But then Caine got a better “grip” and Panda rose off the ground. He was on his back, staring up at the unreal stars, eyes still open.
Caine levitated the boy up from the crash, up and up until he brought him to as gentle a stop as he could. Panda lay now on the road.
Without a word, Caine started walking back to Coates.
“Aren’t you going to carry him back?” Bug whined.
“Get a wheelbarrow,” Caine said. “Carry your own meat.”
THREE
THE WHIP CAME down.
It was made of flesh, but in his nightmare it was a snake, a writhing python that sliced the flesh from his arms and back and chest.
The pain was too terrible to endure. But he had endured it.
He had begged for death. Sam Temple had begged to die. He had begged the psychopath to kill him, to end it, to give him the only relief possible.
But he had not died. He had endured.
Pain. Too small a word. Pain and awful humiliation.
And the whip kept coming down, again and again, and Drake Merwin laughed.
Sam woke up in a bed of tangled, sweat-soaked sheets.
The nightmare did not leave him. Even with Drake dead and buried under a mountain of rock, he had Sam under the control of his whip hand.
“Are you okay?”
Astrid. Almost invisible in the darkness. Only the faintest starlight filtered through the window and framed her as she stood there in the doorway.
He knew what she looked like. Beautiful. Compassionate, intelligent blue eyes. Blond hair all wispy and wild since she’d just gotten up from her own bed.
He could picture her all too easily. A picture more detailed than real life. He often pictured her as he lay alone in his bed. Far too often, and for too long. Too many nights.
“I’m fine,” Sam lied.
“You were having a nightmare.” It wasn’t a question.
She came in. He could hear the rustle of her nightgown. He felt her warmth as she sat at the edge of his bed. “The same one?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s getting kind of boring now,” he joked. “I know how it ends.”
“It ends with you alive and well,” Astrid said.
Sam said nothing. That had been the outcome: He had survived. Yes, he was alive. But well?
“Go back to sleep, Astrid,” he said.
She reached for him, fumbled just a little, unable to find his face. But then her fingers touched his cheek. He turned away. He didn’t want her finding the wetness there. But she wouldn’t let him push her hand away.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “You just make it harder.”
“Is that a joke?”
He laughed. The tension broke. “Well, not an intentional one.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to, Sam.” She bent over and kissed his mouth.
He pushed her away. “You’re trying to distract me. Make me think about something else.”
“Is it working?”
“Yes, I’d say it’s working very well, Astrid.”
“Time for me to go.” She stood up and he heard her moving away.
He rolled out of bed. His feet hit the cold floor. “I need to do a walk-through.”
She stopped in the doorway. “Sam, I heard you come in two hours ago. You’ve had almost no sleep. And it will be dawn in a couple of hours. The town will survive that long without you. Edilio’s kids are on duty.”
Sam pulled on a pair of jeans and zipped them up. He considered telling her about Orsay, about this latest craziness. But there would be time for that later. No rush.
“There are things out there that Edilio’s guys can’t handle,” Sam said.
“Zil?” Astrid said. The warmth was rapidly draining out of her voice. “Sam, I despise Zil as much as you do. But you can’t take him on yet. We need a system. Zil is a criminal, basically, and we need a system.”
“He’s a punk creep, and until you come up with your great system, someone needs to keep an eye on him,” Sam snapped. Before Astrid could react angrily to his tone, he said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
Astrid came back into the room. He hoped it was because she was just too attracted to him to leave, but that wasn’t it. He could barely see her but could hear and feel that she was very close.
“Sam. Listen. It’s not all on your shoulders anymore.”
“You know, I seem to remember a time when you were all in favor of me taking on the responsibility,” Sam said. He pulled a T-shirt over his head. It was stiff with salt and smelled like low tide. That’s what happened when you washed clothes in salt water.
“That’s right,” Astrid said. “You’re a hero. You are without a doubt the biggest hero we have. But, Sam, we’re going to need more in the long run. We need laws and we need people to enforce laws. We don’t need…” She stopped herself just in time.
Sam made a wry face. “A boss? Well, it’s just kind of hard to adjust that quickly. One day I’m just me, minding my business. Then the FAYZ comes and suddenly everyone is telling me to step up. And now you all want me to back off.”
Orsay’s words came back to him, up from the fuzzy, sleepy recesses of his memory. The true hero knows when to walk away. It could have just as easily been Astrid saying that.
“I want you to go back to bed is all,” Astrid said.
“I know how you can get me to go back to bed,” he teased.
Astrid pushed him playfully, palm on his chest. “Nice try.”
“Truth is, I can’t go back to sleep now, anyway,” Sam said. “I might as well take another walk.”
“Well, try not to kill anyone,” Astrid said.
It was meant as a joke, but it bothered Sam. That’s what she thought of him? No, no, it was just a joke.
“Love you,” he said as he headed for the steps.
“Me too,” she said.
Dekka never remembered dreams. She was sure she had them because sometimes she woke up with a shadow on her mind. But she never really recalled details. The dreams or nightmares must have come-they said everyone dreamed, even dogs-but all Dekka retained was a sense of foreboding.
Her dreams-and her nightmares-were all in the real world.
Dekka’s parents had sent her away. They’d sent her to Coates Academy, a boarding school for troublesome kids. In Dekka’s case the “trouble” was not the few incidents of misbehavior she’d been involved in. Nor was it the occasional fight-Dekka had a habit of defending girls who had no other defender, and sometimes that resulted in a confrontation. Nine times out of ten, the fights went nowhere. Dekka was big and strong and fearless, so bullies usually found an excuse to walk away once they realized Dekka wouldn’t. But on half a dozen occasions blows had been traded.
Dekka won some and lost some.
But the fights weren’t the problem for her parents. Dekka’s parents had taught her to stand up for herself.
The problem had been a kiss. A teacher had seen her kissing a girl and had called her parents. It wasn’t even at school. It was in a parking lot outside a Claim Jumper Restaurant.
Dekka remembered every detail of that kiss. It was her first. It had scared her like nothing before ever had. And later, when she’d caught her breath, it had excited her like nothing before ever had.
It had upset her parents. To put it mildly. Especially when Dekka used the “L” word openly for the first time. Her father was not going to have a lesbian daughter. He’d put it quite a bit more crudely than that. He had slapped her face, hard, twice. Her mother had stood there dithering and ineffectual, saying nothing.
So it was off to Coates to be with fellow students who ranged from decent kids whose parents just wanted to be rid of them, all the way to the brilliant, manipulative bully, Caine, and his creep of a henchman, Drake.
Her parents imagined she would be under constant discipline. After all, Coates had a reputation for fixing damaged kids. And a part of Dekka wanted to be “fixed” because that would make life so much easier. But she had never chosen to be what she was, any more than she had chosen to be black. There was no “fixing” her.