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Gaia was fumbling with the earbuds now, frowning as she mimicked what Diana showed her.
And, to her own dark, private amusement, Diana was planning to play hero.
Many hours had passed, night was falling, and Dahra had managed to hobble maybe three hundred yards. It was painful work. Her hands were bloody from the bike crash, and she kept tripping and landing on them again, leaving red handprints on the road behind her.
Maybe, she thought, the barrier would come down and there would suddenly be cars driving down this road. If so, it had better happen fast. Night came dark and intense in the forest. She could barely make out the tree trunks on either side of the road. Looking up, she could see that the sky was the darkest possible blue before going black. Far up above and well off to the east she saw the blinking lights of a passenger jet. A plane full of people, regular people, not captives of the FAYZ, on their merry way from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you look out the right side of the aircraft, you can see the Perdido Beach Anomaly.
Maybe if it all did come to an end, there would be tours of the former FAYZ. And here is where Dahra Baidoo starved to death by the side of the road.
That made her start to cry again. What had she done to deserve—movement! She raised her head, and there, not twenty feet away, stood a coyote. Its head was low. Its eyes glittered in the gloom. It was bedraggled, filthy, skin and bones. Dahra knew that Brianna had played grim reaper to the coyote population, chasing them down one by one. After the terrible coyote attack on panicked kids just south of the lake Sam had made it part of Brianna’s job to eliminate the mutant canines once and for all.
But here was one who was not dead.
The coyote sniffed the air, ears cocking this way and that, on the alert for the sudden death brought by the Breeze. It was nervous, but it was more hungry.
“Go away!” Dahra yelled. “The Breeze is coming to meet me. She’ll be here any second!”
The coyote didn’t buy it. “Not here,” it said in its strangle, glottal voice. It advanced, still cautious. Saliva dripped from its muzzle.
An awful terror took Dahra then. The coyote wouldn’t just kill her; it would eat her. It would eat her alive, and she would watch it happen until blood loss deprived her of consciousness. She knew. She had heard the stories; she had seen the bloody, mangled survivors dragged into the so-called hospital to await salvation at Lana’s hands.
She began to pray. Oh, God, save me. Oh, God, hear me and save me.
Then, aloud, she said, “Kill me first. Kill me before you . . . before . . .”
Oh, God, don’t let him . . .
The coyote closed to within two feet. His nostrils were filling with the scent of her; his mouth was foaming
in anticipation.
“No,” she whispered. “No, God, no.”
The coyote froze. Its ears swiveled to the right. It hunched low, and now Dahra could hear it, too, a slow crashing of underbrush and fallen leaves.
“Help! Help!” she cried, having no idea who or what might be in those woods, only knowing that whatever it was, the coyote didn’t like it.
The coyote made a low growl.
The crashing sound came closer, and with a furious, frustrated whine the coyote trotted away.
“Help me!” Dahra cried.
At first she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing in the shadows. It looked like a person, but built on too thick a scale, with outlines all blurred and indistinct. Then she recognized him and almost fainted with relief.
“Orc!”
Orc easily climbed the incline up to the road, then squatted beside her.
“Dahra? What are you doing here?”
“Praying for you to show up,” she gasped.
Orc couldn’t make much of a smile; it was only the human part of his mouth that could do that. “You prayed to God? Like in the Bible?”
Dahra was about to say she would happily have prayed to any and all gods and the devil, too, but she stopped herself and instead said, “Yes, Orc. Just like in the Bible.”
