Plague (Gone 4)
“I guess that doesn’t sound so good,” Dekka said wearily. “But someone has to do it. We each contribute what we have.”
Sam winced as his heel brushed a stone. “Probably wouldn’t work anyway. The Pete thing, I mean.”
“The train,” Dekka said. “Those missiles.”
“I thought about that,” Sam said. “But how would we get them to town? How would we even figure out how to use them?”
Sam stopped limping.
Dekka stopped, too, after a few steps. Toto kept walking, oblivious.
“Dekka?”
“Yeah?”
“How high does your power go? I mean, you cancel gravity, right? So things float upward.”
“Yeah. So?”
“I’ve seen you levitate yourself. I mean, you cancel gravity right beneath you and you float upward, right? Well, how high can you go?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “If I’m projecting it, you know, like I want to make it happen somewhere else, I can only reach maybe fifty feet or so. Maybe a little more.”
“Okay, but that’s you hitting it at kind of an angle, right? I mean, you’re sort of shooting across gravity because gravity goes straight down.”
Dekka looked at him strangely. She spread her hands by her side. Immediately she began to rise, along with dirt and rock, a pillar of it.
Sam watched as she rose, staying well back from the swirl of debris.
In the dark he quickly lost sight of her.
“Dekka!” He tilted his head back, trying to make her out against the background of black velvet and pinpoint lights.
“Where is Dekka?” Toto asked.
“Up there.”
“That is true,” Toto said.
“Yeah. Watch where you step, unless you want to go floating, too.”
It seemed like a long time before Dekka finally appeared amid falling gravel. She floated easily down, regained her footing, and said, “Okay, more than fifty feet, that’s for sure. I don’t know how far I went, but a long way. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it works better when I’m canceling gravity straight down. But I can only fly straight up. So if you’re thinking I can go all airborne and fly to town, that’s not happening.”
“I’m thinking,” Sam said, “that the FAYZ is a big bubble. Like a . . . what are those things with water inside and you shake them up with snow and—”
“A snow globe,” Toto supplied.
“Like a snow globe. And if you have a bubble inside that snow globe, what does it do? It rises to the top, right?”
“The top of this bubble is probably directly over the power plant,” Dekka said. “I mean, if the FAYZ is a perfect sphere.”
“Okay, tell me if this makes sense.” Sam frowned, trying to work it through as he talked. “The train is near the northern wall of the FAYZ. So if you were standing there and you canceled gravity . . .”
“You’d go scraping along the wall—very painfully—until you reached the top. Like a bubble rising to the top of a snow globe.”
“There are cars at the power plant. I mean, ones that have been used more recently, within the last month, cars Edilio drove there. So the batteries should still work. A lot have had their gas drained, but we wouldn’t need much.” He was thinking out loud. Not even paying attention to Toto’s repeated “He believes it, it’s true, Spidey” remarks.
“I can’t beat the bugs,” Sam said. “My power doesn’t work on them. Not well enough, anyway. But they can be crushed. And I think maybe they can be blown up.”