Fear (Gone #5)(89)

Brianna was jumping around like a crazy person, leaping from place to place, focused like mad on every move, arms windmilling for balance.

“What is she doing?” Drake asked.

Penny laughed. “Trying not to fall into the lava. And her friend, Dekka? The one she was expecting to show up? She’s out there somewhere....” She jerked her head back toward the night-dark desert. “Trying to get her little brain back to reality.”

Diana saw wary concern on Drake’s face. It was beginning to occur to him that perhaps Penny might be more than he could handle. “Let’s go. The gaiaphage is waiting.”

“Do you think I’m cute?” Penny asked him.

Drake froze, stood stock-still, and now the look on his face was more than just wary.

“Yeah,” Drake said. “Yeah. You’re cute.”

His tentacle had grown back, the stumps melding quickly together, smoothing as if he was made out of clay and an invisible hand was pinching the edges together, then rolling the whole thing like a Play-Doh snake. He raised the whip high and snapped it in front of Diana’s face.

“Now move,” he said.

Diana watched Brianna, still leaping desperately, trapped in some illusion of danger.

And she saw the little boy, Justin, crawl ahead of her into the darkness.

Dekka lay sobbing in the darkness. She could barely see her hands in front of her face.

She didn’t know what had happened to her. Just that in an instant she had been frozen, completely immobile. Paralyzed.

She’d been covered in a translucent white goo, like clay or Silly Putty. And it had coated every single inch of her body. It had pushed its way into her ears. Like invisible fingers were poking it in there, filling her right up to the eardrums.

So that she could hear nothing but the beating of her own heart.

So that she could hear the gristle in her neck as she squirmed helplessly.

The white putty was pushed into her nose. So deep, up into her sinuses. She had to breathe through her mouth, but as soon as she opened her mouth the white stuff filled her mouth and pushed its way into the space between her teeth and her cheeks, under her tongue, then down her throat. She gagged but it didn’t matter; the stuff filled her mouth and throat and she could feel it cold and dense and heavy in her lungs.

She screamed but no sound came out.

In some panic-free corner of her mind, some small remnant of Dekka knew this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. She knew it was Penny who had done this, who had filled her mind with this vision.

But she could not breathe. Could. Not.

She was buried alive in it, buried alive, and her brain screamed in a way that her body no longer could.

Had to be an illusion. Had to be a trick. But did it really? Was she so sure it wasn’t real in this nightmare world?

She couldn’t breathe, but she realized, too, that she wasn’t dying. Her heart still beat. She was covered and filled with the white stuff, and she should be dying but she wasn’t.

Then she felt the white stuff harden. It wasn’t putty anymore but fast-drying clay. Already her teeth bit on something as hard as porcelain.

Then the bugs were inside of her.

The bugs.

Not real—she knew that in some tiny, cowering corner of her mind—couldn’t be real; the bugs had been eliminated. They’d been made nonexistent. So there was no way they could be inside her again, no way they could be swarming through her guts and no Sam to cut them out and let them out; she was trapped inside this porcelain tomb and they were inside her again.

She screamed and screamed and screamed.

Suddenly, all of it was gone.

She was on dirt. Air was in her nose. Her eyes opened.

A girl had stood there and said, “That’s a new one for me. Did you like it?”

And Dekka, trembling like a leaf ready to fall, said nothing. Just breathed. Breathed.

“Don’t come after me,” Penny had said.

And Dekka had not.





THIRTY

10 HOURS, 4 MINUTES

“RING THE BELL,??? Sam said.

Edilio nodded at Roger, who ran off to ring the bell atop the marina office.

“What are you going to do?” Edilio asked.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were gay?” Sam demanded.

Edilio looked like he’d been punched. But he recovered quickly, to go to an expression that was half-wary, half-embarrassed. “You got enough stuff to deal with.”

“That’s not something I have to ‘deal with,’ Edilio. My girlfriend lost, the world ending, having to go out there after Drake, that’s stuff I have to deal with. Me finding out you’ve got someone to care about like that? How is that something I have to deal with?”

“I don’t know, I just… I mean, it took me a while to kind of figure it out. You know.”

“Does everyone except me know?” Sam asked. He realized this was a stupid concern; this was hardly the time to worry about seeming out of touch. But no one had been closer to him than Edilio, almost from the first day. It bothered him to think everyone knew something he didn’t. It hurt his feelings.

“No, man,” Edilio reassured him. “No. And it’s not about me being, you know, ashamed or whatever. It’s that … look, I have a lot of responsibility. I have to have people trust me. And some kids are still going to call me a faggot or whatever.”