Free Light by Michael Grant Page A

the way, but it did sag a bit and looked as if it might fall out if she shook the head sideways a little.
    And it had an odd smell about it. It was the smell of the meat department at a supermarket. A smell that suggested slaughterhouses.
    “About your little fantasies there, Drake? Your boy parts? They’re in the glove compartment of an old, wrecked pickup truck that looks like it rolled down a ravine. Might even be Lana’s grandfather’s truck: I should ask her. And some are floating out in the surf. I mean, if you’re ever looking for them.”
    What was left of Drake’s mouth tried to speak, but his esophagus was no longer even slightly intact. The exposed tongue stuck sideways, licking air.
    Brianna opened the bag of dead lizards and the little eggs. She lifted the right side of Drake’s head and dropped it in. Then fetched the left side and dropped it in as well.
    The bag was surprisingly heavy, and the weight of it was awkward, so she couldn’t run full speed. She set off at a slow thirty miles an hour, whistling happily but making no sound since even at thirty the wind snatched the tune away.
    It took just ten minutes—she stopped to pee and drink some water at one point—to reach the lake. She sauntered down the dock toward the houseboat, swinging the bag with affected nonchalance, feeling a bit like one of those girls who likes to shop and can’t wait to show off her purchases to her friends.
    Astrid and Dekka were on the boat, apparently discussing something important. Astrid looked impatient, like she was restraining herself from saying something snippy. Dekka looked like a thundercloud that might spark lightning at any moment. So, basically, both girls were totally normal.
    Astrid was the first to notice Brianna.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be patrolling?”
    “Where’s Sam?” Brianna asked.
    “He’s out. So is Edilio,” Dekka said. “You going to tell us what’s in the bag or do we have to guess?”
    Brianna stopped. She was disappointed. In her imagination the big revelation would have been to an admiring Sam Temple. He was the one she wanted to impress. Failing that, Edilio, who was generally warm and sweet to her.
    But she was tired and wanted to put the bag down. Also, she couldn’t keep the secret any longer.
    She climbed nimbly up to the top deck of the boat, grinned, and said, “Is it anyone’s birthday? Because I have a present.”
    “Breeze,” Dekka warned.
    So Brianna opened the bag. Dekka looked inside. “What is it?”
    So Brianna upended the bag. Dead lizards, broken eggs, and Drake’s head landed on the antiskid flooring.
    “Ahhhh!” Astrid screamed.
    “Ah, Jesus!” Dekka yelled.
    “I know,” Brianna said proudly.
    “Oh, my God.”
    “Oh, that is . . .”
    What lay there was something to strike envy into the heart of a horror movie special-effects expert. The two halves of Drake’s head had started to rejoin. But because the halves had been tossed wildly together, the process was very incomplete. Very.
    In fact at the moment the halves were backward, so that the left half was looking one direction and the right half another. Sections of neck and spine stuck both up and down. The part that held most of Drake’s mouth was stuffed with hair from the back of his head.
    And, somehow, bits of dead lizard were squeezed in between. But the dead lizards thus incorporated were no longer dead. And there was egg white smeared across one eye.
    The mouth was trying to speak and not managing it.
    A lizard tail whipped one eye—hard to tell if it was left or right—a parody of Drake’s whip arm.
    The three of them stared: Astrid with blue eyes wide, hand over mouth; Dekka with mouth wide open and brow furrowed; Brianna like a proud school kid showing off her art project.
    “Ta-da!” Brianna said.
    Connie Temple had done three interviews, sitting in a chair beside her trailer home on the bluffs south of the barrier. They set up a monitor so she could see her