Gone Series Complete Collection (51 page)

“Get down, get down, get down,” he yelled. “On the ground!” But it was useless.

“Save me!” said Computer Jack, falling from the SUV.

An Audi skidded to a stop in front of the church. Someone was standing up in the sunroof.

A scream of sheer terror and pain. Someone was down, struggling against a coyote twice his size.

“Edilio! Now!” Sam roared.

“Having a bad night, brother?” Caine shouted, exultant. “It’s going to get worse.”

Caine raised his hands, aimed not at Sam, not at Sam at all. Instead, he directed the impossible energy of his telekinesis at the church. It was as if an invisible giant, a creature the size of a dinosaur, had leaned against the ancient limestone. The stone cracked. The stained-glass window shattered. The door of the church, the weak point, blew inward, knocked clear off its hinges.

“Astrid!” Sam cried.

Screams, panicked screams from the plaza, mixed with snarls and wild yelps as the coyotes fell on the children.

Suddenly the impossibly loud clatter of a machine gun. Fire blasted from the roof of the day care.

Edilio running from the burned building, three others behind him, charging the coyotes.

Caine blasted again and this time the invisible monster, the beast of energy, pushed hard, hard against the front of the church.

The side windows, all the ancient stained glass and the new, exploded in a sparkling shower. The steeple swayed.

“How you going to save them, Sam?” Caine exulted. “One more push and it collapses.”

Jack at Sam’s feet, clutching him, tripping him, strangely strong.

Sam fired blindly at Caine as he fell.

“I can save you! Save me!” Jack pleaded. “The poof, I can save you.”

Sam fell hard, kicked at Jack’s grasping hands, wiggled free, and stood up in time to see the front wall of the church sag and collapse slowly, slowly inward.

The roof shuddered and slumped. The steeple teetered but did not fall. But tons of limestone and plaster and massive wooden beams fell in with a crash like the end of the world.

“Astrid!” Sam cried again, helpless.

He ran straight at Caine, ignoring the massacre behind him, blocking the screams and the ravening growls and the staccato of machine guns.

He aimed and fired.

The beam hit the front of Caine’s car. The sheet metal blistered, and Caine climbed awkwardly out through the sunroof while others Sam didn’t care enough to identify bolted through the doors.

Sam fired and Caine dodged.

A blast hit Sam, stopped him as dead as if he’d run into a wall. He searched wildly for Caine. Where? Where?

Muffled screams from inside the church joined the background roar, a noise out of a child’s hell, high-pitched cries for mother, agonized cries, desperate, pleading.

A flash of movement and Sam fired.

Caine fired back and the statue on the fountain was blown off its pedestal and fell with a splash in the fetid water.

Sam was up and running. He had to find Caine, had to find him, kill him, kill him.

More machine guns firing and Edilio’s voice yelling, “No, no, no, stop firing, you’re hitting kids!”

Sam rounded the burning Audi. Caine running ahead, leaping a fire hydrant.

Sam fired and the ground under Caine’s feet burst into flame and oily black smoke. The pavement itself was burning. Caine went sprawling onto the street, rolled quickly, got to one knee, and Sam took a massive blow that laid him flat on his back, stunned, blood coming from his mouth and ears, limbs all askew, unable to . . . unable . . .

Caine, a wild, bloody, screaming face.

Sam felt hatred burn through him and erupt from his hands.

Caine jumped aside, too slow, and the scourging light seared his side. Shirt burning, Caine screamed and beat at the flame.

Sam tried to stand, but his head was swimming.

Caine bolted into the burned-out apartment building, through the same door Sam had entered to try and save the little firestarter.

Sam wobbled but ran after him.

Up the stairs and to the scorched hallway, still stinking of smoke. The top floor was a wreckage of burned timbers and asphalt-tiled slopes of roof like children’s slides, and fragments of walls and incongruous jutting pipes.

A blast and Sam could actually see the half-wall beside him ripple from the impact.

“Caine. Let’s finish this,” Sam rasped.

“Come get me, brother,” Caine cried in a pain-squeezed voice. “I’ll bring this place down on us both.”

Sam located the sound of his voice and ran down the hallway, ran beneath the stars, firing the deadly light from his hands.

No Caine.

A creaking door, still hanging from hinges though the wall around it was gone, swung slowly.

Sam kicked it, spun, and fired into the room.

A charred wooden beam flew through the air. Sam ducked under it. The next one hit his left arm, shattering the elbow. More debris, a torrent of it, drove Sam back.

Suddenly, there was Caine, not ten feet from him.

Caine’s hands were raised over his head, fingers splayed, palms out. Sam clutched his shattered left elbow with his right hand.

“Game over, Sam,” Caine said.

Something blurred behind Caine and he reeled. He clutched his skull.

Brianna stood over him, brandishing her hammer.

“Run, Breeze!” Sam yelled, but too late. Even as he staggered backward, Caine fired at point-blank range and Brianna flew backward into the wall, through the wall.

Caine jumped after her through the opening.

Sam fired into the wall, burned a hole. Through it he could see Caine blowing away the next wall.

Sam felt the floor buckle beneath him.

The building was collapsing.

He turned and ran, but all at once the floor was gone and he was running in midair, falling, and the building with him, all around him, on him.

He fell and the world fell on him.

FORTY-FIVE

14
MINUTES

QUINN WATCHED
IN
frozen horror as the coyotes attacked the children.

He saw Sam fire and miss.

He saw Sam agonize for a terrible moment as Caine attacked the church.

Sam ran toward the church.

Quinn shouted, “No!”

He aimed.

“Don’t hit the kids, don’t the kids,” he sobbed, and squeezed the trigger. Aiming at the mass of coyotes. So many more than before.

The coyotes barely noticed him.

One fell, twisting, like it had tripped, and didn’t get up.

Then he could shoot no more, the beasts were in with the kids. He ran for the ladder and slid and fell and landed hard in the alley.

Run away, his brain screamed, run from it. He took three panicked steps away, toward the beach, running toward the beach, but then, as though some invisible force had taken hold of him, he stopped.

“Can’t run away, Quinn,” he told himself.

“Can’t.”

And even as he said the words, he was running back, into the day care, pushing past Mary shielding a child in her arms, past her out to the plaza, wielding the gun as a club now, running and screaming his head off like a lunatic, swinging the gun butt to a sickening crunch on a coyote’s skull.

Edilio was there and kids were shooting and Edilio was shouting, “No, no, no,” and then blood was in Quinn’s eyes and blood was in his brain and blood was everywhere and he lost his mind, lost his mind swinging and screaming and hitting, hitting, hitting.

Mary clutched Isabella to her and huddled with John, and the kids cried hearing the madness outside, the screams and snarls and guns.

“Jesus, save us, Jesus, save us,” someone was repeating in a racked, sobbing voice, and Mary knew in some distant way that it was her.

Drake heard the coyote howl in the night and knew in his black heart what it meant.

Enough of licking his wounds.

The battle was joined.

“Time,” he said. “Time to show them all.”

He kicked his own front door open and marched toward the plaza, shouting, shouting, wishing he could bay at the moon like the coyotes.

He heard guns firing and pulled his pistol from his belt and uncoiled his whip hand and snapped it, loving the crack it made.

Ahead, two figures were moving away from him, also heading for the sound of battle, two figures. One seemed impossibly small. But no, it was the other that was impossibly big. Sumo big. A shuffling, slumping, thick-limbed creature.

The two mismatched ones moved into a pool of light cast by a streetlamp. Drake recognized the smaller one.

“Howard, you traitor,” Drake shouted.

Howard stopped. The beast beside him kept walking.

“You don’t want any of this, Drake,” Howard warned.

Drake whipped him across the chest, tore Howard’s shirt open, left a trail of blood that was black in the harsh light.

“You better be on your way to help take down Sam,” Drake warned.

The rough beast stopped. It turned slowly and came back.

“What is that?” Drake demanded sharply.

“You,” the beast muttered.

“Orc?” Drake cried, half thrilled, half terrified.

“It’s your fault I did it,” Orc said dully.

“Get out of my way,” Drake ordered. “There’s a fight. Come with me or die right now.”

“He just wants some beer, Drake,” Howard said placatingly, clutching the wound in his chest, hunched over in pain, but still trying to manipulate, still trying to be clever.

“God’s judgment on me,” Orc slurred.

“You stupid lump,” Drake said, and whirled his whip hand and brought it down full force on Orc’s shoulder.

“AAHHH!” Orc bellowed in pain.

“Get moving, you moron,” Drake ordered.

Orc got moving. But not toward the plaza.

“You want a piece of Whip Hand, freak?” Drake demanded. “I’ll cut you up.”

Astrid felt a crushing weight on her lower back and legs. She was facedown, lying on top of Little Pete. She was stunned, but had enough presence of mind to understand that she was stunned.

She took a deep breath.

She whispered, “Petey.” She heard the sound through her bones. Her ears were ringing, muffling sound.

Little Pete wasn’t moving.

She tried to draw her legs up, but they wouldn’t move.

“Petey, Petey,” she cried.

She wiped something out of her eyes, dust, dirt, sweat, and blinked to focus on her brother. She had shielded most of his body from the falling wall, but a chunk of plaster the size of a backpack lay on his head.

She bit back a sob. She pressed two fingers against his neck and felt a pulse. She could feel his shallow breathing, the rise and fall of his chest, beneath her.

“Help,” she croaked, unsure if she was shouting or whispering, unable to hear for the ringing.

“Someone help us. Someone help us.”

“Save my brother.”

“Save him,” she pleaded, and the plea became a prayer. “Save Sam. Save us all.”

She began to recite from memory a prayer she’d heard once long ago. Her voice was faraway, someone else’s voice.

“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil.” She could feel more than hear her own sobbing, a racking shudder that twisted the words in her throat.

As if in mocking answer to her plea for mercy, a shower of glass and plaster fragments fell around her.

“May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do you, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God . . .”

Little Pete stirred and groaned. He moved his head and she could see the deep gash, pushed inward, a cleaver-mark in his head.

“ . . . cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.”

Someone stood on the rubble above her. She twisted her neck and saw, silhouetted against the high ceiling in a sudden flash of green lightning, a dark face.

“Amen.”

“I’m not exactly an angel, let alone an archangel,” Dekka said in a voice Astrid could only just make out. “But I can get this stuff off you.”

Caine leaped from the wreckage of the building.

He had done it.

He had done it.

Sam was under the tangled debris, buried. Beaten.

But Caine could scarcely enjoy the moment. The pain from the damaged left side of his body was shocking. The dangerous green-white light had fused his shirt to his flesh and the result was beyond any agony he had ever imagined.

He staggered toward the ruined church, trying to make sense of the chaos around him. There was no more gunfire, but there were still screams and cries and snarls. And something else, a series of tiny sonic booms, the crack of a bullwhip. Below that, a bass drum keeping a random beat.

Caine stopped, stared, momentarily forgetting his pain.

On the steps of the town hall a titanic battle raged between Drake and some rough-hewn monster.

Drake cracked his whip hand and fired his pistol.

The monster lunged with clumsy blows that missed again and again as Drake danced around, whipping and whipping and yet not even backing the beast up.

The beast swung and missed Drake by inches. The stony fist slammed one of the limestone pillars in front of the town hall. The pillar cracked and almost shattered. Little stone chips flew.

Caine’s gaze was drawn downward by a snarling, slurring, high-pitched voice.

“Female say Pack Leader stop,” Pack Leader said angrily.

“What?” Caine could make no sense of it till he saw Diana striding up, dark hair flying, eyes furious.

“I told this filthy beast to stop,” Diana said, barely controlled.

“Stop what?” Caine demanded.

“They’re still attacking the kids,” Diana said. “We’ve won. Sam is dead. Call them off, Caine.”

Caine turned his attention back to the battle between Drake and the monster. “They’re coyotes,” Caine said coldly.

Diana flew at him. “You’ve lost your mind, Caine. This has to stop. You’ve won. This has to stop.”

“Or what, Diana? Or what?” Caine demanded. “Go get Lana. I’m hurt. Pack Leader, do what you want.”

“Maybe this is why your mother abandoned you,” Diana said savagely. “Maybe she could see that you weren’t just bad, you were twisted and sick and evil.”