Fear (Gone 5)

To Caine’s eyes Astrid was just another pawn on the chessboard. To Drake she was a victim waiting to be destroyed for the sheer pleasure it would bring him.

Astrid knew she couldn’t kill Drake with the shotgun. She could blow his head off his shoulder

s and still not kill him.

But that image brought her some sense of reassurance.

She slung the gun over her shoulder. The gun’s weight and length, along with the pack that was loaded down with water bottles, made her a bit slower and more awkward than when she was running free down the familiar trail.

Astrid had never measured the distance from her camp to Lake Tramonto, but she guessed it was six or seven miles. And if she was going to follow the barrier so as to avoid getting lost, it would mean traveling over rough terrain, up steep hills without trails. She’d have to keep up a pretty good pace to get there before night and see Sam.

Sam.

The name made her stomach tense. He would have questions. He would make accusations. He would be angry. He would resent her. She could deal with all of that. She was strong.

But what if he wasn’t mad or sullen? What if he smiled at her? What if he put his arms around her?

What if Sam told Astrid he still loved her?

She was far less prepared to deal with that.

She had changed. The sanctimonious girl with so many certainties in her head had died with Little Pete. She had done the unforgivable. And she had seen the person she truly was: selfish, manipulative, ruthless.

She was not a person Sam could love. She was not a person who could love him back.

Probably it was a mistake going to him now. But whatever her failures and foolishness, she still had her brain. She was still, in some attenuated way, Astrid the Genius.

“Yeah. Right. Genius,” she muttered. That was why she was living in the woods with fleabites in her armpits, smelling of smoke and carrion, hands a mass of calluses and scars, eyes darting warily to identify every sound in the woods around her, tense, practicing the smooth unlimbering of a shotgun. Because that was definitely the life of a genius.

The trail led closer to the barrier now. She knew this trail well; it would disappear through the barrier. There would be some rough terrain for half a mile before another trail would appear. Or maybe it was the same trail doubling back; who could tell.

Here, suddenly, she noticed that the dark part of the barrier had crept higher. Two tall spikes of black on the barrier, like fingers reaching up out of the earth. The taller of the two stretched up for maybe fifteen or twenty feet.

Astrid steeled herself for a necessary experiment. She stuck out one finger and touched the black portion of the barrier.

“Ahhh!” She cursed under her breath. It still hurt to touch. That hadn’t changed.

As she threaded her way through dense bushes and emerged into a blessed clearing, she considered the problem of measuring the advance of the stain. Here, too, she saw rising fingers of darkness, not as high as the others she’d seen, and thinner. She watched one of the stains closely for half an hour, anxious at wasting time but wanting to have some kind of observation. The scientifically inclined part of her brain had survived intact where other aspects had diminished or disappeared.

It was growing. At first she missed it because she’d been waiting for the stain to rise higher and instead it had thickened.

“Still remember how to calculate the surface area of a sphere?” Astrid asked herself. “Four pi r squared.”

She did the math in her head as she walked. The diameter of the barrier was twenty miles, which made r half that. Ten miles.

“Four times pi is roughly twelve point six; r squared is a hundred. So the surface area is twelve point six times a hundred. One thousand two hundred and sixty square miles. Of course, half that is underground or underwater, so six hundred and thirty square miles of dome.

“It’s all a question of how fast the stain is spreading,” Astrid told herself, taking pleasure from the precision of numbers.

How long until the dome was dark? Astrid wondered.

Because Astrid had very little doubt that the stain would continue spreading.

Into her head came a memory from long ago: Sam admitting to her that he was afraid of the dark. It was in his room, in his former home, the place he’d shared with his mother. It was perhaps the reason that in a sudden panic he had created the first of what would come to be known as Sammy suns.

Sam had many more terrible things to be scared of now. Surely he was over that ancient terror.

She hoped so. Because she had a terrible feeling that a very long night was coming.