Fear (Gone #5)(17)

That was what they were doing, playing war in the sandpit they’d excavated a hundred feet or so away from the Pit. In fact, they were arguing over whether a battered Bratz head had or had not gotten the drop on a group of three mismatched beetles.

Two of the outhouses were occupied: number one by Pat and number four by Diana. Diana was there frequently as a consequence of being pregnant.

Blake grabbed the Bratz doll head angrily and said, “Okay, if you won’t play by the rules—” This happened about six times a day. There weren’t really any rules.

Bonnie was just about to hotly deny that she was cheating, when her face smeared. Like her face was a still-wet painting and someone had dragged a brush through it.

Blake stared at the most familiar face in his world and saw it flatten, like it was suddenly just two-dimensional. And something that was transparent, but not somehow invisible, pierced her through.

Bonnie jerked to her feet like a puppet on a string. Her eyes went wide and her face smeared again as her mouth dripped down her chin.

A finger made of air, as big as a tree, swept over her, came back to touch her, and then disappeared.

Bonnie gave a single terrible spasm, then stopped moving, fell over, and landed atop her army.

Blake stood staring at something that was no longer Bonnie. No longer anything he had ever seen before. What lay there in the dirt had one arm and half a face, and the rest—no more than two feet long—looked exactly like a rotted dead log.

Blake started screaming and Diana and Pat moved as fast as they could, but Blake was not one to just stand and scream; he took action. He grabbed the log with half a human face by its one arm and threw it as hard as he could toward the Pit.

It didn’t go far, so he grabbed it again, screaming all the while at the top of his lungs, and dragged it toward the number five as Diana and Pat both shouted for him to stop, stop, stop, but he couldn’t stop; he had to get rid of it, this thing, this monster that had replaced his friend.

Diana almost reached him. But not quite.

Blake threw the thing into the hole of the number five outhouse.

“What is going on?” Pat demanded, rushing up.

Blake was silent.

“He had some kind of…” Diana began. She made a face, then added, “I don’t know what it was.”

“It was a monster,” Blake said.

“Jeez, dude, you scared me half to death,” Patrick said. “I mean, enjoy your game or whatever, but don’t be screaming when I’m doing my business.” He stomped off down the hill toward the lake.

Diana didn’t yell at Blake. “Where’s the other one of you? What’s her name? The girl?”

Blake shook his head dully. A veil went down over his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess she’s gone.”

Orc sat reading.

That fact, the sight of Orc sitting on a rock with a book in his hands, was still inexplicable to Howard.

Orc and Howard had gone with Sam to Lake Tramonto during the Big Split. Sam was a pain in the butt, but he wasn’t likely to decide to throw you through a wall, like Caine might.

The only problem with the lake was that most of the drinking and drugging population had stayed in Perdido Beach. Howard operated a whiskey still at Coates, but traveling from Coates to the lake was not exactly an easy trip. And Howard couldn’t do it with more than about a dozen bottles in a backpack.

Orc could carry far more, of course. But Orc wasn’t helping anymore. Orc was reading. He was reading the Bible.

Orc drunk was depressed, dangerous, unpredictable, and occasionally murderous. But Orc sober was just useless. Useless.

Orc had been given the job of guarding Sinder’s little farm. Mostly this involved sitting on a rock outcropping and reading.

Sinder’s farm wasn’t much bigger than a good-size backyard, a wedge-shaped piece of land that had once been a streambed back when rain still fell in the mountains and sent streams to replenish the lake. Orc had helped them dig a web of shallow canals that brought lake water in to water the neat rows.

Sinder and Jezzie spent all day, every day, planting and tending. Orc spent as much time. In fact, he had set up a little tent just beside the rock and he slept there most nights.

Howard had spent a couple of nights there as well, trying to keep alive his friendship with Orc, trying to get Orc past this whole newfound sobriety thing.

It wasn’t that Howard liked Orc drunk. (Orc had no money, so whatever he drank came straight out of Howard’s profits.) It was just that sober, Bible-reading Orc was useless to Howard. Useless for intimidation and debt collection, and useless for hauling booze.

“What’s ‘meek’ mean?” Orc asked Howard. Then he spelled it, because he wasn’t sure if he was saying it right. “M-E-E-K.”

“I know how to spell ‘meek,’” Howard snapped. “It means wimpy. Weak. Pathetic. Pitiful. A sucker. A victim. A stupid, Bible-reading, monster-looking fool, that’s what it means.”

“Well, it says here they’re blessed.”

“Yeah,” Howard said savagely, “because that’s the way it always works out: wimps always win.”

“They’re gonna inherit the earth,” Orc said. But he seemed doubtful about it. “What’s that mean, ‘inherit’?”

“You are sucking the life right out of me; you know that, Orc?”