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Caine, perfectly calm, said, “This is terrible. Does anyone know first aid? Sam? Your mother was a nurse.”
Little Pete, who had sat silent and still as a stone, began to rock faster and faster. His hands flapped as if he were warding off an attack of bees.
“I have to get him out of here, he’s spiraling,” Astrid said, and bundled Little Pete away. “Window seat, Petey, window seat.”
“I’m not a nurse,” Sam blurted. “I don’t know…”
It was Dahra Baidoo who broke from her stunned trance to kneel beside the thrashing, bellowing Cookie. “I know some first aid. Elwood, help me.”
“I guess we have our new nurse,” Caine said, sounding no more agitated or concerned than the school principal announcing a name for the honor roll.
Diana turned away, drifted past Caine, and whispered something in his ear. Caine’s dark eyes swept across the shocked kids, seeming to size them up in turn. He formed a bare smile, and nodded imperceptibly to Diana.
“This meeting is adjourned till we can help our wounded friend…what is his name? Cookie?”
Cookie’s voice was even more urgent, demanding help, edging toward hysteria. “It really hurts, it really hurts bad, oh, God.”
Caine led Drake and Diana down the aisle, past Sam, following Astrid and Little Pete from the church.
Drake paused halfway, turned back, and spoke for the first time. In an amused voice he said, “Oh, um, Captain Orc? Have your people—the ones who aren’t injured—line up outside. We’ll work out your…um, duties.”
With a grin that was almost a snarl, Drake added a cheerful, “Later.”
FIFTEEN
251 HOURS, 32 MINUTES
JACK WAS SLOW to realize that he should follow Caine and the rest out of the church. He jumped up too suddenly and banged into the pew, making a noise that drew the attention of the quiet boy Caine had called a hero.
“Sorry,” Jack said.
Jack walked quickly outside. At first he couldn’t see any of the other Coates kids. A lot of people were outside the church, milling around, talking about what had happened inside. Cookie’s cries of pain were only slightly muffled.
Jack spotted the tall blond girl he’d seen inside, and her little brother.
“Excuse me, do you know where Caine and everybody went?”
The girl, he didn’t remember her name, looked him in the eye. “He’s in the town hall. Where else would our new leader be?”
Jack often missed nuance when people talked. But he didn’t miss her cold sarcasm.
“Sorry to bother you.” He pushed his glasses back up on his nose and tried to smile at the same time. He bobbed his head and looked around for the town hall.
“It’s right there.” The girl pointed. Then she said, “My name is Astrid. Do you really think you can get the phones working?”
“Sure. It will take time, though. Right now the signal goes from your phone to the tower, right?” His tone was condescending and he formed his hands into a schematic of a tower with beams radiating toward it. “Then it gets sent on to a satellite, then down to a router. But we can’t send signals to the satellite now, so—”
He was interrupted by a shockingly loud cry of pain from inside the church. It made him flinch.
“How do you know we can’t reach a satellite?” Astrid asked.
He blinked in surprise and made the smug face he made whenever someone questioned his technological expertise. “I doubt you would understand.”
Astrid said, “Try me, kid.”
To Jack’s surprise, she seemed to follow everything he said. So he went on to explain how he could reprogram a few good desktop computers to serve as a primitive router for the phone system. “It wouldn’t be fast. I mean, it couldn’t handle more than, say, a dozen calls simultaneously, but it should work at a basic level.”
Astrid’s little brother seemed to be staring at Jack’s hands, which he was now twisting nervously. Jack was anxious being away from Caine. Before they had come down from Coates Academy, Drake Merwin had warned everyone that they should keep talk with the Perdido Beach kids to a minimum.
