Fear: A Gone Novel

rate of acceleration could only be increasing exponentially.
    She stood looking up, craning her neck to see the tallest black finger yet. It stretched three hundred feet up the side of the dome.
    As she watched, it grew. She could see it moving.
    Then, from a low point in the stain, a new black tendril shot up as fast as a car on the freeway. It just seemed to explode upward. Up and up, and she tilted her head back to see it, and up farther and farther.
    The stain crossed the line between blank pearly gray and sunlight. Then it slowed. But that slim black finger violated the sky like graffiti on the Mona Lisa. It was vandalism. It was ugliness.
    It was the future written clearly for Astrid to see.

FIFTEEN
22 H OURS , 16 M INUTES
    MOHAMED HAD SET out from the lake on the tedious walk to Perdido Beach as soon as he could get a water bottle and a little food in his belly.
    He carried a pistol and a knife, but he wasn’t really worried. Everyone knew he was under Albert’s protection. And no one messed with Albert’s people.
    For most of the time since the coming of the FAYZ, Mohamed had lain low, stayed out of the way of all the big wheels who were busy killing and being killed.
    As crazy as things were in the FAYZ, the smart move was to just do the minimum to get food and shelter. And not even shelter some of the time.
    He was thirteen, a man. He was thin and starting to get taller, a growth spurt that had left his shorts too short and his shoes too tight. His family had just moved to Perdido Beach when his mother got a job at the power plant. The school was supposed to be better than the one he’d been at in King City. His dad still worked there, working ten hours a day at the family’s Circle K, selling gas and cigarettes and milk to a mostly Hispanic population. It was a really long commute, and some nights his dad hadn’t come home, which made everyone feel strange and abandoned.
    But that was the way it was, his father had explained. A man worked. A man did what he had to do to take care of his family. Even if it meant he saw less of them.
    Sometimes Moomaw—Mohamed’s paternal grandmother—would talk about going back to Syria. But Mohamed’s father would shut that down right away. He had left Syria when he was twenty-two and didn’t miss it at all, not even a little, no, sir. Yes, he’d been a medical student there and sold hot dogs to farmhands now, but it was still better.
    Was it tough sometimes being the only Muslim at the Perdido Beach school? Yeah. He’d been pushed around by Orc a few times. Kids made fun of him for praying. For refusing the pepperoni pizza at lunch. But pretty soon Orc had lost interest and most kids didn’t even think twice about where his parents came from or how he prayed.
    Fortunately Mohamed’s family had never been all that strict about the dietary laws. He hadn’t eaten pork since the coming of the FAYZ, but he would have in a heartbeat if anyone had some. He’d eaten rat, cat, dog, bird, and fish and slimy things he didn’t have a name for. He’d have jumped all over a pepperoni pizza if anyone had one. Staying alive was not a sin: Allah saw all; Allah understood all.
    Someday this would all end; Mohamed was sure of that. Or tried to be. Someday the barrier would come down and his father and mother and brothers and sister would be waiting for him.
    How would he get along with his brothers? They would ask him all the questions his parents wouldn’t. They’d ask him what he had done. They’d ask him if he represented. They’d ask him if he had stood up or wimped out. That was what brothers were like, at least his.
    Whenever the barrier came down there would be all kinds of people talking to the media and telling all kinds of stories. And pretty quick people would realize they hadn’t just all sat around catching up on their homework.
    People would realize it had been more like a war. And then all those questions. Were you scared, Mohamed? Were you picked on? Did you ever run into all these insane freaks we hear about on TV?
    Did you ever kill anyone? What was it like?
    He hadn’t killed anyone. He’d had a couple of fights; one of them was pretty bad. He’d had a nail driven into his butt cheek and broken his wrist.
    Mohamed figured he’d change that story a little. Nail in the butt sounded funny. It hadn’t been, but if he ever got out, yeah, he’d change that story.
    As for freaks, the only one he’d spent any time with was Lana. She had healed his