Plague (3 page)

The thing on Hunter’s shoulder squirmed. It was growing. Moving. Hunter glanced and could see it move beneath the fabric of his shirt. It seemed almost to be trying to chew a hole through Hunter’s shirt.

Hunter had no word for the thing. It had grown over the last day. It had started out as a bump, a swelling. But then the skin had split apart and gnashing insect mouthparts had been revealed. Like a spider. Or a bug. Like the bugs that crawled on Hunter as he slept.

But this thing on his shoulder wasn’t a regular bug. It was too big for that. And it had grown right where the flying snake, the greenie, had dropped its goo on him.

Hunter strained to think of the word for the thing. It was a word he used to know. Like worms on a dead animal. What was the word? He leaned forward, hands to his head, so mad at himself for not being able to find the word.

He had lost focus for just a few seconds but it was enough for Old Lion.

The cat dropped like mercury, liquid.

Hunter was knocked to the ground. His head banged against the rock. Old Lion had missed his grip, though, and he had to scramble in the narrow space. The cat spun, bared his yellow teeth and leaped, claws outstretched.

Hunter dodged, but not fast enough. One big paw hit him in the chest and knocked him back against the rock, knocked the wind from him.

Old Lion was on him, claws on his shoulders, snarling face just inches from Hunter’s vulnerable neck.

Then, suddenly, the mountain lion hissed and leaped back, like it had landed on a hot stove.

The lion shook its paw and flung droplets of blood. One claw toe had been badly bitten. It hung by a thread.

The thing on Hunter’s shoulder had bitten Old Lion.

Hunter didn’t hesitate. He raised his hands and aimed.

There was no light. The heat that came from Hunter’s hands was invisible. But instantly the temperature in Old Lion’s head doubled, tripled, and Old Lion, his brain cooked in his skull, fell dead.

Hunter pulled his shirt back from the shoulder. The insect mouthparts gnashed, chewing on a bloody chunk of the lion.

ASTRID
HAD FED Little Pete.

She read a little, perched beside the window, book held at an uncomfortable angle to try and take advantage of the faint moonlight.

It was slow going.

It wasn’t a book she’d ever have read back in the old days. She wouldn’t have been caught dead reading some silly teen romance. Back then she’d have read a classic, or some work of great literary merit. Or history.

Now she needed escape. Now she needed not to be in this world, this terrible world of the FAYZ. Books were the only way out.

After just a few minutes Astrid set the book aside. Her hands were trembling. Attempt to escape into the book: failed. Attempt to forget her fear: failed. It was all right there, still, right there in front of every other thought.

Outside, a breeze caused tree branches to scrape the side of the house. A corner of Astrid’s mind noticed, and wondered, but set it aside for more pressing concerns.

She wondered where Sam was. What he was doing. Whether he was longing for her as she longed for him.

Yes, yes, she wanted him. She wanted to be in his arms. She wanted to kiss him. And maybe more. Maybe a lot more.

All of it, all the things he wanted she wanted, too.

Stupid jerk, didn’t he get that? Was he so clueless he didn’t know that she wanted it all, too?

But she wasn’t Sam. Astrid didn’t act on impulse. Astrid thought things through. Astrid the Genius, always so irritatingly in control. That was the word he’d thrown at her: control.

How could Sam not realize that if they crossed that line it would be one more sin? One more abandonment of her faith. One more surrender to weakness.

There had been too many of those. It was like little pieces of Astrid’s soul were flaking off, falling away. Some pieces not so small.

Her self-control had crumbled so swiftly it was almost comic. After all the temptations and provocations, the calm, civilized, rational girl had evaporated like a bead of water on a hot skillet, sizzle, sizzle, all gone. And what had emerged then had been pure violence.

She had tried to kill Nerezza. In screaming, out-of-control rage. The memory of it made her sick.

And that wasn’t all of it. She had wanted Sam to burn Drake to ashes even if it meant murdering Brittney as well.

Astrid couldn’t be that person. She had to put herself back together. She had to take time to rebuild herself. She was afraid she would shatter. Like a glass sculpture, chip chip chip away and all at once it would shatter into a thousand pieces.

And yet, a cool, calculating part of her knew she could not alienate Sam too much. Because it was only a matter of time before everyone else figured out that there was a way out of the FAYZ.

The exit door was right in front of them. Lying just a few feet from Astrid.

A simple act of murder . . .

Others had seen what Astrid had seen on that cliff, when Little Pete’s mind had blanked out, overwhelmed by the loss of his stupid toy game.

A simple act of murder . . .

She sat beside her motionless brother. She ought to brush his teeth. Ought to change his pajamas. Ought to . . .

His forehead was damp.

Astrid put her hand to his head. He’d been hot all night, but this was worse. She pushed the button on the thermometer by the bed, waited for it to zero out, and stuck it under Little Pete’s tongue.

She felt a cool breeze in the room. Her eyes went instantly to the window. It was open wide. Pushed all the way up.

There was no question: it had been closed. She’d been sitting beside it. It had been locked. And now it was open.

And for the first time since the coming of the FAYZ, a cool breeze blew into the room and wafted over the damp forehead of the most powerful person in this little universe.

Drake felt the Darkness touch his mind. He shivered with pleasure.

It was still out there, Drake was sure of it. Still calling to him, to Drake, the faithful one, the one who would never turn against the Darkness.

Drake cracked his whip hand just to hear the sonic-boom snap of it. And to let Orc hear it, too.

“Hey, Orc! Come down here so I can whip that little patch of skin off you!” Drake demanded.

Drake Merwin could see a little by the light of the tiny, dim Sammy sun. He hated that light—he knew where it had come from, and what it represented: Sam’s power, that dangerous light of his.

Drake remembered the pain of that light. He’d been on his back, helpless. And Sam, his face a mask of rage, glorying in his moment of revenge, had burned off Drake’s legs and was working his way methodically up Drake’s torso.

Then that stupid little pig Brittney had emerged.

Drake didn’t know what happened next, he couldn’t see or hear when Brittney was in control. All he knew was that Sam hadn’t vaporized him. And here he was, trapped. Locked in this basement listening to Orc’s heavy tread upstairs.

Drake didn’t know what had happened to make him this way, to cause him to share a body with Brittney. Much of recent life was a mystery. He remembered Caine turning on him. He remembered the massive uranium rod flying straight toward him.

And the next thing he knew, he was in a nightmare that went on and on and on forever. There was a girl in the nightmare, the little piggy, the stupid little metal-mouth moron, Brittney.

Hadn’t they killed her? Long ago? He remembered a crumpled, bleeding form on a polished floor.

Brittney had died. Drake had died. And then, neither of them was dead, and both somehow were connected in a nightmare world where dirt filled their mouths and ears and held them pinned.

Digging like worms. That was the nightmare reality. Drake and the piggy digging in a nightmare, digging dirt, pushing it aside, compressing it to buy half an inch of clearance.

Dark, that dream. Utterly dark. No Sammy sun. No light.

He remembered thinking in the nightmare, thinking, “There’s no air.”

Buried alive, there couldn’t be any air. No light and no air, no water, no food, forever and forever.

It had taken a long time before his mind had cleared enough for him to realize the wonderful truth: he was dead . . . but alive.

Unkillable. Buried in the damp earth and yet somehow alive.

And then, hard-won freedom of a sort. The nightmare was no longer one of being buried in the earth but of walking the earth. He would be in one place, and then quite suddenly, in another. It took him a while to realize what had happened. The piggy was a part of him. They were joined, connected. Melded into one creature with two minds and two bodies.

Sometimes Drake and sometimes Brittney Pig.

Sometimes himself, and other times that little idiot with her lunatic visions of her dead brother.

Then the fight with Sam, the burning, and yet he had survived.

Unkillable.

“You’re a monster, Orc! You know that, right?” Drake shouted the taunt. “People look at you and they throw up. You make them all sick.”

Trapped. For now. In this dank, gloomy basement. Nothing down here but a wooden work table. They had cleaned the place out, Sam and Edilio and the rest. Barely a nail left behind on the concrete floor.

A roomier grave than the one he’d shared with Brittney Pig before. Here there was air. But Drake no longer needed air.

They shoved food in, and Drake ate it but he didn’t need it.

Unkillable.

What could not be killed could not be imprisoned forever. Just a matter of time. Orc was a stupid drunk. Howard was a clown. Drake would have already dug his way out—he had loosened a section of cinderblock wall, working at the mortar with a piece of broken glass.

But he had to be careful not to leave any clues for Brittney to find when she emerged.

That meant working slowly. Putting the piece of glass back in the sweepings right where she would expect to see it.

In the meantime as he worked and waited he howled threats up at Orc. There were two ways out of this trap: working on the wall, and working on Orc’s mind.

“Hey!” Drake shouted. “Orc! If I whip that last bit of skin off you, what do you think will happen? Might as well get rid of it and be all gravel. Why pretend you’re still human?”

Orc stomped the floor, which was Drake’s ceiling. But he did not come down to do battle.

Not yet. But he would eventually. Orc would snap. Then Drake would have his chance.

Through the wall or through Orc: one way or the other, Drake would escape.

He would go then to the Darkness. The gaiaphage would know how to kill the Brittney Pig and let Drake live free.

“I’m going to kill you!” Drake screamed.

He whipped at the walls, whipped at the ceiling, screamed and kicked and whipped in a lunatic frenzy.

Until at last, exhausted, his whip hand bleeding, he fell to his knees and became Brittney.

“Brittney Pig,” Drake slurred as his cruel mouth melted and twisted and became the braces-toothed mouth of his most intimate enemy.

Lana, too, felt the dark distant mind of the gaiaphage reach out for her.

She woke, eyes open quite suddenly. Patrick was beside the bed, panting, worried, wagging his tail uncertainly. He could tell, somehow.

“It’s okay, boy, go back to sleep,” Lana said.

Patrick whimpered, but then went back to his bed, turning around a couple of times before settling himself in.

The gaiaphage could no longer trick her into believing it had a voice. Those days were gone. But it could still touch her with a tendril of consciousness. It could still remind her of its presence, and of her connection to it.

This must be what it was like to be a victim of some awful crime, and to know that the person who did it to you was still alive, still looking for a way to do it again.

The gaiaphage lusted after Lana’s power. Using her power it could do miraculous things. Like replace an amputated arm with a snakelike whip.

But she was no longer quite so weak.

“Anxious, are you?” she asked the cool night air. “Down under the ground nibbling on your uranium snack?”

The Darkness did not answer. But Lana felt her instinct was right: the creature was anxious.

But not afraid.

Lana frowned, thinking about the distinction. Anxious but not afraid. Anticipating? Waiting for something?

She was torn between getting up and smoking a cigarette— she was hooked, she accepted that now—and lying there with her eyes closed and failing to fall asleep. Sleep, even if it came, would now be invaded by nightmares.

So she sat up, fumbled for and found the pack of Lucky Strikes and her lighter. The lighter sparked, the cigarette glowed, and the smell of smoke filled her nostrils.

“What are you up to?” she asked. “What do you want?”

But of course there was no answer. And she could sense the Darkness turning its attention away.

Lana got up and padded over to her balcony. The moon was high overhead. It was either very late or very early.

The barrier was so close, she felt as if she could almost touch it.

Was it true that the world was just on the other side of that barrier? Was it really so close that she’d have been able to smell the french fries at the Carl’s Jr. they built for gawkers who came to see the dome?

Or was that just another lie in this small universe of deceptions?

What if it came down? Right now, just pop: no more barrier? Or what if it cracked, like a gigantic egg?

Her mom and dad . . .

She closed her eyes and bit her lip. The pain of memory had snuck up on her, hit her when she wasn’t ready.

Tears filled her eyes. She wiped them away impatiently.

Suddenly, just down on the cliff above the beach, an eruption of blazing green-white light. Sam stood silhouetted by his own light show. She heard him yelling, roaring in frustration.

He was trying to burn his way out of the FAYZ.

It went on for a while and then stopped. Darkness returned. Sam was invisible to her now.

Lana turned away.

So, she was not the only one fantasizing about cracking the shell and emerging like a newborn chick.

Strange, Lana thought as she stubbed out the end of her cigarette, I’ve never thought of it as an egg before.

A gust of breeze blew her smoke before her.