Gone Series Complete Collection (206 page)

And, of course, she had judged other people the same way. Then, when it had come down to survival, to doing whatever it took to end the horror, she had done the ruthless thing. Yes, there was a certain crude morality at work there: she had sacrificed Little Pete for the greater good. But that was the excuse of every tyrant or evildoer in history: sacrifice one or ten or a million for some notion of the common good.

What she had done was immoral. It was wrong. Astrid had set aside her religious faith, but good was still good, and evil was still evil, and throwing her brother into the literal jaws of death . . .

It wasn’t that she doubted she had done wrong. It wasn’t that she doubted she deserved punishment. In fact, it was the very idea of forgiveness that made her rebel. She didn’t want forgiveness. She didn’t want to be washed clean of her sin. She wanted to own it and wear it like a scar, because it was real, and it happened, and it couldn’t be made to unhappen.

She had done something terrible. That fact would be part of her forever.

“As it should be,” she whispered. “As it should be.”

How strange, Astrid thought, that owning your own sins, refusing forgiveness, but vowing not to repeat them, could make you feel stronger.

“When do we check back?” Edilio asked her when they were finished installing.

Astrid shrugged. “Probably better come back tomorrow, just in case the stain is moving faster than it appears to be.”

“What do we do about it?” Edilio asked.

“We measure it. We see how much it advances in the first twenty-four hours. Then we see how much it advances in the second and third twenty-four-hour periods. We see how fast it grows and whether it’s accelerating.”

“And then what do we do about it?” Edilio asked.

Astrid shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“I guess I’ll pray,” Edilio said.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Astrid allowed.

A sound.

The three of them spun toward it. Edilio had his sub-machine gun off his shoulder, cocked, and the safety off in a heartbeat. Roger sort of slid behind Edilio.

“It’s a coyote,” Astrid hissed. She had not brought her shotgun, since she was carrying half of the measuring frames. But she had her revolver and drew it.

It was almost immediately clear that the coyote was not a threat. First, it was alone. Second, it was barely able to walk. Its gait was shuffling and it seemed lopsided.

And something was wrong with its head.

Something so wrong that Astrid could hardly encompass it. She stared and blinked. Shook her head and stared again.

Her first thought was that the coyote had a child’s head in its mouth.

No.

That. Wasn’t. It.

“
Madre de Dios
,” Edilio sobbed. He ran to the creature now just twenty feet away and so terribly visible. Roger put a comforting hand on Edilio’s shoulder, but he looked sick, too.

Astrid stood rooted in place.

“It’s Bonnie,” Edilio said, his voice shrill. “It’s her. It’s her face. No,” he moaned, a long, drawn-out wail.

The creature ignored Edilio, just kept walking on two coyote front legs and twisted furless legs—bent human legs—in the back. Kept walking as though those empty, blue, human eyes were blind, and those shell-like pink human ears were deaf.

Edilio wept as it kept moving.

Astrid aimed her revolver at the creature’s heart, just behind the shoulder, and fired. The gun kicked in her hand and a small, round, red hole appeared and began leaking red.

She fired again, hitting the creature in its canine neck.

It fell over. Blood pumped from the thing’s neck and formed a pool in the sand.

Once again, the avatar broke apart.

Pete had tried to play with the bouncy avatar and it had broken apart, changed color and shape, and stopped.

He had tried to play with another avatar and it had melted into something different.

Was this the game?

It wasn’t very fun.

And he was beginning to feel bad when the avatars fell apart. Like he was doing a bad-boy thing.

So he had imagined the avatars all back the way they started.

Nothing happened. But things always happened when Pete wanted them really hard. He had wanted the terrible sirens and screams to stop and the world not to burn up and he had created the ball he now lived in.

He had wanted other things and they had happened. If he wanted something badly enough it happened. Didn’t it?

Well, now he was feeling sick inside and he wanted the avatars to go back and be right again. But they didn’t.

No, Pete corrected himself. He’d always been afraid when the big sudden things happened. He couldn’t just wish them and make them happen. He’d always been scared. Panicked. Screaming inside his overloaded brain.

He wasn’t afraid now. The frenzy that used to take him over couldn’t touch him now. That was the old Pete. The new Pete wasn’t scared of noises and colors and things that moved too fast.

The new Pete was just bored.

An avatar floated by and Pete knew it. Even without the stabbing bright blue eyes, without the shrieking voice. He knew her. His sister, Astrid. A pattern, a shape, a coil of strings.

He felt very lonely.

Had he ever felt lonely before?

He felt it now. And he longed to reach out, and with just the smallest touch, to let her know he was here.

But, oh, so delicate, those avatars. And his fingers were all thumbs.

The joke made him laugh.

Had he ever laughed before?

He laughed now. And that was enough for a while, at least.

Albert had made the decision early on to play Caine’s ridiculous game of royalty. If Caine wanted to call himself king, and if he wanted people to call him “Your Highness,” well, that didn’t cost Albert a single ’Berto.

The truth was Caine did keep the peace. He enforced rules, and Albert liked and needed rules.

There had been very little shoplifting at the mall, the ironically named stalls and card tables that were the market outside the school.

There had been fewer fights. Fewer threats. Albert had even seen a decline in the number of weapons being carried. Not much of a decline, but every now and then you could actually see a kid forgetting to carry his nail-studded baseball bat or machete.

Those were good signs.

Best of all, kids showed up for work and they put in a full day.

King Caine scared kids. And Albert paid them. And between the threat and the reward, things were running more smoothly than they ever had under Sam or Astrid.

So if Caine wanted to be called king . . .

“Your Highness, I’m here with my report,” Albert said.

He stood patiently while Caine, seated at his desk, pretended to be absorbed in reading something.

Finally, Caine looked up, affecting an expression of unconcern.

“Go ahead, Albert,” Caine said.

“The good news: Water continues to flow from the cloud. The stream is clean—most of the dirt and debris and old oil and so on has been washed away. So it’s probably drinkable down at the beach reservoir as well as directly from the rain. Flow rate is twenty gallons an hour. Four hundred and eighty gallons a day, which is more than we need for drinking, with enough left over to water gardens and so on.”

“Washing?”

Albert shook his head. “No. And we can’t have kids showering in the rain as it falls, either. Kids are washing their butts in what will end up being drinking water once we open the reservoir.”

“I’ll make a proclamation,” Caine said.

There were times Albert almost couldn’t resist the impulse to laugh. Proclamation. But he kept a straight, impassive face.

“Food is not as good,” Albert went on. “I made a graph.” He drew a nine-by-twelve poster board from his briefcase and held it so Caine could see it.

“Here’s food production over the last week. Good and steady. You see a drop today because we have nothing from the fishing crews. And this dotted line is the food supply over the next week, projected.”

Caine’s face darkened. He bit at his thumbnail, then stopped himself.

“As you know, Cai—Your Highness . . . sixty percent of our vegetables and fruit comes from worm-infested fields. Eighty percent of our protein comes from the sea. Without Quinn we have nothing to feed the worms. Which means picking and planting basically stop. To make matters worse, there’s a crazy story going around about one of the artichoke pickers being turned into a fish.”

“What?”

“It’s just a crazy rumor, but right now no one is harvesting artichokes.”

Caine cursed and shook his head slowly.

Albert put away the graph and said, “In three days we’ll have major hunger. A week from now kids will start dying. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous things get when kids get hungry.”

“We can replace Quinn. Get other kids out in other boats,” Caine said.

Albert shook his head. “There’s a learning curve. It took Quinn a long time to get to be as good and efficient as he is. Plus he has the best boats, and he has all the nets and poles. If we decided to replace him, it would be probably five weeks before we would get production back up to nonstarvation levels.”

“Then we’d better get started,” Caine snapped.

“No,” Albert said. Then added, “Your Highness.”

Caine slammed his fist down on the desk. “I’m not giving in to Quinn! Quinn is not the king! I am! Me!”

“I offered him more money. He isn’t looking for more money,” Albert said.

Caine jumped up from his chair. “Of course not. Not everyone is you, Albert. Not everyone is a money-grubbing . . .” He decided against finishing that thought, but kept ranting. “It’s power he wants. He wants to bring me down. He and Sam Temple are friends from way, way back. I should have never let him stay. I should have made him go with Sam!”

“He fishes in the ocean, and we’re on the ocean,” Albert pointed out. This kind of outburst irritated Albert. It was a waste of time.

Caine seemed not to have heard. “Meanwhile Sam’s sitting up there with that lake stocked with fish, and his own fields, and somehow he has Nutella and Pepsi and Cup-a-Noodles, and what do you think happens if kids here start thinking we have no food?” Caine was red in the face. Furious. Albert reminded himself that Caine, while an out-of-control ego-maniac, was also extremely powerful and dangerous. He decided against answering the question.

“We both know what happens,” Caine said bitterly. “Kids leave town and head for the lake.” He glared at Albert as if it was all Albert’s fault. “This is why it’s no good having two different towns. Kids can just go where they want.”

Caine threw himself back in his chair but banged his knee on the desk. With an angry sweep of his hand he threw the desk crashing into the wall. The impact was hard enough to knock the ancient pictures down, all those ego shots of the original mayor. The desk left a long, triangular dent in the wall.

Caine sat chewing his thumbnail and Albert stood thinking of all the more useful things he could be doing. At last Caine used his powers to scoot the desk back into place. He seemed to need something to lean on in a dramatic fashion, because that was what he did, placing his elbows on the table, forming his fingers into a steeple, an almost prayerful position, and tapping the fingertips thoughtfully against his forehead.

“You’re my adviser, Albert,” Caine said. “What do you advise?”

Since when had Albert become an adviser? But he said, “Okay, since you ask, I think you should send Penny away.” When Caine started to object, Albert, finally evincing his impatience, raised his hand. “First, because Penny is a sick, unstable person. She was bound to cause problems, and she’ll cause more. Second, because what happened to Cigar turns everyone against you. It’s not just Quinn: everyone thinks it’s wrong. And third, if you don’t and if Quinn stands firm, this town will empty out.”

And if you don’t, Albert added silently, I will suddenly learn about a cache of missiles up the coast. And you, King Caine, will go to take them.

Caine’s prayerful hands fell flat on the desk. “If I give in, everyone will think . . .” He took a shaky breath. “I’m the king. They’ll think I can be beaten.”

Albert was actually surprised. “Of course you can be beaten. Your Highness. Everyone can be beaten.”

“Except for you, right, Albert?” Caine said bitterly.

Albert knew he shouldn’t let himself be baited. But the cheap shot rankled. “Turk and Lance shot me,” he said, with his hand on the doorknob. “I’m only alive because of luck and Lana. Believe me: I stopped thinking I was unbeatable.”

And made plans, he thought, but did not say.

FOURTEEN

24
HOURS
, 29
MINUTES

THEY WATCHED
MOHAMED
leave.

Then, when she was sure Sam had at least a couple of minutes to think clearly, Astrid told him what they had found in the desert. “Edilio’s bringing it in so we can take a look at it. I came straight back. When they get it here I’ll see what I can learn.”

Sam seemed barely to pay attention. His eyes were drawn toward the barrier. He wasn’t alone. The stain was clearly visible to kids as they worked. The kids out in the fields probably wouldn’t notice, but the ones still here in the town around the marina couldn’t avoid seeing it.

They came in ones or twos or threes to ask Sam what it meant. And he would say, “Get back to work. If you need to worry, I’ll let you know.”

Each time he said it—and it must have been two dozen times—he used the same gruff but ultimately reassuring voice.

But Astrid knew better. She could feel the tension bleeding from his every pore. She saw the way the corners of his mouth tugged downward, the way his forehead formed twin vertical worry lines between his eyes.

He didn’t need some new thing to worry about. So the awful freak monster thing she and Edilio had found, that would have to wait. Because all Sam had time for right now was the mesmerizing advance of the stain. His imagination was torturing him. She could see it in the way his hands would form into fists, tighten and then release, but the release was forced, conscious, and accompanied each time by a deliberate exhalation.