Gone

A.M . The exact time when every person over the age of fourteen disappeared.”
    On the tape, Little Pete stopped crying.
    He didn’t even look around, he just walked back to the chair where he had been sitting, retrieved his game, and resumed play.
    “Little Pete caused the FAYZ,” Sam said flatly.
    Astrid covered her face with her hands. She was surprised by the tears she felt rising, and their force. She struggled to keep from sobbing. It was a few minutes before she could speak. Sam waited patiently.
    “He didn’t know he was doing it,” Astrid said in a low, unsteady voice. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Not the way we do. Not like, if I do ‘this,’ then ‘that’ will happen.”
    “I know that.”
    “You can’t blame him.” Astrid looked up, eyes blazing defiantly.
    “Blame him?” Sam moved to sit beside her on the couch. Close enough that their legs were touching. “Astrid, I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, but I think you overlooked something.”
    She turned her tear-stained face to him, searching.
    “Astrid, they were having a meltdown. They didn’t seem to be getting it under control. They all looked pretty scared.”
    Astrid gasped. Sam was right: she had missed it. “He stopped the meltdown. A meltdown might have killed everyone in Perdido Beach.”
    “Yeah. I’m not crazy about the way he did it, but he may have saved everyone’s life.”
    “He stopped the meltdown,” Astrid said, still not grasping it fully.
    Sam grinned. He even laughed.
    “What’s funny?” she demanded.
    “I figured something out before Astrid the Genius. I am totally enjoying that. I’m just going to gloat here for a minute.”
    “Enjoy it, it may never happen again,” Astrid said.
    “Oh, believe me, I know that.” He took her hand, and she was very glad to feel his touch. “He saved us. But he also created this whole weird thing.”
    “Not the whole thing,” Astrid said, shaking her head. “The mutations prefigure the FAYZ. Indeed, the mutations were the sine qua non of the FAYZ. The thing without which the FAYZ could not have occurred.”
    Sam refused to be impressed. “You can hammer me all you want with your ‘indeeds’ and your ‘prefigures’ and your ‘sine qua nons,’ I am still gloating here.”
    She raised his hand to her lips and kissed his fingers.
    Then she released him, stood up, paced across the room and back, stopped, and said, “Diana. She talks about it being like cell phone bars. Two bars, three bars. Caine is a four bar. You are, too, I would guess. Petey…I guess he’s a five or a seven.”
    “Or a ten,” Sam agreed.
    “But Diana thinks it’s like reception. Like some of us can get better reception. If that’s true, then we aren’t generating the power, just using it, focusing it.”
    “So?”
    “So where’s it coming from? To extend the analogy: Where’s the cell phone tower? What is generating the power?”
    Sam rose with a sigh. “One thing for sure: This never gets out. Edilio knows, I know, and you know. No one else can ever know.”
    Astrid nodded. “People would hate him. Or try to use him.”
    Sam nodded. “I wish…”
    “No,” Astrid said, and shrugged helplessly. “There’s no way to get him to undo it.”
    “That’s a pity,” Sam said, making a wry smile that did not reach his eyes. “Because tick-tock, tick-tock.”

    Lana stumbled through the night.
    Back with the coyotes. A nightmare revisited.
    And now, adding to the misery, Drake and Howard stumbled along with her.
    Drake with his gun. Drake cursing his pain.
    And Howard calling, “Orc, Orc,” into the night.
    Greater than any misery, the dread of that mine shaft and what lay at the bottom.
    She had disobeyed the Darkness.
    What would the seething monster do to her?
    “Let’s stop and I’ll try to fix Drake’s arm, okay?” she pleaded.
    “No stop,” Pack Leader snarled.
    “Let me try, at least.”
    Pack Leader ignored her, and they ran and tripped and picked themselves up and ran some more.
    No escape now. No possibility of escape.
    Unless.
    She maneuvered closer to Drake. “What if he won’t let me heal you?”
    “Don’t try to play me,” Drake said tersely. “Anyway, now I want to see this thing that has you so terrified.”
    “No, you don’t,” Lana promised.
    “What is it?” Howard asked, nervous, almost as scared as Lana herself.
    Lana had no answer to that question.
    Each step was harder than the one before, and several times Pack