“I found tape,” Dekka said. “You want me to tie him up?”
“It’s a diversion,” Sam said. He punched Frederico in the nose, hard enough to distract him. Frederico roared in pain.
“Now tape him up. Fast.” He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Astrid.”
Her voice was barely audible. “Sam. Oh, my God.”
“What’s happening?”
Her answer was too garbled to understand. But in snatches of static, he heard fear.
“I screwed up,” Sam said. “It was all a trick.”
FORTY-TWO
02 HOURS, 23 MINUTES
“QUINN. QUINN.”
“Is someone yelling my name?” Quinn wondered.
Brianna pointed at the steeple. Quinn squinted and saw Astrid in dark silhouette waving her arms like a crazy person, pointing, gesticulating, yelling something.
“I’ll go see what she wants,” Brianna volunteered. She blurred, then she stopped suddenly, having just reached the top of the ladder. “Oh, my God, look.”
Racing through the street, coming up from the south, pouring down the alley, came a swarm of rough, yellow canines. They threaded through parked cars, bounded over fire hydrants, paused briefly to sniff at garbage, but overall moved with shocking speed.
They were going straight for the day care.
Brianna began pulling the ladder up. Quinn jumped to help her. They slid it up and out of the way as the first coyotes passed beneath.
“What do I do?” Quinn cried.
“Shoot them,” Brianna said.
“Coyotes? Shoot coyotes?”
“They’re not here by accident,” Brianna yelled.
One coyote, hearing them, glanced up.
“Quiet,” Quinn hissed. He crouched behind the wall and clutched the machine pistol to his chest.
“Quinn, they’re going after the littles,” Brianna said.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Yes, you do.”
Quinn shook his head violently. “No. No one told me to shoot coyotes.”
Brianna peeked over the side and sat back down very suddenly. “It’s him. Drake. And he’s…there’s something wrong with him.”
Quinn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to, but Brianna’s ashen face made looking the less terrifying option. He rose just enough to get a view of the alleyway.
Swaggering along behind the coyotes came Drake Merwin.
He held in his hand a long, thick red whip.
Only he wasn’t holding it in his hand. The whip was his hand.
“Shoot him,” Brianna urged. “Do it.”
Quinn unlimbered the gun. He laid the short barrel on the Spanish tile and aimed. Drake wasn’t running, he wasn’t moving furtively, he was right in the middle of the alleyway in plain view.
“I can’t get a shot at him,” Quinn said.
“You’re lying,” Brianna accused.
Quinn licked his lips. He aimed. He wrapped his finger around the trigger.
Impossible to miss from here. Drake was no more than thirty feet away. Quinn had practiced firing the machine pistol. He had fired it at a tree trunk and seen the way it chewed through wood.
Squeeze the trigger, and the bullets would chew through Drake the same way.
Squeeze the trigger.
Drake passed directly below.
“He’s gone,” Quinn whispered.
“I couldn’t…,” he said.
From the day care below there came the screams of terrified children.
Mary Terrafino had had a very bad day. That morning she’d had a major pig-out, a real gorge-a-thon, as she called it. She had found a carton of snack-sized Doritos. She’d sat and torn through twenty-four snack packs.
Then she had vomited it all back up. But even that didn’t seem like enough to cleanse her of the offending food, so she had taken a strong laxative. The laxative kept her running back and forth to the bathroom all day.
Now she was sick to her stomach, wrung out, seething with anger at herself, ashamed.
Mary usually popped her pills in the morning, her Prozac and vitamins. But she was so frazzled as the day wore on that she had also popped a Diazepam she had found in her mother’s bathroom medicine cabinet. The Diazepam spread a gentle mellowness over her mind, like molasses poured into gears. On the drug everything was slow, frustrating, fuzzy. To counteract the Diazepam she poured herself a cup of coffee in a covered safety cup, stirred in sugar, and carried it with her into the classroom.
That’s when Quinn had walked through carrying a machine gun. She had shielded the kids from seeing him, but there was something deeply disturbing about the sight of a machine gun in the real world, not on TV or in a video game, but right there in front of her.
Now she sat cross-legged in circle time. A dozen kids paid varying degrees of attention as she read Mama Cat Has Three Kittens and The Buffalo Storm. She had read all the books so many times she could do them by heart.
Other kids were in various other corners playing with dress-up costumes, or painting, or stacking blocks.
Her brother, John, was doing diaper check on “the tinies,” as they now called the prees who were still in diapers.
One of Mary’s helpers, a girl named Manuela, was bouncing a little boy on her knee while trying to get a marker stain out of her blouse. She muttered under her breath as she worked.
Isabella, who had become Mary’s shadow since being brought to the day care, sat cross-legged and looked over her shoulder. Mary followed the words with her finger, word by word, thinking maybe she was teaching Isabella to read a little and feeling vaguely good about that.
She heard the sound of the back door opening. Probably Quinn wandering back through.
A scream.
Mary twisted around to see.
Screams, and a torrent of dirty yellow shapes piled into the room.
Screams as the coyotes brushed children aside, knocked them down, overturned easels and chairs.
Screams from little throats, screams and little faces filled with terror, eyes pleading.
Isabella bolted, panicked. A coyote was on her in a flash, knocked her to the ground, and stood over her, teeth bared, growling. His slavering muzzle was six inches from her throat.
Mary didn’t scream or cry, she roared. She leaped to her feet bellowing a word she would never have wanted the prees to hear. She beat the coyote’s shoulders with her fists.
“Get off her!” Mary cried. “Get off her, you filthy animal!”
John tried to run to her aid and let loose a strangling cry. A coyote had the back of his hoodie in its jaws and was worrying it, shaking it like a frenzied dog with a chew toy, choking John with each twist.
Manuela stood frozen in a corner, hands over her mouth, rigid with fear.
The coyotes, excited and wild and agitated, yipped and jumped and snapped at everyone around them. A little boy named Jackson yelled at one of the coyotes, “Bad dog, bad dog!”
The animal snapped and made contact, leaving a bloody scrape on Jackson’s ankle.
Jackson wailed in pain and terror.
“Mary,” he cried. “Mary.”
Then an aged, mangy coyote snarled and the animals calmed a little. But the children were all crying and wailing and John was shaking and Manuela was clutching two of the prees to her and trying to look brave.
And then Drake stepped into the room.
“You,” Mary raged. “How dare you scare these children this way!”
Drake snapped his snakelike arm. The tip of it left a red welt across Mary’s cheek.
“Shut up, Mary.”
The whip-crack had silenced some of the children. They stared with appalled amazement as the girl they had come to think of as their guardian touched the wound on her face.
“Caine won’t like this,” Mary warned. “He always said he’d keep the children safe.”
“You’ll be safe,” Drake said. “As long as you keep your mouths shut and do what I say.”
“Get these ani
mals out of here,” Mary said. “It’s almost bedtime.” Bedtime, like that would mean anything to the dogs, or to the monster before her.
This time, the whip snapped and wrapped itself tight around Mary’s throat. She felt blood pounding in her head, tried and failed to draw breath. She dug her fingernails into the scaly flesh of the whip but couldn’t budge it.
“Which part of ‘shut up’ do you have a problem understanding?” Drake yanked her close. “You’re getting all red in the face, Mary.”
She struggled, but it was no use. The living whip was as strong as a python.
“Now, you need to understand something, Mary: These dogs, as far as they’re concerned, all these little kids are just so many hamburgers. They’ll eat them just like they eat rabbits.”
He unwrapped his tentacle from her throat. She sank to the floor, sucking air through a throat that felt as narrow as a straw.
“What do you want?” Mary rasped. “Drake, you have to get these coyotes out of here. You can have me as a hostage. But the children don’t know what’s happening and they are scared.”
Drake laughed cruelly. “Hey, Pack Leader. You guys won’t eat the kids, will you?”
To Mary’s astonishment, the large, mangy coyote spoke. “Pack Leader agreed. No kill. No eat.”
“Until…,” Drake prompted.
“Until Whip Hand say.”
Drake beamed. “Whip Hand. That’s their affectionate name for me.”
Isabella, who had shrunk back into a corner, came forward with her hand extended, like she wanted to pet Pack Leader. “He can talk,” Isabella said.
“Stay back,” Mary hissed.
But Isabella ignored her. She laid her hand on Pack Leader’s neck. The coyote bristled and made a low rumbling noise. But he did not snap at her.
Isabella stroked his harsh ruff. “Good doggie,” she said.
“Just don’t get too close,” Drake said coldly. “Good doggie may get hungry.”
“He took the bait,” Panda reported. “He’s got some girl with him, too. She has some kind of mad powers, like…like I don’t know what to call it. She kind of makes stuff fly off the ground.”
Diana Ladris said, “It must be Dekka. We predicted she would be a problem. She and Brianna. Maybe Taylor, if she’s improved her skills.”
They were in a home belonging to no one any of them knew. Just a house on a back street a block from the school. The shades were drawn, the lights were left just as they had been. No one came or went through the front door.
“Right now my brother is rushing toward the day care,” Caine said. He could barely contain his glee. “He fell for it. He absolutely fell for it. See, the thing is, I knew he’d try to play hero and come after me.”
“Yes, you’re brilliant,” Diana said dryly. “You’re the master of all you survey.”
“Even you can’t get on my nerves. That’s how happy I am.” Caine smirked.
“Where’s Jack?” Diana asked. When Caine scowled, she said, “See? I still know how to get on your nerves.”
Diana knew that Jack had been driven from the highway into the desert. Panda and Drake had reported that. But she didn’t know what had happened after that. If Caine got his hands on Computer Jack, Diana had no doubt that the techie wizard would give her up. What would Caine do then?
In the meantime, Diana had to play it smart by pretending to be concerned by Jack’s escape or defection or whatever it should be called. It would throw Caine and Drake off the scent.
Unless they captured Jack.
She fought down a wave of fear and hid it by pouring herself a glass of water at the kitchen sink.
In the safe house, in addition to Diana and Caine, were Howard, Chunk, Mallet, and Panda. Panda was badly shaken by his run-in with Sam and Dekka. He would occasionally mutter something like “A hole blown right through the wall, could have been my head.”
Chunk had tried entertaining them with the same Hollywood stories they’d all heard a million times before. Caine had threatened to turn him over to Drake if he didn’t shut up.
Howard was no less irritating. He sat and stewed and whined from time to time about going to look for Orc. “Orc is a soldier, man, if he made it back here, he’ll be over at the house we used to live in. It’s not that far. I could sneak over there. He’d be good to have around.”
“Orc’s dead in the desert,” Panda said harshly. “You know those coyotes got him.”
“Shut up, Panda!” Howard yelled.
The other person in the little house was Lana. Ever since Lana had demonstrated her healing powers, Caine had insisted on keeping her close. To Diana, she remained a disturbing mystery. Her eyes seemed always to be looking at something far away. She rebuffed attempts at conversation. Not angrily, not like she was upset by any of them, more like she was in a completely different place, worrying, reflecting, seeing something completely different.
There was a shadow over Lana. A hollowness in her eyes.
Caine paced back and forth, from the open kitchen area into the family room, back and forth, back and forth. He had started biting his thumb again in that stupid way he had. He stopped and threw up his hands and asked Diana, “Where is he? Where is Bug?”
Bug was one of the freaks who had signed up with Caine right at the start. Long before the FAYZ, back when Caine was first discovering his powers, learning to control them and learning to recognize others like himself. In those days it was all about getting control of the school environment: Coates had never been a nice place. Half the kids in the school were one kind of bully or another. Caine had just been determined to be the head bully, the bully who could not be bullied himself.
Bug had always been a little creep in Diana’s eyes. He didn’t rise to the level of a true bully, he was closer to being a Howard-like creature, a bootlick, a toady. He was just ten years old, a nose-picking gross-out artist. But then his power manifested one day when Frederico threatened to kick his butt. Bug, in terror, had disappeared.
Only he didn’t really disappear, it was more that he seemed to blend in, like a chameleon. You could still see him if you knew he was there. But his skin and even his clothes would take on the protective coloration of whatever was behind him, like a mirror that reflected his background. The result could be pretty creepy. Bug standing in front of a cactus would seem to be green with needles poking out.
“You know Bug,” Diana said. “He’ll show up to get his strokes. Unless Sam or one of his people spotted him.”
At that moment the front door opened and closed. Something moved that was hard to see, hard to make sense of, like a wave in the wallpaper.
“Here’s Bug now,” Diana announced.
Caine leaped at him. “What did you see?”
Bug shut down the camouflage and emerged clearly, a short, brown-haired, buck-toothed kid with a freckled nose. “I saw a lot. Sam is in town, right across from the day care. He doesn’t look like he’s doing anything.”
“What do you mean he’s not doing anything?”
“I mean, he’s standing there eating Mickey D’s.”
Caine stared. “What?”
“He’s eating. Fries. I guess he’s hungry.”
“Does he know Drake and Pack Leader have the littles?”
Bug shrugged. “I guess so.”
“And he’s just standing there?”
“What did you expect him to do?” Diana demanded. “He knows we’ve got the kids. He’s waiting to hear what we want.”
Caine bit savagely at his thumb. “He’s up to something. He probably figures we have a way to watch him. So he’s making sure we see him. Meanwhile, he’s up to something.”
“What can he do? Drake and the coyotes are in there with the kids. He has no choice. He has to do whatever you tell him to do.”
Caine wasn’t convinced. “He’s up to something.”
Lana stirred herself, looked at Caine, seeming to hear him for the first time.
“What?” Diana asked her.
<
br /> “Nothing,” Lana said. She patted her omnipresent dog. “Nothing at all.”
“I need to go do this now,” Caine said.
“The plan was to wait till we were close to the birthday hour. That way he loses no matter what.”
“You think he can take me, don’t you?”
“I think he’s had a couple of days to prepare,” Diana said. “And he’s got more people. And some of his people, especially the freaks from Coates, really, really want you dead.” She stepped closer to him, right up in his face. “Every step of the way, Caine, you listen to me, then you do exactly what I’ve told you not to do. I told you to let the freaks go who didn’t want to play along. But no, you had to listen to Drake’s paranoid advice. I told you to go into Perdido Beach and make a quick deal for food. You have to go try and take over. Now you’re going to do whatever you want, and you’ll probably end up screwing things up.”
“Your faith in me is touching,” Caine said.
“You’re smart. You’re charming. You have all this power. But your ego is out of control.”
He might have lashed out, but instead, he spread his arms wide in a gesture of helplessness. “What was I supposed to do? Coates? That’s it? How do you not see what an opportunity this is? We’re in a whole new world. I’m the most powerful person in that whole new world. No adults. No parents or teachers or cops. It’s perfect. Perfect for me. All I have to do is take care of Sam and a few others, and I’ll have complete control.” He was making fists by the conclusion of his rant.
“You’ll never have complete control, Caine. This world is changing all the time. Animals. People. Who knows what’s next? We didn’t make this world, we’re just the poor fools who are living in it.”
“You’re wrong. I’m not a fool. This is going to be my world.” He slapped his chest. “Me. I’m going to run the FAYZ, the FAYZ is not going to run me.”
“It’s not too late to walk away.”
He grinned, a dark echo of his once-charming smile. “You’re wrong. It’s time to win. It’s time to send Bug to Sam with my terms.”
“I’ll go,” Diana volunteered. It was foolish. She knew what he would say. And she could see the light of suspicion in his eyes.
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