Gone Series: Plague Part 31

"They're too fast for you," Brianna said.

Edilio looked like he was going to have a stroke. He glanced at the window above, the bugs racing away, and Brianna could have sworn his next move would be to throw up his hands and say, "Forget it, I'm outta here!"

But he gritted his teeth, took a deep breath, and visibly steeled himself for a decision he knew might be wrong. Might even be fatally wrong.

"Breeze," he said grimly. "Listen to me before you go tearing off. I want you to follow them, see where they go. But this leaves us with, like, no one playing defense. Orc's off on a drunk, Sam and Dekka and Jack are out of town, kids are falling out sick all over the place, and Drake may still be lurking ..." He stuck his finger at her. "Don't take risks, don't be your usual reckless, stupid self: come back as soon as you can, as soon as you see where they're going."

Brianna executed a mock salute-she didn't mind being called stupid so long as he was acknowledging her bravery- and loped off at an easy sixty miles an hour to catch up with the swarm.

"Don't sweat it, Edilio," she called over her shoulder. "The Breeze is all over these bugs."

Orc was running dry. He stared balefully at the bottle in his hand. Shouldn't he be dead by now? How much booze did it take before you just died already?

His mind labored to work out solutions to the problem. Probably still a couple bottles back at the house, if kids hadn't looted them. If not, he had another option, but it was a long walk and he wasn't really in the mood for a long walk. A long walk would sober him up.

He was on his way to the house and drowning his brain in booze again when he thoughtlessly walked past the stop sign.

No body lay crumpled there.

For a moment he thought he might be in the wrong place. Or that maybe he was mistaken about the body. But then he vaguely recalled running into Howard and Howard promising to fix things.

So now the little boy's body would be rotting in an unused house. Probably not the only body lying around. Probably.

Orc took a drink. He was shaky in body and mind. He was used to booze, but even by his standards he had punished his body in the last day. His stomach burned. His head hammered. Now he had to fight down an urge to run and run and run until ...

Until what?

Run where?

They would figure it out, sooner or later. That he had slammed that little boy, that little boy who never hurt Orc or probably anyone else. Just some sick kid.

Someone would have seen it happen, or one of the smart ones-Astrid or Albert or Edilio-would figure it out. And he wouldn't even be given a chance to explain. They would make him leave, go live outside town, like they had Hunter.

But he wasn't Hunter. He couldn't live out there. Out there was where the coyotes were.

Orc remembered the coyotes. He remembered the way they had sunk their muzzles into his living guts and ripped and torn his insides out.

That's when it had started. That's when the ripped-up flesh had turned into gravel and the rocky, pebbly, monster skin had grown to take over his whole body.

No. They couldn't make him live out there.

Astrid had rules, though; she had made them up and that's what they would do, push him out, Go away, Orc, go away and die, you freak.

Yeah, well, Charles Merriman was inside this monster. He was not an orc. He was Charles Merriman.

He had to talk to Astrid. She'd always been nice to him. The only one who'd been nice to him. They were her stupid rules, so she would be able to figure out something. She was smart, after all. And nice.

With that vague thought slos.h.i.+ng around in his brain, Orc stomped off toward Astrid's home.

Two blocks away he noticed something very strange. So strange he thought he might be imagining it. Because it wasn't right, that was for sure.

There was a cloud. Up in the sky. As he gaped up at it the sun started to slide behind it.

Cloud. A dark, gray cloud.

He kept moving. Kept drinking. Kept looking at that crazy cloud up in the sky.

He stepped onto Astrid's street. From half a block away he saw the wreckage strewn out over trees and yards and draped over fences.

Then the house. That stopped him dead in his tracks. The top of the house was gone.

And there stood Astrid, right up on top, right out in the open because the walls were all gone, and there was her 'tard brother, only he was kind of, like, floating in the air above a bed.

Orc gaped up at Astrid, but she didn't notice him. She was looking up at the sky, up at the cloud. Her hands were at her side. In one hand she held a huge-looking pistol.

A brilliant flash lit everything up.

A tree not ten feet away blew apart.

CRRR-ACK!.

BOOOOM!.

Lightning. Thunder.

Splinters and leaves from the tree came down in a shower all around Orc.

And suddenly the cloud seemed to drop from the sky, only it wasn't the cloud itself, it was rain. Gray streamers of water, pouring down.

It was like stepping into a cold shower. The rain fell on Orc's marveling, upturned face. It pooled in his eyes, it ran in streams through his quarry of a body.

Astrid cried out, words irrelevant. Orc heard the despair, the fear. She was soaked through, standing there with her big gun, screaming at her brother, sobbing.

Orc opened his mouth and water flowed in. Clean, fresh, as cold as ice water.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

9 HOURS, 6 MINUTES.

BRITTNEY SAW THE huge, blue-eyed bugs. She saw the cave. And she understood none of it.

Then she saw Jamal's gun. Shreds of his clothing. The blood that soaked them.

Nothing left but his clothing, his shoes, and his gun.

The bugs skittered madly past her carrying rocks eight, nine, ten times their own size. Like busy ants. But ants the size of wolves or Shetland ponies.

Coyotes watched. They were anxious, skittish, scared of the ma.s.sive insects.

She wished she could ask Jamal what was happening. But Jamal would not be answering any more questions.

She wondered if she could flee. She wondered if she should flee. But what difference would it make?

The bugs had piled up a small mountain of rocks. Bigger and bigger stones were being hauled out.

She stepped in front of one of the insects. It was carrying a rock that could easily crush her. It would be nothing for these bugs to attack her, tear her apart as they'd apparently done to poor scared Jamal.

But the bug just scuttled around her.

Why? Why would they eat Jamal and not her? Because they ate only truly living flesh? Or because they knew that she was Drake and Drake was she and they could not harm Drake?

What was stopping them?

Who was stopping them?

But Brittney already knew the answer. She knew that something, someone, some mind was touching hers. It was as if she'd always known it. As if that cold consciousness had always been there in the background watching her even as she averted her eyes and looked to heaven.

When she was still in her grave, clawing at the dirt, she had felt it.

When she looked deep into the eyes of her brother, Tanner, she could sometimes catch glimpses of it, in layers down beneath his disguise as an angel.

She had known but had not wanted to know that Drake was its creature, the creature of this devil, just as she was G.o.d's creature.

She looked at the mine shaft, stood there as the insects cleared the rocks. Like a rock herself in the midst of rus.h.i.+ng waters.

They were freeing the evil one. She could do nothing to stop them. She would do nothing to stop Drake from going to be with it. The devil would win this battle.

The dark mind teased at the edges of her own muddled thoughts. In faint, wordless whispers it made promises.

"What do you want with me?" she asked.

To give you what you want.

"I want to die," Brittney said. "To go to heaven."

When she closed her eyes she felt, rather than saw, something very like a glowing smile from a deep pool of darkness.

She had begged G.o.d to free her. Maybe this was His way. Maybe it wasn't Sam who would free her, but this devil inside the mountain.

Brittney walked into the mine shaft, lifted a small rock, and carried it away.

"Can you make any sense out of that?" Sam asked Jack.

They were in the marina's office. Two dozen boats sat placidly in the water. Several dozen more were raised out of the water in a long boathouse. There were papers on a desk, books in gray steel shelves, two broken-down rolling office chairs. The out-of-date calendars were reminders that no one had been here in a very long time.

The computers were useless, of course, without electricity. But Jack had insisted on carrying three of the half-exhausted laptops from the train. And a search had turned up a flash drive.

"It's some kind of proprietary software. I had to open it in Preview and it's hard to make sense of."

Toto was rummaging through cupboards, finding nothing much. Dekka was sitting in one of the chairs with her feet up, gazing gloomily out at the lake. From time to time she surrept.i.tiously ran her hands over her stomach, shoulders, thighs, checking for any sign of infestation.

And from time to time she would pull her s.h.i.+rt back to check the cauterized wound from Sam's fire.

"Hah!" Jack said. "I think I've got it. They had a truck deliver marine gas just a week before the FAYZ. A thousand gallons in round numbers. That should have brought them up to about twelve hundred gallons total. And they have diesel, too. I just can't find those... ."

He trailed off, lost in the numbers again.

This, thought Sam, is why I brought Jack.

Sam was feeling amazingly contented. He'd had a sudden flood of good news. They had found food. They had found soda. They would undoubtedly find beer and more soda and maybe a few bags of ancient chips once they searched the boats, the kind of stuff people took for a day on the lake.

Best of all, the lake was huge and filled with fresh water. More fresh water than they could ever use in a thousand years.

They'd also found a clipboard with scrawled figures indicating that the lake had recently been restocked with trout and ba.s.s.

It was like stumbling into the Garden of Eden. They could move the whole population up here. Use the boats as housing. Fish the lake. Drink the water. Use the gas to haul the crops from the fields up here.

It wasn't perfect. But for the FAYZ it was heaven.

If only Astrid were here.

He tried to push that thought aside. He was mad at Astrid. He was sick of Astrid. And yet, all he could think of was her face when he handed her a jar of Nutella and a can of Pepsi.

"Why didn't they do something?" Dekka wondered aloud.

"Who?" Sam asked.

"The people who were studying crazy boy over there." She jerked her head toward Toto.

"What were they going to do?" Sam asked with a shrug.

"How about warn people what was happening?" Dekka said. "Like, 'Hey, people of Perdido Beach, something very weird is happening'?"

"They were scientists," Jack mumbled, no longer deciphering boring doc.u.ments but searching the laptop's hard drive, reveling in the sheer visceral pleasure of opening applications.