Light

by Michael Grant

  Orc and Jack emerged from the van and Edilio said, “You get some sleep, Jack?”

  “A little.”

  “A little is all anyone got.”

  “Yeah, but I—”

  “Jack, I know you don’t want to fight.”

  “I just—”

  “I don’t care,” Edilio said flatly. “It’s no longer your choice. I’m drafting you.”

  “You can’t—” Jack started to say.

  “The one person I care most about is floating dead in a lake,” Edilio said. “Pretty soon everyone will be dead. That includes you, Jack. Everyone you know.”

  Jack’s defiance withered as Edilio met his eyes and didn’t let go.

  “Good,” Edilio said. “Here’s the way this goes.”

  He laid out his plan, which hinged entirely on Gaia not spotting the ambush. Diana had told them all she could about her daughter, so they knew Gaia was nearsighted. Maybe that would help. Maybe, too, the fact that Gaia only had bits and pieces of human knowledge, so she hadn’t seen a hundred ambushes laid in a hundred movies and TV shows.

  It was a pitiful plan. Gaia would burn through them like a hot knife through butter. They would be forced to run for it and they wouldn’t make it. Any who did survive would be caught in a panicky cross fire in the town plaza, where ten shooters hid in windows and doorways.

  Well, ten minus however many had run off.

  Edilio walked up the road to the very edge of Dekka’s gravity cancellation. He checked the clip in his automatic rifle. He slowly slid back the bolt to see the round already chambered. He stroked the safety with his index finger.

  Where were Sam and Caine?

  Where was Brianna? Would she be able to come?

  How had Edilio ended up as bait?

  That idea sent a wave of nausea through him. Bait. Like a body floating in a lake.

  Mother Mary, take care of him. Please take him to heaven and let him be happy.

  Tears filled his eyes. No. No time for that.

  A figure appeared in the middle distance, walking down the road, red in the last slanting rays of sunset. Now two figures. One walked in front of the other.

  Well, at least now he knew what had happened to Caine. Had he gone over to her side?

  They had little enough chance against Gaia. Against Gaia and Caine together?

  Well, Edilio thought, I’ll be seeing you soon, Roger.

  He wished he had his rosary with him. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen.

  La hora de nuestra muerte. The hour of our death. . . .

  Edilio raised his automatic rifle and fired six shots at Gaia.

  Sam had endured pain before. This was not as bad as the whipping Drake had given him, but it was bad. And each time he hauled himself another few inches down the road it made him cry out. He couldn’t even be sure what had been broken. But he knew that he could not feel one leg and the other tingled like a banged funny bone. And he felt a twisting, grinding agony in his back and shoulder.

  He didn’t even know how long he had been like this. There were periods of unconsciousness of unknown duration. He seemed to fade in and out, nightmare sleep followed by pain-racked awakening.

  At this rate he would get to Perdido Beach . . . never. He had at least a mile to go just to get to Ralph’s, six inches at a time. He would die of hunger or thirst long before he reached help. Gaia had turned Caine, or maybe just tortured him into submission. It didn’t matter which, because if Caine helped her, or even if Caine just stayed out of the fight, the odds would grow impossible.

  “Unh!” he cried as he pulled himself forward.

  He could get up on one foot and hop, maybe that would be faster, but if he fell, the pain would be awful.

  Maybe he shouldn’t think ill of Caine. He had no idea what agony Gaia could cause his brother. He was unwilling just to risk a fall onto a broken leg; maybe Caine feared something worse.

  Astrid. At least Gaia would not stretch out her death. Gaia would kill everyone as quickly and efficiently as she could. She would burn the town down to do it. Force everyone from hiding and kill them with a light like his own.

  “Unh!”

  He was useless, here at the end, useless. The great and powerful Sam Temple, crawling like a mutilated insect down a road as the sun set out over the ocean. The final sunset of the FAYZ.

  It was unfair. They had all believed the end was in sight. To be slaughtered like those poor kids at the lake, all of them just cut down, crushed. All those lives . . .

  Astrid.

  He’d actually had fantasies of the two of them walking out of this place hand in hand. He had run endless scenarios, wondering how they could stay together outside, out there.

  And she had been worrying about the aftermath, how they would all be seen by the world. Well, maybe this was better. Maybe it would just be better to—

  No, to hell with that. No, they deserved to live. They all had paid and paid and paid their dues a thousand times over. They deserved to live.

  Someone.

  He looked up, flinching, fearing it was the gaiaphage.

  The creature before him was bizarre, a golden-skinned, eerily smooth-looking thing.

  “Taylor?”

  Her eyes blinked. They had changed, somehow. She had changed. She still had that impossible golden skin, but her hair . . . and her mouth was different, somehow more human.

  “Taylor! Don’t bounce! Stay!”

  Did she understand? Lana must have finally found a way to heal her. Although she was no longer the old Taylor who had flirted and teased him so often: unreliable, flighty, gossipy Taylor.

  “Taylor, help me,” he said.

  “I will,” she said.

  “You can talk!”

  “Yes,” she said, and she seemed a bit baffled by it.

  “Okay, listen, Taylor. I need something to write on. Paper, a pen, a pencil, anything you can get me to . . .”

  And she was gone. No nod of the head, not a word.

  He dragged himself again, but his arms and shoulders were aching from the effort, cramping from the unusual work demanded of them.

  He stopped.

  They were all going to die. And he, the big protector, the warrior, wouldn’t even be there for the final battle. Eventually Gaia would come back down the road, find him, and finish him off, kill him as easy as stepping on a bug.

  Why hadn’t she already?

  Wait a minute, why hadn’t she killed him? It made no sense. She should have.

  Taylor was suddenly in front of him. In her hand she had a single Post-it note. Orange. And a pencil.

  “Thank you.”

  Who should he write to? A last “I love you” for Astrid? She would sneer if he used this final opportunity for a stupid romantic gesture. No, no good-byes. Not yet.

  He tried to think clearly. Edilio would have a battle to fight. Dekka would be in it, too, and if Sam asked her, she would come to save him, no matter what. He couldn’t do that to her and the others. It had to be someone resourceful. Someone with no powers necessary for the battle. Someone he could trust.

  He began writing. The first word was “Quinn.”

  Edilio was in the road, holding an automatic rifle.

  It was an ambush. Caine saw it immediately. Not that he saw anyone out there aside from Edilio. But Edilio wouldn’t be standing there in the middle of the road if it wasn’t an ambush.

  The leg was in Caine’s arms.

  Gaia was behind him.

  She was singing. Badly. The song was hard to decipher, not something he had ever heard before, or at least nothing he recognized. Gaia sounded as if she was singing, “Mmmm. Bop. Bop. Bop.”

  “Mmmmm. Bop. Bop. Bop. There’s a person up there,” Gaia said. She took out her earbuds.

  “Yes,” Caine said. He didn’t dare speak another word unasked. He tried to think, but inside he was cringing, waiting in mortal terror of the pain.

  W
hat was Edilio up to? Did he think he could outfight Gaia?

  Only Edilio was visible. They didn’t have Sam over there, obviously, which meant they probably had Dekka and Brianna, Jack and Orc. Could they really take on Gaia?

  Maybe. If he helped them.

  Maybe. If at the right moment he committed: all-in. And if they failed? What she would do to him . . . She wouldn’t let him die; he would beg for it, but she would just go right on and he would—

  “Who is it?” Gaia asked.

  Would she know if he lied? He couldn’t hesitate. “I think it’s Edilio.”

  “What are his powers?”

  “None,” Caine said. And thought, Unless you count having the courage to stand out there facing the gaiaphage.

  “Then keep moving, Father,” Gaia said.

  “He does have a gun.”

  “Do you think I fear a gun?”

  You should, you arrogant . . . “No, but I do,” Caine said.

  “Ah. I see. I can’t have you killed yet,” Gaia said.

  Suddenly shots rang out. One, two, three, four, five, six.

  Gaia laughed gleefully as the bullets buzzed by. “My leg is sufficiently healed. Stay down, Father, I still need your power. You can’t die just yet!”

  She blurred away like Brianna.

  Quinn.

  Hurt bad. On highway. Reach me from that little cove if u can.

  Sam.

  Quinn read the note twice. The truth was, this Taylor—this weird Taylor 3.0 standing here—creeped him out. She wasn’t in as bad a shape as when he’d last seen her down the hall from Lana’s room—Taylor 2.0—but she was still pretty strange.

  The truth was also that the note moved him. Sam was calling on him. Him. After all the ups and downs he’d been through with Sam. Of course it was because the others were more important for the fight. Of course. Still.

  “Worth using a bit of diesel,” Quinn said, trying to sound all cool about it. “Thanks, Taylor. I hope you—” But she was gone. And frankly, he was relieved. Quinn had come a long way since the first days of the FAYZ, but he was still not fond of weird, impossible creatures.

  “How is it I got more normal and everything else got weirder?” he asked the night air.

  Somewhere fairly far away there was the sound of gunfire.

  Dekka waited, heard the sudden burst of gunfire, and saw Edilio running past in staged terror—well, not entirely staged terror; it had to be at least partly very real terror. She herself was quivering with fear. She dared not even peek around the side, could not give away the ambush. One chance to get it right.

  Then suddenly gunfire from half a dozen guns.

  She popped up and yes! Yes! Gaia had hit her force field. Gaia was still running, but running in the air, flailing, getting nowhere.

  The gaiaphage—she refused to think of it as a little girl—was about head height now, orange in the rays of a setting sun. She still hadn’t realized what had happened to her.

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  She saw a chunk of flesh blown from Gaia’s arm. But the bullets were missing. Gaia was rising too fast and too high now to make an easy target. Dekka had to moderate the field, drop her again, bring her back down into range.

  Twin beams of brilliant green light stabbed from Gaia’s hands, and the firing from the moving van faltered. No one had been hit, but now Gaia was using the altitude to her advantage: she was able to spot the shooters and was firing back.

  It was like some terrible parody of a rock concert laser show. Bright beams of light melted runs in the road surface, then reached the moving van and sliced it neatly into three uneven pieces.

  Dekka heard an unearthly scream and saw people bolting from the van. Blinding light followed them as they ran.

  Edilio had stopped and now stood, legs apart, rifle steady, taking aim.

  BLAM!

  And Dekka saw the bullet clip Gaia’s ear. Blood sprayed.

  The monster cried in pain, and Dekka shouted in fierce joy.

  “Yeah! Yeah!”

  But Gaia was not seriously hurt. And now down came Gaia, dropping too quickly toward the ground. Gaia had used her own mirroring of Dekka’s power to restore gravity.

  Dekka strained, focused with all her might, but Gaia was too strong. Bleeding and howling in rage Gaia touched down and leveled a shocking telekinetic blast at the moving van, which knocked the three segments apart, exposing the remaining shooters. They broke and ran.

  Gaia stretched out a hand, raised a car from the pavement, and used it almost like a bowling ball: rolled it down the road and crushed three of the runners. There was no time for screams. They were bugs squashed on the highway.

  Edilio still stood, firing, defenseless, almost daring Gaia to kill him.

  “Jack! Orc!” Edilio shouted over the sound of his own gun.

  A wooden telephone pole, thirty feet long, trailing telephone lines, flew like a javelin. Gaia ducked and the blunt end missed her, but as the pole flew, it dropped and caught her shoulder, slamming her hard around.

  She pushed the pole away and it rattled onto the road, rolled a few feet, and stopped.

  Edilio still kept up his fire, but now Gaia hit him with an invisible fist and knocked him a hundred yards off the road into the dark.

  “No!” Dekka roared, and went for Gaia with nothing but her fists as weapons.

  Gaia grabbed her face in one hand and laughed as Dekka punched air.

  “You’re the one with the power over gravity, aren’t you? I could almost do without you,” Gaia said. Blood still spurted from her ear. Almost absentmindedly, Gaia reached her free hand to touch it and stop the flow. “So don’t annoy me.” She twisted Dekka’s face and sent her sprawling.

  Suddenly Gaia was a blur. Picking herself up Dekka saw a boy simply explode from the force of a blow he’d never seen coming. A girl, screaming, was tripped and then thrown with a sickening crunch into a wrecked car. The last of Edilio’s shooters.

  Gaia paused then, blurring back into sight, and held a hand against the bullet wound on her ear. The chunk taken out of her arm had already stopped bleeding.

  From out of the darkness at the side of the road, Edilio fired again.

  BLAM! BLAM!

  Gaia snarled and swept a telekinetic fist like a haymaker punch and the firing stopped.

  “Edilio!” Dekka cried.

  “Ah, so that was Edilio,” Gaia said. “I’ve heard of him. I should have killed him, but I thought he might be a mutant.” Gaia did not blur out again; she was clearly focused on healing herself.

  Dekka looked around for a weapon, anything. “Jack! Jack!” she cried, but no answer came.

  She saw Caine, still carrying a human leg, coming down the road, uncertain.

  “Caine!” Dekka cried, her voice ragged. “Help us!”

  Caine looked like a different person. A zombie version of himself. He dropped the leg and looked down at his hands as if they were not his.

  All firing had stopped. Gaia stood alone, triumphant.

  Then from the shadow stepped a living slag heap.

  Gaia did a double take. “What are you?”

  “Orc.”

  “You’re not human,” Gaia said dismissively. “I don’t even need to kill you. Run away.”

  “No.”

  Gaia cocked her head, curious, as she chewed her food. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  Orc shook his massive head. “The Lord is my shepherd.”

  Gaia walked right up to him, peering carefully at his gravel skin and taking special interest in the patch of human skin that remained on his face. “Interesting effect. I don’t quite see how you happened.”

  Orc swung a ham-sized fist at her.

  Gaia sidestepped with Brianna’s speed. She dodged Orc’s next three blows as well.

  “Not at all the usual mutation,” Gaia said, fascinated. “You could join me; I doubt Nemesis could use you.”

  Orc was panting from the effort of missing Gaia.

  “No,” Or
c gasped.

  “Mmmm. Well, then, I guess I’d better kill you, just to be safe.”

  “That’s gunfire!” Brianna yelled.

  Lana said, “Brianna, no! You’re not done healing.”

  “What, this?” Brianna pointed at her disfigured face. “Pff. Just a flesh wound.” She winked with her good eye. “Where’s my stuff?”

  Lana nodded toward a pile in the corner: the familiar modified runner’s backpack with the sawed-off shotgun and machete.

  “Kick ass, Breeze,” Lana said, but she was talking to air.

  Down the hall in a second. Down the steps in less. Through the lobby. And now she could really turn on the speed as she blew down the hill, tripped, and went tumbling head over heels.

  Brianna did not get up with super-speed. She stood slowly. Both knees were bleeding, as were the palms of her hands.

  Brianna touched her swollen eyes.

  “Depth perception, Breeze,” she chided herself. “Depth perception.”

  She slowed through town, doing no more than sixty miles an hour down Ocean Boulevard past a darkening sea that was just swallowing the sun. She hung a hard right on San Pablo, blew through the town plaza, slowing just enough to hear the fierce cheers of “Breeeeze!” from shooters positioned in windows and on rooftops. She gave them a jaunty wave.

  She hit the highway and cranked a left toward the sound of gunfire, passed a fleeing kid, noticed that the entire northwest was on fire and the air smelled of smoke, yanked out her machete, and had merely enough time to think, This could go bad, before she saw Gaia and Orc.

  Gaia had a hand on Orc’s throat, and Orc, forced to his knees, was punching air as Gaia twisted her head this way and that to dodge blows. Gaia was laughing. Her blue eyes were alight.

  Brianna blurred to a stop.

  “Hey. Gaia. Remember me?”

  Gaia tossed Orc aside as though he weighed no more than a toy.

  TWENTY-TWO

  17 HOURS, 25 MINUTES

  THE FIGHT LASTED six seconds.

  In that time Brianna rushed, swung her machete, and missed.

  Gaia swung a fist as powerful as Jack’s and caught just a corner of Brianna’s shoulder, spinning Brianna away to sprawl on the concrete.

  Brianna was up in a flash, snapped her shotgun up, fired, and hit Gaia in the chest with a load of buckshot that knocked Gaia staggering back with seven small holes in her.