Fear: A Gone Novel

rat.”
    Sam could look back and see a string of ten lights behind him. The line they made wobbled a bit but it was basically straight. Of course, he could no longer see the lake or its firefly lights.
    He wondered about all the others out in this terrible darkness. Some maybe had flashlights going slowly dim. Some might have built fires. But many were just walking into darkness. Scared. But not stopping.
    Walking into darkness.
    His feet were going up a hill. He allowed it. Maybe he would see something from higher up. It was strange. He wished Astrid was here to talk to about how strange it was to move like this, blind, feeling a hill but not seeing it, not knowing was he near the top or not even close?
    Everything was about feel now. He felt the slope with his ankles rather than seeing it with his eyes. He felt it in his forward lean. When the angle increased he was caught by surprise and stumbled. But then it would lessen and that, too, would catch him by surprise.
    He hung a Sammy sun. It took him a while to make sense of his immediate surroundings. For one thing, there was an old rusted beer can.
    For another he was less than six feet from what might be a sheer drop. It might have killed him if he’d gone off. Then again, maybe it was only a two-foot drop. Or six. He stood at the edge and listened hard. He could almost hear the emptiness of that space. It sounded big. It felt huge. And maybe he could develop those senses someday. But not now, not right now at the edge of a one- or ten- or hundred-foot drop.
    He picked up the rusted beer can and dropped it over the edge.
    It fell for perhaps a full second before it hit something.
    And then it fell some more.
    Stopped.
    Sam breathed and the sound of his own breath seemed dramatic in the darkness.
    He was going to have to backtrack down this hill. Or risk taking a long fall. He turned carefully, slowly, a one-eighty. He was pretty sure that the lake was blocked from view by the bulk of the hill. But he wasn’t absolutely sure. A single point of light appeared. It was as small as a star, much dimmer, and orange, not white.
    A single distant point of barely visible light. Probably a bonfire in Perdido Beach. Or out in the desert. Or even out on the island. Or maybe it was just his imagination.
    The sight of it wrung a sigh from Sam. It didn’t make the dark less dark; it made the dark seem vast. Endless. The tiny point of light served only to emphasize the totality of the darkness.
    Sam started back down the hill. It took all his willpower to turn left when he reached the lowest light on the hill and move toward the ghost town.
    Or where he thought, hoped, pretended the ghost town might be.
    “Aaaahhh, aaaaahhh, aaaahhhh.”
    Dekka cried into the dirt. A despairing sound. She cried and gasped in air mixed with dirt and cried again.
    Penny had taken her most terrible fear—that the bugs could return—and she had doubled it. Dekka would rather die than endure it. Rather die a thousand times. She would beg for death before she would live through it again.
    She heard someone crying and then screaming and then babbling, all three mixed up together, all of it coming from her own mouth.
    Trapped and eaten alive.
    Eaten from the inside out, forever, no end, trapped inside seamless white stone, alabaster, a tomb that went inside her, immobilized her so that she couldn’t even lash out, couldn’t move as they ate her insides…
    Never let it happen again.
    Never.
    Would kill herself first.
    She clutched dirt in her hands, squeezed it like she was holding on to reality. The dirt ran through her fingers and she gathered more and again it got away and she grabbed at more and more, needing something to hold on to, and something to hurt. Needing to feel her body move and not be in that terrible blank white stone prison.
    She was just a girl. Just some girl. Just this girl with the stupid name of Dekka. She had fought enough. And what for? For emptiness. For loneliness. All of it came to here. To this nothing. To clutching at sand and jibbering like a crazy person, beaten.
    Die here, Dekka. It’s okay if you do. It’s okay to just lie here in the dark and let your eyelids close, because there’s nothing more to see, Dekka; do you hear me? Do you, Dekka, because there’s nothing for you but fear. And death is better because death is the end of fear, isn’t it?
    Quiet. Peace.
    It wouldn’t be suicide. That was the thing you could never do, right? Never kill yourself. But