“He hurt Astrid,” Sam said. “She’s alive. But he took her. He hurt her.”
“And here you are the tragic hero, after all,” Lana said dryly. She was unusually droll for Lana. The world was ending and she was being witty. “You may find you need this. And you know what? I think I’m done with it.”
She slipped something heavy into the waist of his jeans, and then walked away with her dog.
Sam felt the butt of Lana’s automatic pistol. Was it true? True that he didn’t have to do this? True that he needed the gun?
“Drake!” he yelled.
He heard the town burning. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The heat was intense, right on the line between barely tolerable and not. It was like standing too close to a fireplace, feeling it dry your skin, and knowing that another five degrees and you’d no longer be dry: you’d be burned. There were sparks everywhere in the air. The whole town would burn.
“Drake!”
The whip slashed his back, a pain like being branded by a hot iron.
He spun, and Drake’s fist smashed him in the face.
Sam went down on one knee, aimed his hands, and fired.
Nothing happened.
Drake seemed as shocked as Sam. He made a single, sudden laugh. “Not so dangerous now, are you, Sam?”
Drake struck again, and the whip burned across Sam’s shoulders. Sam lurched forward.
“I had fun with your girlfriend, Sam,” Drake said.
Sam tried again. But the light did not come. He was powerless. He drew the pistol.
“Come on, you know better than that, Sam, Sam, the hero man. You know bullets don’t kill me.”
“Gaia’s dead. The FAYZ is ended,” Sam said, and leveled the pistol at Drake’s face. “So I don’t know what will work and what won’t. Why don’t we find out?”
But a line had appeared around Drake’s neck. It was blood red, like a gruesome smile. Like the mark a hanged man might bear. It was widening, a gap forming between what had been Drake’s neck and Alex’s neck.
Drake hadn’t noticed yet. He grinned and slashed Sam hard, landing the whip’s blow again across his shoulder, curling around to tear at his back.
But when he retracted his whip arm, it was shorter. A foot-long segment had broken off. It lay like some nightmare worm on the sidewalk.
“No,” Drake said, but the sound of his voice was weakened by air sucking in through his neck.
Drake tried to strike again, to bring Sam down, but his whip arm was limp; it barely moved. It was curling from the end, seeming to crisp like parchment held too close to the fire.
“I’ll get out of here,” Drake said in a fading whisper. “I will find her. And I will make it last for days, Sam. I’ll make her scream, Sam. I’ll make her—”
Sam’s finger tightened on the trigger. It would be good to pull it. Drake was disintegrating before his eyes, and yet still, still, it would be good to pull that trigger. To feel the gun buck in his hand. To see the impact.
At that moment, as Sam stood poised between shooting and not, Drake’s head toppled off its grafted body and hit the ground.
One. Two. Three. Four. And the body collapsed.
The terrible whip arm looked like the skin a snake sheds during molting.
Sam picked up Drake’s head. The eyes fluttered, as though there might still be life.
Sam walked stiffly up the steps to the church, where the fire burned hot. He forced himself forward into the heat, feeling the hair on his head turn crisp, eyes so dry he couldn’t blink. And tossed Drake’s head into the flames.
“Okay,” he said to no one at all. “Now, I can get the hell out of here.”