Fear

She could imagine the muzzle flash. It would be loud.

Bright, too.

Now there was a thought. She had what? Twelve rounds?

Yeah. Interesting.

There were sounds, too. She could hear them all up the path. Probably at the mine shaft entrance by now.

Brianna could feel the dark presence of the gaiaphage. She wasn’t immune to that dark weight on her soul. But she wasn’t paralyzed by it. She felt the gaiaphage, but it didn’t frighten her. It was like a warning, like a terrible deep voice saying, “Stay away, stay away!” But Brianna didn’t scare worth a damn. She heard the warning; she felt the malice behind it; she knew it wasn’t a fake or a joke; she knew it represented a force of great power and deep evil.

But Brianna wasn’t wired the way most people were. She’d known that about herself—and about other people—for some time. Since even before the FAYZ, but much more now since she had become the Breeze.

She remembered once when she was young. How old was she then? Maybe three? Her and some older kids, that boy and his stupid sister who used to live three houses down. And they said, “We’re going to sneak into the old restaurant that burned up.”

It was a big old Italian restaurant. It looked half-normal from the outside except there was yellow police tape across the charred front door.

The two kids, she had no idea what their names were, tried to get little Brianna to be spooked. “Oh, look, that’s where some guy burned up. His ghost is probably haunting this place. Boo!”

She hadn’t been scared. Actually she’d been disappointed when she realized there was no ghost.

Then came the rats. There must have been two dozen of them, at least. They came scurrying out like they were being chased, rushing from the burned-out kitchen into the smoke-stinking dining room where the three kids were and the Olafsons—that was their name, Jane and Todd Olafson; no wonder she didn’t remember it—those two had screamed and run for it. The girl, Jane, had tripped and cut her knee pretty badly.

But Brianna had not run. She’d stood her ground with her talking Woody doll in one hand. She remembered one of the rats had stopped and cocked its rat face to look at her. Like it couldn’t believe she wasn’t running. Like it wanted to say, “Hey, kid, I’m a huge rat: why aren’t you running?”

And she had wanted to say, “Because you’re just a stupid rat.”

She felt her way step by step now. Way too slow for a normal person, let alone the Breeze.

“Oh, I feel you, old dark and scary,” she muttered. “But you’re just a stupid rat.”

Sam could look back and see a string of ten lights behind him. The line they made wobbled a bit but it was basically straight. Of course, he could no longer see the lake or its firefly lights.

He wondered about all the others out in this terrible darkness. Some maybe had flashlights going slowly dim. Some might have built fires. But many were just walking into darkness. Scared. But not stopping.

Walking into darkness.

His feet were going up a hill. He allowed it. Maybe he would see something from higher up. It was strange. He wished Astrid was here to talk to about how strange it was to move like this, blind, feeling a hill but not seeing it, not knowing was he near the top or not even close?

Everything was about feel now. He felt the slope with his ankles rather than seeing it with his eyes. He felt it in his forward lean. When the angle increased he was caught by surprise and stumbled. But then it would lessen and that, too, would catch him by surprise.

He hung a Sammy sun. It took him a while to make sense of his immediate surroundings. For one thing, there was an old rusted beer can.

For another he was less than six feet from what might be a sheer drop. It might have killed him if he’d gone off. Then again, maybe it was only a two-foot drop. Or six. He stood at the edge and listened hard. He could almost hear the emptiness of that space. It sounded big. It felt huge. And maybe he could develop those senses someday. But not now, not right now at the edge of a one- or ten- or hundred-foot drop.

He picked up the rusted beer can and dropped it over the edge.

It fell for perhaps a full second before it hit something.

And then it fell some more.

Stopped.

Sam breathed and the sound of his own breath seemed dramatic in the darkness.

He was going to have to backtrack down this hill. Or risk taking a long fall. He turned carefully, slowly, a one-eighty. He was pretty sure that the lake was blocked from view by the bulk of the hill. But he wasn’t absolutely sure. A single point of light appeared. It was as small as a star, much dimmer, and orange, not white.

A single distant point of barely visible light. Probably a bonfire in Perdido Beach. Or out in the desert. Or even out on the island. Or maybe it was just his imagination.

The sight of it wrung a sigh from Sam. It didn’t make the dark less dark; it made the dark seem vast. Endless. The tiny point of light served only to emphasize the totality of the darkness.

Sam started back down the hill. It took all his willpower to turn left when he reached the lowest light on the hill and move toward the ghost town.

Or where he thought, hoped, pretended the ghost town might be.

“Aaaahhh, aaaaahhh, aaaahhhh.”

Dekka cried into the dirt. A despairing sound. She cried and gasped in air mixed with dirt and cried again.

Penny had taken her most terrible fear—that the bugs could return—and she had doubled it. Dekka would rather die than endure it. Rather die a thousand times. She would beg for death before she would live through it again.