It was hard to read Orc’s expression. But she heard anguish in his voice.
“Oh,” Astrid said.
“Gotta leave town. Like Hunter. That’s the law. You oughta know, you made up that law.”
“I didn’t come up with ‘thou shalt not kill,’” Astrid said defensively. The sanctimony in her own voice made her sick. The same Bible that said “thou shalt not kill” also said “he who hateth his brother is a murderer.”
Didn’t she hate her brother? Hadn’t she contemplated murder? Hadn’t she dared Turk and Lance to do it for her? If Orc had to go into exile, then didn’t she as well?
Would she wish her brother dead and live with that mortal sin, and yet draw the line at sleeping with Sam? How absurd was that? Murder, sure, but fornication? No way.
Astrid had never felt so low. She dropped back so Orc wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes. Oh, God, how had she become this person? How had she failed so utterly?
Hypocrite. Murderer in her heart. A cold, manipulative witch. That’s what she was. Astrid the Genius? Astrid the Fraud.
And now she slogged through darkening woods to find a cold shelter with a drunken killer and her brother. One who killed from rage and stupidity; the other who killed from what? Ignorance? Indifference? From the simple fact of too much power for anyone to handle, let alone an autistic child? She laughed, but it was not a happy sound.
“What’s funny?” Orc demanded suspiciously.
“Me,” Astrid said.
They spotted the dark gabled roofs of Coates through the trees and then struck the road that led up to the front gate.
It was a gloomy place, a haunted place. Pale whitewashed stone that showed evidence of violence. A massive hole in the facade was like a fatal bullet wound. The door had been ripped apart, shredded.
Orc stomped steadily forward, climbed the steps, and yelled, “Anyone here?”
His voice echoed in the arched entryway. “There’re beds upstairs. Gotta take the back stairs.”
He led the way, obviously familiar with the layout. Astrid wondered how he had come to know the place so well. Orc was not a Coates kid.
They found a dorm room that hadn’t been burned or shredded or used as a toilet.
Orc tossed Little Pete negligently onto a bare mattress. Astrid searched for and found a tattered blanket, which she spread over him.
She felt his forehead. Still feverish, but perhaps no worse than before. She had no thermometer. He was coughing in fits and starts. Not worse, not better.
“What’s next, Petey?” she asked him.
If Lance had squeezed the trigger, would the bullet have killed Little Pete? Would he have had the power to stop it? Surely. But would he have known what was happening?
“How much do you know, Petey? How much do you understand?”
He would need clean bedding after he wet himself. And she herself needed clothing, she was still in just a nightgown. And although there would be no food left in this place, surely there might be a few drops of water.
Astrid called to Orc, but he didn’t hear. She heard his heavy footsteps reverberate in the eerie silence.
Best to leave him be. In another room she found clothing that was close to her size. Close enough. It wasn’t clean, but at least it had not been worn recently. Coates had been abandoned for a while. She wondered if it belonged to Diana.
She went in search of water. What she found was Orc. He was in the dining hall. His massive legs were propped on a heavy wooden table. He had pushed two chairs together to bear his weight and spread.
In his hand he held a clear glass bottle full of clear liquid.
The room smelled of charcoal and something sickly sweet. The source was obvious: in the corner, next to a window, was a contraption that could only be a still. Copper tubing probably salvaged from the chemistry lab looped from a steel washtub that rested on an iron trestle over the cold remains of a fire.
“This is where Howard makes his whiskey,” Astrid said. “That’s how you know the place.”
Orc took a deep swig. Some of the liquor sloshed out of his mouth. “No one ever comes here since Caine and all them took off. That’s how come Howard set up here.”
“What does he use?”
Orc shrugged. “Don’t matter much as long as it’s any kind of vegetable. There’s a patch of corn only a few people know about. Artichokes, too. Cabbages. It don’t matter.”
Astrid took a chair at some distance from him.
“You changed clothes,” he said.
“I was cold.”
He nodded and drank deep. His eyes were on her, looking at her in detail. She was very glad to no longer be wearing her nightgown.
She wondered whether Orc was old enough for her to worry about in that way. She thought not. But it was a frightening possibility.
“Should you be drinking that so fast?”
“Gotta be fast,” Orc said. “Otherwise I pass out and can’t get enough to do the trick.”
“What trick?” Astrid asked.
Orc made a sad smile. “Don’t worry about it, Astrid.”
She didn’t want to worry about it. She had enough of her own worries. So she said nothing as he gulped and gulped until forced to take a breath.
“Orc,” she said softly. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“Like I said, don’t worry ’bout it.”
“You can’t do that,” she said. “It’s . . . it’s wrong.”
She noticed two more bottles down on the floor, right where he could reach them without moving.
“It’s a mortal sin,” she said, feeling like a stupid fool. The very word “sin” felt like a sin when she spoke it.
Hypocrite, she berated herself silently. Fraud.
“If you do this, you’ll have no chance to repent,” Astrid said. “You’ll die with a mortal sin on your conscience.”
“Got that already,” Orc said.
“But you’re sorry for that. You’ve thought about it. And you’re sorry for it.”
Orc sobbed suddenly, a loud sound. He tilted his head back and she saw the last of the bottle drain into his mouth.
“If you’ve asked for forgiveness, and if you felt truly sorry, then God has forgiven you for that little boy.”
The bottles weren’t corked, just sealed with a piece of Saran Wrap and a rubber band. Orc pulled the plastic off a second bottle.
“There’s no God in the FAYZ, didn’t you know that?” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
3 HOURS, 48 MINUTES
SAM FIRED. THE beams of light hit the hovering bug squarely. The rays of light bounced and fragmented, steaming the water.
“Dekka!” Sam yelled.
She killed gravity beneath the hovering bug so that it shot suddenly upward followed by a swoosh of rising water.
But it was no good. More of the creatures were opening their roachlike wings and flying awkwardly out toward the boat.
Sam cursed. He threw the engine into gear and spun the wheel. The boat zoomed toward the middle of the lake.
The bugs tried to chase, but they were insects, not eagles, and their flight was jerky and poorly controlled.
“I can maybe crush them,” Jack said over the roar of the engines.
“He believes he maybe can,” Toto commented.
“But they scare me.”
“That is true, too,” Toto said.
“Yeah, I could have guessed that,” Sam yelled as they dodged another lumbering creature.
They could keep dodging the bugs, maybe forever, but when Sam tapped the gas gauge it showed just an eighth of a tank.
There was a hand pump built into the dock’s gas tank. But it wasn’t as if Drake would let them pull in and refuel.
“We need gas,” Sam said.
He headed the boat away from the marina, keeping close to the shore, hoping Drake’s creepy army would follow. They were faster on land than in the air so they zoomed in their crazy bumblebee way back to land on shore.<
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He looked back and saw Drake urging the creatures on. They were quick, skittering on their insect legs. But not quite as fast as the boat. At top speed he could pull away.
“Are we running away?” Toto wondered.
“Yes,” Sam snapped.
“That’s not true.”
“Is there any way to shut you off?” Sam demanded. “We’re faster than they are. So we’re going to draw them off, double back, and beat them back to the marina.”
“Then what?” Dekka asked.
“We gas up and drive around out here forever,” Sam said.
“Great plan,” Dekka said.
“Sooner or later Drake gives way to Brittney. We might have a shot then.”
It didn’t take long at full speed to reach the end of the lake. The huge roaches swarmed along the shore, rushing eagerly to catch up. None were airborne now.
“Where’s Drake?” Jack asked.
Sam scanned the insect army. No sign of Drake. Sam killed the engine, saving gas for the mad dash back to the marina. In the sudden quiet he heard a different engine.
A sleek boat with two big outboards was throwing up a cloud of spray and whump-whumping toward them. There could be no doubt as to who was driving the boat.
The bugs on the shore. Drake on the water.
“If he has a gun, we’re in trouble,” Dekka said.
“He doesn’t need a gun,” Sam said grimly. “He can ram us. He’s unkillable, we’re not.”
“What do we do?” Jack asked. Then, more panicked, “What do we do?”
Dekka put a calming hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy.”
Sam measured the shoreline, checked the gas supply, glanced at his two friends, and finally appraised Toto.
“Dude, do you think you can pump gas?”
Toto looked away and passed the question along to the imaginary Spidey head. “Can I pump gas?” Then, apparently hearing an answer, he said, “Yes.”
Sam fired the engine up. He turned the wheel, waited, waited, as Drake’s bow wave grew large.
“Jack. Grab that boathook. And be ready.”
“What?”
“You ever see that movie where Heath Ledger was a knight?”
“Not his best movie,” Dekka said.
“True,” Toto agreed.
“Hold on,” Sam warned. He put the engine into gear, pushed the throttle all the way, and flew toward Drake.
Lana did not run, she was too tired for it, and anyway Howard was probably wrong. Turk and Lance surely did believe they’d killed Albert. As he’d laid there, shrieking in pain beneath Lana’s healing touch, Lance kept babbling something about forgiveness, praying to be saved, saying he was sorry for Albert. “It was Turk, it wasn’t me!” he’d said, his destroyed cheek flapping bloodily with each word as the drenching rain swept the blood down to the carpet beneath his head.
Lana had mostly healed Turk and Lance. They wouldn’t die, at least. She hadn’t much seen the point: they were scum and someone would only have to kill them all over again, sooner or later. But she supposed it wasn’t her decision to make. She was just a player in the madness.
She had missed her chance to be a hero by destroying the gaiaphage. And she had failed to stop the virus that now claimed nine bodies. Instead she’d saved a couple of creeps. Yay for her.
She and Howard found Albert just as he’d said: sitting with his back against the wall.
Lana noticed an awful lot of blood. A small, sticky sea of it around Albert.
“He didn’t die right away,” Lana observed. “Dead people don’t bleed as much. And see how the wall is smeared? He sat up.” She knelt and placed her fingers on his neck. “Then he just sat here and bled to death.”
No question in her mind. He had a bullet hole in his face. And a much larger exit wound out the far side. It looked as if some wild animal had taken a messy bite out of his skull.
“I don’t raise the dead,” Lana said.
“No, wait,” Howard insisted. He knelt beside her and lifted one eyelid. It was dark, there wasn’t much light for an iris to react to. So Howard fished out a lighter and flicked the flame.
Lana’s eyebrows went up. “Do it again.”
Howard lifted the other lid. That iris, too, responded.
“Huh,” Lana said.
She pressed both hands against Albert’s head. After a few minutes holding that pose she bent his head forward to see the awful exit wound. Around the jagged, ripped edges, flesh was growing.
“The brother’s not dead,” Howard said.
“About as close as you can get,” Lana said. “But no: he’s not dead. And this kind of thing, at least, I can heal.”
“Boy’s going to owe me,” Howard said.
“You’re a trip, Howard, as my dad would say,” Lana said. “You are definitely a trip.”
“You’ll tell Albert I brought you, right? You’ll tell him it was me, right?”
“Why? Are you leaving?”
Howard stood up. “Gotta go find Orc. I just figured out where he’d go.”
Lana got herself into a more comfortable position. Patrick went off to scavenge around in the house.
“You find anything, you better share,” Lana called after her dog.
The two boats raced toward each other.
Six seconds to impact.
Sam’s mind was racing. Drake would know he was bluffing. Drake didn’t fear an impact, he would know Sam was bluffing and he would expect Sam to suddenly veer aside.
Four seconds to impact.
“Jack!” Sam yelled. “Up on the bow!”
“What?”
“Do it!” Sam bellowed.
Jack sprang straight from the stern to the bow. He was holding the boathook like a lance. Like he really was a knight. Hopefully Drake had noticed.
One second.
“Now, throw it!” Sam shouted.
Jack threw it with all his desperate, supernatural strength.
Sam had not expected the boathook to impale Drake— and it didn’t. But even an unkillable killer had instincts, and Drake instinctively dropped to let the boathook fly harmlessly over his head.
Sam had already twisted the wheel.
They blew past Drake’s boat, spraying it with their bow wave and taking a drenching spray in return.
Dekka grinned at Toto. “See, this is what makes Sam, Sam.”
It took a furious Drake ten seconds to turn his boat and come after Sam.
The bugs were even slower to catch on. Now they were racing back along the shore, but neither Drake nor the bugs would get to the marina before Sam.
“Okay,” Sam yelled over the throb of the engines. “Toto, when we get there you pump like crazy, right? I’ll show you how. But Drake will be on us quick and he may try again to ram us, so Jack? You and Dekka be ready.”
“Ready to do what?”
“Hang on!” Sam yelled. He aimed the boat for the dock, threw it into reverse, the water boiled, the engine roared, and the boat scraped harshly to a stop by the gas pump.
Sam grabbed Toto and shoved him bodily up onto the dock.
“Dekka! Tie us off.” He unlimbered the hand pump, thrust the nozzle into the gas tank and physically placed Toto’s hands on the pump. “Up and down, up and down, and don’t stop until I tell you to.”
Sam ran to the end of the dock. Drake was roaring down on them. Sam glanced left, right, looking for what he needed. A low-slung sailboat. That would do.
“Dekka! Float that boat!”
Dekka raised her hands and the boat rose from the water, dripping all over them, tilting to one side so that for a moment Sam was afraid it would roll over and smash its mast down on their heads.
“Okay, Jack. You missed with the boathook. Try this!”
Jack had to skirt Dekka’s field, and for a second he lost his footing and almost fell into the water. Sam grabbed his hand and hauled him upright.
Jack backed up twenty feet, took a deep breath, and ran straight at the bo
at that now hovered over the end of the dock.
Sam had the pleasure of seeing the sudden realization dawn in Drake’s eyes.
Jack rushed forward, jumped, and hit the stern of the sailboat.
The boat flew, twisting crazily through the air. Not far, just twenty or thirty feet before it exploded into flames as Sam aimed and fired.
The boat fell, hit the water, and Drake’s boat smashed into it at full speed.
Both boats shattered, flaming wood splinters flew, bits of metal railing and big pieces of the engine spiraled and landed like shrapnel all around them.
Toto cried out in pain. His hip had been hit and he was bleeding and screaming and not pumping any longer.
“Jack! Pump! Dekka, get Toto.”
Sam dropped back into his boat and began snatching up and tossing out bits of flaming debris.
“Be dead, be dead,” Sam muttered under his breath.
A sudden sound and Sam felt a burning pain. A red lash mark appeared on his arm.
Drake was holding the dock with his real arm, whip hand drawn back to strike again.
Sam fired. Missed. Bought two seconds as Drake sank beneath the disturbed water.
He shot a look up the shore. The racing creatures pelted through the parking lot, swarmed over and around the cars, would be on them in seconds. Now or never.
“Enough! Back in the boat!”
No one needed to be told twice. Toto and Jack were first in. Dekka stumbled as she ran, slapped her belly, and for a moment Sam thought something had hit her.
Drake was up and his whip hand found Jack. Jack howled and grabbed at the tentacle but missed.
Sam gunned the engine. But he had forgotten the rope. The boat roared, shot forward, and snapped the cleat off the dock. The resistance was enough to yank the boat around.
It smashed into another parked boat and sent everyone tumbling.
By the time Sam cleared his head, Drake had his hand on the gunwale and his whip hand was flailing madly into the boat, striking Jack again and Toto.
Sam threw the boat into reverse, pushed the throttle, twisted the wheel, and ground Drake between boat and dock.
Then he changed gears and roared off, leaving Drake cursing in the water as the bugs raced down the dock, their mandibles slashing at the air.
Sam drove to the middle of the lake and killed the engine. The gas gauge showed a hair over a quarter tank. Enough for now. But at the cost of Toto screaming in pain.
Plague Page 25
