Fear (Gone 5)

A HELICOPTER HAD arrived overhead. It was decorated with the logo of a news station out of Santa Barbara. It made no sound, of course—the dome was still impervious to noise—but Astrid could see faces in the cockpit, and could

guess at the telephoto camera lens aimed down at them.

The helicopter’s view was slightly hampered now by the fact that outside, out there beyond that diamond-hard, glass-clear barrier, it was raining. The drops splatted on the dome and then ran down in streams.

Along the inside of the barrier, on both sides of the highway, kids stood as close as they could get to the outside. Three or four dozen kids had come so far, rushing from Perdido Beach. At first all they saw were the soldiers and the state cops who had raced up with lights flashing, the helicopter, and a handful of parents.

But more parents were arriving in cars and SUVs from their new homes in Arroyo Grande, Santa Maria, and Orcutt. The parents who had found new places to live farther away, in Santa Barbara or Los Angeles, would take a while longer to get here.

Some of the parents were holding up signs.

Where is Charlie?

Where is Bette?

We love you! With the ink bleeding from the rain.

We miss you!

Are you okay?

There wasn’t much paper left in the FAYZ, and kids had come at a run, not even waiting to grab anything. But some found pieces of wallboard or tattered windblown scraps of cardboard, and used bits of gravel to write back.

I love you, too.

Tell my mom I’m okay!

Help us.

And all of this was watched by the TV camera on the helicopter, and the people, the adults—parents and cops and gawkers. Half a dozen smartphones were snapping pictures and shooting video. Astrid knew that more, many, many more, would come.

There were boats beginning to appear on the ocean outside the dome. And they, too, stared with binoculars and telephoto lenses.

An old couple came running from a motorhome, scribbling as they ran. Their sign read, Can you check on our cat, Ariel?

No one would answer that, because the cats had all been eaten.

Where is my daughter? And a name.

Where is my son? And a name.

And whose job was it, Astrid wondered bitterly, to write the answers? Dead. Dead. Died of carnivorous worms. Died of a coyote attack.

Murdered in a fight over a bag of chips.

Dead of suicide.

Dead because she was playing with matches and we don’t exactly have a fire department.

Killed because it was the only way we could deal with him.

How did one explain to all those watching eyes what life was like inside the FAYZ?

Then a familiar car that almost rear-ended a parked police cruiser. A man jumped out. A woman moved slowly, unsteady. Astrid’s mother and father came to the barrier. Her father was holding her mother up, as though she might collapse.

The sight of them tore Astrid apart. The adults and older teens who had been in the FAYZ area when Petey had performed his mad miracle had obviously made it out. How many thousands of hours had Astrid spent trying to figure it out, trying to walk through each possible outcome? Parents dead, parents alive, parents all off in some parallel universe, parents with all memory rewritten, parents erased from past as well as present.

Now they were back, crying, waving, staring, carrying loads of emotional baggage and demanding explanations that most kids—Astrid included—could not somehow reduce to a few words scratched on a piece of plaster, or gouged with a nail on a piece of wood.