Hunger (6 page)

Toward air. Not away.

Carefully, Duck made his way down the tunnel, hands outstretched like a blind person, down the tunnel.

It was so dark, he could not see his hand in front of his face. No light. None.

He soon found that it was easier if he kept one hand on the wall. It was rock, pitted and rough, but with bumps and protrusions that felt worn down. The ground below him was uneven but not wildly so.

“Cave has to lead somewhere,” Duck told himself. He found the sound of his own voice reassuring. It was real. It was familiar.

“I wish it was a tunnel. People don’t build a tunnel for no reason.” Then, after a while, “At least a tunnel has to go somewhere.”

He tried to make sense of the direction. Was he going north, south, east, west? Well, hopefully not too far west, because that would lead him to the ocean.

He walked and occasionally started crying and walked some more. It was impossible to guess how long he’d been down there. He had no idea what time of day it might be. But he soon realized that the place where he’d fallen in was seeming more and more homey by comparison. There wasn’t much light back there, but at least there had been some. And here there was none.

“I don’t want to die down here,” he said. He was instantly sorry that he had voiced that thought. Saying it made it real.

At that moment he banged his head on something that shouldn’t have been there, banged it hard.

Duck cursed angrily and put his hand to his forehead, feeling for blood, and realized his feet were sinking into the ground. “No!” he yelped.

The sinking stopped. He’d gone up to his knees. But then he had stopped. He had stopped sinking. Carefully, cautiously, he pulled his legs up out of the hard-packed dirt.

“What is happening to me?” he demanded. “Why…” But then he knew the answer. He knew it and couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him earlier.

“Oh, my God: I’m a freak.”

“I’m a moof!”

“I’m a moof with a really sucky power.”

What exactly the mutant ability was, he wasn’t sure. It seemed to be the power to sink right down through the earth. Which was crazy. And, besides, he hadn’t intended to do any
such thing. He sure hadn’t said, “Sink!”

He started walking again, careful of his head, trying to work through what had happened. Both times he had sunk he’d been angry, that was the first thing. He’d heard the stories of how Sam had discovered his abilities only when he was really scared or really mad.

But Duck had been scared now for quite a while. He’d been scared since the FAYZ. It was only when he got angry that the thing happened.

The thing. Whatever it was.

“If I got mad enough maybe I’d sink clear through the earth. Come out in China. See my great-great grandparents.”

He crept along a bit farther, toward a dim glow.

“Light?” he said. “Is that really light?”

It wasn’t bright, that was for sure. It wasn’t a lightbulb. It wasn’t a flashlight. It wasn’t even a star. It was more like a less dark darkness. Hazy. At a distance that was impossible to guess.

Duck was sure it was a hallucination. He wanted it to be real, but he feared it wasn’t. He feared it was imagination.

But he kept moving and the closer he got the less likely it seemed that it was a mirage. There was definitely a glow. Like a glow-in-the-dark clock face, a sickly, cold, unhealthy-looking light.

Even close up it didn’t glow enough to make out many features, just a few faint outlines of rock. He had to stand and stare hard, straining his eyes for quite some time before he
could figure out that the glow was mostly along the ground. And that it came from a side tunnel of the main cave. This second shaft was narrow, far smaller than the main cave, which, it seemed to Duck, had gradually broadened out.

He could follow this new shaft and at least see something. Not much, but something. Some proof that he wasn’t actually blind.

But some little voice in his brain was screaming, “No!” His instincts were telling him to run.

“There’s light down there. It must lead to somewhere,” Duck argued with himself.

But although Duck had never been the most attentive student, and had very little information of a scientific nature in his brain, he was an avid fan of
The Simpsons
. He’d seen this glow, in cartoon form. And it featured in any number of comics.

“It’s radiation,” he said.

This was wrong, he realized, filled with righteous indignation. Everyone said there was no radiation left from the big accident at the power plant thirteen years ago, when the meteorite hit. But where else would this glow have come from? It must have seeped along underground seams and crevices.

They had lied. Or maybe they just hadn’t realized.

“Not a good idea to go that way,” he told himself.

“But it’s the only light,” he cried, and began to weep with frustration because it seemed he had no choice but to plunge back into absolute darkness.

And then, Duck heard something.

He froze. He strained his senses to listen.

A soft, swishing sound. Very faint.

A long silence. And then, there it was again. Swish. Swish.

He’d missed the sound because he’d been focusing on the glow. It was a sound he knew. Water. And it did not, thank God, come from the radioactive shaft.

Duck hated the ocean. But all things considered, he hated it a bit less than he hated this cave.

Leaving the glow behind, and feeling carefully ahead, cautious about his bruised forehead, he crept on through pitch blackness.

96
HOURS
, 22
MINUTES

“
LOOK, ALBERT, DON’T
tell me we have a problem and I can’t do anything about it,” Sam said, practically snarling. He marched along at a quick walk from the town hall to the church next door. Albert and Astrid were with him, struggling to keep up.

The sun was setting out over the ocean. The dying light laid down a long red exclamation point on the water. A boat was out there, one of the small motorboats. Sam sighed. Some kid who’d probably end up falling in.

Sam stopped suddenly, causing Albert and Astrid to bump into each other. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound mad. Although I am mad, but not at you, Albert. It’s just I have to go in there and lay down the law, and I’m sorry, but killer worms aren’t making it any easier.”

“Then hold off for a few days,” Albert said calmly.

“Hold off? Albert, you were the one who was saying weeks ago, months ago, we had to make everyone get to work.”

“I never said we should
make
them work,” Albert countered.
“I said we should figure out a way to pay them to work.”

Sam was not in the mood. Not in the mood at all. Losing a kid was a tragedy to everyone, but to him it was a personal failure. He’d been handed the job of being in charge, which meant everything that went wrong was on him. E.Z. had been under his care and protection. And now E.Z. was a pile of ash.

Sam sucked in a gulp of air. He shot a baleful look at the cemetery in the square. Three more graves in just the last three months since Sam had been officially elected mayor. E.Z. wouldn’t get a grave, just a marker. At the rate things were going, they’d run out of room in the square.

The front door of the church stood open. Always open. That was because it, and much of the church roof, had been damaged in the big Thanksgiving Battle. The wide wooden doors had been blown off. The sides of the opening were shaky, held up by a slab of stone across the top that made the wreckage look like a lopsided Stonehenge monolith.

Caine had come close to collapsing the entire church, but it was built strong, so three quarters of it still stood. Some of the rubble had been cleared, but not much, and even that had only been pushed into the side street. Like so many ambitious undertakings that had fallen apart as kids quit working and could not be convinced to come back.

Sam walked straight to the front of the church and mounted the three low steps to what he thought of as the stage, although Astrid had patiently explained that it was called a chancel. The great cross had not been replaced in its rightful spot, but stood leaning in a corner. A close examination would reveal
bloodstains where it had once crushed Cookie’s shoulder.

Not until he turned around did Sam notice how little of the church was filled. There should have been close to 250 kids, leaving aside the day care and the people on guard in various locations. There were closer to eighty present, half of those so young, Sam knew they’d been dumped there by big brothers or sisters looking for a bit of free babysitting.

Astrid and Albert took seats in the first pew. Little Pete was at the day care. Now that Mother Mary had more help at the day care, Astrid could occasionally leave Pete there, although never for very long. As long as Pete stayed lost in his video game, anyone could care for him. But if Pete got upset…

Mother Mary Terrafino herself was two rows back, too humble to insert herself in the leadership area of the church. Sam was struck by how good Mary looked. Weight loss. Probably from overwork. Or maybe she didn’t enjoy living on the kinds of canned food that, in the old pre-FAYZ days, people had donated to food drives. But she was quite thin, which was not an adjective normally applied to Mary. Model thin.

Lana Arwen Lazar slumped in a back row. She looked tired and a little resentful. Lana often looked resentful. But at least she had come, which was more than could be said for most kids.

Sam gritted his teeth, angry that so many had skipped this town meeting. Just what exactly did they have to do that was more important?

“First off,” he said, “I want to say I’m sorry about E.Z. He was a good kid. He didn’t deserve…” For a moment he
almost lost it as a surge of emotion welled up from nowhere. “I’m sorry he died.”

Someone sobbed loudly.

“Look, I’m going to get right to it: we have three hundred and thirty-two…I’m sorry, three hundred and thirty-one mouths to feed,” Sam said. He placed his hands on his hips and planted his feet wide apart. “We were already pretty bad off for food supplies. But after the attack by the Coates kids…well, it’s not pretty bad off, anymore, it’s desperate.”

He let that sink in. But how much were six-and eight-year-olds really grasping? Even the older kids looked more glazed than alarmed.

“Three hundred and thirty-one kids,” Sam reiterated, “And food for maybe a week. That’s not a long time. It’s not a lot of food. And as you all know, the food we have is awful.”

That got a response from the audience. The younger kids produced a chorus of gagging and retching sounds.

“All right,” Sam snapped. “Knock it off. The point is, things are really desperate.”

“How about the food in everyone’s house?” someone yelled.

The light of the setting sun streamed through the damaged façade of the church and stabbed Sam in the eyes. He had to take two steps to the left to escape it. “Hunter? Is that you?”

Hunter Lefkowitz was a year younger than Sam, longhaired like just about everyone except the few who had taken the initiative of cutting his or her own hair. He was not someone who had ever been popular in school before the FAYZ. But then, Sam reflected, the things that had made kids popular in
the old days didn’t mean much anymore.

Hunter had begun developing powers. Sam was trying to keep that fact secret—he suspected that Caine was sending spies into Perdido Beach. He wanted to be able to use Hunter as a secret weapon if it came to another fight with Caine’s people. But secrets were tough to keep in a place where everyone knew everyone else.

“Hunter, we’ve searched all of the homes and carried the food to Ralph’s,” Sam continued. “The problem is that all the fruit and veggies spoiled while we were all filling up on chips and cookies. The meat all rotted. People were stupid and careless, and there’s nothing we can do about that now.” Sam swallowed the bitterness he felt, the anger he felt at his own foolishness. “But we have food sitting out in the fields. Maybe not the food we’d like, but enough to carry us for months—many months—if we bring it in before it rots and the birds eat it.”

“Maybe we’ll get rescued, and we won’t have to worry,” another voice said.

“Maybe we’ll learn to live on air,” Astrid muttered under her breath but loudly enough to be heard by at least a few.

“Why don’t you go get our food back from Drake and the chuds up there?”

It was Zil. He accepted a congratulatory slap on the back from a creepy kid named Antoine, part of Zil’s little posse.

“Because it would mean getting some kids killed,” Sam said bluntly. “We’d be lucky to rescue any of the food, and we’d end up digging more graves in the plaza. And it wouldn’t solve our problem, anyway.”

“Get your moofs to go fight their moofs,” Zil said.

Sam had heard the term “moof” more and more lately. “Chud” was a newer term. Each new term seemed just a little more derogatory than the one it replaced.

“Sit down, Zil,” Sam went on. “We have twenty-six kids who are in the…have we decided? Are we calling it the army?” he asked Edilio.

Edilio was in the first pew. He leaned forward, hung his head, and looked uncomfortable. “Some kids are calling it that, but man, I don’t know what to call it. Like a militia or something? I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“Mother Mary has fourteen kids working for her, including one-day draftees,” Sam said, ticking off the list. “Fire Chief Ellen has six kids at the firehouse, dealing with emergencies. Dahra handles the pharmacy herself, Astrid is my adviser. Jack is in charge of technology. Albert has twenty-four kids working with him now, guarding Ralph’s and distributing food supplies. Counting me, that’s seventy-eight kids who do various jobs.”

“When they bother to show up,” Mary Terrafino said loudly. That earned a nervous laugh, but Mary wasn’t smiling.

“Right,” Sam agreed. “When they bother to show up. The thing is, we need more people working. We need people bringing in that food.”

“We’re just kids,” a fifth grader said, and giggled at his own joke.

“You’re going to be hungry kids,” Sam snapped. “You’re
going to be starving kids. Listen to me: people are going to starve. To death.

“To. Death.” He repeated it with all the emphasis he could bring to bear on the word.

He caught a warning look from Astrid and took a deep breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that the situation is really bad.”

A second-grade girl held up her hand. Sam sighed, knowing what to expect, but called on her, anyway.

“I just want my mom.”

“We all do,” Sam said impatiently. “We all want the old world back. But we don’t seem to be able to make that happen. So we have to try to make this world work out. Which means we need food. Which means we need kids to harvest the food, and load it into trucks, and preserve it, and cook it, and…” He threw up his hands as he realized he was staring at rows and rows of blank expressions.

“You crazy with that stuff about picking vegetables?” It was Howard Bassem, leaning against the back wall. Sam hadn’t seen him come in. Sam glanced around for Orc, but didn’t see him. And Orc wasn’t something…no, someone, still some
one
despite everything…you overlooked.

“You have another way to get food?” Sam asked.

“Man, you think people don’t know about what happened to E.Z.?”

Sam stiffened. “Of course we all know what happened to E.Z. No one is trying to hide what happened to E.Z. But as far as we know, the worms are just in that one cabbage field.”

“What worms?” Hunter demanded.

Obviously not everyone had heard. Sam would have liked to smack Howard right at that moment. The last thing they needed was a retelling of E.Z.’s gruesome fate.

“I’ve taken a look at one of the worms,” Astrid said, sensing that Sam was reaching the limit of his patience. She didn’t come up onto the chancel but stood by her pew and faced the audience, which was now paying very close attention. Except for two little kids who were having a shoving match.

“The worms that killed E.Z. are mutations,” Astrid said. “They have hundreds of teeth. Their bodies are designed for boring through flesh rather than tunneling through the dirt.”

“But as far as we know, they’re just in that one cabbage field,” Sam reiterated.

“I dissected the worm Sam brought me,” Astrid said. “I found something very strange. The worms have very large brains. I mean, a normal earthworm’s brain is so primitive that if you cut it out, the worm still keeps doing what it normally does.”

“Kind of like my sister,” a kid piped up, and was poked by his sister in retaliation.

Howard drifted closer to the front of the room. “So these E.Z. killer worms are smart.”

“I’m not implying that they can read or do quadratic equations,” Astrid said. “But they’ve gone from brains that were a bundle of cells that did nothing more than manage the organism’s negative phototropism to a brain with differentiated hemispheres and distinct, presumably specialized, regions.”

Sam hid a smile by looking down. Astrid was perfectly capable of simplifying the way she explained things. But when someone was irritating her—as Howard was doing now—she would crank up the polysyllables and make them feel stupid.

Howard came to a stop, perhaps paralyzed by the word “phototropism.” But he recovered quickly. “Look, bottom line, you step into a field full of these E.Z. killers, these zekes, and you’re dead. Right?”

“The large brains confirm the possibility that these creatures are capable of territoriality. My point is, judging by what Sam, Edilio, and Albert observed, the worms may stay perfectly within their territory. In this case, the cabbage field.”

“Yeah?” Howard said. “Well, I know someone who could walk right through that field and not be bothered.”

So that was it, Sam thought. Inevitably with Howard, it all came back to Orc.

“You may be right that Orc would be invulnerable,” Sam said. “So?”

“So?” Howard echoed. He smirked. “So, Sam, Orc can pick those cabbages for you. Of course he’s going to need something in exchange.”

“Beer?”

Howard nodded, maybe a little embarrassed, but not much. “He has a taste for the stuff. Me, I can’t stand it. But as Orc’s manager I’ll need to be taken care of, too.”

Sam gritted his teeth. But the truth was it might be a solution to the problem. They had quite a bit of beer still at Ralph’s grocery.

“If Orc wants to try it, fine with me,” Sam said. “Work something out with Albert.”

It was not fine with Astrid. “Sam, Orc has become an alcoholic. You want to give him beer?”

“A can of beer for a day’s work,” Sam said. “Orc can’t get very drunk on—”

“No way,” Howard said. “Orc needs a case a day. Four six-packs. After all, it’s hot work out there in the field picking cabbage.”

Sam shot a glance at Astrid. Her face was set. But Sam had the responsibility for feeding 331 kids. Orc was probably invulnerable to the zekes. And he was so strong, he could yank up thirty thousand pounds of cabbage in a week’s work. “Talk to Albert after the meeting,” Sam said to Howard.

Astrid fumed but sat down. Howard did a jaunty little finger-pointing thing at Sam, signifying agreement.

Sam sighed. The meeting wasn’t going the way he’d planned. They never did. He understood that kids were kids, so he was used to the inevitable disruptions and general silliness of the younger ones. But that even so many of the older kids, kids in seventh, eighth grade, hadn’t bothered to show up was depressing.

To make things worse, all this talk of food was making him hungry. Lunch had been grim. The hunger was almost always present now. It made him feel hollow. It occupied his brain, when he needed to be thinking of other things.

“Look, people, I’m announcing a new rule. It’s going to seem harsh. But it’s necessary.”