Once, the hotel had been full of food. But on Sam’s orders Albert and his crew had collected it all, centralized it all at Ralph’s. Where Drake had managed to steal a good portion of the dwindling remainder.
Now there was no food in the hotel. Not even in any of the mini-bars in the rooms, which once had been stocked with delicious candy bars, and chips and nuts. Now all that was left was alcohol. Albert’s people had left the booze, not knowing quite what to do with it.
Lana had stayed away from the little brown and white bottles. So far.
Alcohol was how she had managed to get herself exiled from her home in Las Vegas. She’d snuck a bottle of vodka from her parents’ house, supposedly for an older boy she knew.
That was the cleaned-up story she’d managed to sell to her parents, anyway. They had still packed her off for some time to “think about what you’ve done” at her grandfather’s isolated ranch.
Now, in the world of the FAYZ, Lana was a sort of saint. But she knew better.
Patrick had finished his food as coffee brewed in the room. Lana poured herself a cup and dumped in a Nutrasweet and some powdered cream, rare luxuries that she’d found by searching the maids’ carts.
She stepped out onto the balcony and took a sip.
She had the stereo on, the CD player that had been in the room. Someone, some previous inhabitant of the room, she supposed, had left an ancient Paul Simon CD in there, and she’d found herself playing it.
There was a song about darkness. A welcoming of darkness. Almost an invitation. She had played it over and over again.
Sometimes music helped her to forget. Not this song.
Out of the corner of her eye she spotted someone down on the beach. She went back inside and retrieved a pair of binoculars she’d liberated from some long-gone tourist’s luggage.
Two little kids, they couldn’t be more than six years old, playing on the rock pier that extended into the ocean. Fortunately there was no surf. But the rocks were like jumbled razor blades in places, sharp and slick. She ought to . . .
Later. Enough responsibility. She was not a responsible person, and she was sick of having it forced on her.
Various adult vices were spreading through the population of the FAYZ. Some as benign as coffee. Others—pot, cigarettes, and alcohol—were not so harmless. Lana knew of six kids who were confirmed drinkers. They had tried to get her to cure their hangovers.
Some others were smoking their way through bags of weed found in their parents’ or older siblings’ bedrooms. And on just about any day you could see kids as young as eight choking on cigarettes and trying to look cool. She’d once spotted a first grader trying to light a cigar.
Lana couldn’t cure any of that.
Sometimes she wished she was back at Hermit Jim’s cabin.
It was not the first time she’d had that thought. She had often thought of the strange cabin in the desert with its quirky little lawn—now all brown and dead, most likely.
It’s where she had found sanctuary after the crash. And then again, briefly, after escaping from the coyote pack.
The cabin itself had been burned to the ground. It was nothing but ash. And gold, of course. Hermit Jim’s stash of gold might have been melted, but it would still be there beneath the floorboards.
The gold. From the mine.
The mine . . .
She took a big gulp from the Styrofoam cup and burned her tongue. The pain helped her focus.
The mine. That day was clear in her memory, but it was the clarity of a well-remembered nightmare.
At the time she hadn’t known that the FAYZ meant the disappearance of all adults. She’d gone to the mine in search of the hermit, or hoping at least to find his missing truck and use it to get to town.
She’d found the hermit, dead in the mouth of the mine. Not disappeared, dead. Which meant he’d been killed before the FAYZ.
The coyotes had come after her then and driven her deeper into the mine. And there she’d found . . . it. The thing. The Darkness, the coyotes called it: the Darkness.
She remembered the way her feet had felt heavy as bricks. The way her heart had slowed down and thudded, each beat like a blow from a sledgehammer. The dread that went deeper than simple fear. The sickly green glow that made her think of pus, disease, a cancer.
The dream state that had overtaken her . . . the heavy-lidded eyes and mind gone blank and the feeling of being invaded, of . . .
Come to me.
“Ah!”
She had crushed the cup. Hot coffee all over her arm.
Lana was sweating. Her breathing was labored. She took a deep breath and it was as if she’d forgotten how until that very moment.
It was in her head still, that monster in the mine shaft. It had its hook in her. Sometimes she was sure she heard its voice. A hallucination, surely. Surely not the Darkness itself. It was miles away. Far beneath the ground. It couldn’t . . .
Come to me.
“I can’t forget it,” she whispered to Patrick. “I can’t get away from it.”
In the early days after she had come out of the desert and joined this strange community of children, Lana had felt almost at peace. Almost. There had been, from the start, a sense of damage done, an invisible wound with no specific location except that it was inside her.
That unseen, unreal, unhealed wound had reopened. She told herself at first that it would go away. It would heal. A psychic scab would form. But if that was true, if she was healing, why did it hurt more with each passing day? How had that dreadful voice grown from faint, distant whisper to insistent murmur?