“That’s your solution? Have a cookie?” Astrid asked.
“No, my solution is to run down to the beach and hide out until this is all over,” Sam said. “But a cookie never hurts.”
They kept moving, Sam and Quinn and Astrid. Sam’s home was east of downtown. He and his mom shared a small, squashed-looking one-story house with a tiny, fenced backyard and no real front yard, just a sidewalk. Sam’s mother didn’t make much money working as a night nurse up at Coates Academy. Sam’s dad was out of the picture, always had been. He was a mystery in Sam’s life. And last year his stepfather had left, too.
“This is it,” Sam said. “We don’t believe in showing off with a big house and all.”
“Well, you live near Town Beach,” Astrid said, pointing to the only advantage of this house or this neighborhood.
“Yeah. Two-minute walk. Less if I cut through the yard of the house where the biker gang lives.”
“Biker gang?” Astrid said.
“Not the whole gang, really, just Killer and his girlfriend Accomplice.” Astrid frowned, and Sam said, “Sorry. Bad joke. It’s not a great neighborhood.”
Now that he was here, Sam didn’t want to go in. His mother would not be there.
And there was something in his house maybe Quinn, and especially Astrid, shouldn’t see.
He led the way up the three sun-faded, gray-painted wooden steps that creaked when you stepped on them. The porch was narrow, and a couple of months ago someone had stolen the rocking chair his mom had put out there so she could sit and rock in the evening before she went to work. Now they just had to drag out kitchen chairs.
That was always the best time of day for them, the beginning of his mother’s workday, the end of Sam’s. Sam would be home from school, and his mom would be awake, having slept most of the day. She would have a cup of tea, and Sam would have a soda or maybe a juice. She would ask him how school had gone that day, and he wouldn’t really tell her very much, but it was nice to think about how he could tell her if he wanted to.
Sam opened the door. It was quiet inside, except for the refrigerator. The compressor on it was old and noisy. The last time they’d talked out on the porch, feet up on the railing, his mom had wondered whether they should get the compressor fixed, or whether it would be cheaper just to get a secondhand refrigerator. And how would they get it home without a truck?
“Mom?” Sam said to the emptiness of the family room.
There was no answer.
“Maybe she’s up the hill,” Quinn said. “Up the hill” was the townie phrase for Coates Academy, the private boarding school. The hill was more like a mountain.
“No,” Sam said. “She’s gone like all the others.”
The stove was on. A frying pan had burned black. There was nothing in the pan. Sam turned off the cooktop.
“This is going to be a problem all over town,” he said.
Astrid said, “Yeah, stoves left on, cars running. Somebody needs to go around and make sure things are off and the little kids are with someone. And there’s pills, and alcohol, and some people probably have guns.”
“In this neighborhood some people have artillery,” Sam said.
“It has to be God,” Quinn said. “I mean, how else, right? No one else could do this. Just make all the adults disappear?”
“Everyone fifteen or over,” Astrid corrected. “Fifteen isn’t an adult. Trust me, I was in class with them.” She wandered tentatively through the living room, like she was looking for something. “Can I use the bathroom, Sam?”
He nodded reluctantly. He was mortified to have her here. Neither Sam nor his mother was really into housekeeping. The place was more or less clean, but not like Astrid’s house.
Astrid closed the bathroom door. Sam heard the sound of running water.
“What did we do?” Quinn asked. “That’s what I don’t get. What did we do to piss God off?”
Sam opened the refrigerator. He stared at the food there. Milk. A couple of sodas. Half of a small watermelon placed cut side down on a plate. Eggs. Apples. And lemons for his mom’s tea. The usual.
“I mean, we did something to deserve this, right?” Quinn said. “God doesn’t do things like this for no reason.”
“I don’t think it was God,” Sam said.
“Dude. Had to be.”
Astrid was back. “Maybe Quinn’s right. There’s nothing, you know, normal, that can do this,” she said. “Is there? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not possible and yet it happened.”
“Sometimes impossible things happen,” Sam said.
“No, they don’t,” Astrid argued. “The universe has laws. All the stuff we learn in science class. You know, like the laws of motion, or that nothing can go as fast as the speed of light. Or gravity. Impossible things don’t happen. That’s what impossible means.” Astrid bit her lip. “Sorry. It’s not really the time for me to be lecturing, is it?”
Sam hesitated. If he showed them, crossed this line, he wouldn’t be able to make them forget it. They would keep at him till he told them everything.
They would look at him differently. They would be freaked, like he was.
“I’m going to change my shirt, okay? In my room. I’ll be right back. There’s stuff to drink in the fridge. Go ahead.”
He closed the door to his room behind him.
He hated his room. The window opened onto an alley and the glass was that translucent kind you couldn’t really see out of. The room was gloomy even on a sunny day. At night it was so dark.
Sam hated the dark.
His mom made him lock up the house at night when she was at work. “You’re the man of the house now,” she would say, “but still, I’d feel better if I knew you had the door locked.”
He didn’t like it when she said that, about him being the man of the house. The man of the house now.
Now.
Maybe she didn’t really mean anything by it. But how could she not? It was eight months since his stepfather had fled their old house. Six months since Sam and his mother had moved to this shabby bungalow in this decrepit neighborhood and his mother had been forced to take the low-paying job with the lousy hours.
Two nights ago there had been a thunderstorm and the lights had gone out for a while. He’d been in total darkness, except for faint flashes of lightning that turned the familiar things in his room eerie.
He’d managed to fall asleep for a while, but a huge crack of thunder had awakened him. He’d come out of a terrifying nightmare to total darkness in an empty house.
The combination had been too much. He’d cried out for his mother. A big, tough kid like him, fourteen, almost fifteen, yelling “Mom” in the darkness. He had reached out his hand, pushing at the darkness.
And then . . . light.
It had appeared not quite all the way inside his closet. He could kind of hide it by closing the closet door. But when he’d tried to close the door all the way, the light had simply passed right through it. Like the door wasn’t even there. So the door was kind of closed, not all the way. He had hung some shirts casually over the top of the door to block most of the light, but that lame deception wasn’t going to last long. Eventually his mom would see . . . well, when she came back, she would.
He pulled the closet door open. The camouflage fell away.
It was still there.
The light was small, but piercing. And it hovered there, unmoving, unattached to anything, no strings. Not a lamp or a lightbulb, just a tiny ball of pure light.
It was impossible. It was something that could not exist. And yet there it was. The light that had simply appeared when Sam had needed it, and had not gone away.
He touched it, but not really. His fingers just went through it, feeling only a warm glow, no hotter than bathwater.
“Yes, Sam,” he whispered to himself, “still there.”
Astrid and Quinn thought today was the beginning, but Sam knew better. Normal life had started coming apart eight months ago. The
n, normalcy again. And then, this light.
Fourteen years of normal for Sam. Then normal had started to slip off its track.
Today, normal had crashed and burned.
“Sam?”
It was Astrid calling from the living room. He glanced at the doorway, anxious lest she come in and see. He did his hurried best to hide the light again, and went back to his companions.
“Your mom was writing on her laptop,” Astrid said.
“Probably checking email.” But when he sat down at the table and looked at the screen, it was open to a Word document, not a browser.
It was a diary. Just three paragraphs on the page.
It happened again last night. I wish I could take this to G. But she’ll think I’m crazy. I could lose my job. She’ll think I’m on drugs. If I had a way to put cameras all over, I could get some proof. But I have no proof, and C’s “mother” is rich and generous to CA. I’d be out the door. Even if I tell someone the whole truth, they’ll just put me down as an overwrought mother.
Sooner or later, C or one of the others will do something serious. Someone will get hurt. Just like S with T.
Maybe I’ll confront C. I don’t think he’ll confess. Would it make any difference if he knew everything?
Sam stared at the page. It hadn’t been saved. Sam hunted around on the computer’s desktop and found the folder labeled “Journal.” He clicked on it. It was password protected. If his mother had saved this final page, it too would have been under a password.
“CA” was easy. Coates Academy. And “G” was probably the head of the school, Grace. “S,” too, was easy: Sam. But who was “C”?
One line seemed to vibrate as he stared at it: “Just like S with T.”
Astrid was reading over his shoulder. She was trying to be subtle, but she was definitely peeking. He closed the laptop.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?” Quinn asked.
“Anywhere but here,” Sam said.
FOUR
297 HOURS, 40 MINUTES
“LET’S HEAD FOR the plaza,” Sam said. He closed the door of his home behind him, locked it, and stuck the key in his jeans.
“Why?” Quinn asked.
“It’s where people will probably go,” Astrid said. “There’s nowhere else, is there? Unless they go back to the school. If anyone knows anything, or if there are any adults, that’s where they’d be.”
Perdido Beach occupied a headland southwest of the coastal highway. On the north side of the highway the hills rose sharply, dry brown and patchy green, and formed a series of ridges that ran into the sea northwest and southeast of town, limiting the town to just this space, confining it to just this bulge.
There were just over three thousand residents in Perdido Beach—far fewer now. The nearest mall was in San Luis. The nearest major shopping center was down the coast twenty miles. North, up the coast, the mountains pressed so close to the sea that there was no space for building, except for the narrow strip where the nuclear power plant sat. Beyond that was national parkland, a forest of ancient redwoods.
Perdido Beach had remained a sleepy little town of straight, tree-lined streets and mostly older, Spanish-style stucco bungalows with sloped orange tile roofs or old-style flat roofs. Most people had a lawn they kept well-trimmed and green. Most people had a fenced backyard. In the tiny downtown, ringing the plaza, there were palm trees and plenty of angled parking spaces.
Perdido Beach had a resort hotel south of town, and Coates Academy up in the hills, and the power plant, but aside from that, only a smattering of businesses: the Ace hardware, the McDonald’s, a coffee shop called Bean There, a Subway sandwich shop, a couple of convenience stores, one grocery store, and a Chevron station on the highway.
The closer Sam and Astrid and Quinn got, the more kids they encountered walking toward the plaza. It was like somehow all the kids in town had figured out that they wanted to be together. Strength in numbers. Or maybe it was just the crushing loneliness of homes that were suddenly not homey anymore.
Half a block away, Sam smelled smoke and saw kids running.
The plaza was a small open space, a sort of park with patches of grass and a fountain in the middle that almost never worked. There were benches and brick sidewalks and trash cans. At the top of the square the modest town hall and a church sat side by side. Stores ringed the plaza, some of them closed up forever. Above some of the stores were apartments. Smoke was pouring from a second-story window of an apartment above an out-of-business flower shop and a seedy insurance agency. As Sam came to a panting stop, a jet of orange flame burst from a high window.
Several dozen kids were standing, watching. A crowd that struck Sam as very strange, until he realized why it was strange: there were no adults, just kids.
“Is anyone in there?” Astrid called out. No one answered.
“It could spread,” Sam said.
“There’s no 911,” someone pointed out.
“If it spreads, it could burn down half the town.”
“You see a fireman anywhere?” A helpless shrug.
The day care shared a wall with the hardware store, and both were only a narrow alley away from the burning building. Sam figured they had time to get the kids out of the day care if they acted fast, but the hardware store was something they could not afford to lose.
There had to be forty kids just standing there gawking. No one seemed about to start doing anything.
“Great,” Sam said. He grabbed two kids he sort of knew. “You guys, go to the day care. Tell them to get the littles out of there.”
The kids stared at him without moving.
“Now. Go. Do it!” he said, and they took off running.
Sam pointed at two other kids. “You and you. Go into the hardware store, get the longest hose you can find. Get a spray nozzle, too. I think there’s a spigot in that alley. Start spraying water on the side of the hardware store and up on the roof.”
These two also stared blankly. “Dudes: Not tomorrow. Now. Now. Go! Quinn? You better go with them. We want to wet down the hardware—that’s where the wind will take the fire next.”
Quinn hesitated.
People were not getting this. How could they not see that they had to do something, not just stand around?
Sam pushed to the front of the crowd and in a loud voice said, “Hey, listen up, this isn’t the Disney Channel. We can’t just watch this happen. There are no adults. There’s no fire department. We are the fire department.”
Edilio was there. He said, “Sam’s right. What do you need, Sam? I’m with you.”
“Okay. Quinn? The hoses from the hardware store. Edilio? Let’s get the big hoses from the fire station, hook ’em up to the hydrant.”
“They’ll be heavy. I’ll need some strong guys.”
“You, you, you, you.” Sam grabbed each person’s shoulder, shaking each one, pushing them into motion. “Come on. You. You. Let’s go!”
And then came the wailing.
Sam froze.
“There’s someone in there,” a girl moaned.
“Quiet,” Sam hissed, and everyone fell silent, listening to the roar and crackle of the fire, the distant car alarms, and then, a cry: “Mommy.”
Again. “Mommy.”
Someone mocked the voice in falsetto. “Mommy, I’m scared.”
It was Orc, actually finding the situation funny. Kids drew away from him.
“What?” he demanded.
Howard, never far away from Orc, sneered. “Don’t worry, School Bus Sam will save us all, won’t you, Sam?”
“Edilio. Go,” Sam said quietly. “Bring everything you can.”
“Man, you can’t go up in there,” Edilio said. “They’ll have air tanks and stuff at the fire station. Wait, I’ll bring it all.” He was already running, shepherding his crew of strong kids ahead of him.
“Hey, up there,” Sam yelled. “Kid. Can you get to the door or the window?”
He stared up, craning his nec
k. There were six windows on the front of the building upstairs, one in the alley. The far left window was where the fire was, but now smoke was drifting out of the second window, too. The fire was spreading.
“Mommy!” the voice cried. It was a clear voice, not choking from the smoke. Not yet.
“If you’re going in there, wrap this around your face.” Somehow Astrid had come up with a wet cloth, borrowed from someone and soaked.
“Did I say I was going in there?” Sam asked.
“Don’t get hurt,” Astrid said.
“Good advice,” Sam said dryly, and wrapped the wet fabric around his head, over his mouth and nose.
She grabbed his arm. “Look, Sam, it’s not fire that kills people, it’s smoke. If you get too much smoke, your lungs will swell up, they’ll fill with fluid.”
“How much is too much?” he asked, his voice muffled by the cloth.
Astrid smiled. “I don’t know everything, Sam.”
Sam wanted to take her hand. He was scared. He needed someone to lend him some courage. He wanted to take her hand. But this wasn’t the time. So he managed a shaky smile and said, “Here goes.”
“Go for it, Sam,” a voice yelled in encouragement. There was a ragged chorus of cheers from the crowd.
The entrance to the building was unlocked. Inside were mailboxes, a back door to the flower shop, a dark, narrow stairway heading up.
Sam almost made it to the top of the stairs before he ran into an opaque wall of swirling smoke. The wet cloth did nothing. One breath and he was on his knees, choking and gagging. Tears filled his stinging eyes.
He crouched low and found more air. “Kid, can you hear me?” he rasped. “Yell, I need to hear you.”
The “Mommy” was faint this time, from down the hall to the left, halfway to the other side of the building. Maybe the kid would jump out the window into someone’s arms, Sam told himself. It would be stupid to get himself killed if the kid could just jump.
The stink of the smoke was intolerable, awful, everywhere. It had a sourness to it, like smoke plus curdled milk.
Sam stayed on his knees and crawled down the hallway. It was strange. Eerie. The ratty hall runner below him seemed so normal: faded Oriental pattern, frayed edges, a few crumbs, and a dead roach. An overhead lightbulb was on, filtering pale light down through the ominous gray.
Gone Series Complete Collection Page 3
