Lies

by Michael Grant

“We’re there,” Brianna said.

  Time stopped for Mary. People froze. The very molecules of air seemed to stop vibrating.

  Yes, just as others had described it. The poof. The big one-five.

  And there, oh God, her mother.

  The mother of Mother Mary, Mary thought. Not beautiful, maybe, not so very beautiful in reality as she had become in memory. But so warm and so inviting.

  “Come on, honey,” her mother said. “It’s time to lay down the burden.”

  “Mom…I’ve missed you so much.”

  Her mother held her hands out, a waiting hug. Waiting. Arms open. Face smiling through tears.

  “Mom…I’m scared…,” Mary said.

  “Come to me, baby girl. Hold tight to their hands and come to me.”

  “The littles…my kids…”

  “All their mommies are with me. Bring them out of that awful place, Mary. Set them free.”

  Mary stepped forward.

  FORTY-THREE

  0 MINUTES

  ASTRID SCREAMED, “GRAB the children! Grab the children!”

  She leaped to get a grip on the child nearest to her. Others just stared. Kids gaped, stunned, as Mary stepped, as if in a dream, off the cliff.

  Mary dropped from sight. She was still trying to take steps as she fell.

  Her grip was tight. Kids fell with her. A chain reaction. One pulling the next, pulling the next.

  Dominoes off the cliff.

  Justin tried to pull back when Mary pulled him over the edge of the cliff. But he wasn’t strong enough to loosen her iron grip.

  He fell.

  And the little girl who held his other hand fell after him.

  Justin didn’t cry out. There was no time.

  Rocks rushed up at him. Fast as a time when he’d been hit in the face by a dodgeball. But he knew the rocks wouldn’t sting and bounce away.

  A rock monster opened jaws to receive him. Jagged stone teeth were going to chew him up.

  Astrid’s grip was too weak.

  The child she’d grabbed was torn from her grip.

  Disappeared over the side.

  She turned away, eyes wide with horror.

  Brittney was there, right there, staring at her. But her face was changing, twisting, a horrible mask of melting flesh.

  And Sam!

  Sam, staring.

  Brianna, a sudden blur as she leaped off the cliff.

  Mary felt her grip on the children loosen. They weren’t falling, they were flying. Flying free.

  Her mother held out her arms and Mary, free at last, flew to her.

  Justin felt Mother Mary’s hand simply disappear. There, firmly gripping his one moment.

  Then gone.

  Justin fell.

  But behind him something fell faster, a wind, a rush, a rocket. He was halfway to the rocks when the something fast hit him and knocked the air out of him.

  He flew sideways. Like a baseball that had just been hit for a home run. He was rolling across the sand of the beach now, rolling like he’d probably never stop.

  He hit the sand ahead of the others who, without Brianna’s speed, simply fell toward the rocks.

  “Well, if it isn’t Astrid,” Brittney said with Drake’s voice. “And you brought the Petard with you.”

  Brittney, whose arm was now as long as a python, whose braces had been replaced by a shark smile, laughed.

  “Surprise!” The thing that was not Brittney said.

  “Drake.” Astrid gasped.

  “You’re next, pretty girl. You and your idiot brother. Over the side. Jump!”

  Drake lashed at her with his whip hand.

  Astrid staggered back.

  She reached for Little Pete. She grabbed his hand. But it slipped from her grip. Instead, she held the game player. She stared at it, uncomprehending.

  Astrid took a step back in midair, tried to recover, windmilled her arms crazily, trying to maintain her balance. But she could feel the truth: she was too far.

  And then, as she gave up, as she accepted the fact of death and called on God to save her brother, something hit her hard in the back.

  She jerked forward. Both feet on solid ground.

  “You’re welcome,” Brianna said.

  The impact had thrown the game player from her hand. It spun through the air and hit a rock. Smashed.

  Drake drew back his whip arm.

  “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this,” Brianna said.

  “No, Breeze,” Sam said. “This is my job.”

  Drake whirled, seeing Sam for the first time. Drake’s mud-stained grin disappeared.

  “Sam!” he said. “You really ready for another round?”

  His whip snapped.

  Sam raised his hand, palm out. Brilliant green light blazed. But the whip had upset Sam’s aim. Instead of burning a hole through Drake’s middle, he hit Drake’s foot.

  Drake bellowed in rage. He tried to take a step forward, but his foot wasn’t just burned—it was gone. He rested his weight on a charred stump.

  Sam aimed and fired and Drake fell onto his back. Both his feet were gone now.

  But even as Sam watched, the legs were regenerating. Growing.

  “See?” Drake said through teeth gritted more in fury and triumph than in pain. “I can’t be killed, Sam. I’ll be with you forever.”

  Sam raised both hands.

  Beams of green light burned away the new growth. Sam played the light slowly up Drake’s legs. Calves. Knees. The whip hand thrashed and slashed, but Sam was out of range.

  Drake screamed.

  Thighs burned. Hips. But still Drake lived and screamed and laughed. “You can’t kill me!”

  “Yeah, well, let’s just see if that’s true,” Sam said.

  But then, a voice cried out. “Sing, Jill! Sing!”

  Nerezza, her face no longer covered with flesh but with what seemed to be billions of crawling cells that glowed a green not much different from Sam’s own killing light.

  “SIIIING, Siren!” Nerezza cried. “SIIIING!”

  Jill knew the song she was supposed to sing. The song John had taught her.

  She had come to fear Nerezza. She’d feared her almost from the first. But then had come the moment when Orsay told Nerezza to go away.

  The last words Orsay had spoken. “I can’t go on this way,” Orsay had said.

  “What do you mean?” Nerezza had asked.

  “You…you have to go away, Nerezza. I can’t go on this way.”

  That’s when Nerezza had done the horrible thing to Orsay. With her hands around Orsay’s throat. Squeezing. Orsay had barely seemed to fight back, as though she accepted it.

  Nerezza had carried her to the rock and dragged her to the top.

  “She’ll be fine,” Nerezza had lied to Jill. “And if you do exactly what I say, you’ll be fine, too.”

  Now Orsay stared through blank, empty eyes. She hadn’t seen Mary lead the children to the cliff.

  She hadn’t seen Mary pull the children off the edge.

  Hadn’t seen them fall.

  But Jill had.

  Jill sang.

  Tho’ like the wanderer,

  The sun goes down,

  Darkness be over me.

  My rest a stone;

  Yet in my dreams I’d be

  Nearer, my God, to thee,

  Nearer, my God, to thee,

  Nearer to thee!

  Sam’s killing light died.

  Brianna stood still completely still.

  Astrid froze in mid-cry.

  The kids of Perdido Beach, all within sound of the Siren’s voice, stopped, and turned toward the little girl.

  All but three.

  Little Pete stumbled toward his game player.

  Nerezza laughed and reached down to give a hand to Drake, who was swiftly regrowing what he had lost.

  “Sing on, Siren!” Nerezza cried, giddy, triumphant.

  Sam knew in a distant, far-off way what was happening. His mind still
worked, though at a tenth of its normal speed, gears turning like a windmill in the faintest breeze.

  Drake could almost stand. In a moment he would come for Sam. He would finish what he had started.

  The memory of pain bubbled slowly up within Sam. But he lacked the power to move, to act, to do. He could only watch helplessly. Just like before. Helpless.

  But then, out of a corner of his eye, Sam saw something very strange. Something was flying very fast over the ocean.

  He heard a distant thwap thwap thwap.

  The sound grew louder, as the helicopter roared across the ocean.

  Loud.

  Louder.

  Loud enough.

  Sam tried to move and found that he could.

  “No!” Nerezza cried.

  Sam fired once. The beams hit Nerezza in the chest. It was enough to kill anyone. To burn a hole through any living thing.

  But Nerezza did not burn. She simply looked at Sam with a look of cold hatred. Her eyes glowed green, a light so bright it almost rivaled Sam’s fire for brightness. And then, she was gone.

  Drake watched as his feet grew back. But not quickly enough.

  “Now, Drake,” Sam said. “Where were we?”

  He felt Astrid at his side. “Do it,” she said grimly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sam said.

  Sanjit had mastered the art of flying straight ahead.

  He had almost mastered the art of aiming in one particular direction. You could do it with the pedals. So long as you were very, very gentle and very, very careful.

  But he wasn’t exactly sure he knew how to stop.

  Now he was rushing toward land at amazing speed. And he supposed he might as well keep going a while longer. Especially since he didn’t quite know how to stop. Exactly.

  But then Virtue yelled, “Stop!”

  “What?”

  Virtue reached over, grabbed the cyclic, and pushed it hard to the left.

  The helicopter banked suddenly, wildly, just as Sanjit noticed the fact that the sky directly ahead of them wasn’t exactly sky. In fact, when you looked at it from the right angle it looked an awful lot like a wall.

  The helicopter screamed over the heads of a bunch of kids who looked like they were watching the sunset from the cliff.

  The helicopter went fully sideways and the skids screeched along something that was very definitely not sky.

  Then it was free again but still sideways and sinking fast toward the ground. An empty pool, tennis courts, rooftops flashed by in a split second.

  Sanjit eased the cyclic back to the right but completely forgot about the pedals. The helicopter spun a 360 in the air, slowed, fought its way up, and then hovered in midair.

  “I think I’m going to land,” Sanjit said.

  The helicopter came down with a crash. The plastic of the canopy cracked and starred. Sanjit felt as if his spine had been jackhammered.

  He switched off the engine.

  Virtue was staring and shaking and maybe mumbling something.

  Sanjit twisted in his seat.

  “You guys okay? Bowie? Pixie? Peace?”

  He got three shaky nods in response.

  Sanjit laughed and tried to high-five Virtue but their hands missed. Sanjit laughed again.

  “So,” Sanjit said. “You guys want to go up again?”

  Drake bellowed in fear and pain as the green light ate its way relentlessly up his body.

  Drake was smoke from the waist down when from his mouth came Brittney’s voice.

  Drake’s teeth flashed metal.

  The lean, cruel face of the psychopath melted from its own internal fire. Brittney’s full, pimpled face emerged.

  “Don’t stop, Sam!” Brittney cried. “You have to destroy all of it, every bit.”

  “I can’t,” Sam said.

  “You must!” Brittney said through her screams. “Kill it! Kill the evil one!”

  “Brittney…,” Sam said, helpless.

  “Kill it! Kill it!” Brittney cried.

  Sam shook his head. He looked at Astrid. Her face was a mirror of his own.

  “Breeze,” Sam said. “Rope. Chains. A lot of it. Whatever you can find. Now!”

  Astrid spotted Little Pete. He was safe. Looking for his game. Searching, but not near the edge of the cliff, thankfully.

  She forced herself to go to the cliff. She had to see.

  She leaned out over the side.

  Dekka lay on her back in a mud of bloody sand. Her arms were both outstretched toward the cliff.

  The little boy named Justin was limping up out of the surf, holding his stomach. Brianna had saved him. Dekka had saved the rest.

  And where Astrid had expected to see small, crumpled bodies, children huddled together on the rocks.

  Astrid, tears in her eyes, gave Dekka a small wave.

  Dekka did not notice her and did not wave back. She slowly lowered her arms and lay there, a picture of exhaustion.

  Mary was nowhere to be seen. Her fifteenth birthday had come, and she had gone. Astrid made the sign of the cross and prayed wordlessly that somehow Mary was right and that she was in her mother’s arms.

  “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 dr
awn 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.