Fear (A Gone Novel)

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.

"Why are you here?" Sam demanded as he began his grisly work. "Did you bring these kids here?"

"Lana sent me."

"Explain." He didn't know Sanjit well. Just knew that he had pulled off something close to a miracle in flying a helicopter from the island to Perdido Beach. "Bad stuff in Perdido Beach," Sanjit began. "Penny somehow managed to cement Caine. They're going to try to free him, but last I saw Caine he was crying and having his cemented hands beaten on with a hammer."

Sam's reaction surprised him: his first feeling was worry, and even outrage, on Caine's behalf.

Caine had been an enemy from the start. Caine was responsible for battle after bloody battle. He had come close to killing Sam on more than one occasion. Maybe, Sam reflected, he was reacting to the fact that Caine was, after all, his brother.

But no. No, it was that Caine was strong. And however much of a power-mad jerk he was, Caine would have tried to keep some kind of order. He would have—probably—worked to avoid panic. Always for his own reasons, but still...