Fear (Gone #5)(11)

He wondered if it was one of those games you just … touched. It felt wrong and dangerous. But Pete was bored.

So he touched one of the avatars.

His name was Terrel Jones, but no one called him anything but Jonesie. He was just seven, but he was a big seven.

He was a picker working an artichoke field. It was hard, hard work. Jonesie spent six hours a day walking down the rows of chest-high artichoke plants with a knife in his gloved right hand and a backpack on his back.

The larger artichokes were higher up on the plant. Smaller ones lower down. The up-chokes—picker slang for the higher ones—had to be a minimum of five inches across. The ankle-chokes—the lower ones—had to be at least three inches. This was to make sure the pickers didn’t wipe out the whole crop at once.

No one was exactly sure if this rule made sense, but Jonesie didn’t see any reason to argue. He just moved along the row cutting with practiced ease and tossing the chokes over his shoulder to drop into the backpack. Up one row and down the next was all it would take to fill his pack. Then he would sling it off and dump it into the old wagon—a big, ramshackle wooden thing that rested on four bald car tires.

And that was all Jonesie had to worry about. Except that right now he was finding it more and more tiring. He felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath.

He reached the end of the row carrying no more than the usual weight of chokes, but staggered to the wagon. Jamilla, the wagon tender, had that relatively soft job because she was only eight years old and small. All she had to do was pick up the stray chokes that might fall to the ground, and carefully rake the chokes in the wagon into an even layer, and check in each backpack load on a sheet of paper for Albert so that the daily harvest could be accounted for.

“Jonesie!” Jamilla cried angrily when he failed to heft his bag high enough and it slipped from his hands, spilling chokes everywhere.

Jonesie started to say something but his voice was gone. Just not there.

He tried to suck in breath to cry out, but air did not flow through his mouth and into his lungs. Instead he felt a sudden, searing pain, like a cut, like a knife was drawn across his throat from ear to ear.

“Jonesie!” Jamilla screamed as Jonesie fell to the ground, facedown.

His mouth gulped helplessly at the air. He tried to touch his throat but his arms didn’t move.

Jamilla had jumped down from the wagon. Jonesie could see a misty, distant, distorted image of her above him. A face, mouth wide, all the way open, screaming silently.

And behind her a shape. It was transparent but not invisible. A huge hand with one finger extended. That finger reached through his body. He couldn’t feel it.

And then he couldn’t feel anything.

Jamilla’s scream brought Eduardo and Turbo from the adjacent fields. They came at a run from different directions, but Jamilla hardly noticed them at first. She stared and screamed and screamed....”

And then she spun away and started running. Turbo caught her in his arms. He had to lift her up off the ground to get her to stop running.

“What is it? Is it zekes?”

Zekes were the carnivorous worms that inhabited many of the fields and had to be bribed with payments of blue bats and junk fish.

Jamilla went still. Turbo was there, and now so was Eduardo. They were her friends, her coworkers.

Jamilla steeled herself to try to explain what had just happened. But before she could gain control of her raw voice, Eduardo said, “What is that?”

Jamilla felt Turbo crane to see past her. He set her down. She no longer felt like running. Or screaming. Turbo left her and walked the ten steps to join Eduardo.

“What is that thing?” Turbo asked. “Is that what scared you, Jammy?”

“Looks like some kind of weird fish or something.”

“Big. And weird,” Turbo repeated. “I worked a couple of days filling in with Quinn and I never saw anything like that.”

“Like a fish with, like, armor. But what’s it doing here in the middle of a choke field?”

Jamilla did not dare to come any closer. But her voice was her own again.

“It’s Jonesie,” she said.

The two boys turned slowly to look at her. “Say what?”

“He was… Something touched him. And his whole body…” She made a writhing movement with her hands. Twisting the fingers together as somehow the pieces of Jonesie had been twisted together, turned inside out, and formed this … thing.

They stared at her. Probably glad to have any excuse not to stare at the thing she was calling Jonesie.

“Something touched him? What touched him?”

“God,” Jamilla said. “God’s hand.”

Turk brought Cigar in with his hands tied behind his back.

“Untie him,” Penny said.

Cigar was nervous. Penny smiled at him. He seemed to relax a little.

“I don’t think I’ll have any problems with Cigar,” Penny said to Turk. “He’s basically a good kid.”

Cigar swallowed hard and nodded.

Plywood had been nailed up over the windows. The room was bare. Before leaving town Sam had left a small Sammy sun burning in one corner. It provided the only light and added a lugubrious quality, casting dark green shadows in the corners. It was dawn but you’d never know it in this room. Not even high noon would penetrate here.