EIGHTEEN
“WE GO TONIGHT,” Caine said. Weak. So weak in every muscle. Sore. Panting just from climbing the stairs to the dining hall. Like he’d run a marathon.
Starvation. It did that to you.
He tried to count the exhausted, gaunt faces that turned toward him. But he couldn’t keep the number in his head. Fifteen? Seventeen? No more than that, certainly.
The last candle flickered on the table that had once been piled high with turkey loaf and pizza, Jell-O and limp salad, cartons of milk, all the usual school lunchroom fare.
This room had once been full of kids. All so healthy looking. Some thin, some fat, none as gaunt and hideous as what was left here now.
Coates Academy, the fashionable place for the well-off to send their troublesome kids. Kids who started fires. Bullies. Skanks. Druggies. Kids with psychological problems. Or just kids who talked back once too often. Or kids whose parents wanted them gone from their lives.
The difficult, the losers, the rejects. The unloved. Coates Academy, where you could dump your kids and not be bothered by them anymore.
Well, that was certainly working out well for all concerned.
Now, the desperate remnants of Coates. The ones mean enough or lucky enough to survive. Only four of them known to be mutants: Caine himself, a four bar; Diana, whose only power was the ability to gauge another mutant’s powers; Bug, with his ability to almost disappear; and Penny, who had developed an extremely useful power of illusion: she could make a person believe they were being attacked by monsters or stabbed with knives or on fire.
She had demonstrated it on a kid named Barry. Barry had been made to believe he was being chased around the room by spears. It had been funny watching him run in terror.
That was it. Four mutants, only two of which, Caine and Penny, were any good in a fight. Bug had his uses. And Diana was Diana. The only face he wanted to see now.
But she had her head down, resting it on her hands with elbows on her knees.
The others looked to him. They didn’t love him or even like him, but they still feared him.
“I called everyone here tonight because we are leaving,” Caine said.
“Do you have any food?” a voice cried pitifully.
Caine said, “We’re going to get food. We know a place. It’s an island.”
“How are we going to get to an island?”
“Shut up, Jason. It’s an island. Used to be owned by two famous actors you probably remember. Todd Chance and Jennifer Brattle. It’s a huge mansion on a private island. The kind of place they’d have stocked with lots of food.”
“The only way to get there is on a boat,” Jason whined. “How can we do that?”
“We’re going to take some boats,” Caine said with far more confidence than he felt.
Bug sneezed. He became almost visible when he sneezed.
“Bug knows about this place,” Caine said. “It’s famous.”
“So why didn’t we hear about it earlier?” Diana asked, mumbling at the floor.
“Because Bug is an idiot and it didn’t occur to him,” Caine snapped. “But the island is there. It’s called San Francisco de Sales. It’s on the map.”
He pulled a torn and crumpled paper from his pocket and unfolded it. It was taken from an atlas in the school’s library. “See?” He held it up and was gratified to see flickers of actual interest.
“We’re going to get boats,” Caine said. “We’re going to get them in Perdido Beach.”
That killed whatever faint enthusiasm there had been. “They got all kinds of freaks and guns and all,” a girl nicknamed Pampers said.
“Yeah, they do,” Caine admitted wearily. “But they’re all going to be too busy to deal with us. And if any of them get in our way, I’ll take care of them. Me or Penny.”
Kids glanced at Penny. She was twelve years old. She’d probably been pretty once. A pretty little Chinese-American girl with a tiny nose and surprised eyebrows. Now she looked like a scarecrow, brittle hair, gums red from malnutrition, with a rash that covered her neck and arms in a lacy pink pattern.
Jason said, “I think you’re nuts. Go through Perdido Beach? Half of us can’t even walk that far, let alone fight. We’re starving, man. Unless you have some food to give us, we’ll fall out before we reach the highway.”
“Listen to me,” Caine said softly. “We’re definitely going to need some food. Soon.”
Diana looked up, dreading what Caine might do next.
“The only food we’re going to get is on that island. We reach it, or we find someone else to eat.”
NINETEEN
IT WAS WEIRD, Zil thought. Weird how it had come to this. Weird how scared he was, how rattly his insides were, but he couldn’t let on. Because he was in charge. Because they were all looking to him.
The Leader. Capital “T,” capital “L,” when Turk said it.
Turk, a creepy little toady with his bad leg and his rat face.
And Hank. Hank was scary. Probably crazy as a loon. Okay, not probably, definitely. Hank was always the one pushing, provoking, demanding.
The others. Twenty-three of them. Antoine, the fat druggie. Max. Rudy. Lisa. Trent. Others Zil barely knew. The only one Zil really even liked was Lance. Lance was cool. Lance was the good-looking, smart one who made Zil feel like maybe this was all okay, like maybe Zil really did deserve to be The Leader, capital “T,” capital “L.”
Anyway, too late to turn back now. He’d made his deal with Caine. The deal was very simple: there were two people in the FAYZ who Zil had to fear above all others-Sam and Caine. Caine had offered Zil a chance to discredit one and wave good-bye to the other.
The time was now or never.
First things first. Gasoline. And after that it would be too late for second thoughts.
The declaration of total war against the freaks was a minute away.
Twenty-three of them filtered through the dark streets in ones and twos, guns and clubs hidden beneath hoodies and coats. Swaggering, some of them, others creeping along scared like mice. The great fear was that Sam might see them early. Try to stop them before they could start the party.
Zil laughed, not meaning to.
Turk was with him. Neither of them carrying a weapon, nothing that would give Sam an excuse if he stopped them.
“See, that’s a Leader,” Turk said in his greasy way. “You laugh despite everything.”
Zil said nothing. His stomach was in his throat.
So much could go wrong. Brianna. Dekka. Taylor. Edilio. Even Orc. Freaks and freak supporters, traitors. Any one of them could bring this to a sudden halt.
Zil felt as if he was standing at the edge of a cliff.
One step at a time. First, the gas station.
It had to be tonight.
Now.
And the whole town had to burn.
Out of that fire the Human Crew would gather the survivors under Zil’s leadership. Then he’d be the Leader, not just of this little crew of losers, but of everyone.
Brittney did not know where she’d been. Or what she’d done since leaving Brianna’s house. She had flashes, like single frames pulled out of a movie. A flash of a crawl space under a house. Of lying in the dirt again, of feeling it cold on her back. Of spiderwebbed wooden beams above her, a comforting coffin lid.
Other flashes showed rocks at the beach. Sand that made it hard to walk.
She remembered seeing kids. Two, at a distance. They ran away when they saw her. But maybe they weren’t real. Maybe they were just ghosts because Brittney wasn’t totally sure that anyone she saw was real. They looked real on the surface-their eyes and hair and lips were all familiar to her. But at times they seemed to have lights coming out of them in wrong places.
It was hard to know what was real and what was not. All she could know was that Tanner appeared sometimes, just beside her. And he was real.