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He had run in blind panic from Perdido Beach. That shameful fact filled his mind, driving out even hunger.
He had seen Drake and he had panicked.
Freaked.
Lost it.
After bumming a free meal off Hunter Sam had headed toward the power plant. The power plant was where it had happened.
The beating, the whipping, had been so bad that Brianna had found morphine in the medical supplies at the plant and jabbed the needle into him and even then, even after the painkiller flooded him, the pain was too awful to endure.
But he had endured. And he’d lived through the next nightmarish hours, the morphine hallucinations, the staggering, stumbling, needing-to-scream hours.
He had fought Drake again, but it was Caine who had finally killed the psychopath. Caine had thrown Drake down a mine shaft that then collapsed on Drake’s head. Nothing could have survived.
And yet, Drake was alive.
He’d coped since that day by knowing that Drake was dead, buried under tons of rock, dead, gone, never to be faced again. That fact had let him cope.
But if Drake was unkillable…
Immortal…
Would Drake always be a part of life in the FAYZ?
Sam sat on the edge of the cliff, just half a mile from the power plant. He had found a bike on the way there and ridden it until the tire blew out. Then he had walked down the winding coast road intending to return to the power plant, to that room where it had happened. The place where Drake had broken him.
That was the thing of it, Sam thought, as he looked out over the empty, sparkling sea: Drake had broken something inside him. Sam had tried to put it back together. He’d tried to go back to being Sam. The Sam everyone expected him to be.
Astrid had been a part of it. Love and all. It was so corny, but love had kept him from despair. Love and the cold comfort of knowing that Drake had died while Sam had survived.
Love and revenge. Nice combination.
And responsibility, he realized suddenly. That had helped in a strange way, knowing that kids needed him. Knowing that he was necessary.
Now Astrid was telling him he was not so necessary. And, by the way, not so loved. And the comfort of thoughts of Drake’s broken body lying under the ground? Gone.
Sam took off his shirt. The wound in his shoulder didn’t look like much. When he probed it with his finger he could feel something hard and round just below the skin.
He squeezed the wound with his fingers, wincing at the pain, squeezed some more and the dull lead ball came out along with a little blood.
He looked at the ball. A shotgun pellet. About the size of a BB. He tossed it away. A Band-Aid would have been nice, but he would have to content himself with washing the wound.
He started climbing down the cliff, needing something to do, and hoping he might find something to eat down in the tidal pools in the rocks.
It was a tough climb. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get back up once he was down. But physical movement seemed necessary to him.
I could jump in the water and swim, he told himself.
I could swim until I can’t swim anymore.
He wasn’t afraid of the ocean. You couldn’t be a surfer and be afraid of the ocean. He could start swimming, straight out. From here it was ten miles to the distant FAYZ wall. Couldn’t see it from here, couldn’t usually see it at all until you were up close to it. It had a gray, satiny, pseudo-reflective character that fooled the eye. As far as they knew, it was a complete sphere, a dome, though it looked like the sky, and at night it looked like stars.
He wondered if he could reach the wall. Probably not. He wasn’t in as good a shape as he’d been back in the old days.
He’d probably wear out after a mile. If he swam hard, maybe a mile, maybe a mile and a half. And then, if he let it, the ocean would take him down, swallow him up. Not the first person to be taken by the Pacific. There were human bones scattered across the ocean floor, from here to China.
He reached the rocks and bent over awkwardly to rinse the shotgun wound in salt water.
