Gone Series: Plague Part 3

Then that stupid little pig Brittney had emerged.

Drake didn't know what happened next, he couldn't see or hear when Brittney was in control. All he knew was that Sam hadn't vaporized him. And here he was, trapped. Locked in this bas.e.m.e.nt listening to Orc's heavy tread upstairs.

Drake didn't know what had happened to make him this way, to cause him to share a body with Brittney. Much of recent life was a mystery. He remembered Caine turning on him. He remembered the ma.s.sive uranium rod flying straight toward him.

And the next thing he knew, he was in a nightmare that went on and on and on forever. There was a girl in the nightmare, the little piggy, the stupid little metal-mouth moron, Brittney.

Hadn't they killed her? Long ago? He remembered a crumpled, bleeding form on a polished floor.

Brittney had died. Drake had died. And then, neither of them was dead, and both somehow were connected in a nightmare world where dirt filled their mouths and ears and held them pinned.

Digging like worms. That was the nightmare reality. Drake and the piggy digging in a nightmare, digging dirt, pus.h.i.+ng it aside, compressing it to buy half an inch of clearance.

Dark, that dream. Utterly dark. No Sammy sun. No light.

He remembered thinking in the nightmare, thinking, "There's no air."

Buried alive, there couldn't be any air. No light and no air, no water, no food, forever and forever.

It had taken a long time before his mind had cleared enough for him to realize the wonderful truth: he was dead ... but alive.

Unkillable. Buried in the damp earth and yet somehow alive.

And then, hard-won freedom of a sort. The nightmare was no longer one of being buried in the earth but of walking the earth. He would be in one place, and then quite suddenly, in another. It took him a while to realize what had happened. The piggy was a part of him. They were joined, connected. Melded into one creature with two minds and two bodies.

Sometimes Drake and sometimes Brittney Pig.

Sometimes himself, and other times that little idiot with her lunatic visions of her dead brother.

Then the fight with Sam, the burning, and yet he had survived.

Unkillable.

"You're a monster, Orc! You know that, right?" Drake shouted the taunt. "People look at you and they throw up. You make them all sick."

Trapped. For now. In this dank, gloomy bas.e.m.e.nt. Nothing down here but a wooden work table. They had cleaned the place out, Sam and Edilio and the rest. Barely a nail left behind on the concrete floor.

A roomier grave than the one he'd shared with Brittney Pig before. Here there was air. But Drake no longer needed air.

They shoved food in, and Drake ate it but he didn't need it.

Unkillable.

What could not be killed could not be imprisoned forever. Just a matter of time. Orc was a stupid drunk. Howard was a clown. Drake would have already dug his way out-he had loosened a section of cinderblock wall, working at the mortar with a piece of broken gla.s.s.

But he had to be careful not to leave any clues for Brittney to find when she emerged.

That meant working slowly. Putting the piece of gla.s.s back in the sweepings right where she would expect to see it.

In the meantime as he worked and waited he howled threats up at Orc. There were two ways out of this trap: working on the wall, and working on Orc's mind.

"Hey!" Drake shouted. "Orc! If I whip that last bit of skin off you, what do you think will happen? Might as well get rid of it and be all gravel. Why pretend you're still human?"

Orc stomped the floor, which was Drake's ceiling. But he did not come down to do battle.

Not yet. But he would eventually. Orc would snap. Then Drake would have his chance.

Through the wall or through Orc: one way or the other, Drake would escape.

He would go then to the Darkness. The gaiaphage would know how to kill the Brittney Pig and let Drake live free.

"I'm going to kill you!" Drake screamed.

He whipped at the walls, whipped at the ceiling, screamed and kicked and whipped in a lunatic frenzy.

Until at last, exhausted, his whip hand bleeding, he fell to his knees and became Brittney.

"Brittney Pig," Drake slurred as his cruel mouth melted and twisted and became the braces-toothed mouth of his most intimate enemy.

Lana, too, felt the dark distant mind of the gaiaphage reach out for her.

She woke, eyes open quite suddenly. Patrick was beside the bed, panting, worried, wagging his tail uncertainly. He could tell, somehow.

"It's okay, boy, go back to sleep," Lana said.

Patrick whimpered, but then went back to his bed, turning around a couple of times before settling himself in.

The gaiaphage could no longer trick her into believing it had a voice. Those days were gone. But it could still touch her with a tendril of consciousness. It could still remind her of its presence, and of her connection to it.

This must be what it was like to be a victim of some awful crime, and to know that the person who did it to you was still alive, still looking for a way to do it again.

The gaiaphage l.u.s.ted after Lana's power. Using her power it could do miraculous things. Like replace an amputated arm with a snakelike whip.

But she was no longer quite so weak.

"Anxious, are you?" she asked the cool night air. "Down under the ground nibbling on your uranium snack?"

The Darkness did not answer. But Lana felt her instinct was right: the creature was anxious.

But not afraid.

Lana frowned, thinking about the distinction. Anxious but not afraid. Antic.i.p.ating? Waiting for something?

She was torn between getting up and smoking a cigarette- she was hooked, she accepted that now-and lying there with her eyes closed and failing to fall asleep. Sleep, even if it came, would now be invaded by nightmares.

So she sat up, fumbled for and found the pack of Lucky Strikes and her lighter. The lighter sparked, the cigarette glowed, and the smell of smoke filled her nostrils.

"What are you up to?" she asked. "What do you want?"

But of course there was no answer. And she could sense the Darkness turning its attention away.

Lana got up and padded over to her balcony. The moon was high overhead. It was either very late or very early.

The barrier was so close, she felt as if she could almost touch it.

Was it true that the world was just on the other side of that barrier? Was it really so close that she'd have been able to smell the french fries at the Carl's Jr. they built for gawkers who came to see the dome?

Or was that just another lie in this small universe of deceptions?

What if it came down? Right now, just pop: no more barrier? Or what if it cracked, like a gigantic egg?

Her mom and dad ...

She closed her eyes and bit her lip. The pain of memory had snuck up on her, hit her when she wasn't ready.

Tears filled her eyes. She wiped them away impatiently.

Suddenly, just down on the cliff above the beach, an eruption of blazing green-white light. Sam stood silhouetted by his own light show. She heard him yelling, roaring in frustration.

He was trying to burn his way out of the FAYZ.

It went on for a while and then stopped. Darkness returned. Sam was invisible to her now.

Lana turned away.

So, she was not the only one fantasizing about cracking the sh.e.l.l and emerging like a newborn chick.

Strange, Lana thought as she stubbed out the end of her cigarette, I've never thought of it as an egg before.

A gust of breeze blew her smoke before her.

Chapter Four.

63 HOURS, 41 MINUTES.

SAM WOKE UP in the last place he'd have expected: his bedroom.

He hadn't been to his former house in ages.

He'd hated it when he lived here with his mother. Connie Temple. Nurse Temple.

He barely remembered her. She was from another world.

He sat up on the bed and smelled the sick. He'd thrown up on the bed. "Nice," he said with thick tongue.

His head exploded in supernovas of pain.

He wiped his mouth on the blanket. This was one house no one had raided or vandalized or moved into. It was still his, he supposed. There might still be drugs in the bathroom.

He staggered there. Leaned against the sink and threw up again. Not much came up.

In the medicine cabinet nothing but a small bottle of generic ibuprofen.

"Oh," Sam moaned. "Why do people drink?"

Then he remembered. Taylor.

"Oh, no. Oh, no."

No, no, he hadn't made a grab for Taylor, had he? He hadn't kissed her, surely? The memory was so hazy it could almost have been a dream. But pieces of it were too immediate and real. Especially the memory of her fingertips on his chest.

"Oh, no," he moaned.

He swallowed two ibuprofen dry. They didn't go down easily.

Holding his head, he went to the kitchen. Sat down at the little table. He'd had meals here with his mom. Not a lot of days, because she'd be up at Coates, working.

And keeping a worried eye on her other son.

Caine.

Caine Soren, not Temple. She had given him up for adoption. They had been born just a few minutes apart, fraternal twins, him and Caine. And their mother had given Caine away and kept Sam.

No explanation. She'd never told either of them. That truth hadn't come out until after the coming of the FAYZ.

And no real explanation for what had become of their father. He was out of the picture before Sam and Caine were born.

Had it just been too much for their mother? Had she decided she could handle one fatherless boy but not two? Eeny meeny miny moe?

He had a new family now. Astrid and Little Pete. Only now he didn't have them, either. And now he had to ask himself what he had done to deserve it, his father's disappearance, his mother's lies, Astrid's rejection.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Time for self-pity. Poor me. Poor Sam."

He meant it to sound ironic, but it came out bitter.