Light (30 page)

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.

When he regained consciousness, he first felt the burns from the chain. Then the weight and strength of it, holding his arms tight against his body. He could move his hands, he could still fire his killing light, but he could not aim.

Floating. Wrapped in chains that stuck to his skin as they slowly cooled.

When he twisted his head, he saw Gaia walking down the middle of the highway.

Behind her the burning truck floated.

She noticed him stirring.

“Watch this,” she said. She raised a hand and one log broke free from the flaming mass, rose in the air, and then hurtled like a missile across the parking lot to smash into the shattered glass and tattered banners at the front of Ralph’s store.

“Fire is a very good distraction, don’t you think?” Gaia said.

He couldn’t speak. Whatever consciousness he had was almost a dream state, a hallucination.

“I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It’s beautiful, and people stare at it, don’t they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It’s the beauty of light, don’t you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It’s even better than darkness.”

“Don’t do this,” he begged in a choked voice.

He saw two people running from the burning grocery store. Some kids had been living there—skaters. The skaters loved it for all the smooth tile floors and the way the shelves and freezer cases could be turned into ramps.

Sam turned quickly to avoid looking, to avoid giving the two kids away, but it was too late.

Gaia stretched out her hand, and the nearest of the kids, a boy who insisted on being called Spartacus, came flying toward them, yelling in surprise.

He was twelve years old. He had hair down to his waist worked into mismanaged dreads. He wore a T-shirt that was more hole than cloth and oversized shorts.

“Watch the pretty light, Sam,” Gaia whispered to him, right into his ear.

“No!” he cried.

“You’ve been a problem for me, Sam, right from the start. You were one of the first ones whose names I learned. I saw images of you in their minds, in the mind of the Healer, in Caine’s mind, even distorted versions that Nemesis showed me sometimes. You defied me. Didn’t you, you willful little boy?”

She was laughing, laughing at her own cleverness, laughing at the way Spartacus cried and begged and at the way Sam pleaded, at the way he turned his face away, at the futility of it.

Gaia grabbed Sam’s head in the crook of her arm. She pried his eyes open with fingers dragging on his forehead. “Watch. Watch it all. Your light, Sam. Because you didn’t have the courage to end your own life, did you? You wanted me to do it for you. The hero who missed his chance. Watch now, Sam. I’m going to slice him apart, and his every scream will be your fault.”

“You’re insane!”

“Compared to what?” she asked. “I haven’t gotten out much.”

The light burned from her free hand and like a power saw begun cutting into the boy’s head, and he screamed and Sam roared and Gaia laughed, and Sam’s hands were close enough, he could twist them just enough, and his own hands blazed with the green light cutting into Spartacus’s heart.

Gaia cried out in ecstatic joy. She dropped the dead boy and with her telekinetic power twirled Sam around in the air like a top and laughed.

“Made you kill! Made you kill!” she yelled. “This will be fun.”

She danced in a circle and shouted up at the smoke-darkened, spark-lit sky. “Too late, Nemesis, too late!” Like a child. Taunting. “Too late!”

“SHE’S COMING.”

Edilio stood atop the town hall. It was the highest spot in the downtown area since the church was nearly leveled. Dekka was beside him, Jack and Orc just a few feet away.

She was coming with fire. Fire against a background of fire. She wasn’t waiting for the Stefano Rey fire to reach town; she was bringing it, inspired by it.

A massive flaming torch of a truck floated at a stately pace down the highway, like some awful parade float.
Next up in the parade, ladies and gentlemen, the float from hell
.