Hero (Gone 9)

She thought of calling Mary. But what could she say? Hi, Mary. Guess what? I can fly, and my father’s a bunch of diseased bugs! Come on over, we’ll order a pizza.

She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling that this familiar place was no longer familiar. She knew each element of her surroundings, had chosen most of them herself, but they all belonged to someone else now. That Simone no longer existed; that Simone had died in the Pine Barrens, almost as surely as her father had died.

Simone cried a little, silent weeping. She cried for herself and for her father. No, she didn’t approve of what he did for a living, or his politics, and yes they fought, but he was still her father and she was his daughter, and that could not just be dismissed. She’d never believed that the tensions between them would be permanent. Simone was honest enough to know that some of the issues she had with her father were at least partly her fault. She wasn’t so simple as to see herself as

an angel or her father as a devil. He was wrong—about so many things—but he was still Dad.

Or had been. She had lost him and yet he was still there, like a terrifying ghost of himself.

But Simone did not let herself wallow in misery; she knew this was not a time for self-pity. The world had turned suddenly. Life had changed and was not going to change back. Simone followed the news and current events; she had not been blind to the unraveling of the world around her. She had been as shocked as anyone by the earliest outbreaks of mutant violence. She’d seen Knightmare’s destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge live on TV. She followed most of the known Rockborn who had accounts on social media. And she had belatedly watched the movie based on Astrid Ellison’s riveting account of life in the FAYZ.

She had been fascinated as the news and social media exploded with video of an attack on the so-called Ranch, followed all too swiftly by the bloody massacre in Las Vegas. But Simone felt like most New Yorkers: what happened outside the city seemed safely distant.

Now it was here. Not just here in New York, but here in her life, in her father, in her own freakish mutant body. There was no more hiding behind denial, no more pretending that this was all just a passing phase and that life would return to normal and she could go on with her life, with her plans, with her love affairs.

No. All of that, all of her dreams . . . She sighed. How strange, she thought, that she’d read so many books, seen so many movies and TV shows about this or that vision of dystopia, but all those dire scenarios had been safely unrealistic. And now? This was it. This was the birth of dystopia, the beginning of the end of civilization as she had known it.

But, on the plus side . . . she could fly. There was that.

It remained true, though, that this apartment was no longer safe. No place she’d ever frequented would be safe. The government would be desperate to find her, and her father, and finish the job they’d botched in the Pine Barrens.

Maybe for once her father was right: there was no point arguing with reality; there was only adapting and surviving. Or, in Bob Markovic’s case, looking for a way to profit.

Simone could not sneak out of her room without walking right past her father’s office. But she could open a window, fly two windows across, and open the window to her father’s bedroom. He never locked his window—who did, fourteen floors up?

Inside that darkly masculine space with its greens and browns, she went to the Francis Calcraft Turner painting of a traditional English fox hunt that hung over the fireplace. She swung the painting aside on its hinges. Behind it was a wall safe with a six-digit code Simone had long since memorized. Inside the safe were important documents, a handgun, and neat stacks of currency. Each bank-banded stack of hundred-dollar bills was half an inch thick and represented ten thousand dollars. She took five.

Then she contemplated the handgun, her other unacknowledged goal. She had never before had any interest in guns, but at the same time, given her father’s paranoid-yet-giddy state of mind? Leaving him a gun could only make matters worse. And in this Looney-Tunes world, a gun seemed like a good idea.

Close-up on Simone’s face. She’s conflicted. She touches the gun cautiously, hesitates, turns away, then turns back, decisive.

Simone slipped the gun, the extra clips, and the money into her backpack. She was closing the safe when she heard her father approaching, a clicking, scraping, buzzing sound very unlike his usual purposeful stride.

Simone raced for the window, climbed onto the sill, took a deep breath, and zoomed effortlessly across Fifth Avenue.

CHAPTER 14

Astrid Does Amazon

“HEY, YOU’RE THAT girl.”

Astrid Ellison was often recognized. She’d been the unofficial public voice of FAYZ survivors and had given numerous interviews over the last four years, starting with the famous interview where she’d first been reunited with Sam Temple. Then, too, she’d had a bestselling book that had spawned a hit movie. The whole country knew the name Astrid Ellison, and knew she was the girlfriend—now wife—of the hero of the FAYZ.

Astrid Ellison nodded at the UPS driver. “Yes, I am.” The direct gaze of her blue eyes and the chill in her voice ended the chitchat. She signed for the delivery, a long cardboard box. In the box was a forty-nine-inch-long galvanized-steel tool box of the sort that fits in the back of a pickup truck. It was way too heavy for her to lift, so she dragged it to the elevator that led down to the basement of the apartment building.

Astrid rode down with the box while checking her find-a-phone feature for Sam’s whereabouts. Good, he was still at Costco. Using a box cutter, she stripped away the cardboard box and shoved it into a recycling bin. Each apartment had a storage space in the underground parking garage, chain-link enclosures lit by bare bulbs, half of them burned out. She wiped sweat from her brow, opened the lock of the storage cage, and pushed the box inside. Then she carefully covered it with plastic containers of mementos and cartons of her Perdido Beach book so that a casual glance wouldn’t reveal it.

The steel box had come from Amazon, and she was sure the government was watching her, but it was just a box, after all, and might mean anything or nothing. Still, for caution’s sake, she would buy the rest of her list at various stores, using cash, and leave no digital trace.

When she was done in the storage cage, she opened her Notes app and scanned her list. Six items left to obtain.

Chain

Locks

Chain saw

Machete