Lies

THIRTY-NINE

ASTRID FELL AND fell knowing it wasn’t real, knowing it was all an illusion of some kind. But it was very hard to believe that when her clothing rippled and her hair flew straight up and her arms were reaching for the walls of a tunnel that couldn’t possibly be real but seemed like it was.

But after a while falling began to feel like floating. She was suspended in the air and things no longer streamed past; they floated around.

Symbols, Astrid thought.

She was relieved to see that her brain still worked. Whatever was happening, whatever power was giving her this intense waking dream, it wasn’t frying her brain. Reason intact. Words right there where she had left them.

Symbols. Neon symbols arrayed across a dark landscape.

Not even symbols, she realized: avatars.

There was a monstrous face framed with long dark hair that formed snakes. Dark eyes and a mouth that dribbled fire.

There was a female being with orange rays, like sunset beams spraying out of her head.

A male with a hand held up and a green light formed in a ball. This avatar was far away, at the edge of the dark playing field.

One avatar was neither male nor female but half of each sex. Metal teeth and a whip.

Nerezza. Orsay. Sam. But what was the fourth avatar?

It was this fourth avatar that seemed to be in contention between two manipulators, two players. One player was represented by a box. The box was closed but for one edge that shone so bright it was hard to look at. Like a toy box containing a sun.

Petey, Astrid whispered.

The other player she felt rather than saw. She tried to turn her eyes toward it, to see it, but it was always just out of range. And she realized that the light box was restraining her, not allowing her to see the opponent.

For her own good. Protecting her.

Petey would not let her look at the gaiaphage.

Astrid’s mind flooded with images of other shadow avatars. Dark avatars. Dead. Victims in the game.

All of these were in neat little rows, like pawns lined up before the soul-killing emptiness that was the gaiaphage.

“Astrid!”

Someone was yelling her name.

“Astrid! Snap out of it!”

The game field disappeared.

Astrid’s eyes saw the plaza, her brother just getting to his feet, and Brianna shaking her roughly.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Brianna demanded, more angry than concerned.

Astrid ignored Brianna and searched for Nerezza. She was nowhere to be seen.

“The girl, there was a girl here,” Astrid said.

“What’s going on, Astrid? I just-” She stopped talking long enough to cough ten, twelve times in startlingly rapid succession. “I just stopped Lance from beating some kid half to death. People all running around like nuts down on the beach. I mean, jeez, I take a day off to get over this stupid flu and suddenly it’s craziness everywhere!”

Astrid blinked, looked around, tried to make sense of way too much information. “It’s the game,” she said. “It’s the gaiaphage. It reached Petey through his game.”

“Say what?”

Astrid knew she’d said too much. Brianna was not the person to trust with the truth about Little Pete. “Did you see Nerezza?”

“What? The girl who hangs out with Orsay?”

“She’s not a girl,” Astrid said. “Not really.” She grabbed Brianna’s arm. “Find Sam. We need him. Find him!”

“Okay. Where?”

“I don’t know,” Astrid cried. She bit her lip. “Look everywhere!”

“Hey,” Brianna said, and then interrupted herself to cough until she was red in the face. She cursed, coughed some more, and finally said, “Hey, I’m fast. But even I can’t look everywhere.”

“Let me think for a minute,” Astrid said. She squeezed her eyes shut. Where? Where would Sam have gone? He was hurt, angry, feeling useless.

No, that wasn’t quite right.

“Oh, God, where?” Astrid wondered.

She hadn’t seen him since he had gone off to deal with Zil and the fire. What had happened to make him run away? Had he done something he was ashamed of?

No, that wasn’t it, either. He had seen the whipped boy.

“The power plant,” Astrid said.

“Why would he be there?” Brianna frowned.

“Because it’s the place that scares him most,” Astrid said.

Brianna looked doubtful. But then her frown lines relaxed. “Yeah,” she said. “That would be Sam.”

“You have to get him, Brianna. He’s Petey’s best piece.”

“Ummmm…what?”

“Never mind,” Astrid snapped. “Get Sam here. Now!”

“How?”

“Hey, you’re the Breeze, right? Just do it!”

Brianna considered that for a moment. “Yeah, okay. I’m outta-”

The “here” was lost in the wind.

Astrid handed the game player to her brother. He looked down at the ground, oblivious. He felt the game player for a moment, then dropped it.

“You have to keep playing, Petey.”

Her brother shook his head. “I lost.”

“Petey, listen to me.” Astrid knelt before him, held him, then thought better of it and let him go. “I saw the game. You showed me the game. I was inside it. But it’s real, Petey. It’s real.”

Little Pete stared past her. Not interested. Not even seeing her, maybe, let alone hearing her.

“Petey. He’s trying to destroy us. You have to play.”

She shoved the game at him. “Nerezza is the gaiaphage’s avatar. You made her real. You gave her a body. Only you have that kind of power. It’s using you, Petey, it’s using you to kill.”

But if Little Pete cared, or even understood, he showed no sign of it.

It was a panic run. Most of the population of Perdido Beach, all running and no one knowing quite why. Or maybe they all knew why but each had his own reason.

Zil loved it. Here at last was the total blind panic he’d hoped would result from the fires. Here was all order breaking down completely.

Kids on the beach stumbled in the sand. Some ran screaming into the water.

Drake, alive. Drake with his whip hand lashing at them, like he was driving cattle into the sea.

More kids sticking to the road, running parallel to the beach. Zil was with them, running with Turk beside him, looking for the freaks, seeing a kid whose only mutant power was the ability to glow brightly, harmless, but a freak and like all freaks he had to be dealt with.

Turk pulled up, raised his shotgun, aimed and fired. He missed, but the kid panicked and smashed facedown against the curb. Zil kicked him and kept running. He shouted in wild glee as he ran.

“Run, freaks! Run!”

But there were very few freaks in the mass of kids on the road. Too few real targets. But that was okay because the point right now was fear, fear and chaos.

Nerezza had told him it was coming. A freak herself? Zil wondered. He would hate to have to kill her, she was hot and mysterious and so much better than boring, pasty Lisa.

He spotted Lance ahead. Good old Lance, but he had lost his gun and his bat.

“I need a weapon!” Lance cried. “Give me something!”

Turk had a nail-studded stick. He tossed it to Lance. They took off again, a pack of wolves chasing down a terrified herd of cattle.

The older kids were pulling away. But the fat ones, the young ones, they were falling behind, worn out or simply unable to keep up on shorter legs.

They were all crammed onto the curved road that led to Clifftop.

Zil pointed. “That kid there. There! He’s a freak lover!”

Lance got there first and swung the nailed stick. The kid evaded it and hared off the road, tumbling down the slope into bushes and coming to rest against a cactus.

Zil laughed and pointed. “He’s yours, Turk!”

And Zil was off again, with Lance at his side, Lance like a blond warrior god, like Thor, slashing away at everyone now, no longer differentiating between freak or non-freak, they could all die, all of them who had refused to join Zil. “Run!” Zil screamed. “Run, you cowards! Join me, or run for your lives!”

He paused for a minute, winded from running uphill. Lance stopped beside him. Others, half a dozen of them, the Human Crew faithful, each of them a human hero, Zil thought fiercely.

Then Lance’s grin fell. He pointed. Back down the road they had just climbed.

Dekka, walking, but fast just the same.

Relentless.

Someone was beside Zil. He could sense her. Nerezza. He looked at her. Her throat was red, like the first stage of serious bruising. There was a cut on her forehead. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was all astray.

“Who did that to you?” Zil demanded, outraged.

Nerezza ignored him. “She has to be stopped.”

“Who?” Zil jerked his chin toward Dekka. “Her? How am I supposed to stop her?”

“Her powers don’t reach as far as your gun, Zil,” Nerezza said.

Zil frowned. “Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“How do you know? Are you a freak?”

Nerezza laughed. “What am I? What are you, Zil? Are you the Leader? Or are you a coward who hides from some fat, black lesbian freak? Because right now you choose which to be.”

Lance glanced nervously at Zil. Turk started to say something but couldn’t seem to find the right words.

“She has to be stopped,” Nerezza said.

“Why?” Zil asked.

“Because we’re going to need gravity, Leader.”

Mary reached the top of the road, up to Clifftop. A series of smaller pathways led down to the cliff itself.

She looked back to check on her charges and saw the whole population of Perdido Beach seemingly following her.

Kids were spread all down the road, some running, some wheezing and gasping for breath. At the back of the crowd Zil and a handful of gun-toting thugs.

Farther off, kids who had fled to the beach were being herded back onto the road.

This second group fled from a different terror. From where she stood Mary could too clearly see Drake, driving terrified kids before him. Some were in the water. Others tried to climb over the breakwater and the rocks that separated Perdido’s main beach from the smaller beach beneath Clifftop.

As the Prophetess had said. The tribulation of fire. The demon. And the red sunset in which Mary would lay down her burden.

Mary cried, “Come with me, children, stay with me!”

And they did.

They followed her across the overgrown, formerly manicured grounds of Clifftop. To the cliff. To the very edge of the cliff, with the blank, inscrutable FAYZ wall just to their left, the end of their particular world.

Down below on the beach, Orsay sat cross-legged on the rock that had become her pulpit. Some kids had already reached her and gathered, terrified, around her. Others were scrambling down the cliff to her.

The sun set in a blaze of red.

Orsay sat very still on her rock. She seemed not to be moving a muscle. Her eyes were closed.

Below her stood Jill, the Siren, seeming lost, scared, a wobbly silhouette against the light show in the west.

“Are we going down to the beach, Mother Mary?” a little girl asked.

“I didn’t bring my baving suit,” another said.

It was just minutes away now, Mary knew. Her fifteenth birthday. Her Mother’s Day birthday.

She glanced at her watch.

She should be troubled, she knew, afraid. But for the first time in so very, very long Mary was at peace. The children’s questions didn’t reach her. The concerned, anxious, upturned faces were far away. Everything was finally going to be okay.

The Prophetess did not stir. She sat so calmly, unmoved by the madness around her, indifferent to cries and pleas and demands.

The Prophetess has seen that we will all suffer a time of terrible tribulation. This will come very soon. And then, Mary, then will come the demon and the angel. And in a red sunset we will be delivered.

Orsay’s prophecy, as told to Mary by Nerezza.

Yes, Mary thought. She truly is the Prophetess.

“I can climb down to the beach,” Justin said bravely. “I’m not scared.”

“No need,” Mary said. She ruffled his head affectionately. “We’ll fly down.”