“Petey?” she called.
“He’s over there,” someone answered.
Little Pete had come to a stop near the FAYZ wall. He was just bending down.
“Petey,” Astrid called.
Little Pete stood up with his game player, shattered screen dribbling fragments of glass from his hand.
His eyes found Astrid.
Little Pete howled like an animal. Howled like a mad thing, howled in a voice impossibly large.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” A cry of loss, a mad tragic cry.
He bent into a backward “C” and howled like an animal.
Suddenly, the FAYZ wall was gone.
Astrid gaped in amazement at a landscape of satellite trucks and cars, a motel, a crowd of people, regular people, adults, behind a security rope, staring.
Little Pete fell on his back.
And in a flash it was all gone.
The wall was back.
And Little Pete was silent.
FORTY-FOUR
THREE DAYS LATER
“HOW IS IT going?” Sam asked Howard.
Howard looked at Orc to answer.
Orc shrugged. “Good. I guess.”
Howard and Orc had been relocated, given a new home. It was one of the few houses in Perdido Beach that had a basement. There were no windows in the basement. No electricity of course, so Sam had left a small light of his own burning there.
The only way in or out of the basement was down a flight of steps from the kitchen. There, at the bottom of the steps, they had nailed two-by-fours across and up and down, forming a thick grid work. The spaces between the two-by-fours was just three inches.
At the top of the stairs the door had been strengthened by having Orc shove a massive armoire against it.
Twice a day Orc would shove the armoire aside. Then he would stump down the stairs and peek inside. Then he would come back up and replace the barricade.
“Was it Brittney or Drake when you went down last?” Sam asked.
“The girl,” Orc said.
“Did she say anything?”
Orc shrugged. “Same thing she always says. Kill it. Kill me.”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“How long you think we can keep this up?” Howard asked Sam.
It was not a great solution, keeping the undead thing locked in this basement to be guarded by Orc. But the alternative was destroying it. Him. Her. And that felt a little too much like murder for Sam.
Astrid and Edilio had worked for a couple of long days to try and make sense of the disaster that had come to the FAYZ. All the individuals who’d had direct contact with the Darkness, had touched the mind of the gaiaphage, had been used like pawns in a chess match.
Orsay’s power had been subverted. Her empathy and kindness had been turned against her as the gaiaphage filled her dreams with images drawn from her own imagination. She had shown kids a path that seemed to lead to freedom but led instead to death.
Little Pete had been tricked into believing he was playing a game. And it was his own powers that had been used to create Nerezza, the gaiaphage’s main player.
Nerezza had guided Orsay and, when the opportunity arose on that last terrible evening, pushed Zil to attack.
Lana still refused to admit that the gaiaphage had been able to tap her own healing powers to bring Brittney and Drake back to life.
Drake, the Whiphand, was in a sense, Lana’s creation. The Darkness had used her to give Drake his whip. And he had used her to give Drake a second life. It was no wonder, Sam thought, that Lana refused to acknowledge that.
Lana had spent days healing the wounded. And then she and Patrick had walked out of town. No one had seen her since.
Sam and Astrid had talked honestly about their mistakes. Astrid berated herself for being arrogant and dishonest, and too slow to understand what was happening.
Sam knew all too well how he had failed. He had been terrified by his own weakness and had reacted by mistrusting his friends. He had become paranoid and finally, indulging in self-pity, had run away. Abandoned his post.
But the gaiaphage had underestimated Brittney. It had needed her power, her immortality as well as Lana’s healing power, to bring Drake back from the grave.
Brittney had fought him every step of the way. Not knowing what she was fighting she had nevertheless resisted Drake’s takeover of the body they shared. Even when the gaiaphage had filled her shattered mind with visions of her dead brother, Brittney’s faith and willpower had kept the demon she sensed inside her from escaping completely.
The gaipahage had wanted to break the will of the kids of Perdido Beach. It had wanted them to give up, to abandon hope. Only then would the kids of the FAYZ become its slaves.
It had failed in the end. But it had been a matter of milliseconds. Had Zil managed to delay Dekka just a little longer, or had Drake not been slowed by Edilio’s heroism, the children who jumped with Mary would have died.
That would have been the fatal blow for the struggling little society of Perdido Beach.
They had survived, but barely.
And maybe they had done better than just survive: Astrid’s laws were in effect. They’d been voted in by all the kids assembled the day after Mary’s Big Jump, as Howard had dubbed it.
It was a bitter thing, to Sam, to think that after all she had done, Mother Mary was to be known for her final madness. Sam hoped she really was alive, somehow, on the outside.
There would be no grave in the plaza for Mary. There was one now for Orsay.
They might never know whether that brief glimpse of a world just outside the FAYZ wall was real or just a last trick of the Darkness. The one person who might know was talking even less than usual: Little Pete had fallen into something almost like a coma since he’d held his shattered game player. He would eat. But that was all he would do.