Light (10 page)

The urge to kick him was almost too much to resist.

“Go ahead,” Dekka said, as if she’d read Astrid’s thoughts.

It took Astrid a while to react, to slowly shake her head no. She hated Drake; there was no denying it. But she couldn’t give in to that. She had to use what she had been given.

“Tell us about Gaia, Drake,” she said.

His answer was voiceless but easy enough to decipher.

“Yeah, you don’t seem to have the body parts to do that,” Dekka said.

“Hah! I told him the same thing,” Brianna said with a happy grin.

“I’m just going to, um, not be here anymore,” Roger said, and beat a retreat.

“You had a bag of dead lizards and a couple eggs,” Astrid said. “Why was that?”

Drake cursed foully. But softly.

“Where are Diana and Gaia?” Astrid asked Drake.

“Better just chop him up,” Brianna said. “I can spread the parts of his head all over like I did the rest of him. I only brought him to show Sam.”

Astrid and Dekka exchanged a look. They were in charge at the lake. It was their call. But neither wanted to decide without Edilio. This was not exactly one of the contingencies they had discussed beforehand.

A thought occurred to Astrid. “He morphed from Brittney back to Drake. He’ll sooner or later go the other way. Brittney may be easier to talk to.”

Dekka nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. She might be of some use if we can get her to talk.”

“We can’t be careless, though,” Astrid said. “We don’t know what his capabilities are. Maybe he can regenerate beyond just his head. For all we know the separate parts can regenerate.” She glanced uneasily at Brianna. “Do you know where you put all the parts?”

“Yes,” Brianna said, but with definite uncertainty in her tone, accentuated by the way she stared up and off to one corner as if trying to remember.

“If he can regenerate . . .,” Dekka began.

“Then we could have a bunch of Drakes, one from each severed part.”

“Are you guys going to turn this into a bad thing?” Brianna asked shrilly. “I
got
him! I got him and I sliced him up. And I brought you the head.”

“You did great, Breeze,” Dekka said. “But do us a favor and check on some of those parts. Make sure they’re where you left them, huh?”

“Okay, I just have to eat something first. I ran a hundred miles, probably.” She zipped away, leaving Astrid and Dekka, and the head, which was still making faint vocalizations of an unpleasant nature.

“I have an idea,” Dekka said. “There’s a cooler in my trailer. I get it, I poke some holes in it, put the head in, weigh it down with rocks, and we sink him at the end of a long rope. Maybe it’ll even kill him.”

Astrid sighed. “This would be a story not to tell the
Today
show. I’ll start getting some rocks.”

DRAKE COULD
HEAR
perfectly well, although there was something of an echo effect. But pretty well given that his head was separated from his body and split in two still-somewhat-mismatched halves.

He had heard what they were planning. And he was afraid. It was an odd kind of fear, disconnected from his body: there was no stomach-churning, no shortness of breath, no quickening of his pulse.

But he was afraid. He had spent long weeks buried underground—it had had an effect on him. He was not quite human, but he could still feel fear.

And pain. Not like he would have in the old days, but still . . . he could feel the body that was no longer attached to his head.

He itched for his whip hand. God, he would make these two witches pay. Oh, definitely. He could picture it. He had pictured it, many times, especially Astrid. How long had he hated her? Probably from their very first meeting. She was just that kind of girl: hate at first sight.

But now . . .

Dekka, the dyke, was using a Phillips screwdriver to poke holes in the plastic cooler. It wasn’t easy—she was slamming it again and again, like some crazy killer. She’d already put a couple of dozen holes in it.

Astrid was just standing there, watching her, and looking back at Drake. He knew she wanted to say something to him. She wanted to tell him,
Hah, see, now it’s me on top. Now it’s me looking down at you
. She couldn’t hide the look of triumph, not from Drake.

“Ready,” Dekka said.

Astrid squatted down. She grabbed a handful of his hair, and suddenly he was up and swinging through the air.

He saw the cooler with its top open. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t manage that much noise, and he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

Astrid set him down—didn’t drop him, set him down—in the cooler.

“I have a bike chain I can wrap around it,” Dekka said. “Then I’ll tie the rope around the whole thing, in case we need to haul him back up.”

“Drake,” Astrid said. “Last chance: tell us where we can find Gaia and Diana.”

For a terrible moment Drake considered it. But he knew that whatever these two could do was nothing next to the pain the gaiaphage could inflict.

He cursed weakly.

The two of them set heavy chunks of broken concrete in beside him. Astrid closed the lid. Darkness stabbed through with beams of light from the holes.

The cooler rocked back and forth with much scraping noise as they wrapped the chain and then the rope.

“That’ll hold,” Dekka said.

Drake felt the cooler being lifted. It teetered precariously as they almost lost their grip.

Then: A short drop. A splash.

Water began seeping in through the screwdriver holes as air leaked out. Water came in from all directions, like some kind of awful multihead shower. Soon there was an inch of water in the bottom, and when Drake tried to curse, it was lake water that he sucked up into his severed throat.

The descent seemed to take forever. Then: a bump as the cooler landed on the lake bottom.

It took ten minutes for the box to fill completely with water as it rose over his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and finally swirled his hair.

But he was not dead.

Tiny fish, guppies, came sneaking in through the holes. They nibbled at him, but stopped once they’d had a taste. Still, they swirled around him, faintly luminescent in the dark water, like dull fireflies.

They looked into his ears. They poked curious heads into his nose. They swam up into his esophagus and from there up into his mouth.

They were still there when Drake began screaming without sound as he changed into Brittney.

The idea of facing Taylor without a cigarette was bothering Lana quite a bit. Not that she was addicted to cigarettes, she told herself; it wasn’t anything like that. Only a very weak person would become addicted, and she was not weak.

The fact that she’d been shaking and even more snappish than usual all day absolutely did not prove that she was addicted. Neither did the fact that she’d spent much of the day searching for smokes or cursing Sanjit.

And yet she was thinking of cigarettes even as she turned the key in the lock. The old electronic key system at the hotel didn’t work, of course, but she hadn’t wanted to leave Taylor free to just walk away—like she could anyway—so Lana had told Sanjit to screw a lock onto the door. He was handy that way. It was almost a pity she would have to shoot him.

Strange the idea of locking Taylor up. Before her recent—well, it wasn’t quite a mutation; no one knew what it was—anyway, before all this, she’d had the power to teleport. To “bounce,” as she called it, from one place to the next with just a thought. Maybe she still could, but she’d have a hard time standing up when she got wherever she was going.

Lana slid open the bolt.

“Taylor. It’s me.”

She opened the door. No one had ever closed the curtains in the room, so it was bright with the slanting rays of the setting sun. Different light now. Hard to say what made it different; it just was. The old sky and the old sun had had a seasonless sameness to them. This sun—the real sun—set a little earlier, and a low cloud bank out beyond the barrier bent the light into shades of yellow and gold.

It was a different gold than the gold color of Taylor’s skin: Taylor was more metallic. Almost as if she really was made of actual gold. She sat propped up in the hotel bed, leaning on her one stump arm, the other complete arm in her lap. Her legs had been placed on the bed with her, but one had fallen off and was on the floor.

Taylor was completely nude, but it didn’t matter. She had none of the signs of gender. She was a golden Gumby with one arm and a long, green, reptilian tongue.

The best theory anyone had was that it had been done by Little Pete. Little Pete was not thought to have done it maliciously—Petey was incapable of malice. Or any intention, really. He might be the most powerful person in the FAYZ but he was still, despite it all, a five-year-old autistic kid. Couldn’t blame him. He’d probably just been playing. A heedless, unaware little god.

With great power comes great responsibility, Lana thought, recalling the line from the Spider-Man movie. But Little Pete had all kinds of power and no responsibility.

“Let’s try the hand again, Taylor,” Lana said. “Where is it?”

Maybe Taylor understood what she was saying, maybe not. Her ears looked normal, but who knew what went on down inside them? And who knew what went on in her brain? Or if she still had a brain?

Lana couldn’t find the hand, which was disturbing. She’d had no evidence that Taylor could move off her bed. Then she found it all the way across the room and behind the permanently off television. Were the parts moving on their own? Once, Brianna had told Lana that Drake could do that: reassemble. As if the parts had lives of their own. Was Taylor the same sort of thing Drake now was? Or at least similar?

No. Drake still looked like Drake. Taylor . . . well . . . But maybe there was some kind of similarity. It was a puzzle. A creepy, creepy puzzle.

Lana carried the cold thing back and pressed it against Taylor’s stump. She focused her thoughts on healing the stump. Had Taylor been a regular human, it might well have worked. It wouldn’t be the first appendage Lana had reattached. But it wasn’t working, just as it hadn’t worked on earlier efforts.

“What do I do with you?” Lana asked Taylor. “What are you? You’re sure not human. Or even mammal, obviously. Or . . .”

A thought struck her. Was she sure Taylor was even an animal?

A second more perverse thought popped into her head: what would happen if she dragged Taylor out to the balcony to wave to the lookers out there?
Hey there, tourists, check this
out! That should keep your nightmares fresh for a while
.

She wondered how much The Powers That Be in the FAYZ—Sam, Caine, Edilio, and Astrid—had thought about the outside world’s view of what was going on. The reality in the FAYZ was way weirder than the lookers could imagine. This wasn’t just a bunch of kids trapped in a bubble; it was an unprecedented event in the history of the planet. The barrier wasn’t the only thing separating inside from outside—things could happen here that just flat
could not exist
out there.

For example: a girl able to heal with a touch.

“Yeah, let’s not even start thinking about that,” she told herself. She looked at Taylor, a pretty girl with dead eyes and golden skin and black hair like a sheet of rubber. “Are you more like a plant?”

No answer.

“Are you made out of Play-Doh?”

There came a soft knock at the door. “Can I come in?”

“Why not?” she answered sourly.

Sanjit stepped in. “Any change?”

Lana shook her head. “What if she isn’t an animal? If she was a plant, what would we do if we wanted to try and reattach a broken stem or whatever? Bring me a knife. The big sharp one.”

“A plant?”

He fetched the knife.

“Now, hold her stump,” Lana said.

Sanjit shuddered. “You know, Lana, that’s one of those phrases I could have gone my whole life without hearing. ‘Hold her stump.’” He had seen a lot in his life and dealt with some serious weirdness, but Taylor gave him the willies. Nevertheless, he came around the bed, stepping over Lana’s legs, and took hold of the stump.

Lana took the knife and began to shave off a thin slice of the stump. Taylor turned her head to watch, but there was no evidence it was causing her any pain or concern. Sanjit, on the other hand, was turning green.

Lana removed an oval slice and picked it up like a piece of bologna. She held it to the light, inspecting it critically. Then she laid it aside and took a similar slice from the hand. Then she pressed the two newly cut pieces together.

“Get me some duct tape,” Lana said.

“Some what?”

“Some tape,” she said impatiently. “Tape. Staples. Whatever.”

It took Sanjit twenty minutes, and he came back with a roll of white Velcro.

“How am I going to Velcro this?”

“It’s adhesive-backed. It’s like tape. I couldn’t find tape. I found a stapler, but this will be better. Also less disturbing.”

“Wimp. Get me a cigarette.”

He pulled another half cigarette from his pocket, stuck it in her lips—she was busy holding the hand and the arm together—and lit it.

Then he rolled out a foot of Velcro, cut it, and carefully taped the body parts together.

An hour later they carefully unwound the tape.

“Huh. It’s adhering,” Lana said. “A little, anyway. Huh. Wow. You think you could manage a trip into town?”

“Why? So you can try to find your smokes with me out of the way?”

“Yeah, that, too. But mostly I was thinking you could bring Sinder back here. I saw her in town, down from the lake. Or she might be out at the barrier playing wave-at-the-’rents. Either way, get her: she has a green thumb.”

“I don’t feel it,” Sam said.

Caine shook his head. “Me neither.”

They were at the entrance to the mine shaft. They hadn’t even discussed their first stop; they’d both just known that it had to be here. This mine shaft was where the gaiaphage had lain for years, growing and festering. This had been the nexus of the evil, its home.