Gone Series Complete Collection (47 page)

The SUV’s headlights illuminated the field where he lay. Two kids, a boy and a girl, were silhouetted by the glare. Neither of them was Drake Merwin.

Jack dared to breathe. He didn’t dare stand up.

“We saw you driving around out here with your lights off,” the girl said accusingly.

Jack wondered how she could have seen him on a pitch-black night. He didn’t ask, but she provided the answer, anyway.

“Even if you have your headlights off, your brake lights still come on. I guess you didn’t think of that.”

“I’m not very experienced at driving,” Jack said.

“Who are you?” the boy, who looked to be Jack’s age, asked.

“Me? I’m . . . Jack. People call me Computer Jack.”

The girl had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed the barrel at Jack’s face.

“Don’t shoot me,” he begged.

“You’re on our land, and we protect our land,” the girl said. “Why shouldn’t we shoot you?”

“I have to . . . if I don’t . . . Listen, if I don’t get to Perdido Beach, something awful is going to happen.”

The girl had an odd combination of pigtails and a hard face made even harder by the harsh white light from the SUV. She seemed unimpressed. She was maybe eleven or twelve and it occurred to Jack that there was so much resemblance that the boy had to be her brother.

The boy said, “He doesn’t look dangerous.” To Jack, he said, “How come they call you Computer Jack?”

“Because I know a lot about computers.”

The boy thought awhile and said, “Can you fix a Wii?”

Jack nodded violently, digging dirt into his hair. “I could try. But really, really, I have to get to Perdido Beach. It’s really important.”

“Well, my Wii is important to me. So if you fix my Wii, I won’t let Emily shoot you. I guess not getting shot would be as important as you getting to Perdido Beach, huh?”

“Hi, Mary,” Quinn said. She met him at the door of the day care classroom. “I’m heading up top.”

Mary closed the door quickly behind her. “I don’t want the kids to see the guns,” she said. She herself was staring at the weapon.

“Mary, I don’t want to see it my own self,” Quinn said.

“Are you scared?”

“Pee-less.”

“Me too.” She touched Quinn’s arm. “God bless you.”

“Yeah. Let’s hope so, huh?” He wanted to stay and talk to her. Anything to avoid climbing up on the roof with a machine gun. But Mary had her duty, and he had his. He was ashamed to realize that he yearned to go into that day care room and just hide in there with Mary.

He went through the day care to the alleyway in back. He slung the machine pistol carefully and climbed the rickety aluminum ladder.

The day care and the hardware shared a roof. It was flat, gravel and tar, adorned only by several vertical pipes and two ancient air-conditioning units. The roof was encircled by a parapet, a three-foot-high wall topped with cracked Spanish tile.

Quinn went to the corner facing the church and town hall. He watched as Sam and Dekka marched off.

“Don’t screw up today,” Quinn told himself. “Just don’t screw up.”

The ladder rattled, and something blurred over onto the roof. Quinn swung his gun around. The blur resolved itself into the figure of Brianna.

“You have got to stop doing that, Brianna,” Quinn said.

Brianna smiled and said, “The Breeze. My name is the Breeze.”

“You are way too into this,” Quinn grumbled. “I mean, what are you, ten?”

“I’m eleven. I’ll be twelve in a month.” Brianna pulled a claw hammer from her belt and brandished it. “Caine and Drake had me starving to death with a cinder block on each hand. I wasn’t too young for Caine and Drake to almost kill me.”

“Yeah.” Quinn wished she would go away and leave him in peace, but it was her assignment to move between Quinn and Edilio and Sam and anyone else, carrying messages. “So. How fast can you go, Brianna?”

“I don’t know. Fast enough that people almost can’t see me.”

“Doesn’t it kind of wear you out?”

“Not really. But it kind of tears up my shoes.” She raised one foot to show him a worn sole on her sneakers. “And I have to keep my hair in pigtails or it whips around and stings my eyes.” She gave her braided pigtails a toss.

“Must be weird. Having powers.”

“You don’t have any?”

He shook his head. “No. Nothing. I’m just . . . me.”

“You know Sam real well, right?”

He nodded. It was a question he got a lot from Coates kids.

“Do you think he’ll win?” she asked.

“Guess we better hope so, huh?”

Brianna looked at her hands, the hands that had been imprisoned in concrete. “That’s why it doesn’t matter that I’m just eleven: we have to win.”

Sam fought a sense of doom as he walked with Dekka toward the school. He wasn’t afraid of getting hurt, mostly; after all, he expected to end the day by poofing, and then . . . well, he didn’t know what.

The dread was fear of failure. Whatever happened to him, he had Astrid to think about. And Little Pete, because Astrid would be shattered if anything happened to Little Pete. Not to mention the fact that Little Pete might be the only one in all of existence who could end the FAYZ.

He had to beat Caine for her. For them. For all of them, all the kids. And that weighed him down like he was carrying an elephant on his back.

He had to win. Had to make sure Astrid was safe. Then he could blink out if that had to be.

But the closer he got, the more he doubted his decision. He was deviating from the plan, which meant no one would really know what role they were supposed to play. Caine going to the school had thrown everything off.

They stopped a block from the edge of the school grounds. Sam keyed the walkie-talkie.

“Has anything changed?”

“No,” Astrid said. “The cars are parked. Panda is by the front door. The light’s fading fast, so I can’t be totally sure. Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“I think Panda has a gun.”

“Okay.”

“Be careful.”

“Uh-huh.” He signed off. He wanted to tell her one more time that he loved her, but that seemed almost like tempting fate. He was already thinking too much about Astrid and not enough about Caine.

“Okay, Dekka, there’s no way to sneak up. I have to be within sight before I take Panda down.”

Dekka nodded. Her mouth was tight, like she couldn’t open it at all. She was breathing hard, tense. Scared.

“I’m going to count to three. On three we go. All out. As soon as I can, I try to nail Panda. You do your thing when we get to the door. Ready?”

She didn’t answer. For what felt like a very long minute she just stared at emptiness. Then at last she croaked, “I’m ready.”

“One. Two. Three.”

They burst from cover and started running, flat out. They closed the distance to the edge of the school grounds and were pounding across the turf before Panda spotted them and yelped.

“Don’t do it, Panda,” Sam warned, yelling as loud as he could while running.

Panda hesitated, hefting the gun, not quite raising it to fire.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Sam shouted.

Fifty feet away.

Panda aimed and fired.

The bullet flew wide.

Panda gaped at the weapon like he was seeing it for the first time.

“No,” Sam yelled.

Thirty feet.

Panda raised the gun again. His face was a fright mask of fear and indecision.

Sam dropped to the ground, rolled, and came up in a squatting position as Panda fired again.

Sam extended his arm, fingers splayed. The green-white light missed Panda and burned a hole in the brick beside his head.

Panda threw down the gun, turned, and ran.

Ten feet.

“Dekka, get the door.”

Dekka raised her hands high and gravity beneath the door was suspended. The whole wall, including the door frame, lurched suddenly, as if struck by a truck from the other side. The door swung slowly open. Loose dirt and fallen mortar shot straight up toward the sky.

Dekka dropped her hands and the dirt fell back to earth, the bricks slumped and cracked, the door jamb sagged and splintered.

Sam fired into the dark interior through the open door. He and Dekka barreled through and slammed back against opposite walls, panting and ready. Paper signs and once-colorful posters on the walls burned and curled from Sam’s blast.

There was no sound.

Sam glanced at Dekka. She looked as scared as he felt.

They edged along the hallway, nerves taut, eyes searching each doorway.

The office was on the right side, fronted by a reinforced glass wall. Sam crept closer. Peered inside. Nothing. Lights still on from the day of the FAYZ.

Should he move on without checking the office thoroughly? If one of Caine’s people was in there, Sam and Dekka could end up surrounded. Sam made a motion to Dekka: go in.

Dekka shook her head violently.

“Okay,” Sam said. “I got it.”

He crossed the hallway quickly and opened the door himself. Something large flew at him, he ducked instinctively, but he’d been hit, smacked a glancing blow that spun him around.

A boy with dark hair was crouched atop the school secretary’s desk. He held a wooden club, short and thick, in one hand. The boy grinned. Then he leaped again, fast as a jungle cat.

Sam was caught off guard and landed hard, banging his head on the floor. He saw stars.

He rolled over, but the move was sluggish. The boy had jumped away to safety and was gathering himself for another assault.

Suddenly the boy, the papers and mementos on the desk, and the desk itself lifted off the floor, flew straight up, and smashed into the low ceiling.

The boy had just long enough to register surprise and pain before Dekka restored gravity and he dropped like a rock. Sam reached him before he could recover, knelt with one knee on his chest, and grabbed his head with both his hands.

“Twitch and your head’s a cinder,” Sam said.

The boy went limp.

“Good decision,” Sam said. “Dekka, get his club. Find some duct tape.” To the boy he said, “Who are you? And where’s Caine?”

“I’m Frederico. Don’t burn me up.”

“Where’s Caine?”

“Not here. They all went out the back as soon as we got here. They left me and Panda.”

Sam’s insides twisted. “They left?”

Frederico read the fear in Sam’s eyes. “You can’t beat Caine. Him and Drake, they have it all scoped.”

“I found tape,” Dekka said. “You want me to tie him up?”

“It’s a diversion,” Sam said. He punched Frederico in the nose, hard enough to distract him. Frederico roared in pain.

“Now tape him up. Fast.” He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Astrid.”

Her voice was barely audible. “Sam. Oh, my God.”

“What’s happening?”

Her answer was too garbled to understand. But in snatches of static, he heard fear.

“I screwed up,” Sam said. “It was all a trick.”

FORTY-TWO

02
HOURS
, 23
MINUTES

“QUINN. QUINN.”

“Is someone yelling my name?” Quinn wondered.

Brianna pointed at the steeple. Quinn squinted and saw Astrid in dark silhouette waving her arms like a crazy person, pointing, gesticulating, yelling something.

“I’ll go see what she wants,” Brianna volunteered. She blurred, then she stopped suddenly, having just reached the top of the ladder. “Oh, my God, look.”

Racing through the street, coming up from the south, pouring down the alley, came a swarm of rough, yellow canines. They threaded through parked cars, bounded over fire hydrants, paused briefly to sniff at garbage, but overall moved with shocking speed.

They were going straight for the day care.

Brianna began pulling the ladder up. Quinn jumped to help her. They slid it up and out of the way as the first coyotes passed beneath.

“What do I do?” Quinn cried.

“Shoot them,” Brianna said.

“Coyotes? Shoot coyotes?”

“They’re not here by accident,” Brianna yelled.

One coyote, hearing them, glanced up.

“Quiet,” Quinn hissed. He crouched behind the wall and clutched the machine pistol to his chest.

“Quinn, they’re going after the littles,” Brianna said.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Yes, you do.”

Quinn shook his head violently. “No. No one told me to shoot coyotes.”

Brianna peeked over the side and sat back down very suddenly. “It’s him. Drake. And he’s . . . there’s something wrong with him.”

Quinn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to, but Brianna’s ashen face made looking the less terrifying option. He rose just enough to get a view of the alleyway.

Swaggering along behind the coyotes came Drake Merwin.

He held in his hand a long, thick red whip.

Only he wasn’t holding it in his hand. The whip was his hand.

“Shoot him,” Brianna urged. “Do it.”

Quinn unlimbered the gun. He laid the short barrel on the Spanish tile and aimed. Drake wasn’t running, he wasn’t moving furtively, he was right in the middle of the alleyway in plain view.

“I can’t get a shot at him,” Quinn said.

“You’re lying,” Brianna accused.

Quinn licked his lips. He aimed. He wrapped his finger around the trigger.

Impossible to miss from here. Drake was no more than thirty feet away. Quinn had practiced firing the machine pistol. He had fired it at a tree trunk and seen the way it chewed through wood.

Squeeze the trigger, and the bullets would chew through Drake the same way.

Squeeze the trigger.

Drake passed directly below.

“He’s gone,” Quinn whispered.

“I couldn’t . . . ,” he said.

From the day care below there came the screams of terrified children.

Mary Terrafino had had a very bad day. That morning she’d had a major pig-out, a real gorge-a-thon, as she called it. She had found a carton of snack-sized Doritos. She’d sat and torn through twenty-four snack packs.

Then she had vomited it all back up. But even that didn’t seem like enough to cleanse her of the offending food, so she had taken a strong laxative. The laxative kept her running back and forth to the bathroom all day.