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“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t,” Caine said flatly.
Caine felt Sam watching him, impatient, ready to move on. But Caine was mesmerized by that dark, blank opening. Once, it had been neatly framed with timber, but now it was more of a gash in the ground, a twisted mouth with stone teeth.
The memory of it . . . Dread had left a permanent mark on him. Pain. Fear.
Loneliness.
“Lana knows,” Caine said at last. “And I guess Diana does now, too.” That thought, that realization, something he should have long since acknowledged, rocked him.
When he had come crawling away from this terrible place and found his way home, shattered and insane, Diana had helped him. Who had helped Diana?
“Once it touches your mind, see . . .,” Caine said, “once it really reaches inside you, it doesn’t let go. It doesn’t just stop. It’s like a, you know, like a wound, like you got cut real badly, and you stitched it up, but it won’t really heal.”
“Lana fought it,” Sam said.
“So did I!” Caine snapped. Then, more quietly, “So did I. I still do. It’s still in my head. It still reaches out to me sometimes.” He nodded, now almost seeming to have forgotten Sam. “Hungry in the dark.”
He had fought it. But he hadn’t fought it alone.
What the hell? He felt tears in his eyes. He tried to shake it off. Diana had spoon-fed him, and protected him, and cleaned him. And what had he done? He’d been sitting in Perdido Beach feeling sorry for himself while she was out there. With it.
“Is that what you’re going to tell people if we get out of this?” Sam asked. “That the gaiaphage made you do it? Because I don’t buy it.”
If Sam expected a furious answer, Caine disappointed him. He wasn’t going to let Sam bait him. At the moment he didn’t care about Sam.
The failing light was casting long shadows. They would need to think about finding a place to spend the night.
“Won’t make any difference what I say,” Caine said softly. “Won’t be me telling the story. It’ll be a hundred kids if we get out of here. All those kids who mostly just kept their heads down all through this, they’ll be the ones telling the story.”
“Why do you say that?”
Caine laughed. “Sometimes you are so naive. You think you and me and the other big deals are going to be the only ones talking to whoever? The cops? The FBI? Don’t be stupid. You think the adults are going to listen to us? They’ll be afraid of us.”
“You think we’ll still have our powers? Even if we did—”
“It’s not about that, Sammy boy.” Caine turned his back on the mine shaft. It seemed to take a great deal of effort for him to do that, and once he’d accomplished it he nodded like yes, yes he could do it. “It’s not about the powers, man; it’s that we aren’t kids anymore. Look what we’ve been through. Look what we’ve done. Look at yourself, surfer dude. We’ve done something none of our parents have even come close to. We didn’t take over their boring world; we took over a world about a thousand times tougher. If we walk out of this alive, we won’t have to bow our heads to anyone. There’ll be guys who were in wars hearing what we did and thinking, ‘Whoa.’ You and me, we can say, ‘You got yourself some medals, soldier? Yeah, well, I lived through the FAYZ.’”
“I haven’t thought much past wanting to get out of here and have a pizza.” Sam was trying to lighten the mood, probably because what Caine was saying made Sam squirm.
But Caine wasn’t done. “They’ll be afraid of us, brother, not because we can shoot light out of our hands or throw people through walls, but because we’ll be the living proof that they’re nothing special just because they’re old. They’ll fear us and they’ll hate us. Most of them, anyway. And they’ll try to use us, make money off us.” He sighed. “You don’t know much about human nature, do you?”
At last Caine smirked and nodded his head, satisfied with himself and satisfied as well with t
he troubled expression on Sam’s face.
Sam said, “Yeah, well getting back to reality here, we should make sure the gaiaphage doesn’t come back this way. Let’s shut this place down once and for all.”
Caine spun on his heel, looked back at the mine shaft. “Now, that is an excellent suggestion.” He raised his hands, palms out. Loose rock from all around the mine entrance hurtled into the pit. Boulders rose and suddenly veered, fast as jet fighters, to crash into the hole. Pebbles and rocks and bushes and dirt and bits of broken timber all flew at the entrance.
The noise was a screaming hurricane.
“That outcropping up there, that big rock?” Sam pointed to a sun-bleached boulder about the size of a house. “If I get it to break loose, can you handle it?”
“Let’s find out.”
Sam aimed green beams of light at the rock and held them on target for several minutes. The rock went from orange-by-sunset to a deep, glowing red. There was a loud cracking sound, and half of it broke away, a single very big, very hot boulder.
