Light (31 page)

Edilio raised binoculars and twisted the focus knob. What he saw made him catch his breath. A person floated before her, a person wrapped in chains.

He knew who it was. He couldn’t see the face, but he knew.

Mary, Mother of God, if ever you were going to intercede, now would be a very good time
.

The air was already hard to breathe for the smoke, and now terror crushed the air from his lungs. He could hardly control his body. The gaiaphage was on the march and they would all die. All of them. Just like Roger, they would all die, no chance, no salvation, they would die die die die . . .

“Okay,” Edilio said, tough, unflinching, because that’s what the others all wanted from him. “Let’s go do it.”

He led the way, automatic rifle hanging from his shoulder, finger on the trigger guard, ready, scared. He trotted down the steps:
Don’t miss, don’t trip, Edilio; they’re watching you, they’re scared, they’re so scared because they know it’s over, they know death is here for them and there’s no defense against it
.

Don’t trip. Careful
.

Out the front door, out onto the patio that overlooked the plaza. There were kids there, the few who hadn’t yet run to the barrier, and yes, still some up in the windows with gun barrels visible.

You’ll run when you see, he thought; you’ll run and scream and so will I
.

“Listen up,” he shouted in a voice so calm it could not possibly be his. “Remember to make every shot count. Aim. Fire. Aim again. Fire. Keep that up until you run out of ammunition.”

“Edilio!” someone cried out, but it wasn’t a question: it was a slogan, it was a rallying cry.

“Edilio! Edilio!”

They shouted from their dark windows.

Like he was seeing her in a dream, he made eye contact with Dekka, who nodded and said, “Edilio!”

Quinn appeared, carrying a gun. He was grim. A spark floated past his face, illuminating his eyes.

“There’s a boat coming in,” Quinn said.

Edilio nodded like he understood, but he understood nothing except that he had no power to resist what was coming.

Drake dragged her down Second Avenue, not seeming to have any plan or direction, really, just to drag her.

Astrid was in and out of consciousness, eyes misted red, hands scratching weakly at the powerful whip arm around her throat. A false night had fallen, a night that stank of smoke.

She must have passed out, because when she opened her eyes she was in a house. Vague, disjointed memories of footsteps on a porch, of a door kicked in, of herself hurled against a dining-room table.

Over her head a brass-and-crystal chandelier—much abused over the months—swung back and forth. Someone who had occupied the house at some point had hung Barbie dolls and action figures from the chandelier with bits of colored yarn. There was a smell of sewage to join the reek of smoke.

He threw Astrid onto the table, faceup. She gathered her strength and screamed, “Help! Help me!
Help me!
”

Drake came into view from behind her head, stepped around so she could see him and he could look into her eyes. There was something odd and disjointed about him. The body didn’t match the head. He was taller than he’d been, stronger, more muscled. His head was pale; his neck was tan.

A lizard’s tail whipped madly, protruding from his brow, right between his eyes.

The windows glowed orange and red. The fire was coming.

Endgame.

“Help me! Help me!” Astrid screamed.

Drake nodded in satisfaction. “That’s good. That’s very good. I’ve waited a long time to hear you—”

She rolled away from him, trying to get off the table, but his whip arm had her and dragged her back. She kicked and punched and none of it mattered. He enjoyed it.

He laughed.

She fell silent.

So he whipped her across her belly and she screamed in pain.

“Better,” he said.

“You’re a sick person, Drake. You sick creep!”

“Who, me? Hey, who was it who put whose head in a beer cooler and weighted it down with rocks?
I’m
sick?”

“Go ahead and kill me, because if you don’t, when Brittney comes she’ll let me go.”

He cocked a pistol finger at her. “You know: I thought about that. I get a few seconds of warning before the changeover, so what I’ll do is kill you as soon as I feel it coming on. But until then . . .”

He slashed at her again. Again. Again, and she tried not to scream, but she did, she screamed: she screamed and he laughed.

“Sam will burn you to ashes!” she gasped out.

“That would be the only thing lacking now,” Drake said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “I wanted him here. It would be way better if he could see. If he could watch. It’s a hard thing to watch someone you care for being hurt.”

She heard something there. Something.

“Who did you watch being hurt?” she asked, desperate to engage him, stall, distract . . .

“Really? You want to get into my head? Figure out what makes me
me
? You’re not here to play shrink. You’re here to suffer.”

He slashed at her again. Astrid cried out. The pain was too awful to endure. She wished for unconsciousness. She wished for death. She sobbed quietly.

Petey
.

Jesus
.

Anyone . . .

But she felt no presence. Just the psychopath in the shadows cast by firelight.

“Gaia wanted me to bring you to her. So she could use you as a hostage. But I don’t take orders from her anymore. I wasted too much time following. I followed Caine. I followed the gaiaphage. But she’s not the gaiaphage, not really, not in that body, not with that face . . .”

“She’s pretty,” Astrid managed to say, gasping out each word. “Is that what you hate? Is that the sickness in you?”

Drake barked out a laugh. “Do you have any idea how many shrinks have tried their words on me? You think you can do better? It has to be some sickness, some syndrome, right? Put a label on it and everything will be all better.” He laughed at the idea. “Are you as clueless as the rest of them, Astrid? It’s simple. Here it is, here’s the answer, Astrid the Genius: it’s fun to hurt people. It’s such . . . it’s such joy, Astrid. Such joy realizing that all the power is yours, and all the fear and pain is right there, in your victim. Come on, smart girl, you know what it’s called. You know the word for it. Come on, say it.” He cupped his hand to his ear, waiting for the word.

“Evil,” Astrid said.

Drake laughed, threw up his hand wide, and nodded his head. “Evil! There you go. Good for you.
Evil
. It’s in all of us. You know that, too. It was in you. I saw it in your eyes as you looked down at me in that cooler. Evil, hah. We all want to have someone powerless beneath us while we stand over them.” His voice had grown husky. “We all want that. We all want that.”

He slid his whip arm over the painful wounds on her belly.

“I wish Sam was here to see. But he’s probably dead by now.” He sighed. “And if he’s not, well, we’ll tell him, won’t we? We’ll tell him every little detail.

“Be sure to scream,” he said.

“You too,” she said.

He looked at her, puzzled, his face inches from hers.

Astrid jerked her face forward, clamped her teeth down on Drake’s nose, and bit down as hard as she could.

At Sheridan Avenue a group of kids broke and ran from a house. Gaia cut them down.

Sam turned his palms inward, toward himself. He couldn’t turn them far enough to aim for his own head or internal organs. His only chance was to use the light to cut through a leg artery and bleed to death.

Better than watching his power be used to murder.

“If there really is a God, forgive me,” he said, and clamped his palms to his thighs and . . .

The pain was searing. The beams of light burned into his thighs.

Gaia was on him in a flash. She twisted his hands away as Sam roared in pain.

Had he done it? Had he cut an artery? Could it be over now, please, please could it be over now?

“No, no, no, I don’t think we can have that,” Gaia said.

Sam struggled against the chains, struggled against her grip on him, but his strength was nothing compared to hers.

Gaia slapped him hard, a backhand blow that sent him reeling into a state that was neither conscious nor unconscious. He was vaguely aware of Gaia rewinding the chain, this time tightly binding his hands together so that they were palm to palm. This left his shoulders free, but he had missed his only chance.

He began to cry. He had failed. Finally, permanently, he had failed. And hadn’t he always known he would? Wasn’t that why he had resisted for so long becoming the leader? Wasn’t that why he’d been relieved, finally, to turn much of it over to Edilio?

He wasn’t a hero. He never had been. School Bus Sam, the great myth that had caused kids to turn to him at first, that hadn’t been heroism: it had just been quick thinking and self-preservation.

Everything he had done, it wasn’t courage: it was all just a desperate effort to stay alive, wasn’t it? In the end wasn’t that all it was?

And now, failure.

Failure, and he would watch them all die, one by one, die because he had chosen life over heroic sacrifice.

Gaia had tired of levitating him before her as some kind of prize. She was angry now. She threw him twenty feet down the highway. He landed on his back and smacked his head against the concrete.

She ran up to him, laughing, and kicked him, crushing ribs and sending him rolling down the highway, chains clanking, crying like a baby, beaten.

“Aaaaahhhh!”

People running. Sam could barely see them through the smoke. Three girls who had never been anything important in the life of the FAYZ, three regular kids, Rachel, Cass, and Colby, three sisters who had never fought, never been in on any of the battles, had just kept their heads down and done what work they were given, now rushed madly, hopelessly, at Gaia with tire irons and clubs.

Gaia seemed startled. She raised one hand and froze them in place. “Look at this,” Gaia marveled. “Are they brave or stupid, Sam Temple?”

Sam blinked tears from his streaming eyes.

“Let them—” he started to say, but began to cough.

“I couldn’t quite hear that,” Gaia taunted.

Sam closed his eyes. Through his eyelids he saw a flash of green light. There were no cries. Just the wet-sandbag sound of bodies hitting the ground.

“Open your eyes, Sam Temple,” Gaia said. “I cut them in half. With your light. With your power.”

She pushed him with her foot to send him rolling.

“On to the rest. On to—” She fell silent suddenly. He opened one soot-streaked eye and saw that Gaia was looking around, nervous. Like she felt someone watching her.

“Where is the whip hand with my hostage?” she asked aloud. Then to Sam, as if he might have the answer: “Where is Drake with the sister of Nemesis?”

“Astrid!” Sam gasped.

“Hear me, Nemesis!” Gaia cried, choking then recovering. “Hear me! I have your sister!”

“I don’t see her,” Sam said.

“Never worry, Sam Temple: Drake will get her.” But Gaia chewed at her thumbnail, a very Caine gesture Sam had seen before.

“You seem scared,” Sam said.

Gaia snarled at him and raised her own hands as if ready to kill him herself. Then she laughed shakily. “Ah-hah. Trying to provoke me?”

But she was rattled. She had felt something. She had felt something she didn’t like.

“Nemesis?” Sam asked her.

Gaia didn’t answer. She was done playing games. She was done enjoying herself. She grabbed Sam’s chain and began dragging him down the road, then broke into a run.

Caine and Diana docked the boat at the marina. The fire, which had been to the north, now seemed to be everywhere at once. Bursts of sparks rose high from the direction of the highway. The air was filled with ash, hard to breathe, hard to keep your eyes open. Impossible to believe that somewhere the sun was still shining.

“Should I tie off the boat?” Diana asked.

Caine didn’t answer. He levitated himself from the boat to the dock. Then, with equal ease, he lifted the missiles in their crates and landed them safely on the wood planks.

“Give me a hand,” Diana said. She held her hand up to him.

He looked down at her. “I don’t think so, Diana.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He raised one hand and pushed the boat gently away from the dock.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Going out in style,” he said.

“Caine. Caine. What are you doing?”

“There’s no good reason for both of us to die.”

“Caine, you’re being silly,” she said as firmly as she could. “You know this is the end. I want to be with you. I don’t want our monster child hunting me down and finding me at the end all alone.”

He shrugged. “I know you asked Little Pete to take you. I know you offered yourself up.”

“How? How did you know?”

He shrugged.

“But he didn’t,” Diana said. “He didn’t, which—”

“Yeah. Well. He had a better offer.”

“What?” The word came out as a sob. “Caine . . . No. No. We do this together.”

“Nah, I don’t think so,” he said with strained nonchalance. “I think it will be like it is with Gaia. I think when Little Pete does his thing, well, I don’t think I’ll be around then. So I don’t see how we do this together.”

“Don’t, Caine. Don’t you do this,” Diana pleaded.

“You have to understand, Diana: I’m not trying to be noble. It’s just the only way I have to beat it. The gaiaphage. It thinks it has me. It thinks it owns me. It thinks it cracks the whip and I have no choice but to obey. And the pain . . .” He shrugged again. “So. So, we want old green-and-evil to be surprised when it finds out, right?”

“Caine, this is not what we . . . No. No.”

He stretched out his hand and she rose through the air, almost as if she was flying to him.

They were in each other’s arms, Diana shaking, Caine strangely calm.

“Sam’s probably out there somewhere being his usual heroic self,” Caine said. “I can’t let that boy save the world all alone. I’d never live it down.”

“Don’t do this, baby, don’t do this,” Diana begged as she stroked his face.