Taylor stepped out beside her. Off to the north, up the coast, the orange glow of fire.
“Some idiot burning down their house with a candle again?” Taylor suggested.
“I don’t think so. This is no accident,” Lana said.
“Who would start fires deliberately?” Taylor wondered. “I mean, what does it accomplish?”
“Fear. Pain. Despair,” Lana said. “Chaos. It accomplishes chaos. Evil things love chaos.”
Taylor shrugged. “Probably just Zil.”
“Nothing in the FAYZ is ever just anything, Taylor. This is a very complicated place.”
“No offense, Healer, but you’re getting weirder all the time,” Taylor said.
Lana smiled. “You have no idea.”
Quinn’s little flotilla set out to sea. Dark as always. Too early. Sleep still crunchy in everyone’s eyes. But that was normal. Routine.
They were a tight little group, Quinn thought. It made him feel good. As much as he had screwed up in his life, he had done this well.
Quinn’s fishing fleet. Feeding the FAYZ.
As they cleared the marina and headed out to sea Quinn felt an unusual joy welling up inside him. What did I do when the FAYZ happened? he asked himself. I fed people.
Not a bad thing. A bad start, yes. He had freaked out. He had at one point betrayed Sam to Caine. And he had never gotten over the memory of that awful battle against Caine and Drake and the coyotes.
So many vivid, indelible memories. He wished he could cut them out of his brain. But other times he realized no, that was foolish. It was all those things that had made him this new person.
He wasn’t Quinn the coward anymore. Or Quinn the turncoat. He was Quinn the fisherman.
He pulled on the oars, enjoying the healthy burn in his shoulders. He was facing Perdido Beach.
So he saw the first small flower of flame. An orange pinpoint in the darkness.
“Fire,” he said calmly. He was in a pole-fishing boat with two other guys.
The others stirred and looked.
From a nearby boat a shout. “Hey, Quinn, you see that?”
“Yeah. Keep pulling. We’re not the fire department.”
They set to their oars again and the boats edged farther from shore. Far enough out that they could soon drop hooks and spread nets.
But every eye was on the town now.
“It’s spreading,” someone said.
“It’s jumping from house to house.”
“No,” Quinn said. “I don’t think it’s spreading. I think…I think someone is setting those fires.”
He felt his stomach churn. His muscles, warm from rowing felt suddenly stiff and cold.
“The town is burning,” a voice said.
They watched in silence as the orange flames spread and billowed up into the sky. The town was no longer dark.
“We’re fishermen, not fighters,” Quinn said.
Oars splashed. Oarlocks creaked. The boats pushed water aside with a soft shushing sound.
Sam and Edilio broke into a run. Across the highway onto the access road. Past the rusting hulks of cars that had crashed into one another or into storefronts or simply stalled in the middle of the highway on that fateful day when every driver disappeared.
They ran down Sheridan, passing the school on their right. At least it wasn’t on fire. Once they reached the cross-street at Golding the smoke was much thicker. It billowed toward them, impossible to avoid. Sam and Edilio choked and slowed down.
Sam pulled off his T-shirt and bunched it over his mouth, but it didn’t do much good. His eyes stung.
He crouched low, hoping the smoke would pass overhead. That didn’t work, either.
Sam grabbed Edilio’s arm and pulled him along. They crossed Golding and in the lee of houses on Sheridan they found the air was clearer but still reeking. The houses on the west side of Sheridan were black silhouettes cut out of the sheet of flame that soared and danced and curled toward heaven from Sherman Avenue.
They started running again, down the street and around the corner on Alameda, trying to stay on the sweet side of the very slight breeze. The smoke was still thick but no longer blowing toward them.
Fire was everywhere along Sherman. A roaring, ravenous, living thing. It was more intense north of Alameda, but it was moving fast south toward the water down the rest of Sherman.
“Why is the fire moving against the breeze?” Edilio asked.
“Because someone’s setting new fires,” Sam said grimly.
Sam glanced left. Right. At least six houses burning to their right. The rest of that block would go up, no stopping it, not a thing they could do.
“There are kids in some of these houses,” Edilio said, choking from emotion as much as smoke.
At least three fires burned to their left. As they watched Sam saw a twirling firework, a spinning Roman candle that soared and arced downward and crashed into the front of a house far down the block. He couldn’t hear the Molotov cocktail smash over the roar of fire around him.
“Come on!” Sam yelled, and ran toward the newest fire.
He wished he had Brianna with him, or Dekka. Where were they? Both could have helped save lives.
Sam barely missed plowing into a group of kids, some as young as three, all huddled together in the middle of the street, faces lit by fire, eyes wide with fear.
“It’s Sam!”
“Thank God, Sam is here! Sam is here!”
“Sam, our house is burning down!”
“I think my little brother is in there!”