Gone (Gone #1)(122)

"Where's Caine?"

"Not here. They all went out the back as soon as we got here. They left me and Panda."

Sam's insides twisted. "Thev left?"

Frederico read the fear in Sam's eyes. "You can't beal Caine. Him and Drake, they have i: all scoped"

"I found tape" Dekka said."You want me to tie him up?"

"It's a diversion " Sam said. He punched Frederico in the nose, hard enough to distract him. Frederico roared in pain.

"Now tape him Up. Fast." He keyed the walkie-talkie. "Astrid."

Her voice was barely audible. "Sam. Oh, my God." "What's happening?"

Her answer was too garbled to understand. But in snatches of static, he heard fear.

"I screwed up," Sam said. "It was all a trick"





FORTY-TWO


0? HOURS, 23 MINUTES

'QUINN. QUINN.*

"Is someone yelling my name';" Quinn wondered.

Brianna pointed at the steeple. Quinn squinted and saw Astrid in dark silhouette waving her arms like a crazy person, pointing, gesticulating, yelling something.

Til go see what she wants** Brianna volunteered. She blurred, then she stopped suddenly, having just reached the top of the ladder. "Oh, my God, look"

Racing through the street, coming up from the south, pouring down the alley, came a swarm of rough, yellow canines. They threaded through parked cars, bounded over fire hydrants, paused briefly to sniff at garbage, but overall moved with shocking speed.

They were going straight for the day care.

Brianna began pulling the ladder up. Quinn jumped to help her. They slid it up and out of the way as the first coyotes passed beneath.

"What do I do?" Quinn cried. "Shoot them," Brianna said, "Coyotes? Shoot coyotes?" "They're not here by accident," Brianna yelled. One coyote, hearing them, glanced up. "Quiet" Quinn hissed. He crouched behind the wall and clutched the machine pistol to his chest.

"Quinn, they're going after the littles," Brianna said. "I don't know what to do" "Yes, you do."

Quinn shook his head violently. "No. No one told me to shoot coyotes/'

Brianna peeked over the side and sat back down very suddenly. "It's him. Drake. And he's ... there's something wrong with him"

Quinn didn't want to look, didn't want to, but Brianna's ashen face made looking the less terrifying option. He rose just enough to get a view of the alleyway.

Swaggering along behind the coyotes came Drake Merwin.

He held in his hand a long, thick red whip.

Only he wasn't holding it in hit hand. The whip was his hand.

"Shoot him," Brianna urged."Do it"

Quinn unlimbered the gun. He laid the short barrel on the Spanish tile and aimed. Drake wasn't running, he wasn't moving furtively, he was right in the middle of the alleyway in plain view.

"I can't get a shot at him " Quina said.

"YouVe lying" Brianna accused.

Quinn licked his lips. He aimed. He wrapped his finger around the trigger. Impossible to miss from here. Drake was no more than thirty feet away, Quinn had practiced firing the machine pis-toL He had fired it at a tree trunk and seen the way it chewed through wood.

Squeeze the trigger, and the bullets would chew through Drake the same way.

Squeeze the trigger-Drake passed directly below,

"He'sgone" Quinn whispered.

"I couldn't... "hesaid.

From the day care below there came the screams of terrified children-Mary Terrafino had had a very bad day. That morning she'd had a major pig-out, a real gorge-a-thon, as she called it. She had found a carton of snack-sized Doritos. She'd sat and torn through twenty-four snack packs-Then she had vomited it all back up. But even that didn't seem like enough to cleanse her of the offending food, so she had taken a strong laxative. The laxative kept her running back and forth to the bathroom all day.

Now she was sick to her stomach, wrung out, seething with anger at herself, ashamed.

Mary usually popped her pills in the morning, her Prozac and vitamins. But she was so frazzled as the day wore on that she had also popped a Diazepam she had found in her mother's bathroom medicine cabinet. The Diazepam spread a gentle mellowness over her mind, like molasses poured into gears. On the drug everything was slow, frustrating, fuzzy. To counteract the Diazepam she poured herself a cup of coffee in a covered safety cup. stirred in sugar, and carried it with her into the classroom.

That's when Quinn had walked through carrying a machine gun. She had shielded the kids from seeing him, but there was something deeply disturbing about the sight of a machine gun in the real world, not on TV or in a video game, but right there in front of her.

Now she sat cross-legged in circe time. A dozen kids paid varying degrees of attention as she read Mama Cat Has Three Kittens and The Buffalo Storm, She had read all the books so many times she could do them by heart.

Other kids were in various other corners playing with dress-up costumes, or painting, or stacking blocks.

Her brother, John, was doing diaper check on "the tinies," as they now called the prees who were still in diapers.

One of Mary's helpers, a girl named Manuela,was bouncing a little boy on her knee while trying :o get a marker stain out of her blouse. She muttered under her breath as she worked.