Gone Series Complete Collection (275 page)

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.

But he might not come out. It was one thing to be gay in the FAYZ—people had bigger worries on their mind than who liked who. It was another thing to come out to his family. And it would be still more difficult if he had to be openly gay in the completely unfamiliar, macho culture of Honduras.

La migra
could come at any moment. There were plenty of people who didn’t like the idea of Edilio as some kind of folk hero. Too many interviews with survivors had mentioned him as a leader in the FAYZ. He was conspicuous.

“I can’t eat any more,” Edilio said, pushing the plate away.

“You want to go out and play?” His mother posed the question in Spanish. She tried to speak English with him, but mostly she ended up back in her comfort zone.

Go out and play.

Despite himself, Edilio had to smile. Like he was a six-year-old. “No, Mama, I’ll just see what’s on TV . . .” And that’s when he looked up and saw the video.

The video showed a helicopter landing in a clearing in the charcoal forest. A young man, a boy, at first running away, then caught by paramedics. Resisting. Then, it seemed, breaking down, before being finally led by kind hands to the helicopter door.

There was no audio: the TV had been muted.

Edilio’s heart stopped beating the instant he saw the frightened figure. The video was shaky and poorly focused. The boy’s face wasn’t clear. But Edilio knew.

The chyron at the bottom of the screen said the unidentified survivor had been taken to a hospital just south in San Luis Obispo.

“I need to go to SLO,” Edilio said.

“San Luis?
Por qué?
”

Edilio sighed. For several minutes he just couldn’t speak. His heart felt ten times its normal size. He had given up. A voice in his head berated him:
Why did you give up, Edilio? After all that’s happened, didn’t you learn not to give up?

He picked up a paper towel and pressed it against his eyes. He no longer felt as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. He felt, rather, that he might be on the verge of an uncontrollable laughing fit.

“Mama, sit down, okay? I have something kind of big to tell you.”

Connie left after telling Sam all he had asked her to tell him. Not what he had wanted to know, but that’s what happened when you got answers.

He sat in his hospital bed feeling winded. Feeling lost.

He wanted to talk to Astrid. He needed to talk to Astrid. But what could he do? They were blocking his calls and—

“Really, Sam?” he demanded of the empty room. “That’s all it takes to stop you now?”

The hospital was an older building on the University of Southern California campus, massive and imposing, but it still had windows that could be opened for fresh air.

An open window. Sheets. He stuck his head out and looked down. He was twelve floors up, but just two stories above the roof of a wing of the hospital.

He went into the tiny bathroom and removed most of his bandages. It hurt. He was not healed. And what he planned to do next would hurt even more. But the scabs probably wouldn’t do more than leak a little. That was nothing:
Remember when
. . .
No, Sam,
he told himself,
don’t remember when.

He dressed in his street clothes, quickly wound the sheets into a loop, slid it over a pipe near the window, and without pausing to worry too much about it, swung out and slid down.

He pulled the sheet down after him. Then he bent over and let the pain subside. Yep. That hurt, all right.

He had left a note on his bed. The note said,
Poof!
He hoped the police guards would find it funny.

On the roof of the secondary hospital wing he could literally walk up to windows in the main building. He saw patients inside. One of them, an old man, waved. Sam waved back. A woman just stared. He smiled.

He found one window open. It was to a doctor’s office. He slid inside and took a quick inventory. In the closet was a suit on a hanger. No wallet, no money, unfortunately. Frustrating. It was hard to do much here in the out there unless you had money.

There was a computer. It was password protected, but the password turned out to be “password.”

“People did not get any smarter while I was away,” Sam said with a laugh.

Now, the question was: Who would help him? And who could he find a number for? He only remembered one number from the old days, and what were the odds that Quinn had a phone? Or that it was the same number?

He opened a messaging app.

It’s Sam. I need help.

He went on then, searching the office while waiting, expecting a notification that the message was undeliverable. He found five dollars in a junk drawer in the doctor’s desk. Yay. The doctor wouldn’t even notice.

There came a ding. A reply! It said,
Sam? Sam T?

Hey, Fisherman
, Sam typed.
I’m busting out of the hospital.

The reply came quickly.
Obviously to go surfing.

Sam laughed. Wow. Just how much would he love to be surfing right now?

Before he could answer, another message came.
On my way. Q.

Quinn did not have a car and he was too young to drive. But he did have a mother who had already heard Quinn’s account of life in the FAYZ.

“This is the same Sam?” she asked. “Our Sam? Your Sam?”

“My Sam,” Quinn said.

“Get in the car.”

Quinn kissed her spontaneously for that. It was an hour’s drive. The Gaither family had relocated to Santa Monica, where his father had a better job than before. In fact, to Quinn’s amazement they lived just ten blocks from the Santa Monica Pier.

Sam had instructed them to enter the parking structure, but not the one nearest the hospital. That one would be searched. Instead he’d given them the location of a parking structure adjoining a different campus building.

As instructed, they drove to the third floor, southeast corner, and honked their horn, just a couple of taps.

Sam emerged from a parked car and slid into the backseat behind Quinn.

“Dude,” Quinn said.

“Thanks, Mrs. Gaither,” Sam said. “I don’t think they’ve even noticed I’m gone yet. But they may have, so I’m just going to duck down behind the seat.”

“Don’t you worry about it,” Mrs. Gaither said. “This campus is wide open. We’ll get you out of here.”

They drove for half an hour and then, finally, Sam raised his head cautiously. Quinn tossed him a stocking cap. “Put that on.”

They were on a freeway jammed with cars, doing a stop-and-go, heading north. Toward Santa Barbara. Toward Astrid.

Mrs. Gaither turned the radio on to NPR, and naturally Quinn reached over to switch to a music station. But he was a little slow, and when he heard what was being reported, his hand froze.

It was a press conference. The voice speaking was calm, assured, audibly intelligent, and very familiar.

“My name is Astrid Ellison. A-S-T-R-I-D. E-L-L-I-S-O-N.”

“And most of you know me.” This was Todd Chance. “And you know my wife, Jennifer Brattle.”

Astrid was seated between them. Between two of the most famous people in the world: the couple sometimes known as Toddifer. They were both beautiful, especially—from Astrid’s perspective—Todd Chance. About fifteen years too old for her—okay, twenty years too old—but still and all a startlingly handsome man.

And Jennifer was cute. In her own way.

It was Jennifer who spoke next. “As you all know, our property, San Francisco de Sales Island, where we maintained a home, was part of the FAYZ. Our children, thankfully, are all alive and well and now at our other home in Malibu.”

“We returned to the island just yesterday and found that it had been occupied during the time we were . . . away.” And that seemed to be the end of her prepared remarks, because she looked beseechingly at Todd.

“The house is fine. Well, a little bit of a mess. And our yacht, well . . .” He pushed his fingers back through his mane of blond hair. “That’s not the point, though. We’re here to talk about what we found. I mean, two letters that were left in a desk in our bedroom.”

There were eight TV cameras in the overly gold hotel ballroom where the press conference was being held. Microphones were mounted in front of Todd, Astrid, and Jennifer.

Astrid still wore a few bandages. And an amazingly clean cotton shirt and totally intact jeans and shoes. Shoes that had not been looted from some stranger’s home. Impractical shoes you couldn’t easily run in.

These are not fleeing shoes, Astrid had realized when she put them on.

“One of the letters was addressed to Diana Ladris, another survivor,” Todd continued. “We’ve given that letter to her. It’s private. But the other was addressed to us. To me and to Jennifer, which was a surprise, obviously. It’s um . . . well, actually, we’ll just have Astrid read it. She knew the boy who wrote it.”

I knew him, all right, Astrid thought. I wanted him dead. And then this. The FAYZ continued to teach her lessons.

She picked up the photocopy of the letter. It was handwritten.

“‘Dear Mr. Chance and Ms. Brattle. Sorry about the mess. Great bed. Loved it. As a matter of fact, loved the whole house. Actually, I tried to kill your kids when I found them here. Yeah, funny story. Maybe not funny, hah hah.’”

Astrid heard nervous laughter from the media people, or maybe just from the hotel staff who were hovering around the edges grabbing a glimpse of the Hollywood royalty.

“‘Anyway, I missed and they got away. I don’t know what will happen to Sanjit and that stick-up-his butt Choo and the rest, but whatever happens next, it’s not on me. However . . .’”

Astrid took a dramatic pause.

“‘However, the rest of what happened was on me. Me, Caine Soren. You’ll probably be hearing a lot of crazy stories from kids. But what they didn’t know was that it was all me. Me. Me me. See, I had a power I never told anyone about. I had the power to make people do bad things. Crimes and whatnot. Especially Diana, who never did anything wrong on her own, by her own will, I mean. She—and the rest of them—were under my control. The responsibility is on me. I confess. Haul me away, officers.’”

Astrid suddenly felt her throat tightening, although she’d read the letter many times already, and knew what it said. Rotten son of a . . . And then
this.

Redemption. Not a bad concept.

Well, partial redemption.

“It’s signed Caine Soren. And below that, ‘King of the FAYZ.’”

It was a full confession. A lie: a blatant, not-very-convincing lie. But it would be just enough to make prosecutions very difficult. Caine’s role in the FAYZ, and the reality that strange powers had actually existed in that space, were widely known and accepted.

Of course Caine had enjoyed writing it. It was his penultimate act of control. He was manipulating from beyond the grave.

“Now,” Jennifer said, interrupting the long silence, “we want to discuss the deal we’ve just signed with Astrid to develop a book and then movie, telling the true story of the FAYZ.” She began reading off a prepared statement. “‘Astrid Ellison was a central figure, right from the start. She had long since earned the nickname Astrid the Genius, and . . .’”

And Jennifer went on, and then Todd, and Astrid smiled when it seemed appropriate, and made a humble face when that seemed appropriate, and her thoughts went far away, far from the ballroom and the cameras.

She didn’t even realize that tears were running down her cheeks until she felt Todd offer her a tissue.

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I was just . . . It happens sometimes—”

And then she looked up, toward someone at the back of the room.

Diana’s letter was much shorter. Just four lines.

Diana:

I’m sorry for hurting you. I know I did.

I’m most likely dead now, and I guess if there’s any kind of fairness in the afterlife I’m probably in hell getting roasted. But if that’s where I am, I want you to know, I still love you. Always did.

Love,

Caine

She read the letter over and over again. Each time crying. Each time laughing.

The news networks and the local TV stations all led with the same footage. An obviously moved, very pretty young woman with blond hair and alert blue eyes looking up. Eyes widening. Stumbling a little as she pushed back her chair and went around the table.

Shaky cameras turning too fast, following her as she ran to a boy at the back of the room who pushed through the press of people to reach her.

The embrace.

The kiss that went on for a very long time.