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.
She had hurled her sick, strange little brother to the huge, appalling creatures that threatened her and threatened every human in the FAYZ.
Her brother had disappeared.
So had the creatures.
The sacrifice had worked.
Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac,
whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah.
Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one
of the mountains I will tell you about.”
Only no loving God, seeing her faith, had intervened to stop the killing.
For the excellent reason that there was no loving God.
That it had taken her so long to realize this was an embarrassment to her. She was Astrid the Genius, after all. The name she had carried for years. And yet Sam, with his shoulder-shrugging indifference to all matters religious, had been so much closer to the truth.
What kind of a fool looked at the world as it was—and this terrible world of the FAYZ especially—and believed in God? A God actually paying attention, let alone caring about his creations?
She had murdered Little Pete.
Murdered. She didn’t want to dress it up with any nice word. She wanted it harsh. She wanted the word to be sandpaper dragged across her raw conscience. She wanted to use that awful word to obliterate whatever was left of Astrid the Genius.
It was a good thing to have decided there was no God, because if there were then she would be damned to eternal hell.
Astrid’s hands shook. She laid the book flat on her lap. From her backpack she retrieved the bag of pot. She rationalized the drug on the grounds that it was the only way she could fall asleep. If this were the normal world, she might have a prescription for a sleeping pill. And that wouldn’t be wrong, would it?
Well, she needed to sleep. Hunting and fishing were early morning activities and she needed to sleep.
She flicked the lighter and brought it to the bowl of the pipe. Two hits: that was her rule. Just two.
Then she hesitated. A memory twinge. Something nagging at her consciousness, warning her that she had seen something important and missed it.
Astrid frowned, tracing back her actions. She set aside the pot and the book and walked back to her buried pantry. She hauled up the cooler. It was too dark to see into the hole, so she made the decision to use a few precious seconds of battery life and flicked on a small flashlight.
She knelt down, and yes, there it was. Three sides of the hole were dirt; the fourth was the barrier. Nothing ever stuck to the barrier—nothing. And yet, a few small clumps of dirt now did exactly that.
Astrid drew her knife and poked at the dirt, which fell away.
Was it her imagination? The barrier down in the hole looked different. It no longer seemed to glow softly. It was darker. The illusion of translucency was gone. Now it seemed opaque. Black.
She drew the sharp point of her knife along the barrier, from above the hole down.
It was subtle, almost imperceptible. But the knifepoint glided with no resistance whatsoever until it reached the darker color and then the point dragged. Not much. Not much at all. Just as if it had gone from polished glass to burnished steel.
She flicked off the light and took a deep, shaky breath.
The barrier was changing.
Astrid closed her eyes and stood there for a long moment, swaying slightly.
She put the cooler back into the hole. She would have to await sunrise to see more. But she already knew what she had seen. The beginning of the endgame. And she still didn’t know what the game was.
Astrid lit the pipe, took a deep lungful, then, after a few minutes, another. She felt her emotions go fuzzy and indistinct. The guilt faded. And within half an hour sleep drew her to her tent, where she crawled into her sleeping bag and lay with her arms curled around the shotgun.
Astrid giggled. So, she thought, she wouldn’t have to go to hell. Hell was coming to her.
When that final night came the demon Drake would find her.
She would run. But never fast enough.
TWO
64 HOURS, 57 MINUTES
“PATRICK, YOUR GENIUS is showing!” Terry cried in a high falsetto voice.
“It iiiiis?” Philip asked in a low, very dumb voice. He covered himself with his hands and a wave of laughter rose from the assembled audience.
It was Friday Fun Fest at Lake Tramonto. Every Friday the kids rewarded themselves with an evening of entertainment. In this case, Terry and Philip were doing a re-creation of a SpongeBob episode. Terry had a yellow T-shirt painted with spongelike holes, and Phil wore an arguably pink T-shirt for the role of Patrick Star.
The “stage” was the top deck of a big houseboat that had been shoved out into the water so that it wallowed a few dozen feet off the dock. Becca, who played Sandy Cheeks, and Darryl, who did a very good Squidward, were in the cabin below waiting for their cues.
Sam Temple watched from the marina office, a narrow, two-story, gray-sided tower that afforded him a clear view over the heads of the crowd below. Normally the houseboat was his, but not when there was a show to put on.