Edilio waited.
“I never set out thinking I’m going to kill someone. I go into a fight and I think, maybe I’ll have to hurt someone. Yeah. I think that. And I have. You know: you’ve been there.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there,” Edilio said.
“If it’s him, though, I mean if Drake is somehow back…it’s not going to be about just doing what I have to do. You know?”
Edilio did not answer.
“I’ve done what I had to do. To save people. Or to save myself. This won’t be like that. If it’s him, I mean.”
“Dude, it’s Zil. Zil and Human Crew did this.”
Sam shook his head. “Yeah. Zil. But I know he’s out there, Edilio. I know Drake is out there. I feel it.”
“Sam…”
“If I see him, I’ll kill him,” Sam said. “Not self-defense. I’m not waiting until he attacks. I see him, I burn him.”
Edilio grabbed him by both shoulders and got in his face. “Hey! Listen to me, Sam. You’re getting freaked out here. The problem is Zil. Okay? We have real problems, we don’t need nightmares. And, anyway, we don’t do cold-blooded murder. Not even if it is Drake.”
Sam firmly pried Edilio’s hands off his shoulders. “If it’s Drake, I’m burning him down. If you and Astrid and the rest of the council want to arrest me for doing it, fine. But I’m not sharing my life with Drake Merwin.”
“Well, you do what you got to do, Sam, and I will, too. Right now what we got to do is figure out what Zil is up to. So, I’m going to go and do that. You want to come? Or do you want to stand here in the dark talking about murder?”
Edilio stomped away, swinging his machine pistol down into firing position.
For the first time, Sam followed Edilio.
TWENTY-TWO
DOWN THE ACCESS road they marched, the station lost behind them in the night.
Their numbers had diminished a little. Kids, the weak and scared ones, had peeled off unnoticed, slinking home once they’d had a taste of violence.
Weaklings, Zil thought. Cowards.
Just a dozen of them now, the hard core, pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with softly clinking bottles, trailing the smell of gasoline.
Left at the school. Past the gloomy, darkened buildings. So alien now. So long ago, all of that.
Zil couldn’t make out individual windows in the edifice, but he could see approximately where his old home room had been. He imagined himself back then. Imagined himself sitting, bored during morning announcements.
And now here he was at the head of an army. A small army. But dedicated. All together in a great cause. Perdido Beach for humans. Death to freaks. Death to mutants.
On stiff legs he led the march. The march to freedom and power.
Right at Golding. Golding and Sherman, off the northwest corner of the school, that was the target zone, as agreed with Caine. No idea why. Caine had only said that they should start at Golding and Sherman. And move along Sherman toward the water. Burn all they could till they reached Ocean Boulevard. Then, if they still had any left, they could go along Ocean toward town. Not toward the marina.
“If I see you nitwits heading toward the marina, our little agreement is over,” Caine had warned.
Nitwits. Zil seethed at the memory. Caine’s casual arrogance, his contempt for anyone who wasn’t a freak like him. His time would come, Zil vowed.
“We’re here,” Zil said. But that wasn’t a very historic thing to say. And this, make no mistake, was history happening in the FAYZ. The beginning of the end for the freaks. The beginning of Zil being in control.
Zil turned to faces he knew were expectant, giddy, excited. He could hear it in their whispered conversation.
“Tonight we strike a blow for humans,” Zil said. That was the line Turk had come up with. Something everyone would be able to quote. “Tonight we strike a blow for humans!” Zil cried, raising his voice, no longer afraid.
“Death to freaks!” Turk shouted.
“Light up!” Hank cried.
Lighters and matches flicked. Tiny yellow pinpoints in the black night, casting eerie shadows on wild eyes and mouths pulled back in grimaces of fear and rage.
Zil took the first of the bottles-Molotov cocktails, Hank said they were called. The spark of the lighter caught the gasoline-saturated wick.
Zil turned and heaved the bottle toward the closest house.
It arced like a meteor, spinning.
It crashed onto the brick steps and burst. Flames spread over several square feet of porch.
No one moved. All eyes were fixed. Faces fascinated.
The spilled gasoline burned blue. For a while it seemed it would do nothing but burn itself out on the porch.
But then a wicker rocking chair caught fire.
And then the decorative lattice.
And suddenly the flames were licking up the pillars that supported the porch roof.
A wild cheer went up.
More bottles were lit. More wild arcs of twirling fire.
A second house. A garage. A parked car sitting on deflated tires.
Cries of shock and horror came from inside the first house.
Zil didn’t let himself hear them.
“Onward!” he cried. “Burn it all down!”
Down through the dark they shuffled and stumbled, Caine’s starved and starving remnants.
“Look!” Bug cried. No one could see him, of course, or his outstretched pointing hand. But they looked, anyway.
An orange glow lit the horizon.
“Huh. The stupid punk actually did it,” Caine said. “We have to hurry. Anyone falls out, they are on their own.”
Orsay climbed to the top of the cliff, weary but propelled by Nerezza’s helping hand.
“Come on, Prophetess, we’re almost there.”
“Don’t call me that,” Orsay said.
“It’s what you are,” Nerezza said softly but insistently.
The others had all gone ahead. Nerezza always insisted that the supplicants leave the beach first. Orsay suspected it had to do with Nerezza not wanting anyone to see Orsay struggling and scraping her knees on rocks. Nerezza seemed to think it was important for kids to see Orsay as above all that normal stuff.
A prophet.
“I’m not a prophet,” Orsay said. “I’m just a person who hears dreams.”
“You are helping people,” Nerezza said as they rounded a buried boulder that always gave Orsay trouble. “You are telling them the truth. Showing them a path.”
“I can’t even find my own path,” Orsay said as she slipped and landed on her palms. They were scraped, but not too badly.
“You show them the way,” Nerezza said. “They need to be shown a way out of this place.”
Orsay stopped, panting from exertion. She turned to Nerezza, whose face was just two faintly glowing eyes, like a cat’s eyes. “You know, I’m not totally sure. You know that. Maybe I’m…maybe it’s…” She didn’t have the word for what she felt at times like this, times of doubt. Times when a small voice down deep inside her seemed to be whispering warnings in her ear.
“You need to trust me,” Nerezza said firmly. “You are the Prophetess.”
Orsay topped the cliff. She stared. “I must not be much of a prophet. I didn’t foresee this.”
“What?” Nerezza called up from just below.
“The town is burning.”
“Look, Tanner,” Brittney said. She raised one arm and pointed.
Her brother, now glowing a dark green, like a billion little nodules of radioactivity, but still Tanner, said, “Yes. It is time.”
Brittney hesitated. “Why, Tanner?”
He gave no answer.
“Are we doing the Lord’s will, Tanner?”
Tanner did not answer.
“I am doing what’s right. Aren’t I?”
“Go toward the flames, sister. All your answers are there.”
Brittney lowered her arm to her side. It seemed strange, somehow. All of it. All of it so very strange.