Fear (41 page)

“If you kill yourself, you go to hell.”

Dekka snorted, a derisive sound, as she spit dirt. “You believe in hell?”

“You mean, like, it’s a real place?”

Dekka waited while he thought it out. And suddenly she wanted to hear the answer. Like it mattered.

“No,” Orc said at last. “Because we’re all children of God. So he wouldn’t do that. It was just a story he made up.”

Despite herself Dekka was listening. It was hard not to. Talking nonsense was better than remembering. “A story?”

“Yeah, because he knew our lives would be really bad sometimes. Like maybe we’d be turned into a monster and then our best friend would get killed. So he made up this story about hell, so we could always say, ‘Well, it could be worse. It could be hell.’ And then we’d keep going.”

Dekka had no answer to that. He had completely baffled her. And she was almost angry at him, because baffled was a different thing from despairing. Baffled meant she was still … involved.

“What are you doing out here, Orc?”

“I’m going to kill Drake. If I find him.”

Dekka sighed. She stuck out her hand and eventually encountered a gravelly leg. “Give me a hand up. I’m a little shaky.”

His massive hands found her and propped her up. Her legs almost gave way. She was drained, empty, weak.

But not dead.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” she said.

“Me neither,” Orc said.

“I’m…” Dekka stared into the darkness, not even sure she was looking in his direction. She paused until a sob subsided. “I’m afraid I won’t ever be me again.”

“Yeah, I get that, too,” Orc said. He sighed a huge sigh, like he’d walked a million miles and was just so weary. “Some of it is stuff I did. Some of it is stuff that just happened. Like the coyotes eating on me. And then, you know, what happened after that. I never wanted to remember that. But none of it goes away, not even when you’re really drunk or whatever. It’s all still there.”

“Even in the dark,” Dekka said. “Especially in the dark.”

“Which way should we go?” Orc asked.

“I doubt it matters much,” Dekka said. “Start moving. I’ll follow the sound of your footsteps.”

“Aaaahhh,” Cigar screeched. His hand in Astrid’s squeezed with incredible strength.

It was not the first time he’d suddenly cried out. It was a fairly regular thing for him. But in this case there were other sounds. A rush of wind, a stink like rotting meat, and then a snarl.

Cigar was torn away from Astrid.

She instinctively dropped into a crouch. A coyote missed its attack as a result and rather than closing its jaws around her leg just plowed into her with enough force to knock her on her back.

She fumbled in the dark for her shotgun, felt something metallic, not sure which way it was pointing, fumbled, and was brushed aside by a rushing coyote, fur over muscles.

They could hunt in the dark, but the close-in killing work was harder without sight.

Astrid rolled over, flat, stretching her arm, trying to find the shotgun. One finger touched metal.

Cigar was screaming now in that despairing, beaten voice of his. And the snarling was intensifying. The coyotes were frustrated, too, it seemed, unable to pinpoint their prey, snapping blindly where their ears and nose told them the prey would be.

Astrid rolled toward the gun and now she was on top of it, feeling with trembling fingers, searching for—yes! She had the grip. She pushed it forward, probably filling the barrel with sand, probably jamming the trigger. She tried to tell where Cigar was, rolled once more, pulling the shotgun on top of her, and fired.

The explosion was shocking. A jet of light so much bigger than it had ever seemed before.

In the split-second flash Astrid saw at least three coyotes, and Cigar mobbed by them, and a fourth just a few feet away, lips back in a snarl, all of it freeze-framed for the duration of the flash.

The noise was awesome.

She pushed herself to one knee, aimed at the place where the fourth coyote had been standing, and pulled the trigger again. Nothing! She’d forgotten to jack another round in. She did it, aimed shakily at blank space, and fired again.

BOOM!

This time she was expecting the flash and saw that the coyote she’d aimed at was no longer there. Cigar was no longer mobbed by the beasts. His terrible, white marble eyes stared.

Something had happened to the coyotes. They had exploded.

The flash wasn’t enough to show more. Just that their insides were where their outsides had been.

Silence.

Darkness.

Cigar panting. Astrid, too.

The smell of coyote guts and gunpowder.

It was a while before Astrid could master her voice. Before she could reassemble her shattered thoughts into something like coherence.

“Is the little boy here?” Astrid asked.

“Yes,” Cigar said.

“What did he do?”

“He touched them. Is it… Is it real?” Cigar asked tentatively.

“Yes,” Astrid said. “I think it’s real.”

She stood with her smoking shotgun in her hands and looked at nothing. She was shaking all over. Like it was cold. Like the darkness was made of wet wool wrapped all around her.

“Petey. Talk to me.”

“He can’t,” Cigar said.

Silence.

“He says it will hurt you,” Cigar said.

“Hurt me? Why doesn’t it hurt you?”

Cigar laughed, but it wasn’t a joyful sound. “I’m already hurt. In my head.”

Astrid took a breath and licked her lips. “Does he mean it will make me…” She searched for a word that wouldn’t hurt Cigar.

Cigar himself was beyond worrying about euphemisms. “Crazy?” He said. “My brain is already crazy. He doesn’t know how to do it. Maybe it would make you crazy.”

Astrid’s fingers ached, she was clutching the gun so hard. There was nothing else to hold on to. Her heart beat so loud she was sure Cigar must hear it. She shivered.

Anything else. Not that. Not madness.

She could get all the answers she needed by way of Cigar. Except that Cigar was coherent for only snatches of time before he spiraled down into lunatic rantings and shrieks.

“No,” Astrid said. “Not taking the risk. No. Let’s get going.”

Like she knew which way to go. She’d been following Cigar, who had been following—or so he said—Little Pete.

Panic. It tickled her, teased her. There was something smothering about the darkness. Like it was thick and hard to breathe.

The darkness was so absolute. She could walk in circles and never know it. She could walk into a zeke field and not know it until the worms were inside her.

“Just turn the damned lights on, Petey!” she yelled.

Her words seemed to barely penetrate the blackness.

“Just fix it! You’re the one who did this. Fix it!”

Silence.

Cigar started in again, moaning and giggling, talking about Red Vines and how good candy tasted.

She had a vision of herself back at the lake, lying in the bunk with Sam. She had loved touching his muscles. What an embarrassing, juvenile thing. Like the girls she despised, always mooning over some rock star, some movie star, some guy with hard abs and yet, and yet, hadn’t that been her all along?

She recalled with intimate detail having her hand on his biceps when he flexed to pick her up and the way the muscle had just doubled in size and become hard as if it were carved out of oak. He’d lifted her up like she weighed nothing. And set her down again, so gently, with her hands sliding to his chest to balance and…

And now, she was here. With a ghost and a lunatic. In the dark.

Why?

Risk your sanity and maybe know something. But maybe not. Maybe just be destroyed. And what would she know then, if Petey scrambled her mind?

Scrambled brain, full of things she needed to know, but wouldn’t really know if her brain was twisted in the learning.

“Fix it! Fix it!” she screamed at the dark.

“My leg, it’s not my leg; it’s a stick, a stick with nails poking through,” Cigar moaned.

A dark, terrible urge to turn the shotgun around and end Cigar’s misery had Astrid breathing hard and clenching her jaw. No. No, she’d already played Abraham to Petey’s Isaac, not that ever again. She would not allow herself to take an innocent life, not ever again.

Innocent, a derisive voice in her head taunted. Innocent? Astrid Ellison, prosecutor and jury and executioner.

There’s nothing innocent about Petey, the voice teased. He built this. All of it. He made this universe. He’s the creator and it is all his fault.

“Let’s go,” Astrid said. “Give me your hand, Cigar.” She shouldered the shotgun. She felt around in the dark until she found Cigar, and then fumbled some more before she had his hand. “Get up.”

He got up.

“Which way?” Cigar asked.

Astrid laughed. “I have a joke for you, Cigar. Reason and madness go for a walk in a dark room, looking for an exit.”

Cigar laughed like it had been funny.

“You even know what the punch line is, you poor crazy boy?”

“No,” Cigar admitted.

“Me neither. How about we just walk until we can’t walk anymore?”

CONNIE TEMPLE
SAT
sipping coffee at a booth in Denny’s. Across from her sat a reporter named Elizabeth Han. Han was young and pretty but also smart. She had interviewed Connie several times before. She reported for the
Huffington Post
and had been on the Perdido Beach Anomaly story from the start.

“They’re setting off a nuclear device?”

“The so-called chemical spill is a trick. They just want everyone away from the dome. They must have deliberately left it for the last minute so it would seem like a real emergency.”

Han spread her hands wide. “A nuclear explosion, even underground, will show up on seismographs all over the world.”

Connie nodded. “I know. But—” At that moment Abana Baidoo came into the restaurant, walked past the hostess, and slid into the booth beside Connie. Connie had called her but told her nothing. Quickly, and without revealing Darius’s name, she backed the story up to the start.

“Are they out of their minds?” Abana demanded. “Are they insane?”

“Just scared,” Connie said. “It’s human nature: they don’t want to just wait, feeling powerless. They want to do something. They want to make something happen.”

“We all want to make something happen,” Abana snapped. Then she put a reassuring hand on Connie’s arm. “We’re all worn-out with worry. We’re all sick of not knowing.”

Elizabeth Han barked out a laugh. “They can’t do this without approval from very high up. I mean, all the way up.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “They know something. Or at least they suspect something. This president doesn’t go off half-cocked.”

“We have to stop it from happening,” Connie insisted.

“We still don’t have any idea what caused this,” the reporter said. “But whatever it is, it rewrote the laws of nature to create that sphere. They didn’t just decide this overnight; there must have been a plan in place for a long time. They wanted this as an option. So why suddenly, now, use that option?”

“The dome is changing,” Connie said. “They briefed us. There’s some change in the energy signature or whatever.” She looked at her friend. “Abana. They don’t want our kids coming out. That’s why. They think the barrier is weakening. They don’t want our kids coming out.”

“They don’t want whatever made this coming out,” Abana said. “I can’t believe they’re targeting our kids. It’s whatever made this happen.”

Connie hung her head, aware that she was bringing conversation to a halt, aware that Abana and Elizabeth were exchanging worried glances.

“Okay,” Connie said, wrapping both hands around the ceramic coffee mug and refusing to look at either woman. “What’s happened inside… I mean, the kids who have developed powers… I never shared this, and I’m so sorry. But with Sam…” She bit her lip. She looked up sharply, her jaw set. “Sam and Caine. Their powers developed before the anomaly. I saw them both. I knew what was happening. The, whatever they are, the mutations, they came before the barrier. Which means something caused them besides the barrier.”

Elizabeth Han was thumbing frantically into her iPhone, taking notes, even as she said, “Why would this scare the government any more than—” She frowned and looked up. “They think the dome is the cause of the mutations.”

Connie nodded. “If that’s the way it is, then when the dome comes down the mutations will stop. But if it’s the other way around, if the mutations came before the barrier, then maybe they caused the barrier. Which means this isn’t all just some freak of nature, some quantum flux or whatever, or even an intrusion from a parallel universe, all those theories. This means there’s something or someone inside that dome with unbelievable power.”

Elizabeth Han looked grim as she went back to taking notes. “You have to give me the name of the person who told you about the nuke. I need to source this.”