Plague (Gone 4)

On one side, far, far below him, the jangly noises and eye-searing colors were dimmed. He saw his sister’s yellow hair and piercing blue eyes, but now he was too far away for them to hurt him.

He saw the echoes of the lurid, bright-eyed monsters who had tried to eat him. They were ghosts sinking lazily down toward the greenish glow far, far below.

They had reached for him with stinging tongues and slicing mouths. So he had made them disappear.

The pain in his body was gone. He was cool and light and amazingly limber. He turned a cartwheel along the edge of the glass and laughed.

His body, full of heat and aching and coughs like volcanoes, had gone away, too. Just like the bugs.

No body, no pain.

Little Pete smiled down at the Darkness. It did not try to touch him now. It shrank away.

It was afraid.

Afraid of him.

Little Pete felt as if a giant weight had been lifted off his shoulders. All of it, the too-bright colors and the too-penetrating eyes, and the misty tendrils that reached for his mind, all of it was so very far off.

Now Little Pete floated up and away from the sheet of glass. He no longer needed to teeter precariously there. He could go anywhere. He was free of the sister and free of the Darkness. He was free at last from the disease-wracked body. And he was free, too, from the tortured, twisted, stunted brain that had made the world so painful to him.

For the first time Little Pete saw the world without cringing or needing to run away. It was as if he’d been watching the world through a veil, through milky glass, and now saw it all clearly for the first time in his brief existence.

His whole life he had needed to hide. And now he gasped at the thrill of seeing and hearing and feeling.

His sick body was gone. His distorting, terrifying brain was gone.

But Pete Ellison had never been more alive.