Hero (Gone 9)

“Nothing like this,” Dekka whispered.

Dekka struggled to keep breath in her lungs. Every cell in her body screamed, Run, run! Whoever, whatever had done this to these men could do it to her next. Dekka had survived unspeakable horrors in the FAYZ, the worst of which had been insects the size of rats inside her own body, the solution to which had been . . . She pushed that memory down, down to where she could put it aside and focus instead on this new wickedness.

“I have to call someone,” Dekka said. She turned away from the scene, took a deep breath, and dialed. “Malik. Listen, Malik, there’s a situation . . .” Right, situation. Like this was some random squabble between neighbors or something. She described what she saw to Malik and sent him a photo.

She listened to Malik, and said, “Stay on the line, huh?” To Francis she said, “Malik has a suggestion.” She winced, knowing that she was asking the young girl to do something insane. “Francis? Do you suppose you could, you know, take a look in the . . . whatever you call it?”

“Over There,” Francis supplied.

Francis swallowed hard. She was a brave girl, but she was shaking. Yet Francis seemed determined not to look weak, and Dekka had the stomach-turning realization that Francis was

unwilling to look weak to her, to Dekka. She could give Francis an excuse not to do this; she could let Francis off the hook. She could tell her to run straight back up to the helicopter and close her eyes until they were far away.

But she wouldn’t. This was leadership. This was what Sam Temple had done times beyond counting: sending good people into danger, sending them into trauma and a lifetime of nightmares—if they survived at all. General Eliopoulos’s words came back to her. It’s what these stars on my shoulders are about—sending good young people into harm’s way.

“Do your best,” Dekka said, hating herself for it.

Francis swallowed hard and nodded.

Francis’s eyes took on the oil-slick rainbow whirl that signaled the first stage of her morph. Then her body itself became not a rainbow, quite, but a whirl of colors and shapes, of things unrecognizable, and a second later she slid through the ground, simply sank into the dirt.

Minutes passed, minutes with Dekka’s ears filled with the chorus of agony, nostrils full of the reek of decay, eyes unable to look away because to look away was to abandon these poor men. Francis popped back into 3-D reality and stood trembling, fists clenched, eyes squeezed as tightly as her jaw. Dekka waited impatiently, knowing she could not rush the girl. Francis would speak when she was ready.

“I can’t do anything,” Francis said at last, tears spilling from closed eyes.

“Tell me,” Dekka urged quietly.

Francis opened her eyes, looked at and then away from the doomed men. “There’s something connected to them. Not like the cable things we saw from the Watchers, something different, like . . . like roots. Like tree roots, kind of, but everything Over There is hard to make sense of, you know?”

“Can you cut these root things?” Dekka asked.

Francis shook her head. “I tried grabbing on, but they aren’t always, you know, actual things. My hands just passed right through them.”

Into the phone, Dekka said, “Did you get all that, Malik?”

Malik said, “Antibiotics won’t work. No medicine will. This goes deeper, this is way deeper than just disease organisms. This is bad. Someone has a very, very dangerous power.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Dekka replied and hung up. “We’ve got nothing.”

Williams sagged. Dekka shook her head.

“Who did this to you?” Dekka called to the men.

“Bugs . . . ,” one man managed to gasp. “A man made out of bugs.”

To Williams’s questioning look, Dekka snapped, “No, I don’t happen to know anyone made out of bugs.”

“Don’t leave us like this. Kill us!”

“Are you in pain?” Dekka asked gently.

A strangled laugh became a cry, and a second man said, “You can’t even begin . . . My God! Kill me! God in heaven, make it stop!”

“End it,” the first man gasped. “Have mercy and kill us. Please, please, I’m begging you: Kill us!”

Detective Williams took Dekka’s arm with some force and pulled her away. Dekka took Francis’s arm in turn, and they fled for the safety of the helicopter.

Kill us. . . .