Fear (Gone 5)

“Sergeant Ashton? Sergeant Darius Ashton?”

He froze. The voice, coming from behind him, was unfamiliar. But the tone, the repetition of his name, that told him all he needed to know.

He forced a pleasant smile and turned to see a man and a woman, neither smiling, both holding badges so he could read them.

His cell phone rang.

“I’m Ashton,” he said. Then, “Excuse me.” He held the phone to his ear.

The FBI agents seemed momentarily uncertain as to whether they should or could stop him taking the call.

Darius held up a finger to signal just a minute. He listened for a while.

He was, he knew, destroying himself. With two FBI agents watching he was going to commit what might as well be suicide.

“Yes,” he said into the phone. “What she told you is one hundred percent true.”

The FBI agents took his phone then.

THIRTY-TWO

7 HOURS, 1 MINUTE

DIANA CRAWLED AND fell. She was cut and bruised in so many places she couldn’t even begin to keep track. Her palms, her knees, her shins, her ankles, the soles of her feet, all ripped and torn. And the cuts from Drake’s whip were on her back, shoulders, the back of her thighs, her bottom.

But she felt little of the pain now. That pain was something far away. Something that happened to a real person who was not her. Some shell she’d once inhabited, maybe, but not her, not this person, because this person, this Diana, felt something so much more awful.

It was inside her.

The baby. It was inside her and pushing and kicking.

And it was growing. She felt her belly grow each time she reached to hold it. Bigger and bigger, like someone was filling a water balloon from a hose and didn’t have the sense to stop, didn’t know that it would burst if you just kept making it—

A spasm went through her, seizing her insides, drawing on every ounce of her strength and concentrating it in that one spasm.

Contraction.

The word came to her from the depths of memory.

Contraction.

Was her stomach really growing? Was the impatience of the baby inside her real, or was it Penny playing some game with her reality?

She felt the gaiaphage’s dark mind. She felt the fear that squeezed the air from her lungs. And more horrible still, she felt that evil mind’s eagerness. It strained to hurry her on. It reached for her from the depths. Like a little kid impatient for the ice cream. Give me, give me!

But worse by far was the echo that came from the baby.

The baby felt the force of the gaiaphage’s will. She knew it. It would be his.

How long had she crawled like this? How many times had Drake grabbed her roughly with his whip hand and lowered her down some sheer drop to cling with torn fingernails to the rock wall?

And blind. Always blind. A darkness so total it reached into her memory and blotted the sun from the pictures there.

Then, at long last, a glow. At first it seemed like it must be a hallucination. She had accepted that light was gone forever, and now here was a faint, sickly glow.

“Go!” Drake urged her. “It’s straight and level now. Go!”

She stumbled forward. Her belly was impossibly big, the flesh stretched like a drum. And the next contraction now racked her, a vise inside her that tightened so hard it seemed it must break her very bones.