Fear (30 page)

He looked sharply at her. “It?”

CLANG!

“Don’t play dumb, Caine.” She touched her hand to his head, where the punctures of the staples still oozed blood. Almost instantly the pain in his head diminished. But nothing helped when the next blow of the hammer and chisel made him feel as if fingers were being broken.

CLANG!

“Ahhh!” he cried.

“You were with it,” Lana said. “I know you still feel it sometimes.”

Caine scowled. “No. I don’t.”

Lana snorted. “Uh-huh.”

He wasn’t going to argue about it. They both knew the truth. That was something he shared with the Healer: too much up-close-and-personal time with the gaiaphage. And yes, it left scars, and yes, it was sometimes as if the creature could touch the edge of Caine’s consciousness.

He closed his eyes and the nightmare came on like a storm-driven wave. It had been all hunger then. The gaiaphage needed the uranium at the power plant. That hunger had been so huge, so frantic, Caine could still feel it as a stifling, heart-throttling, choking feeling.

CLANG!

“AHHHH!” Through grinding teeth he said, “I don’t let the Darkness touch me.”

The chisel was cutting closer now, with more than half the concrete chipped away. Penny hadn’t mixed a very good batch, really. No gravel. It was gravel that gave it hardness. He and Drake had learned that.

“Sorry,” Lucas said, not really meaning it.

CLANG!

No, Caine thought, no gentle concern for Caine’s wellbeing. They needed him, but that didn’t mean they liked him.

“The sun is setting,” Lana remarked almost without emotion. “Kids will lose it. They’ll set fires. That’s the big worry, probably, that they’ll finish Zil’s work by burning down the rest of the town.”

“If I ever get out of this, I’ll stop them,” Caine snarled, biting back a cry of pain as the hammer rose and fell again.

“It’s going after Diana,” Lana said. “It wants the baby. Your baby, Caine.”

“What?”

The hammer waited, suspended. This wasn’t exactly a private conversation, and Paul was shocked. He snapped out of it and dropped another awful blow.

CLANG!

“Don’t you feel it?” Lana demanded.

“All I feel is my fingers being broken!” Caine yelled.

“I’ll fix your fingers,” Lana said impatiently. “I’m asking you: do you feel it? Can you? Will you let yourself?”

“No!”

“Scared?”

His lips drew back in a snarl. “You’re damned right I’m scared of it. I got away from it. You’re saying I should open myself up to it again?”

CLANG!

“I’m not scared of it,” Lana said, and Caine wondered if she really wasn’t. “I hate it. I hate myself for not killing it when I had the chance. I hate it.” Her eyes were dark but hot, like smoldering coals.

“I hate it,” she repeated.

CLANG!

“Oh. Ohhhh!” He was breathing in short gasps. “I won’t… What makes you so sure it’s going after Diana?”

“I’m not sure. That’s why I’m talking to you. Because I thought you might give a damn if that monster is after your kid.”

Caine’s hands felt lighter. The concrete block had split. There was a wedge about the size of a double slice of pie hanging from his left hand. His hands were still locked together in a crumbly mass that looked like the stone from which a sculptor might chisel a pair of hands.

Paul and Lucas readjusted their positions, and Caine lifted the hands and carefully, carefully used a piece of concrete to scratch his nose.

“Caine—” Paul said.

“Give me a minute,” Caine said. “All of you. Give. Me. A. Minute.”

He closed his eyes. Pain in his hands, a deep ache of something—or more than one thing—broken. The pain was terrible.

Worse by far: the humiliation.

He’d been outwitted by Penny. Weakness.

He’d been made to bear the torture he and Drake had invented. Weakness.

He sat here now on the steps of town hall, the steps where not two days earlier he’d ruled as king. He sat there now with piss-smelling pants, made to feel weak and small and cowardly by Lana.

He hadn’t been this low since he had walked off defeated into the desert with Pack Leader. Since he had crawled, weeping and desperate, to have his mind messed up by that malevolent, glowing monster.

Lana could let it touch her mind. She was that strong.

He could not. Because he was not.

What did it matter anymore? he wondered. It was the end at last. Darkness would fall and the sun would never rise again and they would wander lost in inky blackness until they starved. The smart ones would just walk into the ocean and swim until they drowned.

What did he, Caine, matter? Let alone Diana. Or the … whatever. Baby. Kid. Whatever.

He closed his eyes and he could see Diana. Beautiful girl, Diana. Smart. Smart enough to keep pace with him. Smart enough to play her games with him.

They’d been happy, mostly, on the island. Him and Diana. Good days. Then Quinn had come with a message that he was needed to rescue Perdido Beach.

He had come back. Diana had warned him not to. But he had come back. And he had proclaimed himself king. Because kids needed a king. And because after he saved their stupid lives for them he deserved to be that king.

Diana had warned him against that, too.

And no sooner was he in charge than he’d realized it was Albert who was the real boss. And no one really respected Caine. They didn’t realize how much he did for them.

Ungrateful.

Now they wanted him, but only because they were all scared of the dark.

“We’ll try a smaller hammer now,” Paul said anxiously.

Caine gritted his teeth, anticipating the blow.

CLANG!

“Ahhh!” The chisel had missed. The hardened steel chisel blade skipped and bit into his wrist. Blood poured out over the concrete.

He wanted to cry. Not from the pain but from the sheer awfulness of his life. He needed to use the bathroom. He wouldn’t even be able to lower his own pants or wipe himself.

Lana took his wrist. The bleeding slowed.

“You need to let them keep at it,” Lana said. “It’ll be a lot worse in the dark.”

Caine nodded. He had nothing more to say.

He bowed his head and cried.

SINDER WEPT
AS
she and Jezzie ripped up their vegetables. It was all over. Their hard work, almost done now. This was the final harvest.

Their little dream of helping to make things better for everyone was at an end. And like all failed hopes it seemed stupid now. They’d been idiots to hope. Idiots.

This was the FAYZ. Hope led to a kick in the face.

Idiots.

They filled plastic trash bags with carrots and tomatoes. And cried silently while Brianna stood watch over them, pretending not to notice.

It was hard for Orc to tilt his head back and look up at the sky. His rocky neck just didn’t like to bend that way. But he made the effort as the sun, with shocking speed, was swallowed by the western edge of that toothed hole in the sky.

Straight up, over his head: blue sky. The clear blue sky of a California early afternoon. But below that sky was a blank, black wall. He was only a few hundred feet away from it. He could walk over and touch it if he wanted.

He didn’t want to. It was too … too something. He didn’t have a word for it. Howard would have had a word for it.

Orc was buzzing with a weird kind of energy. He hadn’t slept. He had searched through the night, sure that Drake was out here, sure that he could find him. Or if not find him, then at least be here when he showed up.

Then he would rip Drake apart. Rip him into little pieces and eat the pieces and crap them out and bury them in the dirt.

Yeah. For Howard.

No one cared Howard was gone. Sam, Edilio, those guys: they didn’t care. Not about Howard. They just cared that something bad was happening. Someone had to care that Howard was dead and gone now. And would never come back.

Orc had to care, that was who. Charles Merriman had to care that his friend Howard was gone.

People didn’t know it, but Orc could still cry. They all figured he couldn’t.... No, that wasn’t true; they didn’t figure anything. They never saw anything but a monster made out of gravel.

He couldn’t blame them.

The only one who saw past that was Howard. Maybe Howard used Orc, but that was okay, because Orc used him, too. People did that. Even people who really liked each other. Good friends. Best friends.

Only friends.

Orc was walking a pattern, back and forth. He walked along from almost the dome to as far as the dock was, then maybe a hundred yards farther out, and back and forth, and another hundred yards out. He’d gone all the way to the far end of the lake and back. But something told him Drake wouldn’t go all the way around like that.

No, no, not Drake. Orc knew Drake a little from when Drake was running things for Caine back so long ago in Perdido Beach. Back when Drake was just a creep, but a regular human creep.

And he’d known Drake in a way while he and Howard had been his jailers. He’d spent a lot of hours listening to Drake rant and rave.

It was Orc’s fault Drake had ever gotten away.

Drake could be tricky, sure, but he wasn’t like Astrid or Jack or one of those real smart kids. He wouldn’t have some big plan. He would just hide until he saw a way.

A way to do what? Orc didn’t know. Sam and the others hadn’t told him anything about it. Just that Drake had killed Howard and let the coyotes eat him. And that he was out loose.

Orc kept his eyes down for the most part. Easier that way. Plus he was looking for something: a footprint, maybe. Coyote prints if he could find them. But even better would be Drake’s footprints.

He’d heard all about how you couldn’t kill Drake. You could smash him or cut him up into little pieces and he’d still put himself back together.

Well. That might discourage most people. But while a drunken Orc wore out pretty easy, a sober, determined Orc had plenty of time and plenty of energy. He wouldn’t mind just taking Drake apart over and over again. And he didn’t feel tired. He felt more awake all the time.

Orc was walking in the gloomy shadow of a rock bluff. There were cracks all in those rocks, and he had decided now to check in every one. One by one. Every crack. Under every rock.

Orc froze. Was that… Yeah, that was a footprint. Most of a footprint. The ground was hard, and the only reason the print showed at all was that a gopher or whatever it was that dug holes up here had dug out a bit of fresh dirt.

In that dirt was half a footprint. A bare foot, not a shoe.

Orc stared down at it. He placed his own foot beside it. It made the print seem even smaller. It seemed awful small to be from Drake. Drake was a pretty big dude. This was more like a little kid, or a girl.

He could make out three toes: the little ones. The toes pointed down toward the water.

Orc followed the direction with his gaze. Weird, the light was, weird. The shore of the lake looked strange. Something not right.

Then he was distracted by the sight of Sinder and Jezzie working away in their garden. And there was Brianna, watching him actually, when she should have been watching over Sinder and Jezzie.

He raised a massive arm to wave at Brianna and seconds later she was beside him.

“Hey. Orc. Trade jobs with me. Sam has me babysitting the weepy gardeners there. You could watch them.”

“No.” He shook his head.

Brianna tilted her head, a little like a bird. Orc remembered her, too, from when he first met her and she was just coming down from Coates with Sam. She’d gotten pretty full of herself since those days.

“You’re looking for Drake, right?” Brianna asked. “A little payback for Howard? I get that. Totally. Howard was your boy.”

“Don’t act like you care,” Orc grunted.

“What? Couldn’t hear you.”

Orc roared, “Don’t act like you care. No one cared about Howard. No one cares he’s dead. Just me.” It was so loud it echoed. Orc snatched up a small boulder and, in violent frustration, threw it.

It flew twenty feet and smashed against the bluff. It set off two things: a small avalanche of pebbles and midsize stones.

And a sudden rush of panicked coyotes.

Orc stared after them. Brianna’s eyes lit up.

She got close to Orc and in a hard whisper said, “I’ll bet those are the coyotes that did the eating. You got a choice: you want me to get them or not?”

Orc swallowed hard. The coyotes were already atop the bluff and in seconds they would be on level ground and running free. He would never catch them.

“Save one for me,” Orc said.