Fear (Gone #5)(91)

He stepped back, out of the direct glow of the Sammy sun, baffled by the unexpected turn his speech had taken. He had meant to tell everyone to stick together and be disciplined. He had ended up feeling like a fool, taking a momentous occasion to just make an idiot of himself.

Edilio spoke up. He had a softer voice. And still had a trace of his Honduran accent. “I know what Sam is. Maybe, like he said, he’s not a great leader. But he’s a great fighter. He’s our warrior; that’s what he is. Our soldier. So what he’s going to do, Sam, what he’s going to do is go out there into the dark and fight our enemies. Try to keep us safe.”

“He believes it,” Toto said unnecessarily.

“Yeah,” Sam whispered. He looked down at his hands, palms up. “Yeah,” he said louder. Then, still to himself: “Well. I’ll be damned. I’m not the leader. I’m the soldier.” He laughed and looked at Edilio, his face nothing but shadows in the light of the Sammy sun. “It takes me a while to figure things out, doesn’t it?”

Edilio grinned. “Do me a favor. When you find Astrid, repeat that to her, word for word, the part about how it takes you a while. Then remember her exact reaction and tell me.”

Then, serious again, Edilio said, “I’ll take care of these people here, Sam. Go find our friends. And if you run into Drake, kill that son of a bitch.”

The sky closed.

Darkness. Absolute, total darkness.

Astrid heard her own breathing.

She heard Cigar’s hesitant footsteps. Slowing. Stopping.

“We aren’t far from Perdido Beach,” Astrid said.

How strange what absolute black did to the sound of words. To the sound of her own heart.

“We have to try to remember the direction. Otherwise we’ll start walking in circles.”

I will not panic, she told herself. I will not let the fear paralyze me.

She reached for Cigar. Her hand touched nothing.

“We should hold hands,” Astrid said. “So we don’t get separated.”

“You have claws,” Cigar said. “They have poison needles in them.”

“No, no, that’s not real. That’s a trick your mind is playing on you.”

“The little boy is here,” Cigar said.

“How do you know?” Astrid moved closer to the source of his voice. She thought she was quite close to him. She tried to call on other senses. Could she hear his heartbeat? Could she feel his body warmth?

“I see him. Can’t you see him?”

“I can’t see anything.”

She should have brought something to use as a torch. Something she could burn. Of course, showing light out here in the open would make her visible to people and things she didn’t want seeing her.

It was just that the pressure of the dark—and that was how it felt, like pressure, like it wasn’t an absence of light, but like it was black felt or something hung in drapes all around her—was hemming her in. Like it was a physical obstruction.

Nothing had changed except that light had been subtracted. Every object was exactly where it had been before. But that wasn’t how it felt.

“The little boy is looking at you,” Cigar said.

Astrid felt a chill.

“Is he talking?”

“No. He likes quiet.”

“Yes. He always did,” Astrid said. “And darkness. He liked the dark. It soothed him.”

Had Petey made all of this happen? Just to get his blessed silence and peace?

“Petey?” she said.

It felt ridiculous. She was talking to someone she couldn’t see. Someone who probably wasn’t there. Someone who, if he existed at all, was not human, not anything physical or tangible.

The irony made her laugh out loud. She’d just given up talking to one perhaps unreal spiritual entity. Now here she was doing it again.

“He doesn’t like when you laugh,” Cigar said, shushing her.

“Too bad,” Astrid said.

That brought silence. She could hear Cigar breathing, so she knew he was still there. She didn’t know whether he was still looking at Petey. Or something that was supposed to be Petey.

“He was in my head,” Cigar whispered. “I felt him. He went inside me. But he left.”

“Are you saying he took you over?”

“I let him,” Cigar said. “I wanted him to make me be like I used to be. But he couldn’t.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s gone now,” Cigar said sadly.

Astrid sighed. “Yeah. Just like a god, never there when you need one.”

She listened hard. And smelled the air. She had an impression, barely an impression, that she could tell in which direction the ocean lay.

But she also knew that the land between where she was and the ocean was largely fertile fields seething with zekes. Zekes that had probably not been fed in some time.

There were fields between her and the highway, but once she got to the highway she would be able to follow it toward town. Even in the dark she could stay on a concrete highway.

Sam wanted to follow the road from the lake down to the highway, because that was where Astrid would be. Most likely. Despite none of the refugees having seen her on their way from Perdido Beach to the lake.

But finding Astrid was not the right move. Not yet. She would slow him down, even if he found her. And she wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t Dekka or Brianna or even Orc. They could help him win a fight; Astrid could not.