the door to admit him.
Sam stared in absolute amazement. He was torn between
outrage and an urge to laugh in admiration.
“Who told you you could do this?” Sam asked.
Albert shrugged. “Same person who told me I could run the
McDonald’s until we ran out of food: no one. I just did it.”
“Fine, but you gave away the food. Now you’re charging
people. That’s not cool, Albert.”
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“You’re trying to profit?” This from Astrid, who had followed Sam, Little Pete in tow.
Inside, the music had shifted from hip-hop to a song Sam
happened to love: the ridiculously hooky Tim Armstrong
tune “Into Action.” If he ever were to dance, this might be the
tune that did it.
Albert considered Astrid and Sam. “Yes. I’m trying to
make a profit. I’m using batteries, toilet paper, and paper towels as currency. Each is something that will eventually be in short supply.”
“You’re trying to get all the toilet paper in town?” Astrid
shrilled. “Are you kidding?”
“No, Astrid, I’m not kidding,” Albert said. “Look, right
now, kids are playing with the stuff. I saw little kids throwing
rolls of it around on their lawns like it was a toy. So—”
“So your solution is to try and take it all away from people?”
“You’d rather see it wasted?”
“Yeah, actually,” Astrid huffed. “Rather than you getting it
all for yourself. You’re acting like a jerk.”
Albert’s eyes flared. “Look, Astrid, now kids know they
can buy their way into the club with it. So they’re not going to
waste it anymore.”
“No, they’re going to give it all to you,” she shot back. “And
what happens when they need some?”
“Then there will still be some left because I made it valuable.”
“Valuable to you.”
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“Valuable to everyone, Astrid.”
“It’s you taking advantage of kids dumb enough not to
know any better. Sam, you have to put a stop to this.”
Sam had drifted away from the conversation, his head full
of the music. He snapped back. “She’s right, Albert, this isn’t
okay. You didn’t get permission—”
“I didn’t think I needed permission to give kids what they
want. I mean, I’m not threatening anyone, saying, ‘Give me
your toilet paper, give me your batteries.’ I’m just playing
some music and saying, ‘If you want to come in and dance,
then it’ll cost you.’”
“Dude, I respect you being ambitious and all,” Sam said.
“But I have to shut this down. You never got permission, even,
let alone asked us if it was okay to charge people.”
Albert said, “Sam, I respect you more than I can even say.
And Astrid, you are way smarter than me. But I don’t see how
you have the right to shut me down.”
That was it for Sam. “Okay, I tried to be nice. But I am the
mayor. I was elected, as you probably remember, since I think
you voted for me.”
“I did. I’d do it again, man. But Sam, Astrid, you guys are
wrong here. This club is about all these kids have that can get
them together for a good time. They’re sitting in their homes
starving and feeling sad and scared. When they’re dancing,
they forget how hungry and sad they are. This is a good thing
I’m doing.”
Sam stared hard at Albert, a stare that kids in Perdido
Beach took seriously. But Albert did not back down.
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“Sam, how many cantaloupes did Edilio manage to bring
back with kids who were rounded up and forced to work?”
Albert asked.
“Not many,” Sam admitted.
“Orc picked a whole truckload of cabbage. Before the
zekes figured out how to get at him. Because we paid Orc to
work.”
“He did it because he’s the world’s youngest alcoholic and
you paid him with beer,” Astrid snapped. “I know what you
want, Albert. You want to get everything for yourself and be
this big, important guy. But you know what? This is a whole
new world. We have a chance to make it a better world. It
doesn’t have to be about some people getting over on everyone else. It can be fair to everyone.”
Albert laughed. “Everyone can be equally hungry. In a
week or so, everyone can starve.”
A group of kids were leaving, pushing open the door. Sam
recognized them, of course. He knew everyone in town now,
at least by sight if not by name.
They came out laughing, giggling, happy.
“Hey, Big Sam,” one of them said.
Another said, “You should go in, dude, it’s great.”
Sam just nodded in acknowledgment.
The decision could no longer be put off. Close down the
club or let it go. If he didn’t close it down he was giving ground
to Albert and would probably have another stupid fight with
Astrid, who would feel as if he’d ignored her.
Not for the first time, or even the hundredth time, Sam
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wished he had never, ever agreed to become anyone’s leader.
Sam stole a glance at the watch on Albert’s wrist. It was
almost nine p.m.
“Close it down,” Sam said firmly. “Close it. At ten thirty.
Kids need sleep.”
Inside the club Quinn relaxed into the beat. Some ska-punk,
sure. Maybe later some hip-hop. Some classic old tunes,
maybe.
Give it up for Albert: the guy had turned the Mac’s into a
decent dance club. The main lights were all off, just the menu
boards were illuminated. But they didn’t show Happy Meals
and combos. Albert had covered them with pink tissue paper
so they gave off a mellow glow, just enough to light the whites
of people’s eyes and their teeth when they smiled.
Hunter, what was he, seventh grade? He was the one spinning the CDs and scratching the turntable. He wasn’t exactly a professional, but he was good enough. Cool enough kid,
Quinn thought, even though the rumor was he was developing some killer powers. Time would tell if he would stay cool, or turn as arrogant as some of the freaks. Like Brianna, who
was suddenly calling herself “the Breeze” and demanding
everyone else play along. Like she was a comic book superhero. The Breeze. And he’d kind of liked her, once.
Speaking of which, there she was, dancing like a crazy
person, speeding herself up, feet flying, bouncing up and
down so fast, she looked like she might start flying around
the room.
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She’d been telling everyone who would listen how she beat
a bullet. “I’m now officially faster than a speeding bullet. Me
and Superman.”
In another corner the weird little kid named Duck was
peddling some crazy story involving fish-bats and an underground city or whatever.
And then there was Dekka, sitting by herself, nodding
almost imperceptibly to the beat, eyes on Br
ianna. No one
really knew much about Dekka. She was one of the Coates
kids, one of the ones who had been rescued from Caine and
Drake’s cruel cinderblock torture.
She had a vibe to her, Dekka, a feeling she gave off that
she was strong and a little dangerous. There was some history there, Quinn thought, something in her past, like with almost all the Coates kids. Coates was known as a school for
troubled rich kids. They weren’t all rich, they weren’t all troubled, but the majority had some serious issues.
Quinn slid between two fourth graders, a guy and a girl,
dancing. Together. When Quinn was that age he would never
have danced with a girl like they were on a date. In fact,
he still didn’t. But things were different now, he supposed.
Fourth grade was like . . . like middle-aged or something. He
himself was old. Old, old, old at almost fifteen.
Birthday coming up. The question was, what would he do?
Stay or step outside?
Mostly, ever since Sam had survived, kids who had hit the
Fatal Fifteen had survived. Sam had told them how to do it.
Computer Jack, who back in those days was with Caine,
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had used high-speed photography to record a captive kid
up at Coates hitting the moment, the AoD, the Age of
Destruction. Jack had come to Perdido Beach with the tale
of the tape, the great revelation that in that fateful moment
your world would slow down, slow down to a crawl as you
approached infinity. And there, in that moment, would
come a tempter to beckon to you, call to you, ask you to
cross over.
But the tempter was a fraud. A liar. Like a devil, Quinn
thought, like a devil. He backed into someone and turned to
apologize.
“Hey, Quinn.” It was Lana, shouting over the music so that
it was halfway to lip-reading for Quinn. The Healer actually
speaking to him.
“Oh. Hi, Lana. This is cool, huh?” He indicated the room
with an awkward motion.
Lana nodded. She looked a little bleak, a little forlorn.
Which seemed impossible to Quinn. Lana was second only
to Sam in hero status. And the difference was that some people really kind of hated Sam, while no one hated Lana. Sam might make you do something—pick up garbage, take care
of the prees at the day care, shoot someone with a machine
gun—but all Lana ever did was heal people.
“Yeah. It’s kind of cool,” Lana said. “But I don’t really know
anyone.”
“No way. You know everyone.”
Lana shook her head ruefully. “No. Everyone knows me.
Or at least they think they do.”
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“Well, you know me,” Quinn said, and made a kind of
slanted grin so she’d know he wasn’t trying to get above himself and act like her equal.
But that wasn’t how she took it. She nodded, so serious that
she looked like she might cry. “I miss my parents.”
Quinn felt the sudden, sharp pang he’d felt about every
hour back when all this started, and now felt only a couple of
times a day. “Yeah. Me too.”
Lana held out her hand, and Quinn, after a moment’s
amazed hesitation, took it.
Lana smiled. “Is it okay if I just hold your hand and don’t,
you know, heal you of anything?”
Quinn laughed. “Whatever’s wrong with me, it isn’t something even you can heal.” Then, “You want to dance?”
“I’ve been waiting to talk to Albert, standing around here
for like, an hour, and you are the first person to ask me,” she
said. “Yeah. I would kind of like to dance.”
The song had just changed to a hip-hop tune, a raucous,
flatly obscene rap. It was a few years old, but still catchy, and
had the added attraction of being a song no one in the room
had been allowed to listen to three months earlier.
Quinn and Lana danced, even bumped hips a couple of
times. Then Hunter changed the mood to a moderately slow,
dreamy song by Lucinda Williams. “I love this song,” Lana
said.
“I . . . I don’t know how to dance slow,” Quinn said.
“Me neither. Let’s try it, though.”
So they held each other awkwardly and just swayed back
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and forth. After a while Lana laid her face against Quinn’s
shoulder. He could feel her tears on his neck.
“This is kind of a sad song,” Quinn said.
“Do you dream, Quinn?” Lana asked.
The question took him aback. She must have felt him
flinch because she looked at his face, looking for the explanation in his eyes.
“I have nightmares,” he said. “The battle. You know. The
big battle.”
“You were really brave. You saved those kids in the day
care.”
“Not all of them,” Quinn said shortly. He fell silent for a
moment, back in the dream. “There was this coyote. And this
kid, right? And . . . and . . . Okay, so I could have shot him,
maybe, a little sooner, right? But I was scared of hitting the
kid. I was so scared I’d hit that little kid, so I didn’t shoot.
And then it was, like, too late. You know?”
Lana nodded. She didn’t show any sympathy, and strangely
Quinn thought that was a good thing because if it wasn’t
you, and you hadn’t been there, and you hadn’t been holding
a machine gun with your finger frozen on the trigger, and
you hadn’t heard your voice coming out of your throat in a
scream like an open artery, and you hadn’t seen what he had
seen, then you didn’t have a right to be sympathetic because
you didn’t understand anything. You didn’t understand anything.
Anything.
Lana just nodded and put her palm against his heart and
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said, “I can’t heal that.”
He nodded, fighting back the tears that had come . . . how
many times since that horrible night? Let’s see, three months,
thirty days in a month, that would make it about a thousand
times. Maybe more. Not less, not if you counted the times he
had wanted to cry but had plastered on his happy-go-lucky
Quinn smile because the alternative was falling down on the
ground and sobbing.
“That’s my sad stuff,” he said after a while. “What’s
yours?”
She cocked her head sideways as if sizing him up, asking
herself if she wanted to share with him. Him of all people.
Unsteady Quinn. Unreliable Quinn. Quinn, who had sold
Sam out to end up being tortured by Caine and Drake.
Quinn, who had almost gotten Astrid killed. Quinn, who was
only tolerated now because when it had all hit the fan in the
big battle he had finally stepped up and pulled that trigger
and . . .
“You ever meet someone you can’t quite forget?” Lana
asked him. “Someone who you meet them and forever after
it’s like they own a piece of you?”
“No,” Quinn said. He felt a little disappointed. “I guess he’s
&nb
sp; a lucky dude.”
Lana was so startled, she laughed. “No. Not that kind of
guy. Maybe not a guy at all. Maybe not . . . well, not a dude the
way you mean. More like someone took a fishing hook, right?
Like they took that hook and stuck it in me like I was a worm.
You know how on the end of a fishhook there’s this barb? So
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you can’t pull it out without ripping a big hole in yourself?”
Quinn nodded without really understanding.
“And then, maybe, here’s what’s weird, right: You almost
want the fisherman to reel you in. It’s like, okay, you have that
hook in me, and it hurts, but I can’t get it out, I’m stuck. So
just reel me in. Just get it over with and stay out of my dreams
because they’re all nightmares.”
Quinn still didn’t understand what she meant, but the
image of a fish, reeled in, helpless, stuck with him. Quinn
knew hopelessness when he heard it. He’d just never expected
to hear it from the most beloved person in the FAYZ.
The musical tempo changed again. Enough with the slow
music, kids wanted to rock out, so Hunter dialed up some
techno that Quinn didn’t recognize. He started to move to
the rhythm, but Lana wasn’t into it.
She put her hand on his shoulder and said, “I see Albert’s
free, and I have to talk to him.”
She turned away without a further word. Quinn was left
with the feeling that however bad his nightmares were, the
Healer’s were worse.
TWELVE
61 HOURS, 3 MINUTES
T H E A R G U M E N T W I T H Astrid about Albert’s club had not
been pretty.
Most nights Sam slept at the house Astrid shared with
Mary. Not this night.
It wasn’t their first argument. It probably wouldn’t be their
last.
Sam hated arguing. When he added up the total number
of people he could really talk to, the number came to two:
Edilio and Astrid. His conversations with Edilio were mostly
about official business. His conversations with Astrid used to
be about deeper stuff, and lighter stuff, too. Now they seemed
to be always talking about work. And arguing about it.
He was in love with Astrid. He wanted to talk to her about
all the stuff she knew, the history, the math even, the big
cosmic issues that she would explain and he would kind of
almost understand.
And he wanted to make out with her, to tell the truth.
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