Gone Series Complete Collection (170 page)

Sanjit was slight in build. But he was strong. So when Lana collapsed he was able to catch her and hold her.

Dahra saw it happen. “She needs sleep,” she said to Sanjit. “Get her out of here.”

“What about you?” Sanjit asked.

“I’ve gotten really good at grabbing power naps,” Dahra said. “Besides, Virtue is almost as much use around here as you are.”

“Almost?” Virtue grumbled.

He had come to the so-called hospital with word that Bowie was doing much better. He had tucked the rest of his brothers and sisters into bed with too little water and too little food. And now he was helping Dahra.

Dahra put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You’re a lifesaver, Virtue. My little African brother, here.”

That brought one of Virtue’s rare smiles. Dahra’s folks came from Ghana and Virtue’s from Congo, so they weren’t exactly from the same neighborhood, but it gave them something in common, Sanjit realized. That, plus the fact that they were both incredibly decent people.

“I can’t carry Lana to Clifftop,” Sanjit said. “But I can get her a place to lie down.”

Lana woke up long enough to say, “Urrhh. Wha?” And then her eyes rolled back in her head and Sanjit lifted her in his arms. Virtue brought him a couple of blankets and draped them over his shoulders.

He carried her up out of the basement, up through the hallway crowded with hacking, miserable kids, and out to the plaza.

Five unburied bodies lay there side by side. Mismatched blankets covered each one, corners tucked underneath, faces covered by chenille or satin or tartan wool.

They’d given the plague a name, a callous nickname. The SDC they called it: Supernatural Death Cough.

But at some point during the day they’d begun to notice that some kids were getting better, too. The flu was awful. But it wasn’t a death sentence to everyone who caught it.

They’d been unable to keep complete records, but according to Dahra’s hasty notes and frazzled memory about one in ten progressed to full-blown SDC.

Sanjit was struggling a bit to carry Lana, but he was unwilling to lay her down near the dead or within sound of the hacking coughs.

She wasn’t just going without sleep. She was going without love and hope. She was living with guilt for having failed to be Superwoman, having failed to kill the evil in the mine shaft, having failed to see what was happening to Mary.

He took her to the beach and laid her down on one of the blankets, which he spread on the soft, dry sand. She was lying on top of the gun in her belt, so he slid it out and lay it on her stomach. Then he covered her with the other blanket.

Her faithful dog had followed them the whole way and now Patrick snuggled beside her. He looked up at Sanjit, questioning.

She would almost certainly be safe here alone. No one wanted to hurt the Healer. And Patrick would bark if anyone came close.

But Sanjit couldn’t just leave her here all alone. So he settled into a sort of yoga sitting posture, sighed, and decided to await sunrise.

Albert did not resist. Maybe, he thought, a braver kid would have. But he wasn’t that kid. When Turk demanded to know where Albert’s secret stash was, Albert told him.

Simple as that.

Albert had wet himself. He had cried. Still was crying.

He was going to die. He knew that. They would figure out pretty soon that there was no safe way to release Albert.

They would know that. He knew it, so how could they not know it?

But he could negotiate, maybe. Maybe now that they had all his stuff, his stash of canned food and bottled water.

It didn’t look like much. It wasn’t, although it was untold wealth in the FAYZ. They had filled two small boxes with his things and filled their hoodie pockets as well.

“You got what you wanted,” Albert said, trying desperately but failing to keep the sobby quaver out of his voice. “Just go away. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Man, you were hiding cans of Beef-a-Roni,” Raul said. He was disbelieving. “You had three cans!”

“Take it,” Albert pleaded. “Take it all.”

Turk glanced at Lance. Even in his despairing, shattered state, Albert knew they weren’t quite sure just yet. Hope rose like a tiny flame inside him. Maybe. Maybe they wouldn’t.

“Look, you want food and water, right?” Albert pleaded.

“You have more?” Lance demanded angrily.

“Not-not-not here.”

“Not-not-not,” Lance mimicked.

“N-n-n-n-not h-h-h-here,” Watcher said, and laughed.

“So where is this other stuff?” Turk asked, and kicked him almost tentatively. It was enough, though, to send a breathtaking spike of pain up Albert’s leg from his broken knee. The knee was already swelling to twice its normal size. It was the worst of many agonies in his body.

“I don’t have anything else here,” Albert said. “But listen, I make more, right? I buy more. I control what gets made and picked and all.”

“Yes,” Turk said, mock-serious. “You’re a big man, Albert. Too bad you peed yourself.”

That set off another round of laughter.

“You think we’re stupid?” Lance demanded. “You think we’re just some stupid white boys who don’t know you can snap your fingers and have Sam or Brianna or one of those freaks come after us?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Albert said. His jaw was quivering so bad he almost couldn’t speak. “I wouldn’t. Because if I did that, you’d, you’d, you’d tell people I cried.”

“And wet your pants.” Watcher seemed the most likely to let him go, but Albert knew the decisions were being made by Turk and Lance.

There was no pity in either face. Lance was aglow with hatred. Turk was less emotional.

“You know what we ought to do?” Turk suggested, laughing in anticipation of his punch line. “We ought to throw him in one of the slit trenches we dug for him.”

“No, no, don’t do that,” Albert begged. A dunking in excrement was infinitely better than being killed. “No, don’t, I’m begging you.”

Lance squatted down, brought his handsome, chiseled face right down to Albert’s level. “You just think you’ve got it all, don’t you? Yeah, it would be fun to see you wallow around in the crap like you made us do. But then you’d just climb out and next time one of us turned around, there’d be Sam Temple. Flash of light and
zap
, we’d be dead.”

“I’m not . . . That’s not . . . ,” Albert said. “Please. Please don’t kill me.”

Turk looked offended. “Did we say we were going to kill you?” He turned to Lance. “Where did he get that idea?”

Lance played along. “I have no idea, Turk.”

“Maybe because of this,” Turk said. He leveled his rifle at Albert’s face.

Something exploded.

Albert heard no sound.

He was on his side.

Blood covered his right eye, blinding him. Or maybe his eye wasn’t there anymore, he didn’t know.

He tried to breathe and heard gurgling in his lungs. Heard his heart slow . . .

Turk looked at once alarmed and ecstatic. Lance’s face became sullen. The two younger kids backed away, tripping over each other, and ran.

Lance punched Turk’s shoulder in rough congratulations.

Albert’s one good eye went dark.

TWENTY-TWO

12
HOURS
, 48
MINUTES

“THAT IS
A
lake,” Sam said. “That is definitely a lake.”

“I can’t believe we didn’t even know this was here,” Dekka said.

The sun was still not up, but a pearly gray light showed a long slope heading down to a vast body of water. Bigger than anything Sam had seen outside of the ocean.

Dry grass grew in tufts. Amazingly scraggly, stunted pine trees showed here and there, but the shore itself was formed by a line of large jumbled rocks broken up by narrow, halfhearted sand beaches.

At the limits of their vision was a small marina with perhaps two dozen boats at the dock.

The barrier sliced right across the lake, but the part on the inside was more water than the kids of Perdido Beach could ever need or want.

“You think it’s drinkable?” Dekka wondered.

“Let’s find out,” Sam said. He jogged downhill toward the shore, careful not to trip, but anxious to see and taste. It would be too cruel to get here and find that it was salt water. That would be one more dirty trick, one more disappointment. Not to mention the fact that it might doom them all.

He reached the lakeshore with the others close behind. The pale rock was shifting and unsteady, so he felt his way gingerly.

He pulled off his shoes and then impulsively dived in a flat arc into the water.

It was shallow near the shore and he scraped his chest on submerged rocks, but with two strokes he was out in water over his head.

Sam gulped a mouthful. Treading water he looked back to see Jack, Dekka, and Toto standing uncertainly on the rocks. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Sam said, his face split by a huge grin, “we have fresh water.”

In something less than five seconds, the three of them splashed in after him.

“It’s water!” Jack cried.

“It is so totally water!” Dekka agreed.

“She’s telling the truth, Spidey!” Toto said.

Sam turned a joyful somersault. The lake was cold but not bone-chilling. The surfer part of his brain calculated he’d have been warm and toasty enough with a 3/2 wetsuit.

He gulped some more water and swam over to his friends.

“Fresh water,” Dekka said. “Cold fresh water. Brrr.”

Sam scanned the shore. “This isn’t a great place to set up a new town, really. We’d need something flatter. And then we’d have to be careful about not having everyone’s sewage end up flowing into our drinking water. I guess we . . .” He stopped himself. Albert and Edilio could figure out the details. He had done what he needed to do.

“I saw boats,” Jack remarked. “I wonder if there are fish.”

Toto said, “Fish, yes, fish.”

“You know something?” Sam asked him.

“My dad used to take me fishing.” Then, as if puzzled by his own words, he looked for the Spidey head that wasn’t there and said, “This isn’t that lake, is it? No, that was Lake Isabella.”

“Okay,” Dekka said patiently. “Were there fish in that lake?”

“Trout,” Toto said. “Bass. Also crappie. Fish.”

“If we find fishing poles and stuff on the boats, it means there are fish,” Jack pointed out.

“It’s only, like, half a mile. We could swim,” Sam said.

“You could swim half a mile,” Dekka said. “Me, I’ll walk.”

They climbed out, Sam with great reluctance. It was invigorating, this new and unexplored body of water. Who knew what might be found on or around the lake?

But he understood that Dekka and the others might not be thrilled by a long, cold swim.

The shore was a series of curves, like the edge of a lace doily made with sketchy sand beaches and rocky promontories. They soon came upon a trail and were laughing and chatting lightheartedly.

Sam knew logically that without gas—and a lot of it—they’d never get enough water down to—

He stopped dead. “Marinas,” he said. He felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. “Marinas. You know what they have?”

“Boats?” Jack suggested, like he was afraid it was the wrong answer.

“Boats.” Sam grinned. “Sailboats, maybe. But you know what else? Motorboats. Jet skis.”

“You want to jet ski?”

“What do jet skis run on, my friend?”

“I want to say water,” Dekka said.

“Gas!” Jack cried.

Sam slapped him on the shoulder. “Yes! A marina isn’t a marina if they don’t have fuel.”

He grinned and started to run toward the marina. A nagging voice in his head warned him not to hope, not to expect a good answer.
It’s the FAYZ
, the voice said.

It’s still the FAYZ.

But after so much pain, so many disappointments, and so many horrors, surely they were due for some good news?

Surely.

Lana opened her eyes.

Patrick licked her face. Which was probably why she opened her eyes.

Something heavy lay on her chest. A head. Long, dark hair.

She pushed it away and it groaned, and said, “I’m awake.”

Sanjit sat up, looked at her, and wiped drool from the corner of his mouth.

Lana was on the beach. The sun was up but had not yet cleared the mountains. How she had come there she did not know. Instinctively she felt for her gun. It was not in her waistband. It had become tangled in the blanket.

“How did I get here?”

“I brought you here.”

Lana absorbed that. “Why?” she demanded suspiciously.

“You passed out.”

Lana ran her hands through her tangled hair. She wiped her mouth and made a face, tasting the inside of her mouth. “You have any water?”

“Sadly, no,” Sanjit said.

She sighed and looked at him with tired eyes. “What is it with you? You don’t even have a blanket,” Lana said.

“I wasn’t going to sleep.”

“Tell me you weren’t watching me sleep, because then I’d have to throw up.”

Sanjit grinned. “I did. I watched you sleep. And heard you sleep, too.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, you farted once. But mostly you talk in your sleep. Groan in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

Sanjit made a show of trying to recall. “Well, mostly it was, urrgh, mmmm, unh, unh, don’t try to . . . urggh. And the fart was very, um, genteel. Like:
poot-poot!
Almost musical.”

Lana stared at him.

He shivered.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“Just a little chilly. You know, from just waking up.” He shivered again and wrapped his arms around his drawn-up legs.

She pulled her top blanket off, balled it up, sand flying, and shoved it at him. He draped it over his shoulders.

“How many more dead?” she asked.

“It was five total when we left.”

Lana hung her head down for a moment and Sanjit remained silent. Then she stood up. She walked down to the water’s edge. She stripped off her outer clothing, leaving only her underthings.

Then, gritting her teeth, she ran into the surf, and as soon as the water was up to her knees, she dove headfirst. It was freezing. But it was clean. It washed away the blood and the grime.