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“Well then, that’s just what I’m going to do, Diana. I’m going to bargain. But first I need something to bargain with. And I know just the thing.”
Astrid Ellison was in the overgrown backyard with Little Pete when Sam brought her the news and the worm. Pete was swinging. Or more accurately he was sitting on the swing as Astrid pushed him. He seemed to like it.
It was dull, monotonous work pushing the swing with almost never a word of conversation or a sound of joy from her little brother. Pete was five years old, just barely, and severely autistic. He could talk, but mostly he didn’t. He had become, if anything, even more withdrawn since the coming of the FAYZ. Maybe it was her fault: she wasn’t keeping up with the therapy, wasn’t keeping up with all the futile, pointless exercises that were supposed to help autistics deal with reality.
Of course Little Pete made his own reality. In some very important ways he had made everyone’s reality.
The yard was not Astrid’s yard, the house not her house. Drake Merwin had burned her house down. But one thing there was no shortage of in Perdido Beach was housing. Most homes were empty. And although many kids stayed in their own homes, some found their old bedrooms, their old family rooms, too full of memories. Astrid had lost track of how many times she’d seen kids break down sobbing, talking about their mom in the kitchen, their dad mowing the lawn, their older brother or sister hogging the remote.
Kids got lonely a lot. Loneliness, fear, and sadness haunted the FAYZ. So, often kids moved in together, into what amounted almost to frat or sorority houses.
This house was shared by Astrid; Mary Terrafino; Mary’s little brother, John; and more and more often, Sam. Officially Sam lived in an unused office at town hall, where he slept on a couch, cooked with a microwave, and used what had been a public restroom. But it was a gloomy place, and Astrid had asked him more than once to consider this his home. They were, after all, a family of sorts. And, symbolically at least, they were the first family of the FAYZ, substitute mother and father to the motherless, fatherless kids.
Astrid heard Sam before she saw him. Perdido Beach had always been a sleepy little town, and now it was as quiet as church most of the time. Sam came through the house, letting himself in, calling her name as he went from room to room.
“Sam,” she yelled. But he didn’t hear her until he opened the back door and stepped out onto the deck.
One glance was all it took to know something terrible had happened. Sam wasn’t good at concealing his feelings, at least not from her.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, just strode across the weedy, patchy grass and put his arms around her. She hugged him back, patient, knowing he’d tell her when he could.
He buried his face in her hair. She could feel his breath on her neck, tickling her ear. She enjoyed the feel of his body against hers. Enjoyed the fact that he needed to hold her. But there was nothing romantic about this embrace.
At last he let her go. He moved to take over pushing Little Pete, seeming to need something physical to do.
“E.Z.’s dead,” he said without preamble. “I was touring the fields with Edilio. Me, Edilio, and Albert, and E.Z. along for entertainment. You know. No good reason for E.Z. to even be there, he just wanted to ride along and I said okay because I feel like all I ever do is say no, no, no to people, and now he’s dead.”
He pushed the swing harder than she’d been doing. Little Pete almost fell backward.
“Oh, God. How did it happen?”
“Worms,” Sam said dully. “Some kind of worm. Or snake. I don’t know. I have a dead one in there on the kitchen counter. I was hoping you’d…I don’t know what I was hoping. I figure you’re our expert on mutations. Right?”
He said the expert part with a wry smile. Astrid wasn’t an expert on anything. She was just the only person who cared enough to try and make sense in a systematic, scientific way of what was happening in the FAYZ.
“If you keep pushing him, he’ll be fine,” Astrid said of her brother.
She found the creature in a Baggie on the kitchen counter. It looked more like a snake than a worm, but not like any normal snake, either.
She pressed gingerly on the bag, hoping it really was dead. She spread waxed paper on the granite counter and dumped the worm out. She rummaged in the junk drawer for a tape measure and did her best to follow the contours of the creature.
“Eleven inches,” she noted.
Then she found her camera and took a dozen photos from every angle before using a fork to lift the monstrous thing back into the Baggie.
Astrid loaded the pictures onto her laptop. She dragged them into a folder labeled “Mutations—Photos.” There were dozens of pictures. Birds with strange talons or beaks. Snakes with short wings. Subsequent pictures showed larger snakes with larger wings. One, taken at a distance, seemed to show a rattlesnake the size of a small python with leathery wings as wide as a bald eagle’s.
She had a blurry photo of a coyote twice the size of any normal coyote. And a close-up of a dead coyote’s mouth showing a strangely shortened tongue that looked creepily human. There was a series of grotesque JPEGs of a cat that had fused with a book.
Other photos were of kids, most just looking normal, although the boy called Orc looked like a monster. She had a picture of Sam with green light blazing from his palms. She hated the picture because the expression on his face as he demonstrated his power for her camera was so sad.
Astrid clicked opened the worm pictures and used the zoom function to take a closer look.
Little Pete came in, followed by Sam.
“Look at that mouth,” Astrid said, awestruck. The worm had a mouth like a shark. It was impossible to count the hundreds of tiny teeth. The worm seemed to be grinning, even dead, grinning.
