Hunger

by Michael Grant

  “Thousands of them in that field,” Sam said. “E.Z. goes in, they attack him. But me and Albert and Edilio are outside, we haven’t stepped into the field, and they don’t come after us.”

  “Territoriality?” Astrid frowned. “Very unusual in a primitive animal. Territoriality is usually associated with higher life-forms. Dogs or cats are territorial. Not worms.”

  “You’re being very calm about all this,” Sam said, almost but not quite accusingly.

  Astrid looked at him, reached with her hand to gently turn him away from the horrible image, forcing him to look at her instead. “You didn’t come to me so I could scream and run away and you could be brave and comforting.”

  “No,” he admitted. “Sorry. You’re right: I didn’t come to see Astrid my girlfriend. I came to see Astrid the Genius.”

  Astrid had never liked that nickname much, but she’d accepted it. It gave her a place in the dazed and frightened community of the FAYZ. She wasn’t a Brianna or a Dekka, or a Sam, with great powers. What she had was her brain and her ability to think in a disciplined way when required.

  “I’ll dissect it, see what I can learn. Are you okay?”

  “Sure. Why not? This morning I was responsible for 332 people. Now I’m only responsible for 331. And part of me is almost thinking, okay, one less mouth to feed.”

  Astrid leaned close and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Yeah, it sucks to be you,” Astrid said. “But you’re the only you we have.”

  That earned her a bleak smile. “So, shut up and deal with it?” he said.

  “No, don’t ever shut up. Tell me everything. Tell me anything.”

  Sam looked down, unwilling to make eye contact. “Everything? Okay, how about this: I burned the body. E.Z. I burned the mess they left behind.”

  “He was dead, Sam. What were you supposed to do? Leave him for the birds and the coyotes?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I know. But that’s not the problem. The problem is, when he burned? He smelled like meat cooking, and I…” He stopped talking, unable to go on. She waited while he mastered his emotions. “A dead sixth grader was burning, and my mouth started watering.”

  Astrid could too easily imagine it. Even the thought of burning meat made her mouth water. “It’s a normal, physiological reaction, Sam. It’s a part of your brain that’s on automatic.”

  “Yeah,” he said, unconvinced.

  “Look, you can’t go around moping because something bad happened. If you start acting hopeless, it will spread to everyone else.”

  “Kids don’t need my help to feel hopeless,” he said.

  “And you’re going to let me cut your hair,” Astrid said, pulling him close and ruffling his hair with one hand. She wanted to get his mind off the morning’s disaster.

  “What?” He looked confused by the sudden change of topic.

  “You look like a fugitive from some old 1970s hair band. Besides,” she argued, “Edilio let me cut his hair.”

  Sam allowed himself a smile. “Yeah. I saw. Maybe that’s why I keep accidentally calling him Bart Simpson.”

  When she glared at him, he added, “You know, the spiky look?” He tried to kiss her, but she drew back.

  “Oh, you’re just so clever, aren’t you?” she said. “How about I just shave your head? Or hot-wax it? Keep insulting me, people will be calling you Homer Simpson, not Bart. Then see how much Taylor makes goo-goo eyes at you.”

  “She does not make goo-goo eyes at me.”

  “Yeah. Right.” She pushed him away playfully.

  “Anyway, I might look good with just two hairs,” Sam said. He looked at his reflection in the glass front of the microwave.

  “Does the word ‘narcissist’ mean anything to you?” Astrid asked.

  Sam laughed. He made a grab for her but then noticed Little Pete eyeing him. “So. Anyway. How’s LP doing?”

  Astrid looked at her brother, who was perched on a kitchen counter stool and gazing mutely at Sam. Or, anyway, in Sam’s direction—she could never be sure what he was really looking at.

  She wanted to tell Sam what had been happening with Little Pete, what he had started doing. But Sam had enough to worry about. And for a moment—a rare moment—he wasn’t worrying.

  There would be time later to tell him that the most powerful person in the FAYZ seemed to be…what would the right term be for what Little Pete was doing?

  Losing his mind? No, that wasn’t quite it.

  There was no right term for what was happening to Little Pete. But, anyway, this wasn’t the time.

  “He’s fine,” Astrid lied. “You know Petey.”

  THREE

  106 HOURS, 11 MINUTES

  LANA ARWEN LAZAR was on her fourth home since coming to Perdido Beach. She’d first stayed in a house she’d liked well enough. But that house was where Drake Merwin had captured her. It felt like a bad place after that.

  Then she’d moved in with Astrid for a while. But she quickly discovered that she preferred being alone with just her Labrador retriever, Patrick, for company. So she’d taken a house near the plaza. But that had made her too accessible.

  Lana didn’t like being accessible. When she was accessible, she had no privacy.

  Lana had the power to heal. She’d first discovered this ability the day of the FAYZ, when her grandfather had disappeared. They’d been driving in his pickup truck at the time, and the sudden disappearance of the driver had sent the truck rolling down a very long embankment.

  Lana’s injuries should have killed her. Almost did kill her. Then she discovered a power that might have lain hidden within her forever, but for her terrible need.

  She had healed herself. She’d healed Sam when he was shot; and Cookie, whose shoulder had been split open; and many wounded children after the terrible Thanksgiving Battle.

  The kids called her the Healer. She was second only to Sam Temple as a hero in the FAYZ. Everyone looked up to her. Everyone respected her. Some of them, especially the ones whose lives she’d saved, treated her with something like awe. Lana had no doubt that Cookie, for one, would give his life for her. He had been in a living hell until she’d saved him.

  But hero worship didn’t stop kids from pestering her at all hours, day and night, over every little pain or problem: loose teeth, sunburn, skinned knees, stubbed toes.

  So she had moved away from town and now lived in a room in the Clifftop Resort.

  The hotel hugged the FAYZ wall, the blank, impenetrable barrier that defined this new world.

  “Calm down, Patrick,” she said as the dog head-butted her in his eagerness for breakfast. Lana pried the lid off the ALPO can and, blocking Patrick, spooned half of it into a dish on the floor.

  “There. Jeez, you’d swear I never feed you.”

  As she said it she wondered how long she would be able to go on feeding Patrick. There were kids eating dog food now. And there were skin-and-bones dogs in the streets, picking through trash next to kids who were picking through trash to find scraps they’d thrown out weeks earlier.

  Lana was alone at Clifftop. Hundreds of rooms, an algae-choked pool, a tennis court truncated by the barrier. She had a balcony that afforded a sweeping view of the beach below and the too-placid ocean.

  Sam, Edilio, Astrid, and Dahra Baidoo—who acted as pharmacist and nurse—knew where she was and could find her if they really needed her. But most kids didn’t, so she had a degree of control over her life.

  She looked longingly at the dog food. Wondering, not for the first time, what it tasted like. Probably better than the burned potato peels with barbecue sauce she’d eaten.

  Once, the hotel had been full of food. But on Sam’s orders Albert and his crew had collected it all, centralized it all at Ralph’s. Where Drake had managed to steal a good portion of the dwindling remainder.

  Now there was no food in the hotel. Not even in any of the mini-bars in the rooms, which once had been stocked with delicious candy bars, and chips and nuts. Now all that was left was alcoho
l. Albert’s people had left the booze, not knowing quite what to do with it.

  Lana had stayed away from the little brown and white bottles. So far.

  Alcohol was how she had managed to get herself exiled from her home in Las Vegas. She’d snuck a bottle of vodka from her parents’ house, supposedly for an older boy she knew.

  That was the cleaned-up story she’d managed to sell to her parents, anyway. They had still packed her off for some time to “think about what you’ve done” at her grandfather’s isolated ranch.

  Now, in the world of the FAYZ, Lana was a sort of saint. But she knew better.

  Patrick had finished his food as coffee brewed in the room. Lana poured herself a cup and dumped in a Nutrasweet and some powdered cream, rare luxuries that she’d found by searching the maids’ carts.

  She stepped out onto the balcony and took a sip.

  She had the stereo on, the CD player that had been in the room. Someone, some previous inhabitant of the room, she supposed, had left an ancient Paul Simon CD in there, and she’d found herself playing it.

  There was a song about darkness. A welcoming of darkness. Almost an invitation. She had played it over and over again.

  Sometimes music helped her to forget. Not this song.

  Out of the corner of her eye she spotted someone down on the beach. She went back inside and retrieved a pair of binoculars she’d liberated from some long-gone tourist’s luggage.

  Two little kids, they couldn’t be more than six years old, playing on the rock pier that extended into the ocean. Fortunately there was no surf. But the rocks were like jumbled razor blades in places, sharp and slick. She ought to…

  Later. Enough responsibility. She was not a responsible person, and she was sick of having it forced on her.

  Various adult vices were spreading through the population of the FAYZ. Some as benign as coffee. Others—pot, cigarettes, and alcohol—were not so harmless. Lana knew of six kids who were confirmed drinkers. They had tried to get her to cure their hangovers.

  Some others were smoking their way through bags of weed found in their parents’ or older siblings’ bedrooms. And on just about any day you could see kids as young as eight choking on cigarettes and trying to look cool. She’d once spotted a first grader trying to light a cigar.

  Lana couldn’t cure any of that.

  Sometimes she wished she was back at Hermit Jim’s cabin.

  It was not the first time she’d had that thought. She had often thought of the strange cabin in the desert with its quirky little lawn—now all brown and dead, most likely.

  It’s where she had found sanctuary after the crash. And then again, briefly, after escaping from the coyote pack.

  The cabin itself had been burned to the ground. It was nothing but ash. And gold, of course. Hermit Jim’s stash of gold might have been melted, but it would still be there beneath the floorboards.

  The gold. From the mine.

  The mine…

  She took a big gulp from the Styrofoam cup and burned her tongue. The pain helped her focus.

  The mine. That day was clear in her memory, but it was the clarity of a well-remembered nightmare.

  At the time she hadn’t known that the FAYZ meant the disappearance of all adults. She’d gone to the mine in search of the hermit, or hoping at least to find his missing truck and use it to get to town.

  She’d found the hermit, dead in the mouth of the mine. Not disappeared, dead. Which meant he’d been killed before the FAYZ.

  The coyotes had come after her then and driven her deeper into the mine. And there she’d found…it. The thing. The Darkness, the coyotes called it: the Darkness.

  She remembered the way her feet had felt heavy as bricks. The way her heart had slowed down and thudded, each beat like a blow from a sledgehammer. The dread that went deeper than simple fear. The sickly green glow that made her think of pus, disease, a cancer.

  The dream state that had overtaken her…the heavy-lidded eyes and mind gone blank and the feeling of being invaded, of…

  Come to me.

  “Ah!”

  She had crushed the cup. Hot coffee all over her arm.

  Lana was sweating. Her breathing was labored. She took a deep breath and it was as if she’d forgotten how until that very moment.

  It was in her head still, that monster in the mine shaft. It had its hook in her. Sometimes she was sure she heard its voice. A hallucination, surely. Surely not the Darkness itself. It was miles away. Far beneath the ground. It couldn’t…

  Come to me.

  “I can’t forget it,” she whispered to Patrick. “I can’t get away from it.”

  In the early days after she had come out of the desert and joined this strange community of children, Lana had felt almost at peace. Almost. There had been, from the start, a sense of damage done, an invisible wound with no specific location except that it was inside her.

  That unseen, unreal, unhealed wound had reopened. She told herself at first that it would go away. It would heal. A psychic scab would form. But if that was true, if she was healing, why did it hurt more with each passing day? How had that dreadful voice grown from faint, distant whisper to insistent murmur?

  Come to me. I need you.

  It had words now, that urgent, demanding voice.

  “I’m going crazy, Patrick,” Lana told her dog. “It’s inside me, and I am going crazy.”

  Mary Terrafino woke up. She rolled out of bed. Morning. She should go back to sleep: she was exhausted. But she would not fall back to sleep, she knew that. She had things to do.

  First things first, she stumbled to her bathroom and used her bare foot to pull the scale across the tile floor. There was a special spot for the scale: aligned with the center of the mirror over the sink, upper-right corner of the scale precisely in line with the tile.

  She removed her sleep shirt and stepped onto the scale.

  First reading. Step off.

  Second reading. Step off.

  Three times made it official.

  Eighty-one pounds.

  She’d been 128 pounds when the FAYZ came.

  She still looked fat. There were still pockets of chubbiness here and there. No matter what anyone else said. Mary could see the flab. So no breakfast for her. Which was fine, given that breakfast at the day care would be oatmeal made with powdered milk and sweetened with pink packets of Sweet’n Low. Healthy enough—and much, much better than what most people were getting—but not exactly worth gaining weight over.

  Mary popped her Prozac, plus two tiny red Sudafed and a multivitamin. The Prozac kept depression at bay—mostly—and the Sudafed helped keep her from getting hungry. The vitamin would keep her healthy, she hoped.

  She dressed quickly, T-shirt, sweatpants, sneakers. Each was roomy. She was determined not to wear anything more body-conscious until she had really lost some weight.

  She went to the laundry room and spilled a dryer full of cloth diapers into a plastic bag. There were still a few disposable diapers in storage, but they were saving those for emergencies. They had made the switch to cloth a month earlier. It was gross and everyone hated it, but as Mary had pointed out to her grumbling workers, the Pampers factory wasn’t exactly delivering anymore.

  Down the stairs with the bag bump-bumping along.

  Sam was with Astrid and Little Pete in the kitchen. Mary didn’t want to interrupt—or be nagged about having breakfast—so she let herself quietly out the front door.

  Five minutes later she was at the day care.

  The day care had fared badly in the battle. The wall it shared with the hardware store had been blown out. So now the gaping hole was covered by plastic sheeting that had to be retaped just about every day. It was a reminder of how close they had come to disaster. The coyote pack had been in this very room, holding these same children hostage, while Drake Merwin preened and gloated.

  Mary’s brother, John, was already at the day care waiting for her.

  “Hey, Mary,” John sa
id. “You shouldn’t be here. You should be sleeping.”

  John was working the morning shift, 5:00 a.m. to noon, breakfast to just before lunch. Mary was supposed to take over at lunch and work straight through until 10:00 p.m. Lunch through dinner through sleep time, with an hour at the end to work out schedules and clean up. Then she’d have time to go home, watch some DVDs while she worked out on the treadmill in the basement. That was the schedule. Eight hours of sleep and a few hours free in the morning.

  But in reality she often spent two or three hours exercising at night. Going after those last few pounds. On the treadmill, down in the basement, where Astrid wouldn’t hear her and ask her why.

  Most days she consumed fewer than seven hundred calories. On a really good day it would be half that.

  She hugged John. “What’s up, little brother? What’s today’s crisis?”

  John had a list. He read it off his Warriors notebook. “Pedro has a loose tooth. He also had an accident last night. Zosia claims Julia punched her, so they’re fighting and refusing to play together. I think maybe Collin has a fever…anyway, he’s kind of, you know, cranky. I caught Brady trying to run away this morning. She was going to look for her mommy.”

  The list went on and as it did, some of the kids ran over to hug Mary, to get a kiss, to get an appreciation of their hairdo, to earn an approving “good job” for the way they had brushed their teeth.

  Mary nodded. The list was about like this every day.

  A guy named Francis came in, pushed rudely past Mary. Then he realized whom he had just shouldered aside, turned back to her with a scowl, and said, “Okay, I’m here.”

  “First time?” Mary asked.

  “What, am I supposed to be sorry? I’m not a babysitter.”

  This scene, too, had been repeated every day since peace had come to Perdido Beach. “Okay, here’s the thing, kid,” Mary said. “I know you don’t want to be here, and I don’t care. No one wants to be here, but the littles have to be taken care of. So lose the attitude.”

  “Why don’t you just take care of these kids? At least you’re a girl.”

  “I’m not,” John pointed out.