Plague (27 page)

SAM
HOBBLED ALONG more quickly than he had hoped. He leaned on Toto and benefited as well from Dekka walking behind him and lessening gravity beneath them.

He felt low. All the lower because he’d actually managed just a little bit of hope earlier. He’d actually allowed himself to believe that things might be better now that they’d found the lake and the train.

But this was the FAYZ. And just because they were due for some good news didn’t mean any was coming. In the space of a very few hours he had gone from the heights of optimism to utter despair.

Over and over again in his mind he played out the likely scenarios. Edilio would have his guys, plus Brianna, Taylor, hopefully Orc. If Jack reached town in time he would fight as well; Jack had really stepped up.

But it wasn’t enough. Even if he and Dekka were there, it might not be enough. So instead of saving the town and showing them salvation in the form of water, noodles, and Nutella, Sam knew he would arrive back at a town devastated.

Some were sure to survive. Surely, some.

Maybe Little Pete would save Astrid. He had the power. But was he aware? Did any of this penetrate to wherever his mind was?

“Do you think he’ll do it?” Dekka asked. “Jack, I mean.”

“No,” Sam said.

“No,” Dekka agreed.

“True,” Toto said, although whether he was agreeing with them or just automatically certifying that they believed what they were saying, Sam could not say.

“He’s not that guy,” Sam said. “He’s not ruthless. Anyway, what are the odds he could even get to town and find Little Pete? And then, who knows if even that would shock Pete into doing anything.”

“You would do it, Sam.”

“Yeah. I would do it,” Sam said.

“He would,” Toto agreed.

“It’s your gift, Sam,” Dekka said. “It has been right from the start.”

“Ruthlessness?”

“I guess that doesn’t sound so good,” Dekka said wearily. “But someone has to do it. We each contribute what we have.”

Sam winced as his heel brushed a stone. “Probably wouldn’t work anyway. The Pete thing, I mean.”

“The train,” Dekka said. “Those missiles.”

“I thought about that,” Sam said. “But how would we get them to town? How would we even figure out how to use them?”

Sam stopped limping.

Dekka stopped, too, after a few steps. Toto kept walking, oblivious.

“Dekka?”

“Yeah?”

“How high does your power go? I mean, you cancel gravity, right? So things float upward.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I’ve seen you levitate yourself. I mean, you cancel gravity right beneath you and you float upward, right? Well, how high can you go?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “If I’m projecting it, you know, like I want to make it happen somewhere else, I can only reach maybe fifty feet or so. Maybe a little more.”

“Okay, but that’s you hitting it at kind of an angle, right? I mean, you’re sort of shooting across gravity because gravity goes straight down.”

Dekka looked at him strangely. She spread her hands by her side. Immediately she began to rise, along with dirt and rock, a pillar of it.

Sam watched as she rose, staying well back from the swirl of debris.

In the dark he quickly lost sight of her.

“Dekka!” He tilted his head back, trying to make her out against the background of black velvet and pinpoint lights.

“Where is Dekka?” Toto asked.

“Up there.”

“That is true,” Toto said.

“Yeah. Watch where you step, unless you want to go floating, too.”

It seemed like a long time before Dekka finally appeared amid falling gravel. She floated easily down, regained her footing, and said, “Okay, more than fifty feet, that’s for sure. I don’t know how far I went, but a long way. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it works better when I’m canceling gravity straight down. But I can only fly straight up. So if you’re thinking I can go all airborne and fly to town, that’s not happening.”

“I’m thinking,” Sam said, “that the FAYZ is a big bubble. Like a . . . what are those things with water inside and you shake them up with snow and—”

“A snow globe,” Toto supplied.

“Like a snow globe. And if you have a bubble inside that snow globe, what does it do? It rises to the top, right?”

“The top of this bubble is probably directly over the power plant,” Dekka said. “I mean, if the FAYZ is a perfect sphere.”

“Okay, tell me if this makes sense.” Sam frowned, trying to work it through as he talked. “The train is near the northern wall of the FAYZ. So if you were standing there and you canceled gravity . . .”

“You’d go scraping along the wall—very painfully—until you reached the top. Like a bubble rising to the top of a snow globe.”

“There are cars at the power plant. I mean, ones that have been used more recently, within the last month, cars Edilio drove there. So the batteries should still work. A lot have had their gas drained, but we wouldn’t need much.” He was thinking out loud. Not even paying attention to Toto’s repeated “He believes it, it’s true, Spidey” remarks.

“I can’t beat the bugs,” Sam said. “My power doesn’t work on them. Not well enough, anyway. But they can be crushed. And I think maybe they can be blown up.”

“Are you talking about those missile launchers in the train?” Dekka asked.

“I’m talking about exactly that,” Sam said. “You raise that container of missiles. You fly it to the top of the dome. You bring it down by the power plant. We find a vehicle with a gallon of gas and we go tearing for Perdido Beach.” He shrugged. “Then we see how these bugs like the M3-MAAWS, Multi-role Anti-Armor Anti-Personnel Weapons System.”

Caine walked the few blocks from the town hall to the highway alone. A gunslinger out of some old cowboy movie.

Kids followed him, but at a safe distance. A dozen of them crowded just inside the busted-out plate glass window of an insurance company. A couple more found seats in parked cars.

Good, let them watch as I save their butts, Caine thought.

But now, alone, standing in the middle of the highway astride the old divider line, he was far from confident. How many of the creatures would come? How large were they? How powerful?

Were they already watching him, out there in the dark?

And what about Drake? Would there be a chance for him to win Drake over? Drake could still be a very useful number two guy. Unless he was determined to be number one.

Fighting these superbugs plus Drake? Suddenly the island seemed very, very inviting.

He could walk away right now. Diana and him, just the two of them, alone on the island. Stick the townies with Penny and Bug. Just him and Diana. Food, luxury, sex. Wasn’t that infinitely better than this battle?

An old suspicion shadowed his thoughts: was he being played? The Darkness had used him before. Was this the gaiaphage’s will reaching into his mind again?

He didn’t feel it. He hadn’t felt the Darkness at all while on the island. Even before that, from the point where Caine had defied the Darkness, the gaiaphage had left him alone.

No. This was his own decision. But why? Why give up the island? For what? To be torn apart by monsters hatched in human bodies? Even if he survived, what would he face? Artichokes and fish, resentment, probably a fight with Sam, and Diana’s sullen withdrawal.

“King Caine! Yeah!”

He rounded quickly, angry, assuming it was a taunt. A boy in the insurance company raised a fist and yelled, “Wooooh!”

Caine nodded in his direction.

Sheep. So long as they had a shepherd to ward off the wolves, they were happy. Spineless, indifferent, weak, stupid: it was hard not to have complete contempt for them.

Of course, if he failed, they’d turn on him in a heartbeat.

Then again, if he failed, they’d be busy running for their lives.

A sudden flash of silver down the highway.

Caine peered into the dark. No light, of course, not even a Sammy sun up here by the main road. Just a little moonlight and a little starlight and a whole lot of dark.

But yes, something. Something moving.

And a sound.
Clickety-clackety,
very fast on concrete.

He saw flashing steel mouthparts, like moonlit machetes.

He couldn’t tell how many of the massive creatures there were. Just that there were at least half a dozen, each the size of a city bus and close enough now that he could see red eyes glaring malignantly.

He pointed at the spectators lounging in a parked car. “Get out of that car!”

The two boys shrugged as if they couldn’t see why they should obey. Then, with a popping of slackening springs and the groan of metal, the car just beside them floated up off the ground.

They got the idea. They bailed out fast.

Caine raised the car up and up. It was hard to see color in this light but it looked like it might be blue. A small, blue SUV.

“Let’s hope this works,” Caine breathed.

He drew back his hand and hurled the car through the air. It whooshed over his head. It tumbled through the air toward the closest of the creatures.

It fell short, smashed into the pavement with a crunch of metal and shattering glass, then tumbled into the bug’s mandibles.

Caine had no time to see what effect it had because a second bug scampered without pause up and over the SUV. One of the bug’s pointed legs pierced the moonroof.

“I got plenty of cars,” Caine said.

He raised the station wagon the boys had been sitting in and hurled it in a quick, sidearm throw. The car turned once in the air and hit the leading bug at almost ground level.

“Yeah, suck on that!” Caine yelled. Not exactly a kingly thing to say, but battle first, propaganda later.

Caine couldn’t see the creature’s face, but he could see that its legs were kicking randomly, out of any rhythm.

“Scratch one.” This was going to be easier than he’d expected.

But just as he was congratulating himself a solid wall of creatures pushed itself up and over the first two. And worse, there were half a dozen of the creatures rushing up the highway from behind him.

They had circled around!

He had picked the wrong place for this fight. It was suddenly blindingly clear. The last thing he should do is fight on open ground where they could come at him from every direction like this.

Caine’s heart thudded, his jaw clenched until his teeth cracked. He’d assumed the tales about the creatures were exaggerated. No. No. Not exaggerated.

Caine broke and ran. He raced at right angles to the two approaching forces. He leaped a ditch, landed hard, scrambled up and ran flat out across the service road, and flew past the shocked and confused crowd in the insurance company yelling, “Run, you idiots!”

Two of the creatures were scampering to cut him off. He snatched up a delivery van as he passed it and hurled it quickly—so quickly it flew low and almost hit him in the head as it blew past.

The crowd in the insurance company panicked. They poured from the narrow door, jamming one another, cursing and screaming.

A boy slipped, caught himself, but the delay was fatal. A bug speared him with a leg and swept him into gnashing, slashing mouthparts.

“Oh, no, no, noooo!” the kid screamed. The sound died suddenly, replaced by a noise like a garbage disposal chewing up chicken bones.

Caine ran down San Pablo with the kids pelting behind him and the swarm was forced to funnel into this more narrow space.

Things had gone from bad to desperate far faster than Caine could have imagined.

A second kid was caught by what looked like a black frog tongue firing from a bug’s mouth. She screamed as the bug reeled her in.

Caine stopped in the middle of the street. Shaking all over. Jaw clenched. He couldn’t outrun them and this was as good as any place: middle of the block so he couldn’t be attacked from the sides, at least.

The insurance company crowd splintered, kids rushing in every direction, all of them screaming, some beating helplessly against locked doors and crying to be let in. Others scrambled over fences into backyards.

Caine raised a parked car and hurled it, then another, another, three cars in rapid succession. It was like a pileup on a freeway, crashing, smashing, glass spraying, side mirrors popping off, rims rolling down the sidewalk.

His furious counterattack may have stopped or even killed some of the bugs—he couldn’t be sure in the darkness—but the swarm never hesitated. Up and over they rolled, like a wave.

Shaking, he stood his ground and raised trembling hands. If he couldn’t smash them maybe he could just hold them back.

The nearest bug slammed into an invisible wall of telekinetic power. Its legs motored madly, tearing gouges in the blacktop, kicking the smashed cars, but unable to advance.

“Yeah, try that!” Caine yelled.

A second, a third, a fourth creature, all pressed against the barrier, all relentlessly scrambling, pushing, determined. And all the while, Caine stood alone in the middle of the street.

But for how long? he wondered. The bugs didn’t seem to be tiring. In fact they were scrabbling over one another in a mad tangle of legs and massive silvery carapaces and scythe-mandibles and always the gnashing mouths and glowing ruby eyes.

He faltered, seeing those eyes, and suddenly the wall of bugs surged a foot closer.

He redoubled his focus. But he was feeling something he’d never felt before when using his power: a physical push back, as if he was holding them back with his muscles as well as his telekinetic ability.

Without thinking, he had set his feet in a strong stance, and he could feel the weight on his calves and thighs, even more on his arms. He wasn’t just projecting power as he always had, he was pushing back, at the limit of his powers, being pressed by thousands of pounds of thrust from dozens and dozens of stabbing legs.

They were just twenty feet away. Piling high against the invisible barrier. With a terrible shock he realized they were climbing over one another in a deliberate effort to get over the top of the invisible wall of energy.

Then, a far worse shock: some of the creatures had come around Golding Street and were rushing him from behind.