“I’ll get all my spare people on it right away,” Edilio snapped. Then, “Sorry.”
“I know you’re stretched thin, man.”
“Thin? I’m stretched invisible, Sam. There are maybe two, three dozen kids in the fields. I have maybe twelve left actually holding guns. And the rest? You know where they are.”
“It’s the waiting,” Sam said, looking to the northwest, the direction of the highway. “Why doesn’t she just attack?”
“Maybe she knows we’re panicking. Or maybe she’s waiting for the fire to do her work for her.”
Sam looked up. The sky was still afternoon blue, but there was a gray tint to the air. “If she’s out there to the northwest of town like we think, then she’s closer to the fire than we are. Maybe we’ll get lucky and—”
He stopped when he saw Edilio’s skeptical look.
“Yeah,” Sam said. Then: “I have to go after her. If I wait, then she uses my own power to kill kids. I have to try to take her down myself.”
Edilio spread his hands as if to say, But . . . There was no but. It was the truth, and they both knew it.
“The only other alternative is, you know, to, um . . . deprive her of my power. It may give me a chance, her needing to keep me alive. That may give me an edge.”
Again Sam was waiting to hear the counterargument. He was waiting to hear Edilio explain how wrong he was to believe that he had to die to stop Gaia. But that wasn’t what he heard, or what he saw in Edilio’s eyes.
“She’s stronger than you are, Sam. It’s like fighting yourself and Caine and Jack and Dekka, all at once.”
“Yeah.”
“Talk to Astrid about it.”
“I already talked to Astrid.”
“And she’s okay with a suicide mission? Because I’m not. You go out there, go to win, huh? Don’t go out there thinking you’re doing us a favor by getting killed.”
Sam sighed. “It’s the endgame, my friend.”
“Sam . . .,” Edilio began, but that was all he had, that one word, that one-word plea for a different solution.
“Take care of Astrid for me. Try to keep her safe and don’t let her follow me.”
“I haven’t been very good at keeping people safe,” Edilio said.
“No, man, what happened to Roger is not your fault or your failing. The grief is enough. It’s enough. You don’t need guilt on top of it.”
Edilio looked grateful, but not like he believed it.
“Listen, Edilio, if she gets past me, she won’t have the light anymore,” Sam said. “You understand? But she will still be very dangerous. When I’ve fought Caine, the worst thing wasn’t him dropping stuff down, because you see the arc of it going up then coming down, right? Him throwing stuff horizontally: that was worse because it was faster. Look out for that when . . . if . . . she gets here.”
Edilio put out his hand and Sam took it.
“It’s been interesting, hasn’t it?” Sam said, trying for a smile.
“It’s been a great honor to stand with you,” Edilio said.
“Tell her I’m sorry I broke my promise,” Sam said, so softly Edilio almost didn’t hear. “Tell her I love her.”
Sam didn’t hurry. He knew where he was going. He wasn’t happy about going there. No rush.
He walked the highway. How many times before had he made this walk? How many times had he passed this wrecked car and that overturned truck?
Someday if, when, the barrier came down, someone would clean it all up. The tow trucks would come. Beep-beeping as they backed up to slip their lift beneath some battered hulk of a car. Maybe there were a few car windows that hadn’t been broken, but not many. All the tires were partly or completely deflated. The gas tanks were long-since siphoned. Many of these cars had kept running until the gas was gone.
In some of these cars babies in car seats had died of starvation. In some of these cars kids had died when the driver poofed at seventy miles an hour. Would the CSI types have to come in and reconstruct it all? Would they identify the unidentified bones?
Someday families would try to come back only to find their home ransacked, torn up, sometimes reeking of human feces. There would be graffiti on their walls and trash stuffed in their toilets. And in many cases they’d find their homes burned down. Zil’s fire had taken something like a quarter of the town, and other houses had been knocked down to make firebreaks.
People would marvel at the destruction and tut-tut and shake their heads because they wouldn’t know what people had lived through in this place.
Those people returning to Perdido Beach wouldn’t understand what desperate battles had been fought.
Yeah, sorry about pulling fuel rods out of the nuclear power plant and tossing them down a mine shaft. Why did we do that? Well . . . hah. You’re never going to believe why we did that.
You say Coates Academy looks like it’s been through an artillery duel? Well, in a way it has been.
Yes, there is at least one whisky still in the woods.
Yes, there are unburied corpses.
Those cat and dog bones? The ones that are charred as if someone cooked and ate a beloved household pet? Well . . . we got a little hungry.
Sorry about the graveyard in the town plaza. So damned sorry you can’t begin to understand how sorry.
Sorry.
He was walking toward fire, into thickening smoke.
That was how he had crossed the line the very first time, so long ago, when an apartment off the town plaza had burned and he’d heard a cry for help. No one else had gone running toward the fire, so he had.