Light (Gone 6)

Astrid was the first to notice Brianna.

“Aren’t you supposed to be patrolling?”

“Where’s Sam?” Brianna asked.

“He’s out. So is Edilio,” Dekka said. “You going to tell us what’s in the bag or do we have to guess?”

Brianna stopped. She was disappointed. In her imagination the big revelation would have been to an admiring Sam Temple. He was the one she wanted to impress. Failing that, Edilio, who was generally warm and sweet to her.

But she was tired and wanted to put the bag down. Also, she couldn’t keep the secret any longer.

She climbed nimbly up to the top deck of the boat, grinned, and said, “Is it anyone’s birthday? Because I have a present.”

“Breeze,” Dekka warned.

So Brianna opened the bag. Dekka looked inside. “What is it?”

So Brianna upended the bag. Dead lizards, broken eggs, and Drake’s head landed on the antiskid flooring.

“Ahhhh!” Astrid screamed.

“Ah, Jesus!” Dekka yelled.

“I know,” Brianna said proudly.

“Oh, my God.”

“Oh, that is . . .”

What lay there was something to strike envy into the heart of a horror movie special-effects expert. The two halves of Drake’s head had started to rejoin. But because the halves had been tossed wildly together, the process was very incomplete. Very.

In fact at the moment the halves were backward, so that the left half was looking one direction and the right half another. Sections of neck and spine stuck both up and down. The part that held most of Drake’s mouth was stuffed with hair from the back of his head.

And, somehow, bits of dead lizard were squeezed in between. But the dead lizards thus incorporated were no longer dead. And there was egg white smeared across one eye.

The mouth was trying to speak and not managing it.

A lizard tail whipped one eye—hard to tell if it was left or right—a parody of Drake’s whip arm.

The three of them stared: Astrid with blue eyes wide, hand over mouth; Dekka with mouth wide open and brow furrowed; Brianna like a proud school kid showing off her art project.

“Ta-da!” Brianna said.

Connie Temple had done three interviews, sitting in a chair beside her trailer home on the bluffs south of the barrier. They set up a monitor so she could see her interviewers—MSNBC, the BBC, and Nightline.

She had noticed the sudden change in . . . temperature. Even a week ago an interview with the media would have been sympathetic. She would have been one of the brave band of bereaved mothers.

Now she was the mother of not one but two killers.

The entire country had turned on a dime. One minute it was concerned but bored—the whole thing had dragged on too long. People were “over” the whole Perdido Beach Anomaly. Ho-hum.

Now the kids inside were a threat. Dangerous. Monsters.

The pictures were everywhere. Kids dressed like something out of a Mad Max movie with knives and spiked baseball bats. A sullen, bedraggled girl with a cigarette and a gun. Toddlers wandering filthy and naked. Kids with the hollow eyes and sunken cheeks of famine victims. A twelve-year-old who had once been an altar boy but was now all-too-obviously drunk.

Video of Sam using some supernatural light to burn a dead girl’s crushed body. That played over and over and over again.

Kids relayed stories by writing on scraps of paper and then holding them up to be read. This had yielded pictures and video of children relating terrifying accounts of hunger, murder, carnivorous worms, talking coyotes, a parasite that ate kids from the inside out.