Fear: A Gone Novel

that,” Quinn said. He was remembering the sight of those tiny eyes like beans in the blackened sockets of Cigar’s head. Let Caine go after the island. It might be good to see whether those missiles Albert claimed to have would work.
    But Caine seemed already to have lost interest in Quinn’s anger. “More likely we’re all dead soon,” he said.
    “Yeah,” Quinn agreed.
    “I would have liked to see Diana again. No baby now.”
    “Are you relieved?” Lana asked harshly.
    Caine thought it over for so long it seemed he’d forgotten the question. Then at last, “No. Just kind of sad.”

THIRTY-THREE
5 H OURS , 12 M INUTES
    WAS THAT LIGHT?
    Astrid opened her eyes wide. Stared.
    Yes. An orange glow. A fire.
    A fire!
    “Cigar, I think I see town. I think I see a fire.”
    “I see it, too. Like devils dancing!”
    They walked forward eagerly. Astrid registered the fact that the ground beneath her boots was no longer flat and hard and occasionally interrupted by some unnamed weed, but had become bumpier, dry clods of dirt that tripped her as they rose and formed rows and from those rows rose neatly ordered plants.
    What she noticed was the light.
    And then Cigar’s screams.
    But Cigar screamed a lot, so Astrid kept walking and ignored his mad shrieks that something was in his feet.
    Then it all came together and Astrid knew. She felt something pushing at the leather of her boot.
    “Zekes!” she cried, and stumbled back, fell down, jumped up like the ground was electrified, crawled, stood, ran back, back until the ground was hard and flat again.
    She fumbled in the dark, fingers searching for and then finding the whipping worm, its head already through the leather and touching her flesh, and she got her hands around it even though it fought, and she pulled at it with all her strength and it came free and whipped around, quick as a cobra, and sank its nasty, tooth-ringed mouth into her arm, but she had the tail and yelled, “No! No!” and then it was away from her.
    She had thrown it. Somewhere.
    Cigar cried pitiably.
    And then, so much more terrible, laughed and laughed in the dark.
    Astrid with shaking hands grabbed the shotgun and fired it once.
    She saw the edge of the field.
    She saw Cigar frozen in a twisting fall.
    He was in the field.
    She heard the greedy mouths burrowing into him. A sound like hungry dogs eating.
    “Petey! Petey! Help him!”
    Cigar said, “Oh,” in a small, disappointed voice.
    And the only sound in the darkness was the relentless feeding of the worms.
    She sat there listening, no choice but to hear. Tears flowed. She sat with her knees together, head in twisting hands, crying.
    How much time passed until the worm sounds were finished she couldn’t know. The stink … that remained.
    She was alone now. Completely and absolutely alone in a darkness that seemed almost like a living thing, as if she had been swallowed whole and was now in the belly of some indifferent beast.
    “All right, Petey,” Astrid said at last. “No choice, huh, brother? The crazy behind door number one or the crazy behind door number two. Show me what you have to show me, Peter.”
    She saw him. Not him, not like there was light, but something, like the darkness had warped around itself. A suggestion of a shape. A little boy.
    “Are you there?” she asked.
    Something cold, like someone had slid an icicle through her scalp and through her skull and pushed it deep inside her brain. No pain. Just a terrible cold.
    “Petey?” she whispered.
    Peter Ellison did not move. He stayed very, very still. His hand touched her on the head, but only just, just barely, and he stayed very still.
    The avatar that was his sister had within it an amazing complexity of lines and designs, signs inside of mazes inside of maps that were part of planets and…
    He pulled himself back. Inside her was a game of such beautiful complexity.
    This was what it was to be the girl with the yellow hair and the stabbing blue eyes. It took his breath away. Or would have if he had breath and body.
    He mustn’t play with those complex swirls and patterns. Each time he had tried he’d broken the avatar and it had come apart. He couldn’t break this one.
    It’s me, Petey , he said.
    The avatar shuddered. Patterns twisted around his touch, feeling for him like tiny light-snakes.
    “Can you fix it, Petey? The FAYZ. Can you make it stop?”
    He could hear her voice. It came straight up through the avatar, words of light floating to