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Astrid put her hand to his head. He’d been hot all night, but this was worse. She pushed the button on the thermometer by the bed, waited for it to zero out, and stuck it under Little Pete’s tongue.
She felt a cool breeze in the room. Her eyes went instantly to the window. It was open wide. Pushed all the way up.
There was no question: it had been closed. She’d been sitting beside it. It had been locked. And now it was open.
And for the first time since the coming of the FAYZ, a cool breeze blew into the room and wafted over the damp forehead of the most powerful person in this little universe.
Drake felt the Darkness touch his mind. He shivered with pleasure.
It was still out there, Drake was sure of it. Still calling to him, to Drake, the faithful one, the one who would never turn against the Darkness.
Drake cracked his whip hand just to hear the sonic-boom snap of it. And to let Orc hear it, too.
“Hey, Orc! Come down here so I can whip that little patch of skin off you!” Drake demanded.
Drake Merwin could see a little by the light of the tiny, dim Sammy sun. He hated that light—he knew where it had come from, and what it represented: Sam’s power, that dangerous light of his.
Drake remembered the pain of that light. He’d been on his back, helpless. And Sam, his face a mask of rage, glorying in his moment of revenge, had burned off Drake’s legs and was working his way methodically up Drake’s torso.
Then that stupid little pig Brittney had emerged.
Drake didn’t know what happened next, he couldn’t see or hear when Brittney was in control. All he knew was that Sam hadn’t vaporized him. And here he was, trapped. Locked in this basement listening to Orc’s heavy tread upstairs.
Drake didn’t know what had happened to make him this way, to cause him to share a body with Brittney. Much of recent life was a mystery. He remembered Caine turning on him. He remembered the massive uranium rod flying straight toward him.
And the next thing he knew, he was in a nightmare that went on and on and on forever. There was a girl in the nightmare, the little piggy, the stupid little metal-mouth moron, Brittney.
Hadn’t they killed her? Long ago? He remembered a crumpled, bleeding form on a polished floor.
Brittney had died. Drake had died. And then, neither of them was dead, and both somehow were connected in a nightmare world where dirt filled their mouths and ears and held them pinned.
Digging like worms. That was the nightmare reality. Drake and the piggy digging in a nightmare, digging dirt, pushing it aside, compressing it to buy half an inch of clearance.
Dark, that dream. Utterly dark. No Sammy sun. No light.
He remembered thinking in the nightmare, thinking, “There’s no air.”
Buried alive, there couldn’t be any air. No light and no air, no water, no food, forever and forever.
It had taken a long time before his mind had cleared enough for him to realize the wonderful truth: he was dead . . . but alive.
Unkillable. Buried in the damp earth and yet somehow alive.
And then, hard-won freedom of a sort. The nightmare was no longer one of being buried in the earth but of walking the earth. He would be in one place, and then quite suddenly, in another. It took him a while to realize what had happened. The piggy was a part of him. They were joined, connected. Melded into one creature with two minds and two bodies.
Sometimes Drake and sometimes Brittney Pig.
Sometimes himself, and other times that little idiot with her lunatic visions of her dead brother.
Then the fight with Sam, the burning, and yet he had survived.
Unkillable.
“You’re a monster, Orc! You know that, right?” Drake shouted the taunt. “People look at you and they throw up. You make them all sick.”
Trapped. For now. In this dank, gloomy basement. Nothing down here but a wooden work table. They had cleaned the place out, Sam and Edilio and the rest. Barely a nail left behind on the concrete floor.
A roomier grave than the one he’d shared with Brittney Pig before. Here there was air. But Drake no longer needed air.
