Fear (Gone #5)(49)

“What’s NEST?”

“Look it up. See you Friday if I can.”

He left.

Connie opened her laptop and tied into the hotel’s wi-fi. She opened Google and typed in NEST. It took a few seconds to find that NEST stood for Nuclear Emergency Support Team.

They were the scientists, technicians, and engineers who were called in to deal with a nuclear incident.

A nuclear response team.

And the colonel threatening to quit.

Something was going on. Maybe some controversial new experiment. Something dangerous. Something involving a possible radiation spill.

Which may have been how this whole thing had started to begin with.





EIGHTEEN

18 HOURS, 55 MINUTES

FULL NIGHT.

Sam had recalled Brianna when the sun went down. The darkness was deadly to her. One stumble and she’d be a bag of broken bones.

Brianna raged and demanded to be turned loose again. But she knew better. Sam sent her below to take one of the unused bunks and get some sleep. Mere seconds later he heard her snoring.

The guards were changed. Edilio sat blinking sleep away. Dekka brooded. Sam hadn’t seen Astrid in a while. He assumed she was down in his bunk. Maybe she was mad at him. Probably. And maybe he deserved it. He’d been curt with her.

He wanted to go down there and be with her. But he knew if he gave in to that need, if he found peace and forgetfulness, he might not have the strength to come out again.

The light was dying. But the moon—or an illusion of it—was rising. This was not yet true darkness. But it was coming.

“Where is he?” Sam wondered for the millionth time. He scanned the beach, already dark. He scanned the woods and the bluff. Drake could be in either place. Beneath those dark trees. Or somewhere up in those rocks.

He sank into a canvas chair.

“You awake enough to keep your eyes open?” he asked Dekka.

“Catch some z’s, Sam.”

“Yeah,” he said, and yawned.

Astrid was waiting for him.

He said, “Sorry I snapped at you before.”

She didn’t say anything but kissed him, holding his face with her hands. They made love slowly, silently, and when they were finished, Sam drifted into sleep.

When Cigar looked at Sanjit he saw a dancing, twirling, happy creature that looked like a greyhound walking erect. The one called Choo looked like a sleepy gorilla with a slow-beating red valentine of a heart.

Cigar knew he wasn’t seeing what other people saw. He just didn’t know whether what he was seeing was a result of having his new eyes, or whether it was madness that turned everything so strange and incredible.

Strange eyes. Strange brain. Some combination of the two?

Even objects—the beds, the tables, the steps at Clifftop—had an eerie glow, a vibration, a streaming light as though, rather than being fixed in place, they were moving.

Mad eyes, mad brain.

Memories that made the screams rise in his raw throat.

When that happened Sanjit or Choo or the little one, Bowie, who looked like a spectral white kitten, would come to him and speak soothing words. At those times he seemed to see something like dust in a strong beam of sunlight, and that … that … he didn’t know what to call it, but that … stuff … would calm the panic.

Until the next panic.

There was another thing, very different from the sparkly sunlit dust, that reached tendrils through the air, passing through objects, rising sometimes like smoke from the floor and other times like a slow, pale green whip.

When Lana came the green whip would follow her, reaching to touch her, sliding away, reaching again, insistent.

And sometimes Cigar felt it was looking for him. It had no eyes. It couldn’t see him. But it sensed something … something that interested it.

When it came close to him he would have visions of Penny. He would have visions of himself doing terrible, sickening things to her.

Making her suffer.

He wondered if the rising smoke, the slow green whip, this stuff, could give him power over Penny. He wondered if he said yes—Yes, reach me; here I am—if then he would be able to get revenge on Penny.

But Cigar’s thoughts never lasted for very long. He would put together pictures in his head; then they would fly apart like an exploding jigsaw puzzle.

At times the little boy would come.

It wasn’t easy to see the little boy. The little boy always stayed just to the side. Cigar would sense his presence and look toward him, but no matter how quickly he moved his head, Cigar could never see the little boy clearly. It was like seeing someone through a narrow opening in a door. It was a glimpse, and then the little boy would be gone.

More madness.

If you had inhuman eyes and a shattered mind, how could you ever know what was real and what was not?

Cigar realized he had to stop trying. It didn’t matter, did it? Did anyone ever really see what was there around them? Were regular eyes so perfect or normal minds so clear? Who was to say that what Cigar saw wasn’t as real as what he had seen in the old days?

Weren’t regular eyes blind to all sorts of things? To X-rays and radiation and colors off beyond the visible spectrum?

The little boy had put that thought in his head.

There he was now, Cigar realized. Just outside of view. A suggestion of a presence. Right there where even Cigar could not see.