Fear (2 page)

The air-conditioning suddenly came alive. The trailers tended to be hot, even on cool days like this one with the ocean breeze blowing.

“We know by now not to believe everything we hear,” Abana said mordantly.

The colonel nodded. “They think there may be a … a softening, they’re calling it.” He held up a hand, cutting off the quick reaction. “No, they still can’t penetrate the barrier. But in the past when they’ve tried bombarding portions of the barrier with X-rays or gamma rays the barrier has acted as a perfect mirror, bouncing back a hundred percent of the energy that struck it.”

“That’s changed?”

“The last test showed ninety-eight-point-four percent refraction. It doesn’t sound like much. And it may not mean anything. But it’s been a hundred percent since day one. And a hundred percent every day since. And now it’s not a hundred percent.”

“It’s weakening,” Abana said.

“Maybe.”

The three of them, Connie, Abana, and George (the parents of Sam, Dahra, and E.Z.) left the trailer. The California National Guard’s grandly named Camp Camino Real stood on the landward side of the highway, in a vacant stretch of land just a quarter mile from the southern boundary of the Bowl. It was an array of two dozen trailers and sheds laid out with military precision. More permanent buildings—a barracks, a motor pool, a maintenance building—were under construction.

When Camp Camino Real had first gone up it was all alone on the lovely, windswept heights above the beach. But since then the Courtyard by Marriott had been completed, as had the Carl’s Jr. The Del Taco had just sold its first burrito a few days ago, and the Holiday Inn Express had opened one wing while construction continued on the rest.

There were only two media satellite trucks left, parked by the side of the highway. But they rarely got any on-air time anymore: the country and the world had largely lost interest, although about two thousand tourists a day still made the trip up the highway to the viewing area, parking all along the highway for a mile or more.

A handful of souvenir vendors still made a living from canvas-awninged stalls.

George climbed into his car and drove off without a word. Connie and Abana lived here now, sharing a Winnebago with a privileged parking spot overlooking the Pacific. They had a nice gas barbecue donated by Home Depot, and every Friday evening she and Abana would have a cookout—burgers or ribs—with the media people and whatever Guardsmen or soldiers or highway patrolmen happened to be around and off duty.

The two women walked across the highway from Camp Camino Real and sat in lawn chairs turned toward the ocean. Connie made coffee and brought a cup to Abana.

“Do we hold a conference call on this?” Abana asked.

Connie sighed. “The families will want to know.”

The families
. That was the term settled on by the media. At first they had referred to them as “the survivors.” But that had implied the others, the children, had died. Even at the start the mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, had rejected that idea.

Out at sea a coast guard cutter rode on gentle waves, guarding the watery perimeter of the anomaly. A grief-crazed family member had driven a boatload of explosives into the side of the dome months earlier. The resulting explosion had had no effect on the Bowl, of course.

“I was just getting to the point…,” Connie began.

Abana waited and sipped her coffee.

“I was getting to the point where I was starting to think I needed to get back to something else. You know? Like maybe it was time to move on.”

Her friend nodded. “And now this. This weakening. This one-point-six-percent change.”

“And now, and now, and now,” Connie said wearily. “Hope is cruel.”

“Some guy, some physicist at Stanford, says if the barrier ever does come down it could be catastrophic.”

“He’s not the first to say that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe not. But he’s the first to have a Nobel Prize. He thinks the barrier is some form of protective coating over an antimatter sphere. He’s worried it could set off an explosion big enough to annihilate the western half of the United States.”

Connie made a dismissive snort. “Theory number eight thousand seven hundred and forty-two.”

“Yeah,” Abana agreed. But she looked worried.

“That’s not going to happen,” Connie said firmly. “Because what’s going to happen is that the barrier is going to come down. And my son Sam and your daughter, Dahra, are going to come walking down that road.”

Abana smiled. She finished their long-worn joke. “And walk right past us to get a burger at Carl’s.”

Connie reached for her hand. “That’s right. That’s what’s going to happen. It’ll be, ‘Hey, Mom, see you later: I’m going to go grab a burger.’”

They were quiet for a while. Both women closed their eyes and lifted their faces to the sun.

“If only there had been some warning,” Abana said.

She’d said it before: she regretted having argued with her daughter the morning before the event.

And as usual the response was on the tip of Connie’s tongue: I did have warning.

I had a warning.

But this time, as every time, Connie Temple said nothing.

SHE WORE
A
pair of jeans and a plaid flannel shirt over a black T-shirt several sizes too big.

A leather belt made two turns around her waist. It was a man’s belt, and a big man at that. But it was sturdy and bore the weight of the .38 revolver, the machete, and her water bottle.

Her backpack was dirty and the seams were all frayed, but it sat comfortably on her thin shoulders. In the pack she had three precious vacuum packs of dehydrated macaroni liberated from distant campsites. Just add water. She also had most of a cooked pigeon in a Tupperware container, a dozen wild green onions, a bottle of vitamins—she allowed herself one every three days—as well as pencil and paper, three books, a small bag of pot and a small pipe, needle and thread, two Bic lighters, and a spare water bottle. There was also a medicine pouch: a few Band-Aids, a mostly used tube of Neosporin and a dozen precious Tylenol, and infinitely more precious tampons.

Astrid Ellison had changed.

Her blond hair was short, hacked off crudely with a knife and without benefit of a mirror. Her face was deeply tanned. Her hands were calloused and scarred from the innumerable small cuts she’d gotten from prying open mussels. One fingernail had been torn completely off when she slipped down an abrupt hill and ended up saving herself only by clawing madly at rocks and shrubs.

Astrid swung the pack off her shoulders, loosened the drawstring, and extracted a pair of heavy gloves sized for a grown man.

She surveyed the blackberry bramble for ripe berries. They didn’t all ripen at once, and she never allowed herself to take any before they were fully developed. This was her blackberry patch, the only one she’d located, and she was determined not to be greedy.

Astrid’s stomach rumbled as she dealt with the incredibly sharp thorns—so sharp they sometimes went right through the gloves—and pried berries loose. She took two dozen: dessert for later.

She was at the northern edge of the FAYZ, up where the barrier cut through the Stefano Rey National Park. Here the trees—redwoods, black oak, quaking aspen, ash—grew tall. Some were cut through by the barrier. In places branches went into the barrier. She wondered if they came out the other side.

She wasn’t far inland, just a quarter mile or maybe a little more from the shore, where she often searched for oysters, clams, mussels, and crabs no bigger than large roaches.

Astrid was usually hungry. But she wasn’t starving.

Water was a bigger concern. She’d found a water tank at the ranger station, and she’d found a tiny stream of what seemed like clean, fresh water fed from some underground aquifer, but neither was close to her camp. And since water weighed a lot to carry, she had to watch every drop and—

A sound.

Astrid crouched, swung her shotgun off her shoulder, raised it, sighted along the barrels, all in one fluid, long-practiced move.

She listened. Listened hard. She heard her heart pounding and willed it to slow, slow, quiet so she could listen.

Her breath was ragged but she calmed it a little, at least.

She scanned slowly, turning her upper body left to right, then back, covering the trees where she thought the sound had come from. She listened hard in all directions.

Nothing.

Sound!

Dry leaves and damp earth. Not heavy, whatever it was. It wasn’t a heavy sound. Not a Drake sound. Not even a coyote.

Astrid relaxed a little. Her shoulders were tight. She rolled them, hoping to avoid a cramp.

Something small scuttled away. Probably a possum or a skunk.

Not Drake.

Not the monster with the tentacle for an arm. Not the sadist. The psychopath.

The murderer, Whip Hand.

Astrid stood all the way up and slipped the shotgun back into place.

How many times each day did she endure this same fear? How many hundreds of times had she peered into the trees or bushes or rocks searching for that narrow, dead-eyed face? Day and night. As she dressed. As she cooked. As she used the slit trench. When she slept. How many times? And how many times had she imagined firing both barrels of the shotgun straight into his face, obliterating his features, blood spraying … and knowing that he would still come after her?

She would pump round after round into him and still she would be the one running and gasping for air, tripping through the forest, crying, and knowing that nothing she could do would stop him.

The evil that could not be killed.

The evil that sooner or later would take her.

With her berries safely tucked away in her backpack Astrid headed back toward her camp.

Camp was two tents: one—buff colored—she slept in, and one—green with tan lining—she used for storage of nonfood items scavenged from the various campgrounds, ranger offices, and trash heaps in the Stefano Rey.

Once home Astrid unloaded her berries and the rest of the food she’d brought with her into a red-and-white plastic cooler. She’d dug a hole right up against the barrier, and the cooler fit perfectly into that hole.

She’d learned many things in the four months since she had left everyone and everything behind and gone off into the woods. One thing she had learned was that animals avoided the barrier. Even the insects stayed a few feet back. So storing her food right up against that eye-tricking, pearly gray wall kept her food supply safe.

It also helped to keep her safe. Camping here, this close to the barrier, and right at the cliff’s edge, meant there were fewer ways a predator could come at her.

She had strung a wire in a perimeter around the camp. The wire was hung with bottles containing marbles, and rusty cans. Anything that hit the wire would make a racket.

She couldn’t say she felt safe. A world where Drake was presumably still alive would never be safe. But she felt as safe here as anywhere in the FAYZ.

Astrid flopped into her nylon sling chair, propped her weary feet up on a second chair, and opened a book. Life now was an almost constant search for food, and without any lamp she had only an hour of light at sunset to read.

It was a beautiful location atop a sheer bluff by the ocean. But she turned to the setting sun to catch the red rays on the page of her book.

The book was
Heart of Darkness
.

Astrid looked up at the trees. Her camp was in a small clearing, but the trees pressed close on two sides. They weren’t as towering here close to the shore as they were farther inland. These seemed friendlier trees than the ones deeper into the forest.

“‘The heavy, mute spell of the wilderness,’” Astrid read aloud.

For her the spell was about forgetfulness. The harsh life she now lived was less harsh than the reality she had left behind in Perdido Beach. That was the true wilderness. But there she had awakened forgotten and brutal instincts.

Here it was only nature trying to starve her, break her bones, cut and poison her. Nature was relentless but it was free of malice. Nature did not hate her.

It was not nature that had driven her to sacrifice her brother’s life.

Astrid closed her eyes and then the book and tried to calm the rush of emotion inside her. Guilt was a fascinating thing: it seemed not to weaken over time. If anything it grew stronger as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract. And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity.