Light (35 page)

“I’ll get out of here,” Drake said in a fading whisper. “I will find her. And I will make it last for days, Sam. I’ll make her scream, Sam. I’ll make her—”

Sam’s finger tightened on the trigger. It would be good to pull it. Drake was disintegrating before his eyes, and yet still,
still,
it would be good to pull that trigger. To feel the gun buck in his hand. To see the impact.

At that moment, as Sam stood poised between shooting and not, Drake’s head toppled off its grafted body and hit the ground.

One. Two. Three. Four. And the body collapsed.

The terrible whip arm looked like the skin a snake sheds during molting.

Sam picked up Drake’s head. The eyes fluttered, as though there might still be life.

Sam walked stiffly up the steps to the church, where the fire burned hot. He forced himself forward into the heat, feeling the hair on his head turn crisp, eyes so dry he couldn’t blink. And tossed Drake’s head into the flames.

“Okay,” he said to no one at all. “Now, I can get the hell out of here.”

THREE HUNDRED
AND
thirty-two kids between the age of one month and fourteen years had been confined within the FAYZ.

One hundred and ninety-six eventually emerged.

One hundred and thirty-six lay dead.

Dead and buried in the town plaza.

Dead and floating in the lake or on its shores.

Dead in the desert.

In the fields.

Dead of battles old and recent. Of starvation and accident, suicide and murder.

It was a fatality rate of just over 40 percent.

SAM TEMPLE
WAS
taken by helicopter to a hospital in Los Angeles, where there were specialists there in burn injuries. He wasn’t consulted: he was found on his knees, obviously in shock, extensively burned. EMTs took over.

Astrid Ellison was taken to a hospital in Santa Barbara, as was Diana Ladris.

Other kids were shared out among half a dozen hospitals. Some specialized in plastic surgery, others in the effects of starvation.

Over the next week all were seen by psychiatrists once their immediate physical injuries were addressed. Lots of psychiatrists. And when they weren’t being seen by psychiatrists, they were being seen by FBI agents, and California Highway Patrol investigators, and lawyers from the district attorney’s office.

The consensus seemed to be that a number of the Perdido survivors, as they were now known, would be prosecuted for crimes ranging from simple assault to murder.

First on that list was Sam Temple.

Astrid tried many times to phone him from her hospital room, but calls to his hospital were being blocked. No, the nurses explained each time, they could not get him to the phone. No, they could not deliver a message. Not their fault. Talk to the district attorney’s office.

Astrid was able to visit Diana, who she found out was being cared for in the same hall, just three doors down.

Astrid walked slowly, cautiously, her body stiff from bruises and stiffer still from the bandages on her whip burns. They’d given her a cane to use.

She was not going to walk with a cane.

They’d offered her heavy-duty painkillers.

She’d rejected them, restricting herself to a few ibuprofen. The last thing she wanted was to be out of her mind, off in la-la land, when shrinks and cops and family were forever questioning her.

She had not told her parents about her own role in her brother’s death. She had only told them that he had died a very good death.

Astrid had seen their pain. She had also seen their hidden but still-visible relief. They would not have to readjust to their out-of-control autistic son. That had hurt the most. But who was she to judge?

She found Diana’s room. Diana was sitting in her bed using a remote control to idly flip through the channels on the wall-mounted TV.

“You,” Diana said by way of greeting.

“Me,” Astrid said.

“Can’t believe it,” Diana said. “All this time. And there’s still nothing on.”

Astrid laughed and lowered herself slowly into a chair. “You know how they say hospital food is so awful? Somehow I’m not having that reaction.”

“Tapioca beats rat,” Diana said.

“I never minded rat as much as that dog jerky we were getting for a while. The stuff Albert had them flavor with celery salt? That was the culinary low point for me.”

“Yeah, well, I had a lower low point,” Diana said, sounding angry. Or maybe not angry, maybe hurt.

Astrid put a hand on Diana’s arm, and Diana did not shake it off.

“How is Sam?” Diana asked.

“They won’t let me talk to him. But they’re going to release me in a couple of days. I’ll find him.”

“Won’t your parents try to stop you?”

Astrid considered this, then barked out a laugh. Diana joined in.

“Oh, my God, we have parents again,” Astrid said, wiping away a tear. “We’re kids. We’re teenagers again.”

A nurse poked her head in. “Listen, ladies, it’s not visiting hours, but there’s someone here to see you.”

“Who?” Diana asked.

The nurse looked left and right like she was afraid to be overheard. “It’s a young woman. She seems very determined. In fact, I almost called the police because she scared me.”

Astrid and Diana exchanged a look.

“Black or white?” Astrid asked.

“She happens to be white.”

“Lana!” Astrid and Diana said in unison.

“You’d better send her in,” Diana said. “You don’t want to say no to Lana. That would be, um, reckless.”

“And she’s saved more lives than every doctor and nurse in this hospital,” Astrid said.

Lana arrived a moment later, looking strangely clean, with her hair cut, and wearing clothing that was not stained or filthy or cut or patched together. She did not have a pistol. She did not have a cigarette.

“Oh, my God,” Diana said to Astrid. “Lana’s a girl.”

“Yeah, hysterical. Cracking me up,” Lana said with her very familiar, very hard-core snarl. “What, there’s only one chair?”

“Who have you seen?” Astrid asked.

“I saw Dekka. She’s with her folks. And if I said she wasn’t happy about things, that wouldn’t really begin to cover it. She wants to see Sam. Everyone wants to see Sam. Talked to Edilio on the phone. He’s in hiding. Worried about
la migra
coming for him and his family.”

“Edilio is in hiding,” Astrid snapped. “Edilio has to worry about being kicked out of the country. Our Edilio.”

“He’s got a volunteer lawyer—”

But Astrid wasn’t done. “They should be putting up statues to Edilio. They should be naming schools after that boy—no, no, I’m not going to call him a boy. If he’s not a man, then I’ll never meet one.”

Lana nodded approvingly, obviously enjoying and sharing in Astrid’s outrage.

“And you, too,” Astrid said to Lana. “No, don’t even wave me off.”

“Whoa,” Lana said. “I had a power. I didn’t make that happen. I used it. No big deal.”

“I don’t suppose you can still . . .,” Diana began, waving a hand toward Astrid’s bandages.

Lana shook her head, not sadly, but with evident relief. “Nope. No, I cannot. I am no longer the capital ‘H’ Healer. I am Lana Arwen Lazar, period,
finito
. Just some girl with a weird name. I thought maybe I might miss it. Guess what? No. No, not even a little. You know what I do now? I eat. And I sleep. I throw sticks for Patrick. And then I do it all over again. That’s my plan, for the rest of my life. Eat, sleep, play with dog.”

“Have they got the shrinks all over you?” Diana asked.

“They tried,” Lana said with a curl of her lip. “I don’t see them coming back at me anytime soon.”

All three laughed at that. But Diana grew serious. “Honestly? I don’t mind the therapy much. I, uh . . . I don’t know. I just. It’s okay. For me, anyway.”

They fell silent then. The only sounds were of gurneys in the hallway, a child crying somewhere, a male and a female voice laughing flirtatiously.

Astrid looked at Lana, now leaning against the window, and Diana, lost in thought, and reminded herself that at times she had hated Diana. She had told Sam to kill her if necessary. And she had disliked Lana as a short-tempered bitch who sometimes abused her privileges.

She let her mind move beyond these two. Orc, who had been the first to kill in the FAYZ, the first murderer. A vicious drunk. But someone who had died a hero.

Mary. Mother Mary. A saint who had died trying to murder the children she cared for.

Quinn, who had been a faithless worm at the start and had been a pillar at the end.

Albert. She still didn’t know quite what to think of Albert, but it was undeniable that far fewer would have walked out of the FAYZ without Albert.

If her own feelings were this conflicted, was it any wonder the rest of the world didn’t know what to do with the Perdido survivors?

“Sorry, I kind of dragged the mood down,” Diana said wryly.

“I’m going to write something,” Astrid said.

“What do you mean?” Lana asked.

“I’m going to write about us. About all of it. Maybe a magazine story, or, I don’t know. Maybe even a book. But what happened to the . . . No, wait. No, that’s not even the right way to start. I don’t want everyone acting like we were victims. I’m going to tell the story. All of it I know, anyway.”

The other two girls looked at her, and to Astrid’s surprise neither of them told her she was being a fool.

“Might be a good idea,” Lana conceded.

“Maybe,” Diana said a bit more hesitantly. “It’s going to all come out anyway. One of us should tell the story. In fact, Astrid, it should be you. Just tell all of it.
All
of it. The bad, the worse, and the worst.”

“And maybe one or two good things,” Astrid said.

“One or two,” Diana agreed softly.

Eight hundred and nine homes had been destroyed. Three dozen businesses had been wiped out. Forty square miles of forest burned. Nearly five hundred cars, boats, buses damaged, almost all unsalvageable.

The cost of it all, plus the cost of cleanup, lost revenues from business, and the rest was estimated to be three billion dollars. At a minimum.

Albert Hillsborough had come through uninjured. He had come through famous. He’d been interviewed on CNBC and by the
Wall Street Journal
. He’d been invited to a party at the home of the chairman of Goldman Sachs. Important people kept telling him they had their eyes on him.

Even his family treated him strangely, and the truth was, he just didn’t fit with his family anymore. He didn’t fit, somehow, in the world of shared bedrooms and dinner-table discussion and school.

School. He knew he had to go. But really? He was going to be a high school freshman?

Really?

He rode now in the backseat of an SUV. There was a golden-arches logo on the side. Behind them a second SUV, and behind that two semis loaded with everything the modern filmmaker needed.

McDonald’s had volunteered to pay for Albert’s college if he would appear in some short videos about the importance to him of keeping the Perdido Beach McDonald’s alive as long as possible.

All the way up from Santa Barbara, where his family now lived, he watched flatbed trucks hauling wrecked cars away from Perdido Beach. And in the other direction went the construction equipment. The cleanup was under way. It was like the aftermath of a hurricane.

But civilian cars were still not allowed on the highway. No one was yet allowed to drive through Perdido Beach: it was still too dangerous. They were still finding bodies, not to mention the occasional straggler. Just that morning an injured, traumatized boy had been found wandering in the forest, near death.

Helicopters buzzed overhead. Surveyors and news reporters and filmmakers. The National Guard camp was still in place. The flashing police and ambulance lights were gone, and most of the TV trucks had moved on. But there were still armed men scowling from behind sunglasses.

Yeah, where were all you tough guys when we could have used you?

As they neared the edge of what had been the FAYZ, Albert began to feel uncomfortable. He squirmed in his seat and kept his eyes focused inside the SUV.

They’d assigned him a handler, a public relations person named Vicky. She was a pretty young woman, a mother herself, she said, and so she felt for the kids, what it must have been like. She had chatted with Albert on the drive up, and every time she had said how she understood, how she could imagine, how terrible . . . he had changed the conversation.

Now she noticed that his hands were fists and his jaw was clenched tight.

“Is something the matter, Albert?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“I can imagine that coming back here—”

“No. All due respect, I don’t think you can imagine.”

By the time they crossed the line, he felt his lungs straining. He was taking air in forced gasps.

He saw the first buildings, very few intact anymore, most of them burned. And he saw, in memory, at least, himself with the life oozing out of him from bullet wounds, months earlier but so fresh in his mind. He remembered knowing that death was very, very close. He remembered the certainty that he would be extinguished.

“Would you like a bottle of water?”

He looked at the bottle. Stared at it. “I’m fine.”

“Are you hungry? It’s been a while since lunch.”

Lunch had been at a McDonald’s in Santa Barbara. It had been so clean. It had smelled like food. It had sounded happy and alive. In the bathroom, the toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink.

He had passed a trash can on the way back to his table and stopped just to look at it. It was full of food. Leftover burgers, the last few fries, smears of ketchup on cardboard. He’d had to hold back tears when he saw it.

“Candy bar?” Vicky asked, and held a Snickers out to him.

At that moment they slowed to turn off the highway and head cautiously, carefully, through recently bulldozed streets, toward the town plaza. That’s where the McDonald’s was. His McDonald’s.

A candy bar. People had killed for less.

“I used to sell rats to starving kids,” Albert said.