Plague (Gone 4)

“If you want to see naked girls, Bug, why don’t you creep up on Penny?”

“She’s not pretty,” Bug said. “Her legs are all . . .” He twisted his fingers around to demonstrate. “And she smells bad.”

Penny was eating better, like Diana. But she was getting worse. She had fallen from one hundred feet onto water and rocks. Caine had levitated her back up the cliff. But her legs were broken in a dozen places.

Diana had done what she could to set the breaks, made splints out of duct tape and boards, but Penny was in constant agony. She would never walk again. Her legs would never heal.

She lived now in one of the bathrooms so that she could drag herself to the toilet when she needed to. Diana brought her food twice a day. Books. A TV with a DVD player.

There was still electricity in the house on San Francisco de Sales Island. The generator supplied a weak and faltering current. When Sanjit had lived here, he’d been worried that fuel for the generator was running out. But Caine could do things Sanjit couldn’t. Like levitate barrels of fuel from the wrecked yacht rusting at the bottom of the cliff.

Life here was very good for Diana and Caine and Bug. But life would never be good for Penny. Her power—the ability to make others see terrifying visions of monsters and flesh-eating insects and death—was of no help to her now.

“She scares you, doesn’t she, Bug?” Diana asked. She laughed. “You tried, didn’t you? You snuck in on her and she caught you.”

She saw the answer on Bug’s face. The shadow of a terrifying memory.

“Best not to make Penny mad,” she said. She pulled on slacks. Then she patted Bug on his freckled cheek. “Best not to make me mad, either, Bug. I can’t make you see monsters. But if I catch you spying on me again, I’ll tell Caine it’s either me or you. And you know who he’ll choose.”

Diana left the room.

She’d resolved to be a better person. And she would be. Unless Bug kept bothering her.

The three Jennifers. That’s what they called themselves. Jennifer B was a redhead, Jennifer H was blond, and Jennifer L had her hair in black dreadlocks. They hadn’t even known one another before the FAYZ.

Jennifer B had been a Coates kid. Jennifer H was home-schooled. Jennifer L was the only one who’d attended the regular school.

They were twelve, twelve, and thirteen, respectively. And for the last couple of months they had shared a house on a cul-de-sac away from the center of town.

It was a good choice: the big fire had come nowhere near the development.

Now, though, it seemed like a bad choice. The so-called hospital was blocks away and the three of them could all have used a Tylenol or something because they all had the same headache, the same sore muscles, and the same hacking cough.

It had started twenty-four hours ago, and they had just figured it was the flu coming back around. There’d been a mini-epidemic of flu that had left a lot of kids feeling bad. But it hadn’t been very dangerous except that it kept some kids immobilized who could have been working.

Jennifer B—Jennifer Boyles—had been asleep for no more than an hour when she was awakened by a loud, percussive sound close by, not from outside, from the room next to hers.

She sat up in bed and fought down the woozy, head-swimming feeling. She felt her forehead. Yeah, still hot. Definitely hot.

Whatever the noise was, forget it, she told herself. Too sick to get up. If something was breaking into the house to kill her, so much the better: she felt rotten.

Kkkrrraaafff!

This time the walls seemed to shake. Jennifer B was up and out of her bed before she could think about it. She coughed, paused, then veered toward the door, eyes not quite focused, head pounding.

In the hallway she found Jennifer L. Jennifer L was coughing, too, and looking as scared as Jennifer B. They were both in sweatpants and T-shirts, both miserable.

“It’s in Jennifer’s room,” Jennifer L said. She had her weapon,

a lead pipe with a grip bound with black electrical tape.

Jennifer B was annoyed with herself for having forgotten her own weapon. You didn’t jump out of bed at night in the FAYZ without going armed. She staggered back to her bed and fished out the machete. It was stuck into a canvas scabbard between her mattress and box spring, handle protruding.

It wasn’t all that sharp, but it looked crazy dangerous and it was. A two-foot-long blade with a cracked wooden grip.

“Jennifer?” Jennifer B called at Jennifer H’s room.

Kkkrrraaafff!