Fear (Gone #5)(86)

Connie’s stomach was in her throat. “You said two possibilities.”

“Ah,” Stanevich said. “The other is more interesting. It may be that the barrier is not overloaded. It may be that it can convert the energy. It may take the sudden release of energy and essentially store it. Soak it up like an incredibly efficient battery. Or, let us say, a sponge.” He made a dissatisfied sound. “It’s not a perfect analogy. No, far from it. Ah, here it is: the barrier’s energy signature is changing, yes? Weakening. So imagine a starving man who at last gets a good, healthy meal.”

“If this happens, the absorbing thing. What does that do to the barrier? Maybe it makes it easier to get through.”

“Or it strengthens it,” Stanevich said. “Alters it in ways we cannot yet predict. It will be fascinating, though. More than one PhD dissertation will result.”

Connie hung up the phone. She walked quickly to her car.

Her head was buzzing. Stanevich was as much an ass as when he’d been on CNN with her. But now his willingness to speculate was welcome, even if the details were horrifying.

There was time to stop this. She would make a public stink. She just had to figure out how to do it. Talk to the media, surely, but how to best bring pressure on the army and the government to stop this reckless madness?

She drove up the 101 and practically ran into a column of army vehicles coming toward her. Trucks. Flatbeds loaded with trailers.

Two miles from Perdido Beach she saw the flashing lights of police cars. A roadblock. They were diverting traffic off the highway, onto a side road, and sending it back south.

Connie pulled onto the shoulder and stopped, breathing hard. Of course they saw her. She couldn’t outrun them; the CHP would pull her over and wonder why she had run, and then there would be explanations demanded.

She pulled up to the roadblock. Highway patrol and army MPs were running the roadblock together. She knew the MPs.

She leaned out of the window. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Mrs. Temple,” the corporal said, “there’s been a bad chemical spill up the road. A truck carrying nerve agent.”

Connie stared into the young face of the corporal. “That’s your story?”

“Ma’am?”

“This road’s been closed for almost a year. And your story is that some trucker carrying deadly chemicals did what? Took a wrong turn and crashed?”

The MP’s lieutenant stepped up. “Mrs. Temple, it’s for your own safety. We’re pulling everything back until we figure out how to contain the spill.”

Connie laughed. This was their cover story? Was she supposed to believe them? It would be a strain to even pretend to believe them.

“Just take the side road here,” the lieutenant said, and pointed with a sort of karate-chop hand. Then, in a voice that was at once compassionate and hard, he added, “It’s not optional, ma’am. You know the Oceano County Airport? That’s the rendezvous. I’m sure the soldiers there will fill you in on all the details.”





TWENTY-NINE

10 HOURS, 27 MINUTES

SAM LEAPED FROM the top deck straight down onto the dock and raced toward the onrushing refugees.

None too gently he pushed them aside and ran on through, up past the Pit, up to the gravel road, up to where he could hear snarling and a gun being fired.

Sanjit plowed into him and for a second Sam didn’t know who he was. He held him out at arm’s length, said, “Stay out of the way,” and took off for the scene of slaughter.

That he was too late was apparent. The coyotes weren’t killing at this point; they were feeding and dismembering.

He raised his palms and a beam of searingly intense green-white light shot forth. The beam caught part of a body and the head of a coyote. The coyote’s head ballooned like a time-lapse video of a burning marshmallow.

Sam swept the beam up the road to where coyotes were already racing away, dragging bodies or pieces of bodies along through the dirt. He caught a second coyote in the hindquarters, which erupted in flame. The coyote howled in pain, fell, tried to keep running with just its two front legs, and lay down on its side to die.

The rest were out of range by then, some even abandoning their meat.

Sanjit came running up to stop beside a heaving, panting Sam.

A boy, maybe twelve, unrecognizable but alive and crying pitiably, lay in two pieces in a bush off the road.

Sam took a deep breath, marched to him, took careful aim, and burned a neat hole in the side of his head. Then he widened his beam and played it over the corpse until there was nothing but ashes.

He shot an angry look at Sanjit. “Anything you have to say about that?”

Sanjit shook his head. He couldn’t form a complete thought. Sam wondered if he’d be sick. He wondered if he himself would be.

“If it was me,” Sanjit began, and ran out of words.

That blunted Sam’s anger. But only a little. This was his fault. It was his job to protect.... Why hadn’t he sent Brianna off months ago to exterminate the last coyotes? Why hadn’t he thought to send a patrol up the road to meet the inevitable refugees?

He now faced the task of cremating the rest of the dead. There was no way he could let brothers and sisters and friends see what the coyotes had left behind. These mangled, barely recognizable slabs of meat could not be what loved ones carried with them in memory for the rest of their lives.