Light (Gone 6)

They fell silent then. The only sounds were of gurneys in the hallway, a child crying somewhere, a male and a female voice laughing flirtatiously.

Astrid looked at Lana, now leaning against the window, and Diana, lost in thought, and reminded herself that at times she had hated Diana. She had told Sam to kill her if necessary. And she had disliked Lana as a short-tempered bitch who sometimes abused her privileges.

She let her mind move beyond these two. Orc, who had been the first to kill in the FAYZ, the first murderer. A vicious drunk. But someone who had died a hero.

Mary. Mother Mary. A saint who had died trying to murder the children she cared for.

Quinn, who had been a faithless worm at the start and had been a pillar at the end.

Albert. She still didn’t know quite what to think of Albert, but it was undeniable that far fewer would have walked out of the FAYZ without Albert.

If her own feelings were this conflicted, was it any wonder the rest of the world didn’t know what to do with the Perdido survivors?

“Sorry, I kind of dragged the mood down,” Diana said wryly.

“I’m going to write something,” Astrid said.

“What do you mean?” Lana asked.

“I’m going to write about us. About all of it. Maybe a magazine story, or, I don’t know. Maybe even a book. But what happened to the . . . No, wait. No, that’s not even the right way to start. I don’t want everyone acting like we were victims. I’m going to tell the story. All of it I know, anyway.”

The other two girls looked at her, and to Astrid’s surprise neither of them told her she was being a fool.

“Might be a good idea,” Lana conceded.

“Maybe,” Diana said a bit more hesitantly. “It’s going to all come out anyway. One of us should tell the story. In fact, Astrid, it should be you. Just tell all of it. All of it. The bad, the worse, and the worst.”

“And maybe one or two good things,” Astrid said.

“One or two,” Diana agreed softly.

Eight hundred and nine homes had been destroyed. Three dozen businesses had been wiped out. Forty square miles of forest burned. Nearly five hundred cars, boats, buses damaged, almost all unsalvageable.

The cost of it all, plus the cost of cleanup, lost revenues from business, and the rest was estimated to be three billion dollars. At a minimum.

Albert Hillsborough had come through uninjured. He had come through famous. He’d been interviewed on CNBC and by the Wall Street Journal. He’d been invited to a party at the home of the chairman of Goldman Sachs. Important people kept telling him they had their eyes on him.

Even his family treated him strangely, and the truth was, he just didn’t fit with his family anymore. He didn’t fit, somehow, in the world of shared bedrooms and dinner-table discussion and school.

School. He knew he had to go. But really? He was going to be a high school freshman?

Really?

He rode now in the backseat of an SUV. There was a golden-arches logo on the side. Behind them a second SUV, and behind that two semis loaded with everything the modern filmmaker needed.

McDonald’s had volunteered to pay for Albert’s college if he would appear in some short videos about the importance to him of keeping the Perdido Beach McDonald’s alive as long as possible.

All the way up from Santa Barbara, where his family now lived, he watched flatbed trucks hauling wrecked cars away from Perdido Beach. And in the other direction went the construction equipment. The cleanup was under way. It was like the aftermath of a hurricane.

But civilian cars were still not allowed on the highway. No one was yet allowed to drive through Perdido Beach: it was still too dangerous. They were still finding bodies, not to mention the occasional straggler. Just that morning an injured, traumatized boy had been found wandering in the forest, near death.

Helicopters buzzed overhead. Surveyors and news reporters and filmmakers. The National Guard camp was still in place. The flashing police and ambulance lights were gone, and most of the TV trucks had moved on. But there were still armed men scowling from behind sunglasses.

Yeah, where were all you tough guys when we could have used you?

As they neared the edge of what had been the FAYZ, Albert began to feel uncomfortable. He squirmed in his seat and kept his eyes focused inside the SUV.

They’d assigned him a handler, a public relations person named Vicky. She was a pretty young woman, a mother herself, she said, and so she felt for the kids, what it must have been like. She had chatted with Albert on the drive up, and every time she had said how she understood, how she could imagine, how terrible . . . he had changed the conversation.