Gone

toward him.
    “Follow us,” Caine cried, caught up in it now, eyes wild and excited. “We go straight toward the plaza. You go straight at the kids there. It will work perfectly.”
    “The fire fist is there?”
    Caine frowned. “Who? Oh. Sam. Fire fist, huh? Yes, he’ll be there, but I’ll take care of him.”
    Pack Leader seemed dubious.
    “If Pack Leader is frightened, maybe someone else should be pack leader.”
    “Pack Leader no fear.”
    “Then let’s kick,” Caine said.

    “Oh, man,” Howard said. “Oh God, oh God, what happened to you, Orc?”
    He had slipped out of Caine’s hideout and made his way to the house he had once shared with Orc. He found his protector there, sitting on a couch that had broken beneath Orc’s weight, collapsed in the middle. Empty beer bottles were everywhere.
    Orc held up a game controller. “My fingers are too big to work this thing.”
    “Orc, man, how did this…I mean, man, what happened to you?”
    Orc’s face was still half his own. His left eye, his left ear and the hair above it, and all of his mouth were still recognizably Orc. But the rest of him was like some slumping statue made of gravel. He was at least a head taller than he had been. His legs were as big around as tree trunks, his arms as thick as fire hydrants. He had burst through his clothing, which now hung from him and provided the barest degree of modesty.
    When he shifted in his seat, he made a sound like wet stones.
    “How did this happen, dude?”
    “It’s a judgment on me,” Orc said flatly.
    “What’s that mean, man?”
    “For hitting Bette. It’s God, Howard. It’s His judgment on me.”
    Howard fought the urge to turn and run screaming. He tried to look at Orc’s one human eye but he found himself looking into the other eye, a yellow oyster beneath a brow of stone.
    “Can you move? Can you stand up?”
    Orc grunted and stood much more easily than Howard expected.
    “Yeah. I still have to be able to get up to pee,” Orc said.
    “What happens when it spreads to your mouth?”
    “I think it’s done spreading. It stopped a few hours ago, maybe.”
    “Does it hurt?”
    “Nah. But it itches when it’s spreading.” As if to illustrate, he used one of his sausage-sized stone fingers to scratch the line between his gravel nose and his human cheek.
    “Heavy as you are, man, you must be pretty strong just to stand up.”
    “Yeah.” Orc dipped his hand into the cooler by his feet and came up with a can of beer. He tilted his head back and opened his mouth. He squeezed the top of the can and it blew out an eruption of liquid and foam. Orc swallowed what landed in his mouth. The rest dribbled down his face onto his rocky chest. “Only way I can open ’em now. My fingers are too big to pull the tab.”
    “What are you doing, man? You just been sitting here drinking beer?”
    “What else am I gonna do?” He shrugged his slag heap shoulders. His human eye was either crying or teared up. “Thing is, I’m almost out of beer.”
    “Man, you have to get back in the game. There’s a war coming. You need to be in on it, making your statement, you know?”
    “I just want to get some more beer.”
    “Okay, then. That’s what we’ll do, Orc. We’ll get some more beer.”

    Stars filled the sky.
    The moon glinted off the steeple.
    A coyote howled, a wild ululation, a ghostly cry of despair.
    In his mind Sam saw the mutants in the church. He sawEdilio concealed with a handful of trusted kids in the smoked-out ruins of the apartment building. He saw Quinn on the roof with the machine gun he might use or not. He saw the kids milling and lost and scared at the south end of the plaza. And Mary and the little kids still in the day care. And Dahra in the church basement awaiting casualties.
    Drake had retreated. For now.
    What would Orc do?
    Where was Caine?
    And what would happen in one hour when the clock ticked and marked exactly fifteen years since Sam had been born, linked though he hadn’t known it to a brother named Caine?
    Could he beat Caine?
    He had to beat Caine.
    And somehow he had to destroy Drake as well. If—when—Sam stepped outside, took the big jump, poofed, he didn’t want to leave Astrid to Drake’s mercy.
    He knew he should be scared of the end. Scared of the mysterious process that would, it seemed, simply subtract Sam Temple from the FAYZ. But he wasn’t as worried for himself as he was for Astrid.
    Less than two weeks ago she had been an abstraction,