Plague (14 page)

“Come on, little man,” he said. “Back to bed.”

But Dorian wasn’t having it. He started screaming and flailing around.

Pandemonium erupted. Two kids started crying loudly, a third rolled off his bed onto the floor, and a fourth was shouting, “I want my mommy, I want my mommy.”

Then, a cough that was so loud it drew every eye. The little boy, Dorian.

He was standing up. He seemed startled by what had just come from his mouth.

He reared back and coughed again.

“No,” Dahra gasped.

Lana leaped to the little boy’s side and pressed her hand against the side of his head.

He coughed with such force it knocked him down, flat on his back.

Sanjit straddled him, holding him down, while Lana lay her hands on him, one on his heaving chest, the other on the side of his throat.

Dorian coughed, a spasm so powerful Sanjit fell backward and Dorian’s head smacked against the floor with a sickening crack. Lana kept her hold on him.

“He’s so hot I can barely keep my—,” Lana said as Dorian convulsed, bent into a C, and erupted in a cough that sprayed bloody chunks over Sanjit’s face.

Lana did not waver, did not pull back, but Dorian coughed again, and now blood seeped from his ears and pulsed from his lips.

Lana stood up suddenly and backed away.

“Don’t stop,” Dahra begged.

“I can’t cure death,” Lana whispered.

Just then two kids appeared in the doorway carrying a third. Lana could see from clear across the room that the girl they were struggling to carry was already gone.

Dahra saw it, too. “Set her down,” she said to them. “Just set her down and get out of here, wash yourselves in the surf, and then go home.”

“Will she be okay? She lives with us.”

“We’ll do everything we can,” Dahra said flatly. And when they beat a hasty retreat, she added under her breath, “Which is not a damn thing.”

Lana closed her eyes and could sense the Darkness reaching out for her, questing, a faint tentacle reaching to touch her mind.

So this is how you destroy us, Lana thought. This is how you kill us off. The old-fashioned way: plague.

ORC
TOOK A small detour on his way to the beach to tear his old home apart looking for a bottle. He found two.

With one bottle in each hand he headed toward the water. He was drinking from both bottles, a swig from the left, a swig from the right, and very soon he was finding the weight of feces in his pants almost funny.

“Orc. Man, where you been?”

Howard. Right there in front of him.

“Go away,” Orc said. Not angry, too happy now to be angry. “Orc, man, what is going on with you? I been looking everywhere for you.”

Orc stared dully at Howard. He drank deeply, tilting the bottle back so far he almost lost his balance.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Howard said. He stepped forward and reached for the bottle and got his fingers around it.

Orc’s backhand sent him flying. He had a sudden savage urge to kick Howard. Howard was looking at him as if he had already been kicked and not just swatted away. A look of betrayal. Of hurt.

Orc closed his eyes and turned his head away. Not up for this. He had turds in his pants, his head hurt, bad memories were bubbling up inside his brain, and he didn’t need this.

“Dude, come on, man, this isn’t right. I’ll take care of you, man.” Howard stood up and made a show of being fine. His voice was soothing, like he was talking to a baby. Or to some stupid animal or something.

“I got what I need,” Orc said. He held the two bottles out like trophies.

Howard stood cautious, ready to jump back. There was blood running from his nose. “I know you’re feeling bad about Drake. I know that, because you and I are best friends, right? So I know how you’re feeling. But that’s done. Anyway, it was just a matter of time, sooner or later it was going to happen.”

Orc liked this line of reasoning. But he felt like maybe there was a diss hidden in there, too. “’Cause no one could trust me, right?”

“No, man, that’s not it,” Howard said. “It’s just, no jail was ever going to hold Drake forever. This is all Sam’s fault, if had just done what he should have done—”

“I think I hurt some little kid,” Orc said.

Just like that. Out it came. Not planned. More like it had to escape. Like Drake: it was going to get out sooner or later.

The comparison made Orc laugh. He laughed loud and long and took another drink and was feeling almost cheerful until his bleary eyes settled on Howard’s face once more. Howard was grave. Worried.

“Orc, man, what’s that mean? What do you mean you hurt some kid?”

“I just want to go wash off,” Orc said.

“This kid you hurt. Where did it happen?”

“I don’t know,” Orc growled. He looked around like he might be in the right place. No, this wasn’t it. It was . . . He spotted a stop sign at the far end of the block.

There was a pile of rags at the bottom of the sign.

Orc felt an icy cold fill his body. Howard was still talking, but his voice was just a distant buzzing sound.

Orc stood staring, unable to speak, unable to move, unable to look away, unable to breathe. Stared at the little pile of rags that was so clearly, so terribly clearly, a body.

Memory. Orc was back in his old body, the one before, the one made of flesh and not rock. He was raising his baseball bat, intending to teach Bette a lesson. Just a tap. Just a smack to show her he was in charge.

He had never meant to kill her, either.

“I’ll get rid of it,” Howard was saying from far away. “I’ll hide it. Or something.”

It. Like the pile of rags wasn’t a little kid.

Orc walked away, numb, indifferent to Howard’s pleas.

It was a small, sandy area, not quite a cove, not really large enough to be much of a beach. It was just a sandy space between jumbled rocks on one side and a stand of scruffy-looking palm trees and grass on the other.

The five fishing boats—the fleet—were beached, pulled up onto the sand. It was like one of those picture postcards from quaint European fishing villages, Quinn thought. Not that the boats were very pretty, really, they were actually rather scruffy, and lord knew they smelled.

Still, kind of perfect.

Quinn and his fishermen had set up a reasonably pleasant campsite. There was never any rain so the fact that they had no tents or other cover didn’t matter.

“We’ll camp out old-school,” Quinn had announced as though it was all a fun diversion.

There were nineteen of them all together and they soon discovered that the beach was alive with fleas, tiny sand crabs, and assorted other animals that made sleep really unpleasant.

It was going to be a long night.

Then someone had the bright idea of burning a patch of grass on the theory that the cleared area would be relatively bug- and crab-free.

This of course gave way naturally to a bonfire of driftwood. It smoked way too much and was hard to keep burning, but it improved everyone’s mood and soon they were cooking an early dinner of fish, including some excellent steaks from the shark.

The dinner talk was all about what was happening back in town. Quinn hoped someone would think to update them. Not just forget about them. He made a point of reassuring his crews that Sam and Edilio would be taking care of their siblings and friends.

“This is just so we don’t get sick and can keep working,” Quinn explained.

“Oh, goody: work,” Cigar said, and everyone laughed.

None of the fishermen seemed sick. No one had complained. Maybe the fact that they were a sort of self-contained group who mostly hung out together and spent most of their time out on the ocean had kept them safe. Maybe they would be okay.

Quinn watched the sun plunge toward the horizon. He walked out alone onto a spit of rock and sand that stretched a few dozen feet from the shore. Weird how much he had come to love his job and being out on the water. He’d always loved surfing, and now that was gone, but the water was still there. Too calm, too peaceful, too much like a lake, but it was still a remnant of the actual ocean, and he loved being near it and on it and in it.

If the barrier ever came down, what would he do? Wait until he was old enough and move to Alaska or Maine and become a professional fisherman? He laughed. That was not a career path that would ever have occurred to him in the old days.

But now he just could not even pretend to care about college or being a lawyer or a businessman or whatever it was his folks thought he should be.

He had crossed a line. He knew it and it made him a little sad. None of them would ever be normal children again. Especially those who had found ways to be happy in the FAYZ.

A light. Down in the direction of the islands. It would never have been noticed back in the days when Perdido Beach itself was lit up.

Quinn had heard the story about Caine and Diana occupying one of the islands. It was weird to think that the light might be coming from Caine’s bedroom. And that Caine might be gazing out at the dark night.

Life would never be totally peaceful as long as that guy was alive.

Quinn turned his gaze south. The Sammy suns in people’s homes weren’t bright enough to light up the town. But the red glow of the setting sun painted the bare outline of Clifftop, snug up against the nearest arc of the barrier.

Lana. Quinn had liked her. Had even thought maybe she liked him. But something had changed in Lana. She was, in some sense, too large and powerful a person for Quinn.

Like Sam, who had once been Quinn’s closest friend. They were both part of some different class of person.

Sam, a hero. A leader.

Lana? She was grand and tragic. Like someone out of a play or a book.

And Quinn was a fisherman.

Unlike them, though, he was happy. He turned back to look at his crews, his fishermen. They were cleaning their nets, tending to their reels, cutting grass to make beds, complaining, joking, telling stories everyone had already heard, laughing.

Quinn missed his parents. He missed Sam and Lana. But this was his family now.

Roscoe had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion. He awoke to find persistent itching on his stomach. He scratched it through his T-shirt.

He went back to sleep. But dreams kept him from sleeping soundly. That and the itching.

He woke again and felt the itchy spot. There was a lump there. Like a swelling. And when he held still and pressed his fingers against the spot he could feel something moving under the skin.

The small room was suddenly very cold. Roscoe shivered.

He went to the window hoping for light. There was a moon but the light was faint. Roscoe pulled his shirt over his head. He looked down at the spot on his stomach.

It was moving. The flesh itself. He could feel it under his fingertips. Like something poking back at him. But he couldn’t feel it from the inside, couldn’t feel it in his stomach. And he realized that his entire body was numb. He could feel with his fingertips but not the skin of his stomach—

The skin split!

“Ahhhh!”

He was touching it as it split, and he shrieked in terror and something pushed its way out through a bloodless hole.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, no no no no!”

Roscoe screamed and leaped for the door. His hand clawed at the knob as he babbled and wept and the door was locked, locked, oh, God, no, they had locked him in.

He banged at the door, but it was the middle of the night. Who would hear him in the empty town hall?

“Hey! Hey! Is anyone there? Help me. Help me. Please, please, someone help me!”

He banged and the thing in his belly stuck out half an inch. He was scared to look at it. But he did and he screamed again because it was a mouth now, a gnashing insect mouth full of parts like no normal mouth. Hooked, wicked mandibles clicked. It was inside him, chewing its way out.

Hatching from him.

“Help me, help me, don’t leave me here like this!”

But who would hear him? Sinder? No. Not anymore. That was over. All over. And he was alone and friendless. No one even to hear as he screamed and begged.

The window. He grabbed the pillow from his bed and pushed it against the glass and then punched it hard. The pane shattered. He took off his shoe and smashed at the starred glass until most of it fell tinkling to the street below.

Then he screamed for help. Screamed into the Perdido Beach night air.

No answer.

“Help me! Please, please, oh, God, please help me! You can’t just leave me locked up!”

But still, no answer.

Fear took hold of him, deep crazy-making fear.

No. No. No no no no, this couldn’t be happening. He hadn’t done anything to hurt anyone, he hadn’t done anything awful. Why? Why was this happening to him?

Roscoe fell to his knees and begged God. God, please, no, no, no, I didn’t do anything wrong. I wasn’t brave or strong but I wasn’t bad, either. Not like this, please, God, no no no, not like this.

Roscoe felt an itching in the middle of his back.

He sat down and cried.

DIANA
FED PENNY a little late. But Penny didn’t complain. She was off in some dream that had her smiling to herself, smiling at her own illusions.

The bathroom reeked of human waste. Penny was sitting on the tile floor, legs twisted in front of her, just sitting on a plastic exercise mat.

“Hey, you want to take a shower?” Diana asked.

Penny didn’t respond, just giggled at something Diana couldn’t see.

Diana bent down and tapped her shoulder. She had to do it several times before Penny’s faraway eyes focused on Diana.

Penny laughed. “Oh, that’s the real you, isn’t it?”

“As real as I get,” Diana answered.

“You come to feed the zoo animal?”

“Here’s your food. But I thought you might want to take a shower or bath. I could help you.”

“Is it because I smell like a sewer? Is that it?”

“Yes,” Diana said bluntly. Without waiting for an answer, she went to the tub, a huge oval affair, all pink marble.

How long the water would last, Diana didn’t know. But for right now there was water and it was even hot. There was an assortment of Bulgari bath beads, salts, and shampoos. She popped a couple of the bath cubes into the water.

Penny wasn’t wearing much, just a dirty yellow tank top and a pair of stained pink shorts. She had two pairs of socks on over her broken ankles.

“How’s the pain?” Diana asked.

“Painful. Feels kind of like someone broke my legs and my ankles and my feet. I’ll show you what it feels like.”

Suddenly a pack of rabid, vicious dogs were there in the room. Their eyes were red, their breath steamed, they snapped at Diana, ready to launch themselves and rip her apart.

Then they were gone.

“Like that,” Penny said, taking malicious pleasure from the way Diana had leaped back, batting wildly at the illusion.

Diana calmed herself. Getting upset would just give Penny more of a sense of power.

“Sorry,” Diana said for lack of anything else to say. “Eat something while the tub fills.”

“You don’t have to stay here. I can haul myself up into the tub.” She scooped some of the spaghetti and meat sauce into her mouth with her hand.

“You could drown.”

“Yeah, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

Diana didn’t answer. There was nothing but pain in Penny’s future. There was no way to fix her legs, not without Lana, and nothing to treat the pain but Tylenol and Motrin. It was like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.

“It’s good you have your power,” Diana said.

“Yeah. It’s great. Really great. It’s like having my own kind of sucky movie theater. You want to know what I was seeing when you came in?”

Diana was pretty sure she did not.

“I was creating monsters with needle teeth. Like vampires, I guess, but more like wolves, like rabid bats, like every scary thing you see pictures of living down at the bottom of the ocean. And you know what they were doing?”

“Let me help get your shorts off.”

Diana knelt and worked Penny’s shorts down her thighs. Carefully, as gently as she could. But still Penny made a rising, shuddering cry of pain.

“They were ripping you apart, Diana,” Penny gasped through gritted teeth. “They were all over you, Diana, doing every horrible thing I could think of.”

“Lift your arms.”

Diana pulled the shirt, none too gently, over Penny’s head.

“Watching you scream in my head helps keep me from screaming,” Penny said.

“Whatever works,” Diana said.

She put her arm under Penny’s, bent low, and lifted her. The girl wasn’t heavy. Food had not cured Penny’s runway-model thinness.

“Oh, oh, ohhhhhh,” Penny sobbed as Diana lifted her.

Diana rested Penny on the edge of the tub, reached awkwardly to turn off the water.

“Caine could do this easier,” Penny said. “But he won’t, will he? He doesn’t want to come in here and see his handiwork. Not the mighty Caine.”

Diana maneuvered to bear most of Penny’s weight and lower her bottom first into the hot water. Her twisted pipe-cleaner legs dragged, then followed their owner into the tub.

Penny screamed.

“Sorry,” Diana said.

“Oh, God, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!”

Diana stood back. Penny was sweating, even paler than before. But she stopped screaming. She lay back against the tub, up to her chest in water and bubbles.

“There’s a sprayer. I’ll wash your hair.” Diana turned on the nozzle, tested the water temperature, and played it over Penny’s lank hair.

She worked in shampoo until it foamed.

“Just like the hair salon,” Penny said.

“Yeah. Probably where I’ll end up working someday,” Diana said.

“Nah, not you, you’re too smart,” Penny said. She had closed her eyes. Diana rinsed shampoo down Penny’s face and neck. “Beautiful and smart and you have Caine all to yourself now, don’t you?”

Diana sighed. “I’m a loser, Penny. Same as you.”

Caine burst in. He looked startled. “I heard screaming.”

“Oh, sorry about that,” Penny snarled. “I hope I didn’t wake you up, you piece of—”

“You okay?” Caine asked Diana.

“She’s perfect,” Penny said. “Perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect skin. Plus she has legs that work, which is really cool.”

“I’m out of here,” Caine said.

“No,” Diana said, “Help me lift her back out.”

“Yeah, Caine, don’t you want to see me naked? I’m still kind of hot. If you don’t mind my legs. Just don’t look at them. Because they’ll kind of make you sick.”

To Diana’s surprise Caine said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

Diana popped the drain.

“Why don’t you just kill me?” Penny demanded. “You know you will sooner or later, Caine. You know you can’t take care of me forever. You want to do it, don’t you?”

Diana tried to read the answer in Caine’s eyes. Nothing. There were times she was sure she saw human decency there. And other times when his dark eyes were as pitiless as a shark’s.

“Okay, raise her up,” Diana said.

Caine stepped closer and lifted up his hands. Penny rose from the water like some awful parody of a surfacing dolphin. She rose and the water fell and bubbles slid off her.

Diana took the nozzle and sprayed Penny off as she floated a few feet in the air. Even the touch of the water on her legs made Penny wince and grit her teeth.

Diana spread a clean towel over the mat and Caine set Penny down slowly. Gently.

“I could fill your head with living nightmares,” Penny said to Caine. “I could make you scream like I scream.”

“But then I would kill you, Penny,” Caine said coldly. “And I don’t think you’re quite ready to die.”

Albert stared at the ledger book like it could answer his worries. But it was the source of his worries. The columns where he normally entered the amount of produce coming in from the fields, the number of pigeons or gulls caught by Brianna, the number of rats sold to him, the quantity of birds, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, or deer brought in by Hunter, were all empty for this day.

Albert reminded himself to get someone down to the dock to bring up the catch. He should have done it earlier, but it had been a hectic day. Maybe he could send Jamal. Speaking of which, where was Jamal? He was supposed to be back by sunset and it was well after that.

Albert made a mental note to himself: give Dahra something nice as a reward for her quick thinking. If Quinn and his people had been brought down by this flu, the situation would be even more desperate.

Albert had a page for water. Bottled water found in homes or cars: nothing in days. Water trucked in: nothing in a day.

Just like that, in the blink of an eye, Perdido Beach had gone from self-sufficient at a very, very basic level to disaster.

Albert glanced around the room. His natural caution had become something closer to paranoia lately. The house was empty—even the maid was away. But what he was about to do would have been troublesome if observed: he opened his desk and pulled out a bottle of water.

It made a snapping sound as he broke the seal on the bottle of Arrowhead water. He drank deep, then carefully sealed the bottle and hid it away again.

He closed the ledger. Nothing to add to the incoming columns.

Then an unmistakable noise: shattering glass.

Albert froze. The sound was from close by. The kitchen?

He hesitated only a moment, running through his options. Then he reached under the desk, fumbled for and found the pistol taped to the underside.

A door opened. He heard the sound of it and felt the air pressure change and pushed back his chair and tried to rip the tape free so he could hold the gun properly as he’d been shown by Edilio, but he was too slow, too late, they were in the room and on him.

Turk, Lance, Watcher, and Raul. All armed.

It was Watcher—a quiet eleven-year-old who had been caught stealing—who whacked his knee with a crowbar.

“Aaahh!” It hadn’t been that hard a swing but the pain shot up his leg and for a second he could think of nothing else. He’d never felt pain like that. His ankle and foot were tingling like he’d stepped on a downed power line.

“Get him!”

“Yeah!”

“Hit him again!”

“No!” Albert yelled, but the next blow came from Turk, who smashed the butt of his rifle into Albert’s face. His nose gushed blood. This was more numbing than painful. His thoughts were scattered, ripped into fragments.

“Wha . . . ?” he said.

His pistol, gone. Where? He squeezed his hand, stupid for a few seconds, not able to figure out—

Turk grabbed him from the back of his neck and slammed him facedown on the ledger. A distant part of Albert’s mind worried that his blood would seep onto the pages and make them hard to read.

He groaned as someone punched him in the back and in the side and ground his face savagely against the ledger.

Turk yanked him back and shoved him against the wall. Albert’s legs gave way and he fell on his rear end.

The four of them loomed over him. Albert knew he was crying as well as bleeding. And he knew that both his tears and his blood would make the creeps happy.

“What do you want?” he said, slurring his words, realizing a broken tooth was stuck into his tongue.

“What do we want?” Turk mocked. “Everything, Albert. We want everything.”

After cleaning Penny, Diana felt the need for a shower herself.

She shampooed. She conditioned. She shaved her legs and armpits. So normal. So like being home. Except that here her mother’s creepy boyfriends didn’t sneak in to get a look at her and pretend they’d come looking for aspirin or whatever.

She turned off the shower with great reluctance. She could stand there under the spray forever. But in the back of her mind was the knowledge that they had all wasted food until they were starving. She had learned a deep lesson about waste.

She wrapped one of the soft bath sheets around herself and brushed her teeth.

She went toward her bed and found Caine waiting there for her. He was standing awkwardly, chewing his thumbnail.

“Napoleon?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, and looked down at the floor.

“Uh-huh.”

“I helped with Penny.”

“Yes, you did. And you only threatened to kill her once.”

A flicker of a smile. “Even Sam would have threatened her.”

Diana went to him. They did not touch. But they stood just inches away. Close enough for Diana to feel his breath on her face.

“Why did you save me?” Diana asked.

Caine sucked in a deep, steadying breath, like he was getting ready to dive into a pool. “Because I . . .” He paused, blinked, seeming surprised at the words coming out of his own mouth. “Because what would I do without you? How would I live without you? Because.”

“Because?”

“Because you are the only human being I need.”

Diana looked at him skeptically. Was he changed? Even a little? Or was it all just manipulation?

She might never know. But at that moment she also knew this was all she would get from him. And she knew that it was enough. Because she was not going to turn him away.

She grabbed his head in both hands and drew him to her. She kissed him hard. It was a hungry, needy, wild kiss. No time to breathe, no time to be gentle, no time for any more stupid questions or doubts.

Diana took a step back, unwound the towel, and let it drop.

Caine made a sound like a strangling animal.

She pushed him hard. He landed on his back on the bed.

He began to fumble with his shirt, trying to get it off.

“No, I’ll do that,” Diana said. “I’ll do everything.”