Light (11 page)

“Should we go in and check?”

“No,” Caine said. “I’ve been in. It wasn’t enjoyable.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t,” Caine said flatly.

Caine felt Sam watching him, impatient, ready to move on. But Caine was mesmerized by that dark, blank opening. Once, it had been neatly framed with timber, but now it was more of a gash in the ground, a twisted mouth with stone teeth.

The memory of it . . . Dread had left a permanent mark on him. Pain. Fear.

Loneliness.

“Lana knows,” Caine said at last. “And I guess Diana does now, too.” That thought, that realization, something he should have long since acknowledged, rocked him.

When he had come crawling away from this terrible place and found his way home, shattered and insane, Diana had helped him. Who had helped Diana?

“Once it touches your mind, see . . .,” Caine said, “once it really reaches inside you, it doesn’t let go. It doesn’t just stop. It’s like a, you know, like a wound, like you got cut real badly, and you stitched it up, but it won’t really heal.”

“Lana fought it,” Sam said.

“So did I!” Caine snapped. Then, more quietly, “So did I. I still do. It’s still in my head. It still reaches out to me sometimes.” He nodded, now almost seeming to have forgotten Sam.
“Hungry in the dark.”

He had fought it. But he hadn’t fought it alone.

What the hell? He felt tears in his eyes. He tried to shake it off. Diana had spoon-fed him, and protected him, and cleaned him. And what had he done? He’d been sitting in Perdido Beach feeling sorry for himself while she was out there. With
it
.

“Is that what you’re going to tell people if we get out of this?” Sam asked. “That the gaiaphage made you do it? Because I don’t buy it.”

If Sam expected a furious answer, Caine disappointed him. He wasn’t going to let Sam bait him. At the moment he didn’t care about Sam.

The failing light was casting long shadows. They would need to think about finding a place to spend the night.

“Won’t make any difference what I say,” Caine said softly. “Won’t be me telling the story. It’ll be a hundred kids if we get out of here. All those kids who mostly just kept their heads down all through this, they’ll be the ones telling the story.”

“Why do you say that?”

Caine laughed. “Sometimes you are so naive. You think you and me and the other big deals are going to be the only ones talking to whoever? The cops? The FBI? Don’t be stupid. You think the adults are going to listen to us? They’ll be afraid of us.”

“You think we’ll still have our powers? Even if we did—”

“It’s not about that, Sammy boy.” Caine turned his back on the mine shaft. It seemed to take a great deal of effort for him to do that, and once he’d accomplished it he nodded like yes, yes he could do it. “It’s not about the powers, man; it’s that we aren’t kids anymore. Look what we’ve been through. Look what we’ve done. Look at yourself, surfer dude. We’ve done something none of our parents have even come close to. We didn’t take over their boring world; we took over a world about a thousand times tougher. If we walk out of this alive, we won’t have to bow our heads to anyone. There’ll be guys who were in wars hearing what we did and thinking, ‘Whoa.’ You and me, we can say, ‘You got yourself some medals, soldier? Yeah, well, I lived through the FAYZ.’”

“I haven’t thought much past wanting to get out of here and have a pizza.” Sam was trying to lighten the mood, probably because what Caine was saying made Sam squirm.

But Caine wasn’t done. “They’ll be afraid of us, brother, not because we can shoot light out of our hands or throw people through walls, but because we’ll be the living proof that they’re nothing special just because they’re old. They’ll fear us and they’ll hate us. Most of them, anyway. And they’ll try to use us, make money off us.” He sighed. “You don’t know much about human nature, do you?”

At last Caine smirked and nodded his head, satisfied with himself and satisfied as well with the troubled expression on Sam’s face.

Sam said, “Yeah, well getting back to reality here, we should make sure the gaiaphage doesn’t come back this way. Let’s shut this place down once and for all.”

Caine spun on his heel, looked back at the mine shaft. “Now, that is an excellent suggestion.” He raised his hands, palms out. Loose rock from all around the mine entrance hurtled into the pit. Boulders rose and suddenly veered, fast as jet fighters, to crash into the hole. Pebbles and rocks and bushes and dirt and bits of broken timber all flew at the entrance.

The noise was a screaming hurricane.

“That outcropping up there, that big rock?” Sam pointed to a sun-bleached boulder about the size of a house. “If I get it to break loose, can you handle it?”

“Let’s find out.”

Sam aimed green beams of light at the rock and held them on target for several minutes. The rock went from orange-by-sunset to a deep, glowing red. There was a loud cracking sound, and half of it broke away, a single very big, very hot boulder.

Caine focused and stopped its slide down the hill. He swung it left and let it drop just to the side of the cave entrance.

“Break it up a little more,” Caine said.

Sam focused the killing light again and held it until the face of the rock began to melt. It fell into two uneven pieces, which Caine easily drew back and then hurled into the mine shaft entrance, blocking it completely.

Sam once again focused energy and held it for a very long time, lighting the mountain’s face with the green glow, until the rock softened into magma and crumbled wetly into the shaft entrance.

Finally he stopped. The boulder formed a welded plug that would have to be blasted out with a great deal of dynamite should anyone wish to dislodge it.

Without looking at Caine, Sam said, “Something we’re good at.”

“Yep. Something we’re good at. But listen to me, Sammy boy, I have one rule for when we throw down with the gaiaphage: Diana doesn’t get hurt.”

It took Sam completely by surprise. “We may have no choice.”

“You’re not listening. I’m going with you to kill what some would call my daughter, although I don’t think she’s anyone’s daughter. But if I suspect you’re going to hurt Diana, our peace treaty ends. We clear on that?”

Sam nodded. “We’re clear.”

“Deep down, she’s a good person, Diana is,” Caine said, and sighed. “Deep down, I’m not. But she is.”

AS SOON
AS
the lights came on, so to speak, Albert had known he had made a mistake. He had seen doom, nothing but doom coming as the dome went dark. But then, like something out of the book of Genesis, it was “Let there be light.”

And there
was
light.

Now as he stood sourly recalling his own failure of judgment, the sun, the actual sun, was setting out over the ocean, and Perdido Beach was touched with gold.

In this light Albert pretty much looked like he’d panicked. In this light he didn’t look like the prescient, cold-eyed businessman. He looked like a coward.

Standing on the southernmost point of San Francisco de Sales Island over these last three terrible days he’d seen that the wild, terrified mobs of kids had not, as he’d expected, burned Perdido Beach to the ground just to provide light as he’d expected. In fact, he was looking now through a very good telescope he’d found in the Brattle-Chance home, and while he could certainly not make out faces, he could see people in town. And he could see beyond town to the motels that had been built, and the fast-food restaurant, and the news trucks. Out there.

And now all was being revealed to that wider out-there world.

Had it happened just a week earlier, he, Albert Hillsborough, would have been one of the great heroes of the FAYZ. Who had kept the McDonald’s running while there was still electricity? Albert Hillsborough. Who had created the market up at the school? Albert Hillsborough. Who had created a stable currency—the ’Berto—using gold and McDonald’s game pieces? Albert Hillsborough.

He had put people to work.

He had saved them all from starvation. Everyone knew it.

My God, had it all ended then, he could have written his own ticket. He was barely in high school and he would have had university business schools lining up to give him a full scholarship.

Albert Hillsborough—Harvard MBA
.

Recently graduated Albert Hillsborough offered vice presidency at General Electric
.

Albert Hillsborough named youngest president ever of Sony Corporation
.

All of it lost in a moment of panic. The story might already be out there. Half the country might already despise him.

Albert Hillsborough buys waterfront villa in the south of France. Says, “I needed some place to dock my yacht.”

Albert Hillsborough hosts party aboard his yacht. George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Olivia Wilde, and Sasha Obama in attendance
.

But he really had done all those good things, and he’d done them without ever raising his hand against anyone, and without any so-called powers he had saved everything.

Just by being smart. Not a genius like Astrid, just smart. By working hard. By not giving up.

Albert Hillsborough dating supermodel. “Marriage not in the plans,” Hillsborough says
.

Albert Hillsborough declines to run for president despite huge poll numbers. Says, “That job doesn’t pay enough.”

A boat.

There it was, black on a rippled yellow sea: a boat.

One of his missiles was lying under a tarp held down by rocks on what had once been a lush green lawn and was now an overgrown, dried-out weed patch. He had read the instructions carefully. The missiles weren’t hard to fire, really, but then, why would they be? They were used by soldiers in the heat of battle—they’d have to be fairly simple.

It was a rowboat. One of Quinn’s.

He turned the telescope toward it and after a few jumpy misses finally centered the boat in the circle and saw the broad back straining against the oars. It would be at least another hour before Quinn could reach the island.

Albert had never before felt shame; it was an alien emotion for him. But of all the people to have to see: Quinn.

At the start Quinn had been Sam’s best friend. But he had been weak while Sam was still uncertain and had fallen in with Caine. Caine had been too violent, too overtly evil for Quinn to stomach, which had left Quinn neither here nor there, not someone Sam trusted, not someone of any use to Caine.

But over time Quinn had found his place. And then he had slowly, imperceptibly, grown from the unreliable, foolish boy he’d been into, well, into the Fisherman. People called him that, just as they called Lana the Healer. The Fisherman, with a capital “F.”

His crews were absolutely devoted. He outworked anyone in the FAYZ. More than any other person except for Albert, he fed Perdido Beach. He had stood up to Penny and to Caine, although Quinn was not the hero type.

And at the end it had been Quinn who’d stayed to see things through when Albert ran away.

No, he did not want to speak to Quinn.

Albert glanced at the missile. It wouldn’t be hard. But beyond the missile, out at sea, out in the open sea beyond the FAYZ barrier, there was a glistening white cruise ship passing slowly. Probably, what, four miles away? Five? But not so far that binoculars and telescopes trained in his direction would miss the flame and the explosion.

“And there’s the fact that I don’t kill people,” Albert admitted almost sadly. “I’m a businessman.”

He walked slowly back to the mansion to tell Alicia and Leslie-Ann that they would be having a guest.

“Oh, God, it hurts. It hurts!” He was staggering and shrieking, pausing to stare in horror at the stump of his arm, crying, babbling. His shirt was saturated with blood, now mostly dried.

The red-haired man was not used to suffering, Diana thought.

Well, welcome to the FAYZ, mister. This is a hard place
.

Gaia was walking along at a sprightly pace, still following the barrier as the sun fell into the distant sea and the shadows deepened. They were very near the northeastern point, where there was a wrecked train: a dozen boxcars tossed around the landscape, some plowed into the sand, others piled up against each other.

Their shadows were long. Night was rapidly approaching. It was possible to imagine goblins and spooks in this desert train wreck.

“The Nutella train,” Diana said. She of course knew about the bisected train that Sam, Dekka, and Jack had found. The freight had been mostly useless, everything from toilets to wicker furniture. But there had also been a huge amount of Nutella, Cup-a-Noodles, and Pepsi. The discovery remained one of the great days in FAYZ history.

Diana would have given anything for a bowl of noodles.

Everything edible had been removed, hauled to the lake, and either eaten and drunk or bartered to Perdido Beach. Baby Gaia had been nurtured in Diana’s womb on a diet that included a lot of Nutella. Sam and Edilio had been generous with her for the sake of her baby. For the sake of what could be their own destruction.

“What is this thing called?” Gaia asked.

Again Diana noted the fact that there were holes in Gaia’s knowledge. She knew a lot. She didn’t know everything.

Weakness.

Vulnerability.

“It’s called a train.”

When exactly had Diana started thinking in those terms of weakness and vulnerability? When had Diana stopped feeling she had some duty to Gaia and begun to think of ways to stop her?

Gaia had slung the cooked arm over her shoulder. The bicep was mostly consumed, as was the tender meat of most of the fingers. The thumb still remained untouched.

Diana knew the taste of human flesh. That was the terrible crime for which she had been punished by a God who could see even into the FAYZ. Gaia was that punishment, the curse that now mocked her mother’s horror at cannibalism with jaunty, careless amorality.

“Why won’t you let me go to a doctor?” the red-haired man moaned.