Fear (13 page)

“The littles. My kids.”

Major Onyx had close-cut black hair, a dark tan, and intense blue eyes. “Our information is that she took care of the little children.”

Dr. Greene leaned closer, but Dr. Chandiramani could see him fighting the nausea that people always felt seeing Mary. “Do you mean the little children you took care of?”

“I killed them,” Mary said. Tears flowed from her one tear duct and ran down the seared, boiled, lobster red skin.

“Surely not,” Dr. Greene said.

Mary cried aloud, a sound of keening despair.

“Change topic,” Dr. Chandiramani said, watching the monitor.

“Mary, this is very important. Does anyone know how this all started?”

Nothing.

“Who did it, Mary?” Dr. Chandiramani asked. “Who created the anom—the place you called the FAYZ?”

“Little Pete. The Darkness.”

The two doctors and the soldier looked at one another, puzzled.

The major frowned and whipped out his iPhone. He tapped it a few times. “FAYZ Wiki,” he explained. “We have two ‘Pete’ or ‘Peters’ listed.”

“What are the ages?” Dr. Chandiramani asked.

“One is twelve; one is four. No, sorry, he would have turned five.”

“Do you have children, Major? I do. No twelve-year-old would be happy to be called ‘Little Pete.’ It must be the five-year-old she’s talking about.”

“Delusional,” Dr. Greene said. “A five-year-old did not create the anomaly.” He frowned thoughtfully and scribbled a note. “Darkness. Maybe she’s afraid of the dark.”

“Everyone’s afraid of the dark,” Dr. Chandiramani said. Greene was getting on her nerves. So were the major and his horrified stare.

The monitor above Mary’s bed suddenly beeped urgently.

Dr. Chandiramani reached for the call panel and yelled, “Code blue, code blue,” but it was unnecessary, because nurses were already rushing in through the door.

At the same time Major Onyx’s smartphone began chiming. He didn’t answer it, but he did open an app of some sort.

A tall, thin doctor in green scrubs swept in behind the nurses. He glanced at the monitor. He put his stethoscope in his ears and asked, “Where is her heart?”

Dr. Chandiramani pointed to the unlikely place. But she knew it was useless. All lines on the monitor had gone flat. All at the same time. Which was not how it happened. Heart, brain, everything suddenly and irreversibly dead.

“You’ll find the other one’s gone, too,” Major Onyx said calmly, consulting his phone. “Francis. Something pulled his plug, as well.”

“Are you going to tell me what you’re talking about?” Dr. Chandiramani snapped.

The major jerked his head, indicating that the other doctor and the nurses should get out. They didn’t argue.

Major Onyx closed the app and put his phone away. “The people who were ejected when the dome was created? They came out clean. So did the twins. The rest, the ones who’ve appeared since? They’ve always had a sort of … umbilical cord … connecting them to the dome. J waves, that’s what we call them. But don’t ask me what they are, because we don’t know. We can detect them, but they are not something encountered in nature.”

“What does ‘J wave’ stand for?” the doctor asked.

Major Onyx barked out a laugh. “Some smart-ass physicist at CERN called them ‘Jehovah waves.’ According to him they might as well come from God, because we sure don’t know what they do or where they come from. The name stuck.”

“So what just changed? Did something happen with these J waves?”

The major started to answer but, with a visible effort, and a last appalled look at Mary, stopped himself. “The conversation we just had? Never happened.”

He left and Dr. Chandiramani was alone with her patient.

Four months after her ghastly appearance, Mary Terrafino was dead.

SAM WOKE
TO
a feeling of utter, profound, incredible relief.

He closed his eyes as soon as he opened them, afraid that being awake would just invite something terrible to appear.

Astrid was back. And she was asleep with her head on his arm. His arm was asleep, completely numb, but as long as that blond head was right there his arm could stay numb.

She smelled like pine trees and campfire smoke.

He opened his eyes, cautious, almost flinching, because the FAYZ didn’t make a habit of allowing him pure, undiluted happiness. The FAYZ made a habit of stomping on anything that looked even a little bit like happiness. And this level of happiness was surely tempting retaliation. From this high up the fall could be a long, long one.

Just yesterday he’d been bored and longing for conflict. The memory shocked him. Had that really been him grinning in the dark at the prospect of war with Caine?

Surely not. He wasn’t that guy. Was he?

If he was that guy, how could he suddenly do a 180 and now feel so different? Because of Astrid? Because of the fact of her in his bed?

Without moving he could see the top of her head—her hair looked as if someone had cut it with a weed whacker—part of her right cheek, her eyelashes, the end of her nose, and farther down a long, shapely, much-scarred and bruised leg entwined with his own leg.

One of her hands was on his chest, just over his heart, which was starting to beat faster, so fast and so insistently he was afraid the vibration might wake her. Her breath tickled.

Sam’s mind was happy to let this go on forever. His body had a different idea. He swallowed hard.

Her eyelash flickered. Her breathing changed. She said, “How long can we go before we have to talk?”

“A while longer,” he said.

The while longer eventually came to an end. Astrid finally pulled away and sat up. Their eyes met.

Sam didn’t know what he expected to see in her eyes. Maybe guilt. Remorse. Loathing. He saw none of those things.

“I forget,” Astrid said, “why was I so against doing that?”

Sam smiled. “I’m not about to remind you.”

She looked at him with a frankness that embarrassed him. Like she was taking inventory. Like she was storing images away in memory.

“Are you back?” Sam asked.

Astrid’s gaze flicked away, evasive. Then she seemed to think better of it, and she met his gaze squarely. “I have an idea. How about if I just tell you the truth?”

“That would be good.”

“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “But I’m out of practice lying. I guess living alone kind of made me intolerant of BS. Especially my own.”

Sam sat up. “Okay. Let’s talk. First, let’s jump in the lake for a minute.”

They made their way on deck and plunged off into the chilly water.

“People will see us,” Astrid said, smoothing her hair back and revealing the tan line on her forehead. “Are you ready for that?”

“Astrid, by now not only everyone at the lake, but everyone in Perdido Beach and probably whoever is out on the island knows all about it. Taylor’s probably been here and gone, most likely Bug, too.”

She laughed. “You’re suggesting gossip actually moves at speeds that are impossible.”

“Gossip this juicy? The speed of light is nothing compared to the speed this will move at.”

“Move at?” she mocked. “Your preposition is dangling.”

Several bits and pieces of leering jokes came to Sam’s mind, but Astrid had gotten there quicker and she shook her head and said, “No. Don’t. That kind of joke would be beneath even you.”

It was good to have her back.

They climbed aboard and toweled off. They dressed and came out onto the top deck with breakfast: carrots, yesterday’s grilled fish, and water.

Astrid got down to business. “I came back because the dome is changing.”

“The stain?”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Yeah, but we thought maybe it was because of what Sinder’s doing.”

Astrid’s eyebrows rose. “What is Sinder doing?”

“She’s developed a power. She can make things grow at an accelerated rate. She has a little garden right up against the barrier. We’re experimenting a little, eating just a little of the vegetables, seeing if there’s any kind of … you know, effect.”

“Very scientific of you,” Astrid said.

He shrugged. “Well, my scientist girlfriend was off in the woods. I had to do my best.”

Had she just reacted to the word “girlfriend”?

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to…” He wasn’t sure what he hadn’t meant to do.

“It wasn’t the word ‘girlfriend,’” Astrid said. “It was the possessive. The ‘my.’ But I realized that was stupid of me. There’s no better way to say it. It’s just that I haven’t been thinking of myself as anyone’s anything.”

“No girl is an island.”

“Seriously? You’re misquoting John Donne? To me?”

“Hey, maybe I’ve spent the last four months reading poetry. You don’t know.”

Astrid laughed. He loved that laugh. Then she grew serious. “The stain is everywhere I looked, Sam. I traveled along the barrier. It’s everywhere, sometimes just a few inches visible, but I saw areas where it rose maybe twenty feet or so.”

“You think it’s growing?”

She shrugged. “I know it’s growing; I just don’t know how fast. I’d like to try to measure it.”

“What do you think it is?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly, side to side. “I don’t know.”

He felt as if a hand was squeezing his heart. The FAYZ punished happiness. He had made the mistake of being happy.

“Do you think…,” he began, but he couldn’t quite get the words out. He changed it to, “What if it keeps growing?”

“The barrier has always been a kind of optical illusion. Look straight at it in front of you and you see a blank, non-reflective gray surface. A nullity. Look higher up and you see an illusion of sky. Day sky, night sky—but never a plane. The moon waxes and wanes as it should. It’s an illusion but it’s also our only source of light.” She was thinking aloud. The way she sometimes did. The way he had missed.

“I don’t know, but this seems like some kind of breakdown. You know how sometimes a movie projector—like the one we had at school, remember?—will get dimmer and dimmer until pretty soon you’re squinting to see anything?”

“You’re talking about it going completely dark?” He was relieved that his voice did not betray him with a tremor.

Astrid started to reach to touch his leg and stopped herself. Then she twined her fingers together, giving them something else to do. She wasn’t meeting his gaze but looking slightly past him, first to his left, then to his right.

“It’s possible,” she said. “I guess, yes. I mean, that was my first thought. That it’s going dark.”

Sam took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to freak out; he was sure of that. But the only reason he was confident was that he, himself, had the power to create light. Pitiful little Sammy suns and blinding beams, not bright yellow suns or even moons. But he himself would have light. He wouldn’t have to be completely in the dark.

He couldn’t be in the dark. Not in the total dark.

He realized his palms were damp and he wiped them on his shorts. When he glanced up he knew Astrid had seen, and that she knew what he was feeling.

He tried out a wry grin. “Stupid, huh? All we’ve been through? And I’m still scared of the dark?”

“Everyone’s afraid of something,” Astrid said.

“Like I’m a little kid.”

“Like you’re a human being.”

Sam looked around at the lake, at the sun sparkling on the water. Some kids were laughing, little kids playing at the water’s edge.

“Complete darkness.” Sam said it to hear it, to see if he could accept it. “Nothing will grow. We won’t be able to fish. We’ll… We’ll wander in the dark until we die of hunger. Kids will figure that out. They’ll panic.”

“Maybe the stain will stop,” Astrid said.

But Sam wasn’t listening. “It’s the endgame.”

Sanjit and Virtue found Taylor that morning when they went outside for some exercise: Sanjit running back and forth, circling around a huffing and puffing Virtue, who was definitely not much of a runner.

“Come on, Choo, this is good for you.”

“I know,” Virtue said through gritted teeth. “But that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.”

“Hey, we have a nice view of the beach and the—” Sanjit stopped because Virtue had disappeared behind a car. He doubled back and saw his brother bent over something, and then he saw the something he was bent over.

“What the… Oh, God, what happened to her?”

Sanjit knelt next to Virtue. Neither of them touched her. The girl with skin the color of a gold bar and both lower legs and one hand simply gone. Cut off.

Virtue held his breath and put his ear close to Taylor’s mouth. “I think she’s still alive.”

“I’ll get Lana!” Sanjit raced back inside, down the hallway to the room he shared with Lana. He burst inside yelling, “Lana! Lana!”