Staggering toward her, she saw Wade Wellman. The guy had the tenacity of a cockroach. Blood ran from his ears and his nose. He seemed to be saying something. Well, screaming something, actually, but she was as deaf to that as she was to everything else. He came at her, one shaky step at a time, fists clenched.

She was too tired to give a damn. She reached into her pocket and found the tear gas her father made her carry everywhere.

She squirted him in the face, keeping it trained on him until half the cannister was gone. If she’d still had her father’s gun, she would have shot him without hesitating this time. The blood, the bodies — they’d erased any twinge of sympathy she might have felt for him.

Wade fell, choking and writhing, into the mud.

Danny managed to get up. He looked at her, and then at Wade, and then back at her. He limped the short distance to Wade.

He kicked Wade in the head until Wade stopped thrashing.

Danny came back and sat down heavily beside her. He put his arm around her. She let him. He gently turned her face toward his.

“Did we win?” he mouthed carefully.

Carrie didn’t know what to say to that. Every time she blinked, she saw bodies.

But the world’s still here, she thought, as the first police cars and paramedics arrived.

She leaned close and spoke into his ear, so he could hear her.

“It could have been worse,” she said. “It could have been so much worse.”

24

Danny Sharp Doesn’t Believe in Ghosts

This time, when Danny wakes up, he knows where he is.

Without a bunch of naked cultists all over the floor, he recognizes the space. He’s in the warehouse of Sharp Industries. There are piles of scrap and abandoned projects, and a bunch of other things that got left behind when the company was finally shut down. Over there is the passage to the factory floor, and there’s the outline of the garage door that opens onto the loading dock.

He supposes that Buzz chose the place as a kind of taunt, but that may be giving his classmate too much credit.

Someone has slapped duct tape over his mouth as a gag. He chews it up and spits it out, a trick he’s known since he was four.

He’s thirsty. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t have a water bottle within a few feet. Hydration is very important in Silicon Valley.

He starts thinking. How do you fight a sex cult and a dead wizard when you don’t have any magic powers, or any of your electronic gadgets, and you’re stuck in a chair in an old warehouse and you can’t feel your legs?

Details. He’ll figure something out. He always does.