Gone Series Complete Collection (175 page)

Edilio had said to get out of town. That’s what was rattling around in his brain, too. Killers had to get out of town.

Astrid’s laws. She made them up.

“That true, right?” he asked her without preamble.

“What?”

“Anyone kills anyone, they have to go away for good.”

“Are you going to kill them?” She meant the two hurt kids. It took him a while to realize that.

“What if . . . what if you didn’t mean to kill some kid.”

“I have to get him away from here,” Astrid said. But Orc didn’t think she was talking to him.

“I mean, if you didn’t even mean to. Like it was just an accident?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking,” Astrid said.

Orc was out of words. He felt so tired. He hurt so badly.

“Can you pick him up? Can you carry him?” Astrid was asking him something. So maybe she didn’t care what he’d done.

“The ’tard?”

“Little Pete. Can you carry him, Charles?”

“Where to?”

“Away,” Astrid said. “That’s the law. Killers have to leave. That’s what he is, you know. He’s the worst of us all. Every death from the FAYZ . . . All those kids . . .”

Orc seized on an idea that drifted through his slow brain. He lost focus when Lance started howling louder than before.

“Shut up or I’ll shut you up,” he yelled. He struggled to regain his thought. Little Pete. Killing. “Yeah, but he don’t know what he’s doing, right? People who don’t know what they’re doing, it’s not their fault.”

“Please, Charles. Pick him up. Edilio will be back with Lana soon. We have to be gone by then.”

Orc stepped over Turk. The boy was shivering uncontrollably now, his legs stuck straight out, feet twisted, shaking as he held his guts.

Lance was still screaming, he hadn’t stopped, but now he was mixing in curses, raging at everyone, spewing every hateful word he could think of.

Orc looked down at Little Pete. Astrid said he had killed people. Orc didn’t see how that was possible. He couldn’t even move much, it didn’t seem.

Little Pete coughed three times real fast. He didn’t cover his mouth or anything. It was like he didn’t even know he’d coughed.

Orc plucked Little Pete out of midair. He didn’t weigh much. Orc was strong.

Astrid watched it all like she was a million miles away. It was as if she was seeing everything through a telescope.

“Where to?” Orc asked her.

Astrid knelt and picked up the gun she had dropped. “Away,” she said.

Orc shrugged and headed down the stairs and walked north, toward the hills, and away from the sound of screams.

TWENTY-SEVEN

6
HOURS
, 11
MINUTES

DRAKE EMERGED.

He was holding a stone. Which meant Brittney had been holding the same stone.

It must have been heavy for her but his tentacle wrapped around it and held it without much strain.

Around him the bugs were looking less and less like insects. Not even like really large insects. The least of them was as big as a Dalmatian. The largest were as big as ponies. They reminded him more of Humvees or tanks.

They seemed more fragile at this size, as though the same weight of burnished exoskeleton had been stretched to make a much larger creature. Only half of them were still carrying out debris. The rest, the larger ones, had stepped aside and now waited with an impression of impatience about them. Like jets waiting for takeoff.

That’s what they reminded him of: fighter jets. They had a predatory, dangerous air about them. Like all they had to do was get the word and they’d go blasting off, dealing out death and destruction.

Who was to give them the word? Him?

The coyotes had disappeared. Had they decided to leave? Or had the bugs eaten them finally? Drake noticed a smear of blood on a slab of rock and thought he knew the answer.

Had the Darkness made the coyotes sacrifice themselves to feed his new servants?

Drake tossed his rock onto the pile. Then he turned back toward the mine shaft. Back to the welcoming shadow of that hole in the earth. His step was light. His heart beat fast, but from joy, not fear.

He felt the mind of the Darkness touching his. Felt that powerful will. It wanted him. And he was sure now what the Darkness would ask of him, and what weapons it would give him.

The mine shaft was clear but still a dangerous place. The supporting timbers had not been replaced and now the stone roof was jagged, hanging precariously in some places, while in others it had been hollowed out into dark cathedral domes by the collapse.

“I’m coming,” Drake whispered. But why whisper? “I’m coming!” he yelled.

He left the last of the light behind. Total darkness now. He felt his way forward, step by step, hand and whip hand outstretched. He scraped against jutting rocks, stubbed his toes dozens of times. The air smelled stale. It was hotter than it should have been in the shaft, warmer than the outside. He was sweating in the pitch black, gasping for scarce oxygen.

“I’m coming!” he shouted again, but his voice now was metallic and flat and did not carry any distance. He tripped and fell to his knees. When he stood up, he banged his head.

He was going down a long, long slope. How far had he come? He couldn’t say. He heard the rustle of the bugs coming behind him. In tight places they had to squeeze through, like massive cockroaches, flattening themselves to squeeze beneath low-hanging ledges, squirming onto their sides to edge past piers of solid rock.

They were following him. His army. Yes. He was certain of it. They would be his to command, his to use.

His army!

He could no longer breathe the air. But this was not his first time without oxygen. He still could see in vivid flashes the long, slow claw up through the mud of his grave.

No, Drake did not need air. Air was for the living, and Drake was something so much better than alive.

Unkillable.

Immortal.

The immortal soldier of the gaiaphage. His head swam with the joy of it.

Suddenly the floor ended and he pitched forward, face-first. He fell for several stretched seconds. He slammed into unyielding rock, bounced, rolled over, and laughed a soundless laugh.

He felt around with his hands and knew he was on a narrow ledge on one side of a deep vertical drop.

He stood up, put his toes on the edge, and looked down. Far below, a dim green light glowed, the only light in this pit of blackness. It might be a hundred feet, it might be a mile, it might be a hundred miles. There was no way to know.

He fell and fell, like Alice down the rabbit hole. It seemed to go on forever. Not seconds but minutes. An eternity.

WHUMPF!

He hit with such force that it should have snapped his calves and thigh bones and burst his knees and jackhammered his spine and cracked his head open like an egg.

Instead, after lying crumpled for a moment, he unwound his twisted limbs and pushed himself back onto his feet.

The walls around him all glowed. With his eyes fully adjusted to the pitch black he could see fairly well now with nothing but the toxic radioactive glow.

Was he there? Was he at the end of the trip?

Come
.

Farther still, down a sloping ramp. He realized that this was a different type of tunnel, no longer a man-made mining shaft but a natural cave deep, deep in the bowels of the stifling earth.

He entered a cavern that soared hundreds of feet above him. Green-tinged hanging stalactites met stumpy stalagmites. Like walking into the jaw of a gigantic shark.

Through the cavern and ever downward, following the faint trail of green. The creatures kept pace behind him. They had fallen after him, one by one, slowing their descent with their wings, spiraling down like helicopter seedpods.

An army! His army!

How far had he fallen? He could not know. How deep was he now? Miles.

Closer and closer.

And then, even as he felt his journey drawing to a close, his desperate goal coming close, Drake felt the familiar disturbance and swift onset of stumbling awkwardness that accompanied the transformation.

“No!” he moaned. “No, not now!”

But he had no power to stop the transformation.

It was not Drake but Brittney who finally came to the place where the gaiaphage lay. It was like living green sand. Billions of particles, each almost invisible to the eye, but together forming a single living thing, a hive.

The cavern was vast, impossibly huge. As if someone had sunk a sports stadium into the earth. The green, glowing mass of the gaiaphage covered stalactites and stalagmites, granite walls, and sandstone rock skyscrapers.

But beneath Brittney’s feet the floor was strangely level and smooth. The gaiaphage had left an uncovered space for her to see and to understand.

She knelt and pressed her hand against a clear patch of translucent, pearly gray beneath her. The searing pain a living person would have felt was only an interesting tingle to Brittney.

She knew what it was and where she was. This was the bottom of the FAYZ wall, the bottom of the giant bubble. She was ten miles down, at the lowest depths of the enclosed universe of the FAYZ.

She stood and looked left and right, in every direction, turning slowly to see. It was all resting on the barrier, she realized. The rock walls, the jutting stalagmites, all of it rested on the barrier itself.

And everywhere but in this one patch, the gaiaphage covered the barrier. It touched the barrier and did not feel pain.

Then, as Brittney looked down, she saw the color of the barrier change. The eternal blank grayness was crossed by fingers of dark green, the color of late summer leaves.

She understood: the gaiaphage could touch and alter the barrier itself.

She knew it was conscious. She knew it because she felt now the dread touch of that awful mind in hers. There could not be the slightest doubt.

Brittney fell to her knees.

She laced her fingers together and squeezed her eyes tight. But she could not block out the green glow. She could not stop herself seeing. She could not keep her mind safe from its terrible touch.

She felt her every thought opened, like so many files on a computer, each opened, observed, understood.

She was nothing. She saw that now. She was nothing.

Nothing.

She tried to call on her God. But her prayers would not form in her brain, would not whisper from her numb, trembling lips.

She saw it all clearly, the whole of it. A race of creatures who worshipped life. A virus designed to spread life wherever it reached. The planet first infected, then deliberately blown up so that seeds of life would spread throughout the universe in a billion meteors.

The endless, endless blackness of space, of millennia during which one of those rocks spun along a path that might never reach an end.

It was caught in the gravity well of a small star.

And then of a small planet.

The shattering, fiery impact.

A death. A man obliterated.

And the absorption into that alien virus of something new and incredible: human DNA.

A new life-form. The unintended consequence of a noble plan.

No God in His Heaven had created the gaiaphage. And here, now, in the airless pit, no God could save her.

It was then in her despair that Brittney prayed, not as she always had, but to a new Lord. A savior who waited to be born, to break free.

Brittney bowed her head and prayed to the gaiaphage.

Tanner appeared to Brittney as she prayed.

Her dead brother was an angel. Not with wings and all of that, but she knew he was an angel. And now he appeared to her and spoke in a soft, soothing voice.

“Don’t be afraid,” Tanner said.

“Let me die,” Brittney whispered.

“Who do you pray to?” Tanner asked.

“To you,” she said. Because she had no doubt that Tanner was speaking for the gaiaphage.

“I cannot give you death,” Tanner said. “You are two in one. Your immortality is his. And he is necessary to me.”

“But who made me this way? Why? Why?”

Tanner laughed. “‘Why’ is a question for children.”

“I am a child,” Brittney said.

There was softly glowing magma dribbling from Tanner’s cruel mouth. He bent down and touched her with fingers of ice.

“I must be born,” Tanner said. “And then, at the ending of my beginning, you will die.”

“I don’t understand.” With piteous eyes she looked up at the angel-turned-devil. “What do you need me to do?”

“Nemesis must be mine,” Tanner said. “Nemesis must serve me and me alone. All who defend him and protect him must be destroyed. He must live to serve me.”

“I . . . I don’t understand.” She knelt with bowed head, unable to look at Tanner, knowing now that he had never been an angel, that he had never been God’s servant, that he was nothing real at all, just the voice of the evil one.

“Nemesis,” Tanner said, hissing the word. “We are two in one, like you and the whip hand. Two in one, waiting to be born. Only when he is alone, utterly alone, will he serve me. And then I will be burst from this cocoon.”

“I don’t know anyone called Nemesis,” Brittney whispered.

She could feel her consciousness fading. Already her fingers were melting together to form the whip.

In the moments before she lost sight and sound, as she spiraled down into the blackness and Drake surged upward, Brittney’s tortured mind saw the image of Nemesis.

She knew his name.

Peter Michael Ellison. Who everyone called Little Pete.

PETE

HE FLOATED
ABOVE
the ground in the arms of a monster. His cheek lay against a stone shoulder. Rain no longer fell. Wild colors—green and yellow, brown and red, jagged edges of color scraped at him, wounding his ears.

The sister walked behind him. Her face was as stony as the monster’s. Lips too red, eyes too blue, the sound of her breathing too loud.

At each step the monster’s pebble skin rubbed against Pete’s raw flesh, like sandpaper, like a thousand saw blades drawn slowly over tender scabs.