Light (Gone 6)

“Take care of Astrid for me. Try to keep her safe and don’t let her follow me.”

“I haven’t been very good at keeping people safe,” Edilio said.

“No, man, what happened to Roger is not your fault or your failing. The grief is enough. It’s enough. You don’t need guilt on top of it.”

Edilio looked grateful, but not like he believed it.

“Listen, Edilio, if she gets past me, she won’t have the light anymore,” Sam said. “You understand? But she will still be very dangerous. When I’ve fought Caine, the worst thing wasn’t him dropping stuff down, because you see the arc of it going up then coming down, right? Him throwing stuff horizontally: that was worse because it was faster. Look out for that when . . . if . . . she gets here.”

Edilio put out his hand and Sam took it.

“It’s been interesting, hasn’t it?” Sam said, trying for a smile.

“It’s been a great honor to stand with you,” Edilio said.

“Tell her I’m sorry I broke my promise,” Sam said, so softly Edilio almost didn’t hear. “Tell her I love her.”

Sam didn’t hurry. He knew where he was going. He wasn’t happy about going there. No rush.

He walked the highway. How many times before had he made this walk? How many times had he passed this wrecked car and that overturned truck?

Someday if, when, the barrier came down, someone would clean it all up. The tow trucks would come. Beep-beeping as they backed up to slip their lift beneath some battered hulk of a car. Maybe there were a few car windows that hadn’t been broken, but not many. All the tires were partly or completely deflated. The gas tanks were long-since siphoned. Many of these cars had kept running until the gas was gone.

In some of these cars babies in car seats had died of starvation. In some of these cars kids had died when the driver poofed at seventy miles an hour. Would the CSI types have to come in and reconstruct it all? Would they identify the unidentified bones?

Someday families would try to come back only to find their home ransacked, torn up, sometimes reeking of human feces. There would be graffiti on their walls and trash stuffed in their toilets. And in many cases they’d find their homes burned down. Zil’s fire had taken something like a quarter of the town, and other houses had been knocked down to make firebreaks.

People would marvel at the destruction and tut-tut and shake their heads because they wouldn’t know what people had lived through in this place.

Those people returning to Perdido Beach wouldn’t understand what desperate battles had been fought.

Yeah, sorry about pulling fuel rods out of the nuclear power plant and tossing them down a mine shaft. Why did we do that? Well . . . hah. You’re never going to believe why we did that.

You say Coates Academy looks like it’s been through an artillery duel? Well, in a way it has been.

Yes, there is at least one whisky still in the woods.

Yes, there are unburied corpses.

Those cat and dog bones? The ones that are charred as if someone cooked and ate a beloved household pet? Well . . . we got a little hungry.

Sorry about the graveyard in the town plaza. So damned sorry you can’t begin to understand how sorry.

Sorry.

He was walking toward fire, into thickening smoke.

That was how he had crossed the line the very first time, so long ago, when an apartment off the town plaza had burned and he’d heard a cry for help. No one else had gone running toward the fire, so he had.

“All downhill after that,” he said to no one.

That was the first burial in the town plaza. Sam had stepped up to try and save the nameless girl, and when he had failed, it was Edilio who had finally dug the grave and placed the marker. Edilio cleaning up after Sam’s failures. That hadn’t changed.

Battles avoided and battles joined. He had seen the rise of Caine and his fall. He had seen the threat from Zil’s antimutant bigots grow and nearly destroy them all, and he’d seen Zil lying dead.

He’d seen Mary, good, sweet, decent Mary who looked after the littles, lose her mind under the influence of demons both internal and external.

He’d seen the zekes consume poor E.Z. He’d seen kids cough their own lungs out. He’d seen the bugs explode from a body half-eaten.