. His lungs were empty and wouldn’t draw air, but he couldn’t let her stop him, not this way, not in a way that left him crippled again.

Win or die.

He rolled in the dirt as she laughed.

“I don’t have to kill you, Sam. You do have to kill me.”

He fired even as he rolled, and the result was a weird laser show of twisting green beams that singed Gaia’s hair and otherwise did nothing.

“We’re too far from town,” Gaia taunted. “Surely you want your last battle to be witnessed and admired. Besides, I don’t want my kindling to burn down to nothing. Come on, Sam, let’s go into town. I’ve never seen the place. I go to exterminate. Don’t you want to see?”

Sam jumped up, fired, but she dropped hard right, dodged around his beam, and with effortless power lifted one of the burning logs from the truck and threw it at him. It was a staggering display of power. The log weighed tons.

No time to get out of the way. He fired with both hands and burned through the fire-weakened log. Two massive, separate torches blew past him, burning his skin and crisping his hair.

WHUMPF!

The log sections crashed behind him on the road, showering him with sparks that stuck to his shirt and hair. The smoke billowed around him.

He choked and blasted randomly, blindly, all around him. Her cry of pain was the sound of hope. But he couldn’t see what damage he had done.

Suddenly she was on him, bursting through the smoke, not with Caine’s telekinetic power but with Jack’s brute strength. Her hand grabbed his arm; he didn’t resist, which would have cost him that arm, but leaped straight into her. Her own pull overbalanced her and she fell back.

With no other easy choice, he punched her in the face.

She pushed him off her and he flew through the air. He had time to see the burning logs and Gaia lying on her back, and then he hit the truck’s cab, hard, bounced off, and lay winded on the ground.

Gaia was on him in seconds, leaning over him. “Come on, Sam, you can do better than that.” Her hand closed on his throat. He could feel the immense power behind that grip. “No death for you. No, you’re going to come along and watch.”

She lifted him more easily than she’d have lifted a baby. There was a length of chain on the bumper of the truck. It was red-hot. He heard and smelled the flesh of her hands burning as she wrapped it around him, heard her cry out in pain but accept it just so she could hurt him. He screamed in agony as she laid the red-hot steel against him, as it burned through his clothing and seared his flesh.

“No glorious death for you, Sam.”

He felt himself floating along above the ground, and then he fell down a long, dark tunnel.