Fear: A Gone Novel

to be gallant.
    “He was also cruel. Manipulative. Ruthless.” She spoke the words with great care, considering each one. “He scared me. And he was one of the first to begin the mutation. The same time as Sam, actually, but Sam was a totally different person. Sam lashed out with his power, lost control of himself, and was devastated by it. But Caine? He used his power without the slightest concern for anyone but himself.”
    “Same mother, same father, and so different?”
    “Same mother,” Connie said, her voice flat. “I was having an affair. I never had a DNA test, but it is possible that they had different fathers.”
    She could see that this shocked Darius. He didn’t approve. Well, why should he? She didn’t approve of herself.
    The room suddenly felt cold.
    “I’d better get going,” Darius said. “You cooking some ribs on Friday?”
    “Darius. I told you my secret,” Connie said. “I gave you everything. What is it you aren’t telling me?”
    Darius stopped at the door. Connie wondered if he would ever come back. He’d seen a side of her he had never expected.
    “I can’t tell you anything,” Darius said. “Except that the military loves acronyms. Just saw a new one the other day I didn’t recognize on some vehicles that came into camp. NEST. Sounds innocent, huh?”
    “What’s NEST?”
    “Look it up. See you Friday if I can.”
    He left.
    Connie opened her laptop and tied into the hotel’s wi-fi. She opened Google and typed in NEST. It took a few seconds to find that NEST stood for Nuclear Emergency Support Team.
    They were the scientists, technicians, and engineers who were called in to deal with a nuclear incident.
    A nuclear response team.
    And the colonel threatening to quit.
    Something was going on. Maybe some controversial new experiment. Something dangerous. Something involving a possible radiation spill.
    Which may have been how this whole thing had started to begin with.

EIGHTEEN
18 H OURS , 55 M INUTES
    FULL NIGHT .
    Sam had recalled Brianna when the sun went down. The darkness was deadly to her. One stumble and she’d be a bag of broken bones.
    Brianna raged and demanded to be turned loose again. But she knew better. Sam sent her below to take one of the unused bunks and get some sleep. Mere seconds later he heard her snoring.
    The guards were changed. Edilio sat blinking sleep away. Dekka brooded. Sam hadn’t seen Astrid in a while. He assumed she was down in his bunk. Maybe she was mad at him. Probably. And maybe he deserved it. He’d been curt with her.
    He wanted to go down there and be with her. But he knew if he gave in to that need, if he found peace and forgetfulness, he might not have the strength to come out again.
    The light was dying. But the moon—or an illusion of it—was rising. This was not yet true darkness. But it was coming.
    “Where is he?” Sam wondered for the millionth time. He scanned the beach, already dark. He scanned the woods and the bluff. Drake could be in either place. Beneath those dark trees. Or somewhere up in those rocks.
    He sank into a canvas chair.
    “You awake enough to keep your eyes open?” he asked Dekka.
    “Catch some z’s, Sam.”
    “Yeah,” he said, and yawned.
    Astrid was waiting for him.
    He said, “Sorry I snapped at you before.”
    She didn’t say anything but kissed him, holding his face with her hands. They made love slowly, silently, and when they were finished, Sam drifted into sleep.
    When Cigar looked at Sanjit he saw a dancing, twirling, happy creature that looked like a greyhound walking erect. The one called Choo looked like a sleepy gorilla with a slow-beating red valentine of a heart.
    Cigar knew he wasn’t seeing what other people saw. He just didn’t know whether what he was seeing was a result of having his new eyes, or whether it was madness that turned everything so strange and incredible.
    Strange eyes. Strange brain. Some combination of the two?
    Even objects—the beds, the tables, the steps at Clifftop—had an eerie glow, a vibration, a streaming light as though, rather than being fixed in place, they were moving.
    Mad eyes, mad brain.
    Memories that made the screams rise in his raw throat.
    When that happened Sanjit or Choo or the little one, Bowie, who looked like a spectral white kitten, would come to him and speak soothing words. At those times he seemed to see something like dust in a strong beam of sunlight, and that … that … he didn’t know what to call it, but that …