Gone Series Complete Collection (203 page)

Cigar didn’t recognize that voice. A boy’s voice, wasn’t it?

“Who are you?” Cigar cried out.

“It’s Lana.”

“Who are yoooooou?”

“I think he means me. It’s me, Sanjit.”

There were snakes in Cigar’s dried-blood eye sockets. He could feel them. They were writhing like mad.

“Nerves,” Sanjit said.

“You might be feeling something,” Lana said.

“Aaaaahhhhhh!” Cigar cried. He tried to claw at his eyes but his hands were pinned. Helpless. He’d had his arms chewed off, hadn’t he? He didn’t have arms anymore. So how had he clawed the roaches out of his eyes if he had no arms? Answer that, Bradley. His real name, Bradley.

Answer that.

And if you don’t have arms how did you light those cigars, those big fat cigars and puff until the ends were glowing red and so hot and then plunge those red-hot tips into the empty holes of your eye and then shriek in agony and beg God, “Kill me, kill me, kill me”?

“The nerves are regrowing. Unbelievable,” Sanjit said.

“He’s trying to claw his eyes again,” Lana said.

“Yeah,” Sanjit agreed. “This can’t ever happen again. That witch has to be stopped.”

“It was Caine’s doing,” Lana said angrily. “He knows what Penny is like. She’s a mental case. She’s evil. She was always twisted, but after her injuries . . . something snapped in that girl.”

“My eyes!” Cigar screamed.

Something. A bar of faint, distant light. Like the earliest hints of sunrise, like the blackness was just a little bit less black.

“Something is happening,” Sanjit said. “Look! Look!”

“My eyes!”

“Not yet, dude, but something is growing. Little white balls, no bigger than BBs right now.” Sanjit put his hand on Cigar’s chest and dug his ripping, tearing, stiletto fingers into Cigar’s heart and . . .

No. No. That wasn’t real. That wasn’t real.

The light bar, that faint glow was growing. Cigar stared at it, willing it to be real. He needed something to be real. He needed something to not be a nightmare.

“Cigar,” Sanjit said in a kind voice. “It looks like the gouging and the cuts are healing up. And it seems like tiny little eyes are forming.”

But then Lana’s more astringent voice said, “Don’t get your hopes up too much.”

Her hands. On his temples. On his brow. Slowly, slowly she probed toward the black sockets.

“No, no, no, nooooooooo!” he wailed.

Lana’s fingers slid back.

Lana was real. Her touch was real. The light he could see was real. He tried so very hard to hold on to that.

“We’re going to cover your eyes with a cloth, okay?” Sanjit said. “Your eyeballs are jerking around and it may be that the light from the Sammy sun bothers them.”

An eternity, during which he slid in and out of consciousness, in and out of screaming nightmares. At times he was on fire. At times his skin crisped like bacon. At times scorpions burrowed into his flesh.

All the while, Lana kept her hands on his face.

“Listen to me,” Lana said at last. “Can you hear me?”

How much time had passed? The madness was not past, but it was diluted, weakened. The screams still threatened to tear his throat, but he could hold them off; he could mount some resistance, at least.

“We’ve been here all night,” Lana said. “So whatever you’ve got is what you’ve got. I can’t do any more.”

“I’m here, too, brother. It’s me, Quinn.” Quinn laid his calloused hand on Cigar’s shoulder and it made him want to cry. “Listen, dude, however it turns out, you’ve got a place with your crew. You’re one of us.”

“We’re going to take the cloth off now,” Sanjit said.

Cigar felt the cloth slide away.

Quinn gasped.

Cigar saw something that looked very much like Quinn. But a Quinn with a storm of purple-and-red light around his head. Quinn enveloped in what looked like the beginning of a tornado.

Cigar saw Sanjit behind him. He glowed softly, a steady silvery light.

Then he saw Lana. Her eyes were beautiful. Shifting rainbows. Sudden, piercing shafts like bright moonlight. She outshone both Quinn and Sanjit. She was a moon to their stars.

But wrapped around her was a sickly green tendril, like an infinitely long snake that writhed and probed at her, seeking a way into her head.

And that was all that Cigar saw. Because everything around the three kids was blank, empty darkness.

There was no teasing or even conversation on the trip back to the lake. Sam drove slowly. Jack slept, snoring from time to time, but not so loud that it bothered Sam.

Dekka stared out of the window. They had waited until dawn—no point risking another drive through the dark. After all, the need for secrecy was long gone.

Sam had no doubt that Caine had the missiles.

No real doubt. Despite the nagging voice in the back of his head that told him that if Caine had the missiles he’d have long since used them to move against the lake.

No. That was stupid. Caine was probably just biding his time. Waiting.

Brianna came running up alongside the truck and made the signal for
Roll down your window.

“You need me anymore?” Brianna asked. “Otherwise I’ll go catch some z’s.”

“No, I’m good, Breeze.”

But she didn’t zoom off; she kept pace. The truck was moving at no more than twenty to thirty miles an hour, so it was a pleasant walking speed for Brianna.

“You’re not letting Caine keep those things, are you?” Brianna asked.

“Not tonight, huh? I’m really beat. I don’t want to think about it. I just want to crawl into my bunk and pull the covers over my head.”

Brianna looked as if she was going to argue, but then she gave a theatrical sigh, winked at Sam like she had already read his inner thoughts, and zoomed away down the road.

Sam noticed that Dekka refused to look at her. He thought of talking to her about it, but he was talked out. He could barely keep his eyes open.

And yet, there it was again, that feeling of not quite seeing something. He felt eyes on him. Something watching him from out there in the black desert night.

“Coyotes,” he muttered. And he almost believed it.

They got back to the lake just as the faintest light of dawn shone from the false sun of the FAYZ. They got nice sunrises on the lake—if you could get past the fact that the “sun” was an illusion crawling up a barrier that was no more than half a mile away across the water.

Sam was stiff and tired. He crept onto the houseboat, careful not to wake anyone, and sidled down the narrow passage to his bunk. The shades were drawn and of course there were no lights, so he felt his way to the edge of his bed and crawled across it on hands and knees to find his pillow.

He collapsed on his back.

But even at the edge of sleep he was aware of something different about the bed.

Then he felt soft breath on his cheek.

He turned and her lips were on his. Not gentle. Not soft. She kissed him hard, and it was like he’d been awakened by an electric power line.

She kissed him and slid on top of him.

Their bodies did the rest.

At some point in the hours that followed he said, “Astrid?”

“Don’t you think you should have made sure of that about three times ago?” Astrid said in her familiar, slightly condescending tone.

They said many things to each other after that, but nothing that involved words.

OUTSIDE

MARY TERRAFINO
HAD
come through the barrier four months ago. She had leaped from a cliff inside the FAYZ at the exact moment of her fifteenth birthday.

She had landed. Not on the sand and rocks beneath the cliff, but two miles away from the barrier. She had appeared in a dry gulch and would have died but for the two dirt bikers who were racing across bumps and drops, yelling and roaring along and definitely not looking for what they found.

The bikers had not called for an ambulance. They had called animal control. Because what they thought they had seen was a terribly mangled animal. It was an understandable mistake.

Mary was in a special ward at the UCLA hospital down in Los Angeles. The ward had two patients: Mary and a boy named Francis.

The doctor in charge was a woman named Chandiramani. She was forty-eight and wore her white coat over a traditional sari. Dr. Chandiramani had a tense but proper relationship with Major Onyx. The major was supposedly the liaison with the Pentagon. In theory he was there only to offer Dr. Chandiramani and her team any necessary support.

In reality the major clearly thought he was in charge of the ward. He and the doctors often clashed.

It was all very polite, with never a raised voice. But the Pentagon’s priorities were somewhat different from those of the doctors. The doctors wanted to keep their two horribly damaged patients alive and comfortable. The soldiers needed answers.

Major Onyx had arranged to have equipment installed in the room, and in both adjacent rooms, that definitely had nothing to do with Mary’s medical condition. Dr. Chandiramani had pretended not to understand any of it, but the doctor had not always confined her studies to medicine. In earlier life she had made a serious start at studying physics. And she knew a mass spectrometer when she saw one. She knew that this room, and Francis’s room, were effectively inside of a sort of super-sensitive mass spectrometer. What other instruments the major had packed into the walls and ceiling and floor she could only guess.

Francis was alive. But no way had yet been found to communicate with him. There were brain waves. So he was conscious. But he had no mouth or eyes. He had one appendage that might be an arm, but it was in a continuous state of spasm, so even if the fingers had not been oddly jointed claws he would not have been able to use either a keyboard or a pencil.

Mary had somewhat more potential. She had a mouth and it appeared to have some limited functionality in terms of speech. They’d had to remove some of the grotesque teeth that had grown through her cheeks. And they had performed other surgeries to repair her tongue and mouth and throat to the best of their abilities.

The result was that Mary could speak.

Unfortunately she had only screamed and leaked tears out of the smear that was her only eye.

But now they had found the right mix of sedatives and antiseizure meds, and Dr. Chandiramani had finally agreed to allow Major Onyx and an army psychologist to question the girl.

The first questions were overly broad.

“What can you tell us about conditions inside?”

“Mom?” she had asked in a voice that was barely a whisper.

“Your mother will come later,” the psychologist said in a soothing voice. “I am Dr. Greene. With me is Major Onyx. And Dr. Chandiramani, who has been taking care of you these last months since you escaped.”

“Hello, Mary,” Dr. Chandiramani said.

“The littles?” Mary asked.

“What does that mean?” Dr. Greene asked.

“The littles. My kids.”

Major Onyx had close-cut black hair, a dark tan, and intense blue eyes. “Our information is that she took care of the little children.”

Dr. Greene leaned closer, but Dr. Chandiramani could see him fighting the nausea that people always felt seeing Mary. “Do you mean the little children you took care of?”

“I killed them,” Mary said. Tears flowed from her one tear duct and ran down the seared, boiled, lobster red skin.

“Surely not,” Dr. Greene said.

Mary cried aloud, a sound of keening despair.

“Change topic,” Dr. Chandiramani said, watching the monitor.

“Mary, this is very important. Does anyone know how this all started?”

Nothing.

“Who did it, Mary?” Dr. Chandiramani asked. “Who created the anom—the place you called the FAYZ?”

“Little Pete. The Darkness.”

The two doctors and the soldier looked at one another, puzzled.

The major frowned and whipped out his iPhone. He tapped it a few times. “FAYZ Wiki,” he explained. “We have two ‘Pete’ or ‘Peters’ listed.”

“What are the ages?” Dr. Chandiramani asked.

“One is twelve; one is four. No, sorry, he would have turned five.”

“Do you have children, Major? I do. No twelve-year-old would be happy to be called ‘Little Pete.’ It must be the five-year-old she’s talking about.”

“Delusional,” Dr. Greene said. “A five-year-old did not create the anomaly.” He frowned thoughtfully and scribbled a note. “Darkness. Maybe she’s afraid of the dark.”

“Everyone’s afraid of the dark,” Dr. Chandiramani said. Greene was getting on her nerves. So were the major and his horrified stare.

The monitor above Mary’s bed suddenly beeped urgently.

Dr. Chandiramani reached for the call panel and yelled, “Code blue, code blue,” but it was unnecessary, because nurses were already rushing in through the door.

At the same time Major Onyx’s smartphone began chiming. He didn’t answer it, but he did open an app of some sort.

A tall, thin doctor in green scrubs swept in behind the nurses. He glanced at the monitor. He put his stethoscope in his ears and asked, “Where is her heart?”

Dr. Chandiramani pointed to the unlikely place. But she knew it was useless. All lines on the monitor had gone flat. All at the same time. Which was not how it happened. Heart, brain, everything suddenly and irreversibly dead.

“You’ll find the other one’s gone, too,” Major Onyx said calmly, consulting his phone. “Francis. Something pulled his plug, as well.”

“Are you going to tell me what you’re talking about?” Dr. Chandiramani snapped.

The major jerked his head, indicating that the other doctor and the nurses should get out. They didn’t argue.

Major Onyx closed the app and put his phone away. “The people who were ejected when the dome was created? They came out clean. So did the twins. The rest, the ones who’ve appeared since? They’ve always had a sort of . . . umbilical cord . . . connecting them to the dome. J waves, that’s what we call them. But don’t ask me what they are, because we don’t know. We can detect them, but they are not something encountered in nature.”

“What does ‘J wave’ stand for?” the doctor asked.