Gone Series Complete Collection (272 page)

THIRTY

25
MINUTES

YEA, THOUGH
I
walk . . . valley of the shadow of death . . .

Orc was not a great runner. He weighed hundreds of pounds. His gravel legs were not quick.

His staff will comfort me . . . Angels and so on . . .

But the downslope helped a little. And the smoke didn’t bother him so much. Maybe his throat was different.

I will fear no evil . . .

She didn’t hear him coming.

The Lord is my shepherd . . .

A hundred yards left.

Her lights burned slowly toward the center, and she threw her head back and laughed and laughed as the crowd outside panicked and ran and died and the crowd inside crawled over one another like desperate animals to escape the slaughter and were cut in half.

Thou art with me. Not just thy staff.

Thou.

Orc hit Gaia like a truck.

She flew. Hit the ground facedown amid the panicked children. The impact rolled Orc into the barrier, squashing a girl beneath him. He hit the barrier and it sent a shock through him, so he jumped up, raging against it, searched for Gaia, saw her rolling onto her back, saw her face distorted with fury, saw her raise her hands.

He was off balance, trying to get to his feet, when she fired.

Both beams hit him mid-chest.

Orc collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

He lifted one massive stone fist to try and shield the patch of human skin that still covered part of his mouth.

People inside and out scattered in panic. The air was filled with screams.

Orc was on his knees. Two holes had been burned right through him. He looked at Gaia, who stood now, enraged, and advanced on him.

“I’m not scared of you,” Orc said, slurring the words like in the bad old days when he was a drunk. “I’m going to dwell . . . I forget . . . forever.”

Gaia advanced on him, but the crowd, the huddled, terrified mass, had used the distraction to break and run.

Gaia felt the fear creeping back in.

And then the missile exploded against the barrier.

Lana stumbled down from Clifftop. It felt like forever since she’d been away from that foul room, that now-terrible place.

She could see in the distance fire eating at the edge of Perdido Beach. She tasted the smoke.

“Not much point quitting if the air’s going to be one big cigarette,” she muttered.

Her battle was over. She felt it inside. The gaiaphage had ceased to struggle against her. She had fought and won her own little war.

Suddenly Patrick came bounding up beside her.

“So, Sanjit sent you to look after me, huh?” She reached down and patted his head. “You and me, boy. You and me.”

There came a loud explosion, a flat but powerful sound, just off to her right.

There would be people hurt by that kind of a thing.

For the last time, the Healer headed toward the sound of suffering.

The missile hit the barrier immediately behind Orc. His body took most of the blast.

It blew him apart. TV cameras caught the moment when a thousand little stones went flying like shrapnel. The rock was blown from his back and much of his chest, from his shoulders and most of his head. It was as if he was a mud-crusted shoe knocked against the wall. The mud gravel was knocked away in patches.

His internal organs were crushed. His eyes bled. For a terrible moment a body, the body of a young man, with pink flesh rising from still-stony legs, tried to push itself up off the ground. Surely just a physical instinct, surely not a conscious effort, because he could not be alive.

Charles Merriman, long known as Orc, tried to rise, and instead fell dead.

Orc’s massive body had shielded Gaia from the worst of it.

She lived, still, but the shrapnel and the fire had stripped the skin from much of her body, a terrible mimicry of Orc’s own destruction.

She was a creature of blood, red from head to foot.

But she lived still.

Sinder ran from the terrible scene. She tripped over bodies, got up, and ran some more.

She glanced back once and saw Orc hit.

She could hardly breathe for the beating of her heart and the sobbing that tore at her.

Her feet pounded earth, tripped, stood, ran, glanced back again and saw Gaia coming.

A beam of light shot past Sinder and she screamed. A girl to her right made a soft gasp and fell. The hole in her neck was smoking.

Feet on concrete now, the road, running. Clifftop! To the left, but uphill, and Gaia was coming, and another deadly beam of light, so close Sinder felt the heat of it on her cheek and cries and shouts and the sound of people gasping for breath, gagging in the smoke.

And suddenly, Caine rising up behind a wrecked car. He was holding something long and white.

The panicked crowd parted around him. Sinder ran on, glanced back, saw Gaia still running and firing, and Caine grim and steady.

“Damn,” Caine breathed. “That is one tough monster Diana and I made.”

The rest of the missiles were off to the side of the road in their crates. He kind of didn’t think he’d get a chance to reload.

Edilio was there, unpacking a second missile, but nope, Caine thought, Edilio isn’t going to get the shot, either.

Gaia saw him.

“You,” she said.

“Yeah, me,” Caine said, disappointed. “Well, I thought it was worth a try. Better than my backup plan.”

“Your backup plan?” Gaia asked.

Caine nodded. And for a moment he hesitated, seeing Diana in his mind.

Diana.

A good final thought, that.

“Now, Little Pete,” Caine said. “Right now.”

Little Pete was ready, but he was still worried. Living inside a body had not been good for him. His brain had been his enemy all his life. And the only peace he had ever known was in this fading twilight unreality he had shared with the Darkness that called itself the gaiaphage.

But the gaiaphage had attacked him. The gaiaphage had hurt him, even while crooning softly to Pete to just fade away.

Little Pete didn’t remember much that his parents and sister had taught him back before. But he remembered that it is not okay to hit.

It is definitely not okay to hit.

Then he had seen the ghostly shapes of all the people starting to flicker and disappear. All those game pieces, all those avatars, just disappearing, and they were being destroyed by the Darkness, weren’t they?

The gaiaphage wasn’t just hitting Little Pete.

Which was wrong.

It was hitting other people, too.

He had tried to fight back using Taylor, but he’d been too weak to make her whole, and too weak to stop the slaughter.

And then he’d heard his sister calling to him.
Little Pete, take me and fight it.

But he didn’t really trust her very much.

Other voices had drifted to him, calling him through the emptiness, even as the Darkness tried to tell him no, no, Nemesis, just fade, fade into nothingness and be happy.

A girl he didn’t know had called to him.
Take me. I deserve to die.

But then had come the voice that said,
Come on, you little freak, wherever the hell you are, whatever the hell you are, let’s get this done with.

Pete had seen the scars on him, the fresh marks of the gaiaphage.

You and me. Blaze of glory, Little Pete. Blaze of glory.

Pete didn’t know what a blaze of glory was, but it sounded good.

Now, Little Pete. Right now.

The Darkness was wrong. It was not time for Peter Ellison to fade away. It was time to hit back.

Caine had not wanted to feel it happening. He’d wanted it just to be over quick. Bam, over. But he did feel it.

He felt like maybe he’d stepped into a hot shower and was having that lovely sense of relaxation as the water warms the back of your neck, and you close your eyes, and you sigh away the night’s bad dreams.

It was warm: that was the surprise. It was warm and it made him sigh. It was like . . . well, not exactly like anything he’d felt, but maybe closest to the way he’d felt after he made love to Diana, and lay beside her, and smelled her, and felt her breath on his cheek, and she would put a hand on his cheek and . . .

You’re giving me a good memory to go out on, aren’t you, Pete?

Well, good choice, Caine thought.

Huh. I can’t feel my body, Caine thought.

Huh.

I . . .

Diana was wet and cold. She had finally jumped into the water and swum to the dock and pulled her battered self out of the water.

She had run as well as she could through smoke, through the streets toward the sounds of panic and death. She’d run into Sam. He was in the plaza calling for Astrid.

“Astrid! Astrid!”

He spotted Diana.

“Have you seen her? Have you seen Astrid?”

“No, Sam. Have you seen—”

They had heard the swoosh of the missile. And they had listened hopefully for the explosion.

For a second’s time they had held on to hope. And then had come the sound of screams.

Sam looked half dead, but he took her hand, and she took his, and they ran toward the sound. Whether he was her protector or she was his, it didn’t really matter. They were two scared kids, running the wrong way, running toward the sound of death, while fire chased them through the streets.

Gaia still stood. She still lived.

A million years in the blackness of space.

Fourteen years in a hole in the ground, growing, mutating, becoming the gaiaphage.

Not dead yet. The body it inhabited was beyond agony, but the gaiaphage lived, and it could still kill.

And there before her was Caine, somehow smiling. Not a cynical smirk: a genuine, happy smile.

And there, rushing up the road, Diana yelling, “No, Caine. No!”

Even Sam, still alive, excellent: her powers would be undiminished.

“Hello, Darkness,” Caine said.

Gaia’s face fell. Her bloody, feral grin faded to be replaced by lips drawn tight in fear. Her killer blue eyes widened as she looked at Caine who was no longer Caine.

“Nemesis,” Gaia said.

THIRTY-ONE

11
MINUTES

A MILLION
YEARS
ago, and a bit more, a lifeless moon had been infected with a carefully structured virus. That moon had then been exploded, sending out countless fragments, seedlings, like the seeds of a dandelion, blowing across the billions of miles of space.

It was to bring life where no life existed. It was an optimistic gesture. But in one place, that hopeful experiment went terribly wrong. One seedling hit a nuclear pile on the planet Earth, and dragged shattered bits of human DNA into the crater.

Slowly the virus and the chromosomes and the radiation cooked up a monster. The virus spread, but instead of creating life it began to infect the very fabric of reality. It spawned mutations. It created its own unhinged version of evolution.

Some living things were affected, and others were spared.

One was especially vulnerable: a strange little boy whose own brain made him a prisoner, whose own mind made life painful and terrifying. Unbearable.

It would be a while before the gaiaphage began to suspect that it had unwittingly created its own nemesis. When the warping of physical laws sent the nuclear plant spiraling into a meltdown, that little boy, overwhelmed by sensory input he could not understand, sirens blaring and screens flashing warnings, created the barrier. In a flash of inconceivable power Peter Ellison simply removed all the noisy, troublesome grown-ups, silenced all that overload, and protected himself as best he could.

The gaiaphage’s malignant effect was contained. The world had found its defense against alien infection. The antibody was a then-four-year-old boy with powers made possible by the gaiaphage virus.

Nature had found the way to defend itself.

And now, at last, gaiaphage and Nemesis stood facing each other.

“Why didn’t you just . . . fade?” Gaia demanded plaintively.

“You hit me,” Nemesis said. It was a little boy’s voice coming from Caine’s mouth. “And that’s not okay.”

Sam let go of Diana’s hand, seeing Astrid ahead. He saw her blond hair from the back and almost wept with relief. But then he saw that she had been hurt.

“Astrid!” he cried.

But she held up her hand, silencing him. He looked past her then and saw Caine and Gaia, no more than a hundred feet apart.

Diana stepped closer.

“Diana, move back.” Edilio, trying to get her to a safe distance.

Diana shook her head. “I don’t think so, Edilio. He wanted a blaze of glory. He deserves an audience.”

Gaia raised her hands, fury and fear on her blood-red face. Blistering green light blazed from them.

At the same moment, Nemesis returned fire, but his light came from every direction at once. It was a white light that shifted into blue and purple and red. It came down as lightning from the sky, a thousand thunderstorms.

The entire FAYZ burned as bright as a star.

Gaia’s light hit Nemesis as she herself absorbed the awesome fire.

The girl and the boy burned bright and yet still fired.

And burned and still fired.

Their hair and clothing were gone.

Their flesh crisped.

Their eyes boiled out of their skulls.

And still the terrible light.

Their legs melted beneath them like candles. Holes appeared in their torsos. And only when they fell, each into a heap of glowing ash, did the light die.

“Well,” Diana said, with tears running down her cheeks. “That was a blaze of glory.”

There was a moment, a frozen, eternal moment, when no one breathed, and no one spoke.

Then: a sudden rush of wind. Wind! There had been no wind since—

“RUN!”
Sam cried. “The fire! Run!”

Wind blew in like the leading edge of a hurricane, rushed into the disturbance created by the sudden disappearance of the barrier. The wind fed the flames, set small fires roaring to new heights, turned bigger fires into pillars of flame that shot high into the sky.