Hero (Gone 9)

Not a soap bubble.

A dome.

“Twitter is going to call me Bubble Boy,” Sam muttered. “Well. There are worse things.”

Edilio was the fourth person whose life had been shaped by a dome. He’d been a nobody at school, an undocumented Honduran immigrant—an illegal, many people would say. He’d come to America as a small child with his parents. He had only vague memories of an interminable trip, most of it on foot, walking and walking by the sides of dusty roads, hot, thirsty, and boring, the whole length of Mexico. Weeks of sleeping in fields and under bridges.

He had no memory at all of being taken across the border from Mexico to the US because he’d been delirious with a fever at the time, most likely, his mother said, some kind of waterborne disease.

They had moved around various migrant labor camps, young Edilio sitting at the edge of a field under a wide hat, or sometimes under a sun shade or umbrella. He’d sat for hours watching stooped figures, including those of his mother and father, picking strawberries within sight of million-dollar homes. Later, when he was able, he had helped with the work. Mostly the Escobar family picked strawberries and grapes, occasionally pitching in on other physical labor, helping to move the mountains of oak barrels at a winery, or hauling bales of hay down out of lofts.

But then his father had gotten lucky. One of the farmers he had worked for had a smaller plot of land, farther up the coast, mostly table grapes but some sauvignon blanc as well, from which they made a good white wine. The farmer needed a foreman to handle the seasonal labor, men and women, families like the Escobars. And from that had come a degree of stability. Edilio had been able to enroll in an actual school, not one of the traveling camp schools.

He had not been happy at Perdido Beach High School, but neither had he been unhappy. He’d done enough miserable work by then that homework didn’t seem like much of a burden. His mother did piecework, mending or tailoring clothing. And she had a dull job handmaking tortillas for a local Mexican restaurant looking for authenticity, never mind that his mother was Honduran, not Mexican.

As for Edilio, he’d picked up work on the side, day-labor jobs, the kind that involved standing in the parking lot of Home Depot waiting for some person in a pickup truck to point a finger.

When the FAYZ came, Edilio had been a nobody, an outsider, a poor kid in a middle-class school, an undocumented immigrant in a country turning hostile to his kind. Then he had been swept into Sam Temple’s orbit, and from that point on, they had been inseparable, even as Quinn became jealous and tried to undermine Edilio’s friendship with Sam. They’d stuck together because Edilio was used to being told what to do, and at first that had been what Sam needed. But things had begun to change quickly, and the relationship that had been one of white local boy and brown-faced outsider, a relationship where Sam had a certain unspoken ascendancy, had evolved. Sam had come to rely more and more on Edilio. Edilio was consulted on everything, and increasingly, he spoke up. And almost to his own surprise, he had useful things to say.

Then, as things grew ever more dire, Sam had given Edilio the job of training recruits to serve as a security force, a tiny army. But a tiny army with real guns and real responsibilities. Edilio had been in firefights like something from a war or maybe the streets of Baltimore. Except that Edilio’s firefights might or might not involve guns, but almost always involved Sam’s blinding laser light and Caine’s telekinetic whirlwind.

Edilio had come to see himself as a professional, almost. A soldier of sorts. An advisor. An organizer. In the end Astrid had said, “Edilio, you may be the one person to get out of here with your soul intact.” Astrid had lost her faith; Edilio had not.

In the movie Edilio’s role was smaller than it had been in real life. For a while he’d been famous, but he was still undocumented, and fame did not work well for people who could not produce a green card. Many promises had been made, but in the end nothing had come of it. ICE had picked up his mother. His father had passed a year earlier from lung cancer.

Rest in peace, you good man and wonderful father.

Edilio couldn’t let his mother be hauled off alone to a country she hadn’t seen in more than a decade, so he went with her. With financial support from Albert, Edilio settled her in, rented her a small apartment where she spent her days playing cards with an elderly couple who lived next door.

Edilio had gone off on his own, finding the job as a desk clerk in La Ceiba. He was on the management track, or so they assured him. He even had a boyfriend named Alfredo, although he preferred to be called Al. Edilio did not expect he would ever see him again.

He’d known as soon as the earliest word of the rock came down from the States that the peaceful interlude of his life was coming to an end. While the world wondered what could possibly have caused monsters to emerge, Edilio had known. The gaiaphage, they’d called it in the FAYZ: the malicious alien will that rose from the first ASO, the one that had taken the shorter orbital path to intersect with Earth. Edilio had known that terror was coming, a terror no radical group could begin to equal. The FAYZ had escaped the dome. The FAYZ was the whole planet now. He hadn’t even been very surprised when the National Police had given him five minutes to pack a bag before hustling him off to a waiting plane.

And now, it was all back. The fear. The unsettling weirdness. The sense of creeping evil, of doom waiting just out of sight. And on this night, in a dark rail yard in New Jersey, the evil felt very, very close.

“I need some signatures from you,” the Marine Corps captain said, turning his clipboard toward Edilio.

Edilio signed.

The captain looked apologetic. “And there’s this. It’s a confidentiality agreement. Basically if you ever tell anyone about what we’re doing, you could be arrested and go to prison for a long time.”

Edilio laughed. “Or you could just deport me again.”

The captain let that pass. “It’s loaded in your truck. It’s crated and padded and strapped down, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to drive carefully. Sarin is . . . well, you know, it’s very nasty stuff. If you are exposed you should immediately administer the atropine pen. You’ll have muscle spasms and feel like shit, but you won’t die. Without atropine, you’re a dead man.”

Edilio glanced at the pickup truck he had “liberated.” Malik was in the driver’s seat. He’d come along for protection and company, and Edilio was grateful. This dark deed on this dark night was made a bit easier by having someone else with him.

“Don’t worry, we will be all kinds of careful,” Edilio said to the captain. He finished signing and handed the clipboard back.

“Listen, I uh . . .” The soldier looked down at the oily gravel under his feet. “I’ve been in the shit. Two tours. I’ve seen the video of Vector’s victims. And I just wanted to say that you’re about the bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. I just wanted to say what many people have said to me: thank you for your service.”

Despite himself, Edilio was touched. “Captain, I’m just hoping not to screw up.”

The captain grinned ruefully. “Mr. Escobar, that is the fondest hope of every poor son of a bitch who has ever walked toward the sound of guns: ‘Please, God, just don’t let me screw up.’”

CHAPTER 33

Plans and Plots and Stolen Kisses