Light

by Michael Grant

  “He’s got a volunteer lawyer—”

  But Astrid wasn’t done. “They should be putting up statues to Edilio. They should be naming schools after that boy—no, no, I’m not going to call him a boy. If he’s not a man, then I’ll never meet one.”

  Lana nodded approvingly, obviously enjoying and sharing in Astrid’s outrage.

  “And you, too,” Astrid said to Lana. “No, don’t even wave me off.”

  “Whoa,” Lana said. “I had a power. I didn’t make that happen. I used it. No big deal.”

  “I don’t suppose you can still . . .,” Diana began, waving a hand toward Astrid’s bandages.

  Lana shook her head, not sadly, but with evident relief. “Nope. No, I cannot. I am no longer the capital ‘H’ Healer. I am Lana Arwen Lazar, period, finito. Just some girl with a weird name. I thought maybe I might miss it. Guess what? No. No, not even a little. You know what I do now? I eat. And I sleep. I throw sticks for Patrick. And then I do it all over again. That’s my plan, for the rest of my life. Eat, sleep, play with dog.”

  “Have they got the shrinks all over you?” Diana asked.

  “They tried,” Lana said with a curl of her lip. “I don’t see them coming back at me anytime soon.”

  All three laughed at that. But Diana grew serious. “Honestly? I don’t mind the therapy much. I, uh . . . I don’t know. I just. It’s okay. For me, anyway.”

  They fell silent then. The only sounds were of gurneys in the hallway, a child crying somewhere, a male and a female voice laughing flirtatiously.

  Astrid looked at Lana, now leaning against the window, and Diana, lost in thought, and reminded herself that at times she had hated Diana. She had told Sam to kill her if necessary. And she had disliked Lana as a short-tempered bitch who sometimes abused her privileges.

  She let her mind move beyond these two. Orc, who had been the first to kill in the FAYZ, the first murderer. A vicious drunk. But someone who had died a hero.

  Mary. Mother Mary. A saint who had died trying to murder the children she cared for.

  Quinn, who had been a faithless worm at the start and had been a pillar at the end.

  Albert. She still didn’t know quite what to think of Albert, but it was undeniable that far fewer would have walked out of the FAYZ without Albert.

  If her own feelings were this conflicted, was it any wonder the rest of the world didn’t know what to do with the Perdido survivors?

  “Sorry, I kind of dragged the mood down,” Diana said wryly.

  “I’m going to write something,” Astrid said.

  “What do you mean?” Lana asked.

  “I’m going to write about us. About all of it. Maybe a magazine story, or, I don’t know. Maybe even a book. But what happened to the . . . No, wait. No, that’s not even the right way to start. I don’t want everyone acting like we were victims. I’m going to tell the story. All of it I know, anyway.”

  The other two girls looked at her, and to Astrid’s surprise neither of them told her she was being a fool.

  “Might be a good idea,” Lana conceded.

  “Maybe,” Diana said a bit more hesitantly. “It’s going to all come out anyway. One of us should tell the story. In fact, Astrid, it should be you. Just tell all of it. All of it. The bad, the worse, and the worst.”

  “And maybe one or two good things,” Astrid said.

  “One or two,” Diana agreed softly.

  Eight hundred and nine homes had been destroyed. Three dozen businesses had been wiped out. Forty square miles of forest burned. Nearly five hundred cars, boats, buses damaged, almost all unsalvageable.

  The cost of it all, plus the cost of cleanup, lost revenues from business, and the rest was estimated to be three billion dollars. At a minimum.

  Albert Hillsborough had come through uninjured. He had come through famous. He’d been interviewed on CNBC and by the Wall Street Journal. He’d been invited to a party at the home of the chairman of Goldman Sachs. Important people kept telling him they had their eyes on him.

  Even his family treated him strangely, and the truth was, he just didn’t fit with his family anymore. He didn’t fit, somehow, in the world of shared bedrooms and dinner-table discussion and school.

  School. He knew he had to go. But really? He was going to be a high school freshman?

  Really?

  He rode now in the backseat of an SUV. There was a golden-arches logo on the side. Behind them a second SUV, and behind that two semis loaded with everything the modern filmmaker needed.

  McDonald’s had volunteered to pay for Albert’s college if he would appear in some short videos about the importance to him of keeping the Perdido Beach McDonald’s alive as long as possible.

  All the way up from Santa Barbara, where his family now lived, he watched flatbed trucks hauling wrecked cars away from Perdido Beach. And in the other direction went the construction equipment. The cleanup was under way. It was like the aftermath of a hurricane.

  But civilian cars were still not allowed on the highway. No one was yet allowed to drive through Perdido Beach: it was still too dangerous. They were still finding bodies, not to mention the occasional straggler. Just that morning an injured, traumatized boy had been found wandering in the forest, near death.

  Helicopters buzzed overhead. Surveyors and news reporters and filmmakers. The National Guard camp was still in place. The flashing police and ambulance lights were gone, and most of the TV trucks had moved on. But there were still armed men scowling from behind sunglasses.

  Yeah, where were all you tough guys when we could have used you?

  As they neared the edge of what had been the FAYZ, Albert began to feel uncomfortable. He squirmed in his seat and kept his eyes focused inside the SUV.

  They’d assigned him a handler, a public relations person named Vicky. She was a pretty young woman, a mother herself, she said, and so she felt for the kids, what it must have been like. She had chatted with Albert on the drive up, and every time she had said how she understood, how she could imagine, how terrible . . . he had changed the conversation.

  Now she noticed that his hands were fists and his jaw was clenched tight.

  “Is something the matter, Albert?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “I can imagine that coming back here—”

  “No. All due respect, I don’t think you can imagine.”

  By the time they crossed the line, he felt his lungs straining. He was taking air in forced gasps.

  He saw the first buildings, very few intact anymore, most of them burned. And he saw, in memory, at least, himself with the life oozing out of him from bullet wounds, months earlier but so fresh in his mind. He remembered knowing that death was very, very close. He remembered the certainty that he would be extinguished.

  “Would you like a bottle of water?”

  He looked at the bottle. Stared at it. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you hungry? It’s been a while since lunch.”

  Lunch had been at a McDonald’s in Santa Barbara. It had been so clean. It had smelled like food. It had sounded happy and alive. In the bathroom, the toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink.

  He had passed a trash can on the way back to his table and stopped just to look at it. It was full of food. Leftover burgers, the last few fries, smears of ketchup on cardboard. He’d had to hold back tears when he saw it.

  “Candy bar?” Vicky asked, and held a Snickers out to him.

  At that moment they slowed to turn off the highway and head cautiously, carefully, through recently bulldozed streets, toward the town plaza. That’s where the McDonald’s was. His McDonald’s.

  A candy bar. People had killed for less.

  “I used to sell rats to starving kids,” Albert said.

  Vicky looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t say that to the camera.”

  “No,” Albert agreed.

  “You did what you had to do. You’re a hero,” Vicky said.

  It took a while to set up the equipment
in the plaza. Albert would not get out of the vehicle. He made an excuse about enjoying the air-conditioning. About wanting to listen to the radio.

  But as the afternoon wore on, they called for him to come onto the set.

  The set.

  They had cleaned it up inside. Not all the way, no, they couldn’t do that without weeks of work. But the debris, the filth, the pitiful decorations had been artfully rearranged. The service counter was gleaming incongruously. The menu had been uncovered and one panel replaced. The obscene graffiti had been cleaned off or painted over.

  It was the sanitized version of the FAYZ.

  He overheard the director talking to one of the cameramen. The cameraman was explaining that he couldn’t get a good long shot on the exterior because someone had set up a fake graveyard right in the plaza.

  “Kids just playing around, I guess, but it’s morbid; we’ll have to get rid of it, maybe bring in some sod to—”

  “No,” Albert said.

  “We’re almost ready for you,” the director assured him.

  “That’s not a fake graveyard. Those aren’t fake graves. No one was playing around.”

  “You’re saying those . . . those are actually . . .”

  “What do you think happened here?” Albert asked in a soft voice. “What do you think this was?” Absurdly, embarrassingly, he had started to cry. “Those are kids buried there. Some of them were torn apart, you know. By coyotes. By . . . by bad people. Shot. Crushed. Like that. Some of those kids in the ground there couldn’t take it, the hunger and the fear . . . some of those kids out there had to be cut down from the ropes they used to hang themselves. Early on, when we still had any animals? I had a crew go out and hunt down cats. Cats and dogs and rats. Kill them. Other kids to skin them . . . cook them up.”

  There were a dozen crew people in the McDonald’s. None spoke or moved.

  Albert brushed away tears and sighed. “Yeah. So don’t mess with the graves. Okay? Other than that, we’re good to go.”

  AFTERMATH 2

  THERE WERE POLICE guards outside Sam’s hospital room. They stepped in occasionally to make sure Sam hadn’t disappeared. For the most part they were nice enough. And the check-ins were less and less frequent.

  Police and prosecutors were not allowed to talk to Sam without either his mother or a lawyer present. His mother, Connie Temple, was also on TV fairly frequently, talking up the just-formed FAYZ Legal Defense Fund. So he had long stretches of time when he was not being questioned by police, prosecutors, or parent.

  He spent those free hours trying not to think too much. And yet thinking too much. There was a tsunami of memories waiting to drown him.

  Video of the final hours of the FAYZ had done a lot to change attitudes about the survivors. People had seen the entire dome glow red with fire. They had video, lots of video, of Gaia. They had confirmed that the murderous teen they’d seen at the end was the same person as the child who had ripped a man’s arm off. And eaten it.

  Something about watching video of a murderous girl using lasers to slaughter children—and to kill three adults on the outside—had made people wonder whether the kids in the FAYZ deserved just a little slack.

  Prosecutors did not believe in slack. They wanted an arrest and a trial. They had one target above all others.

  At the moment that target was eating tacos his mother had brought in despite hospital orders against outside food.

  “Oh, God, this is good,” Sam said as juicy beef and crisp lettuce dribbled out onto the tray on his lap.

  “Still not tired of eating?” Connie asked him.

  “I will never be tired of eating. I’m going to eat until I’m huge. Food, hot water, clean sheets. At least I’ll get those three in prison.”

  Connie pushed herself up out of the chair, angry. “Sam, don’t talk that way.”

  He bit into a second taco. Chicken this time. “Mmm. They want someone to put away. They need a scapegoat. It’s me.”

  “You’re not being serious with me. I’m trying to treat you like an adult.”

  Sam put the taco down. “Are you? You’re trying to treat me like an adult? Okay. Let’s have an adult conversation, Mom. Tell me how I had a brother, but you kind of forgot to mention it. Tell me how that happened. A lot of bad things happened because of that.”

  “This isn’t something—”

  “He gave his life in the end. Caine. Your son. He’s dead. You’ve seen the video.”

  “Yes. And I feel terrible—”

  “Don’t get me wrong: he was a bad person. Your son Caine. He was a very bad guy. You want a murderer? Well . . .” He stopped himself. “In the end, he gave himself up to Little Pete. He took the hit. Atonement, I guess. Redemption. Whatever.”

  “Then tell that to the district attorneys. Tell them it was Caine. There are plenty of other kids out there talking, putting it on Caine.”

  Sam pushed the food away angrily. He slid his legs over the side. His mother moved to help him, but he waved her off. “No. Don’t. I’m fine.”

  He stood up. His legs were fine, at least. It was just the burns from the red-hot chain. It took so much longer to heal when you didn’t have Lana. Half his body was covered in bandages and a webbing that held them in place.

  “I want to see Astrid,” he said.

  “You know they won’t let you talk to anyone, Sam.”

  “As soon as I’m better. They’re not keeping us apart.”

  “Sam, you have more important things to worry about than your girlfriend.”

  He turned on her, suppressed anger now boiling up. “My girlfriend? Like we’re talking about someone I dated? Like some girl I took to a movie?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Tell me. Tell me why.”

  Connie looked around, spotted the pitcher of water, and poured a trembling cup. “This isn’t going to put me in a very good light.”

  Sam said nothing. He had waited so long to find out. Since the first surprise realization that he and Caine were brothers. Fraternal twins, born just minutes apart.

  “There was . . . There were . . .” She took a sip, shook her head slightly, trying to get up the nerve, unwilling to look at him. “I was married. I was not faithful.”

  Sam blinked. “Caine and I were born at the same time.”

  “Yes. Yes. There was my husband. He worked at the power plant. He was a very intelligent man. Very . . . good-looking, kind, decent. But I was young, and I wasn’t very smart about such things. I had an affair with a very different man. He was exciting. He was . . . forgive me . . . sexy.”

  Sam winced. The images this conversation was calling up were not ones he wanted to see. He was suppressing enough; he didn’t need more.

  “So there was my husband, and the other man. And when I realized I was pregnant, I also realized either of them might have been your father, or David’s.”

  “David?”

  “Caine. His adoptive parents gave him the name Caine. To me he was David. When your—when my husband died . . . when he was killed . . .”

  “Mom. Did he die in the power plant?”

  She nodded. “The meteor strike.”

  Sam looked at her. She tried to meet his gaze and decided instead to drink more water. Sam hesitated. Did he want to know? What good would it do?

  “Why did you give Caine up? David. Whatever you called him.”

  “Maybe it was some kind of postpartum depression. I mean, I didn’t think so, but maybe it was depression. Some kind of delusional state . . .”

  Sam waited.

  “He was evil. Sam, that’s what he seemed to me. He was a beautiful baby. But . . . but I could feel something . . . some connection to a terrible darkness. He scared me. I worried I might hurt him.”

  “It was your husband who died in the meteor strike,” Sam said, carefully not using the word “father.” “The man I knew as Dad.”

  “Yes.”

  One question remained.

  “Tell me this,” S
am said, looking past her, out the window at the Southern California sun. “Caine and I don’t look much alike. One of us must have looked more like your husband. And one of us must have looked more like the other man.”

  Connie Temple swallowed hard. She looked strangely young and vulnerable to Sam. He could almost see a teen mother there.

  “David . . . Caine . . . was the spitting image of my husband.”

  “Okay,” he said, feeling deflated.

  “But it’s not that simple,” Connie said.

  It was purely by accident that Edilio Escobar happened to see the TV report of a boy found wandering in the burned-out forest of the FAYZ.

  He was eating. He’d been eating more or less without stop, because he couldn’t focus on anything else, couldn’t think about the future, or even tomorrow. He couldn’t talk to his parents. His mother just cried a lot, and his father, well, his father didn’t really want to know. His father had work. His father was not ready for stories of his son’s life.

  The truth was, as much as they loved him and welcomed him back, he was a liability to them. He was a big neon finger pointing at the family of undocumented workers.

  They were living in a trailer in Atascadero. Too many bodies in too little space. It was clean, but it was also an overstuffed, hot steel box surrounded by other overstuffed, hot little boxes, many of them also full of people who did not need the attention that Edilio drew.

  Edilio would have to figure something out. But he was exhausted. All the way down to the marrow, he was exhausted.

  His mother kept the beans and rice and lemonade coming. Someday, Edilio, he told himself, you will get tired of beans and rice and lemonade. But it won’t be anytime soon.

  He looked up from the narrow table, saw his mother at the stove, then looked above her to see his automatic rifle wedged in atop the cupboards.

  Full of food and hollowed out. That’s how he felt. He was wondering if they could get away with selling the gun. Ought to be worth a hundred bucks or so. That would maybe take some of the strain off his family’s finances.

  He had not told his mother about himself, his personal self. He’d kept the stories simple. He’d answered the mostly clueless questions of friends and neighbors. He was polite, but not volunteering much. Not arguing when they came up with wild theories. Sooner or later it would all come out.