Gone: Chapters 1–9

“Mr. Trentlake poofed?” said Quinn, with a suppressed giggle in his voice.

He couldn’t look away like he normally would, because her gaze wasn’t challenging, skeptical like it usually was: it was scared. Her normally sharp, discerning blue eyes were wide, with way too much white showing.

Quinn was his own clique, which was maybe why he and Sam clicked.

Howard was a little worm, but he was Orc’s number-one toady, and Orc was a glowering thug of an eighth grader, a mountain of fat and muscle who scared even ninth graders.

“You can’t tell us what to do.” Belligerent, but not sure of himself, not sure he was right.

“Astrid?” Sam asked, not sure of her, not sure at all if she wanted to go with him and Quinn. It felt presumptuous to ask her, and wrong not to ask.

From the hallway they heard a rising cacophony of voices. Loud, scared, some babbling, as if it would be okay as long as they didn’t stop talking. Some voices were just wild.

Preschoolers in Perdido Beach mostly went to Barbara’s Day Care, a downtown building decorated with faded appliqués of cartoon characters.

“Don’t worry about Little Pete. We’ll find him.”
“Is that meant to be a pro forma reassurance or a specific commitment?”

The truck was bouncing crazily along the edge of a dry gulch that went down a hundred feet, down to more sand and sagebrush, stunted pine trees, dogwoods, and dry grasses. A few times a year, Grandpa Luke had told her, it rained, and then the water would go rushing down the gulch, sometimes in a sudden torrent.

She wandered tentatively through the living room, like she was looking for something.

Six months since Sam and his mother had moved to this shabby bungalow in this decrepit neighborhood and his mother had been forced to take the low-paying job with the lousy hours.

Perdido Beach had a resort hotel south of town, and Coates Academy up in the hills, and the power plant, but aside from that, only a smattering of businesses: the Ace hardware, the McDonald’s, a coffee shop called Bean There, a Subway sandwich shop, a couple of convenience stores, one grocery store, and a Chevron station on the highway.

Smoke was pouring from a second-story window of an apartment above an out-of-business flower shop and a seedy insurance agency.

“You and you. Go into the hardware store, get the longest hose you can find. Get a spray nozzle, too. I think there’s a spigot in that alley. Start spraying water on the side of the hardware store and up on the roof.”

Sam almost made it to the top of the stairs before he ran into an opaque wall of swirling smoke.

Smoke roiled around him, the fire chasing it toward this fresh source of oxygen.

Astrid looked away discreetly. Later he would be embarrassed.

Sam knew from the reverential way the kids knelt there.

Howard was berating some lower-ranking toady who had lit a Prest-O log and was trying to get it to grow into a bonfire.

Sam said, “What’s gallows humor?”
“Gallows, as in, what they hang people from. Sometimes when people are nervous or afraid, they make jokes.”

Then she added, a bit ruefully, “Of course, some people, when they’re nervous or afraid, turn pedantic. And if you don't know what pedantic means, here’s a clue: in the dictionary, I’m the illustration they use.”

The lame fire was sputtering, melting the tarmac beneath the embers.

Howard’s face grew shrewd. “You need to bring us back something.”

“Ah ah ah,” Howard said, and pointed upward with a flourish to the stoplight.

Standing still, all they heard was the odd, placid, metronomic regularity of the lapping waves.

Standing still, all they heard was the odd, placid, metronomic regularity of the lapping waves.

“I don’t see anyone,” Quinn said in a subdued whisper.

No one at the front desk or the concierge desk, no one in the lobby, no one in the bar.

With their mom incapacitated, the kids had always had to fend for themselves.

Rowena had been the unofficial cook until Albert hit his twelfth birthday, and then part of the kitchen duties had devolved to him.

She only half remembered the seconds before the crash, and the crash itself was just a blur, fractured images of space twirling around her as her body was bludgeoned.

Green eyes, hovering, disembodied. Staring straight at her.

What he had done to his stepfather, what he had done in his room, what had happened with the little pigtailed flamethrower, the disappearance of everyone over the age of fourteen, and this impermeable, impossible barrier—all were pieces of the same puzzle.

They demanded in petulant, scared voices, “I want my mom. I want to go home. Now.”

“Maybe because you’re really not a complete jerk? Maybe you’re really a decent human being?”
That earned her a skeptical look and a derisive snort.

“By the way, don’t touch it.”
Sam nodded ruefully. “Yeah. We figured that out.”

Astrid rolled her eyes at Sam. “I thought I would cut to the chase and avoid more male posturing.”
“I wasn’t posturing,” Sam grumbled.

A convertible was all the way inside the dry cleaner’s. It had taken out the plate-glass window. Clothing in plastic wrap lay strewn across the car’s hood and into the passenger compartment.

Sam tossed the stick aside contemptuously.