Hunger

by Michael Grant

Mary said, “See that easel? There are three lists on there, one list for each of the daily helpers. Pick a list. That’s what you do. Whatever is on the list. And you smile while you’re doing it.”

  Francis marched over and checked the list.

  John said, “I’ll bet you a cookie he doesn’t pick diaper duty.”

  “No bet,” Mary said. “Besides, there are no cookies.”

  “I miss cookies,” John said wistfully.

  “Hey,” Francis yelled. “All these lists suck.”

  “Yes,” Mary agreed. “Yes, they do.”

  “This all sucks.”

  “Please stop saying ‘sucks.’ I don’t want to have three-year-olds repeating it all day.”

  “Man, when my birthday comes, I’m stepping out,” Francis sulked.

  “Fine. I’ll be sure not to schedule you after that. Now, pick a work list and do it. I don’t want to have to waste Sam’s time calling him over here to motivate you.”

  Francis stomped back to the easel.

  “Stepping out,” Mary said to John, and made a face. “How many people have hit the magic fifteen so far? Only two have poofed. People talk about it. But they don’t actually do it.”

  The FAYZ had eliminated everyone over the age of fourteen. No one knew why. At least, Mary didn’t, although she had overheard Sam and Astrid whispering in a way that made her think they might know more than they admitted.

  A fourteen-year-old who reached his fifteenth birthday would also disappear. Poof. If he let himself. If he decided to “step out.”

  What happened during what kids called Stepping Out was now known to just about everyone. The way subjective time would slow to a crawl. The appearance of the person you loved and trusted most to beckon you across, to urge you to leave the FAYZ. And the way this person transformed into a monster if you resisted.

  You had a choice: stay in the FAYZ, or…But no one knew just what the “or” was. Maybe it was escape back into the old world. Maybe it was a trip to some whole new place.

  Maybe it was death.

  Mary noticed John looking intensely at her. “What?” she said.

  “You wouldn’t ever…”

  Mary smiled and ruffled his curly red hair. “Never. I would never leave you. Missing Mom and Dad?”

  John nodded. “I keep thinking about how many times I made them mad.”

  “John…”

  “I know. I know that doesn’t matter. But it’s like…” He couldn’t find the words, so he made the motion of a knife stabbing his heart.

  Someone was tugging at Mary’s shirt from behind. She looked around and with a sinking heart saw a little boy named…named…she couldn’t remember his name. But the second little boy behind him she remembered was Sean. She knew why they were there. They had both recently had their fifth birthdays. The age limit for the day care was four. At age five you had to move out—hopefully to a house with some responsible older kids.

  “Hi, kids. What’s up?” Mary asked as she brought her face down to their level.

  “Um…,” the first one said. And then he burst into tears.

  She shouldn’t do it, she knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t stop herself from putting her arms around the little boy. And then Sean started crying as well, so the embrace was extended, and John was in there, too, and Mary heard herself saying of course, of course they could come back, just for today, just for a little while.

  FOUR

  106 HOURS, 8 MINUTES

  COATES ACADEMY WAS quite a bit the worse for wear. Battles had damaged the façade of the main building. There was a hole in the whitewashed brick so big, you could see an entire second-story classroom, a cross-section of the floor beneath it, and a jagged gap that didn’t quite reach to the top of the first-story window below. Most of the glass in the windows was gone. The kids had made an effort to keep the elements out by duct-taping sheets of plastic over the holes, but the tape had loosened and now the plastic and the tape hung limp, stirring with the occasional breeze. The building looked as if it had been through a war. It had been.

  The grounds were a mess. Grass that had always been trimmed to obsessive perfection in the old days now grew wild in some areas and had gone yellow as hay in others. And weeds pushed up through the circular gravel driveway where once parents’ minivans and SUVs and luxury sedans had lined up.

  The plumbing was out in half the building, toilets overflowing and reeking. The smaller buildings, the art classroom, and the dormitories were in better shape, but Drake insisted on staying in the main building. He had occupied the office of the school shrink, a place where in the old days Drake had standing appointments for counseling and testing.

  Do you still dream of hurting animals, Drake?

  No, Doc, I dream of hurting you.

  The office was an armory now. Drake’s guns, nine of them, ranging from hunting rifles with scopes to handguns, were laid out on a table. He kept them unloaded, all but two, the guns he carried on him. He’d hidden the ammunition for the other guns: there was no one Drake trusted. The ammunition, never enough of it, to Drake’s thinking, rested behind the ceiling tiles and in air-conditioning vents.

  Drake sat watching a DVD on the plasma screen he’d stolen. The movie was Saw II. The sound effects were so great. Drake had the volume up high enough to rattle one of the few surviving panes of glass. So he didn’t at first hear Diana’s voice when she said, “He wants you.”

  Drake turned, sensing her presence. He flicked his tentacle arm, the arm that gave him his nickname, Whip Hand, and turned off the set. “What do you want?” he demanded with a scowl.

  “He wants you,” Diana repeated.

  Drake loved the fear in her eyes. Tough-chick Diana: snarky, sarcastic, superior Diana. Scared Diana. Scared of him and what he could do to her.

  “Who wants me?”

  “Caine. He’s up.”

  “He’s been up before,” Drake said.

  “He’s back. Mostly. He’s back and he wants you and Bug.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’ll get there when I get there.” He flicked his whip and turned the set back on. “Great, now I missed the best part. Where’s the remote? I can’t rewind without the remote.”

  “You want me to tell Caine to wait?” Diana asked innocently. “No problem. I’ll just go tell him you’re too busy to see him.”

  Drake took a deep breath and glared at her. Slowly the whip moved toward her, the end twitching with anticipation, wanting to wrap around her neck.

  “Go ahead, do it,” she challenged him. “Go on, Drake. Go ahead and defy Caine.”

  His cold eyes flinched, just a little, but he knew she’d seen it and it made him mad.

  Not today. Not yet. Not until Caine took care of Sam.

  Drake coiled the whip. He had a way of wrapping it sinuously around his waist. But the arm was never entirely still, so it always looked like a pink and gray anaconda squeezing him, always looked like Drake was its prey.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Diana? Me fighting Caine. Sorry to disappoint you. I am one hundred percent loyal to Caine. We’re like brothers, the two of us. Not like him and Sam, more like blood brothers.” He winked at her. “The brotherhood of the Darkness, Diana. Me and him, we’ve both been there. We’ve both faced it.”

  Drake knew Diana was eaten up with curiosity about the thing in the mine shaft, the thing that had given Drake his arm after Sam had burned his old arm off. But Drake wasn’t going to give her anything. Let her wonder. Let her worry. “Let’s go see the boss.”

  Caine looked better already. Whatever sickness had been consuming him these last three months, imprisoning him in a world of fevers and nightmares, must have finally run its course.

  Too late for Chunk.

  The memory made Drake smile. Fat-ass Chunk flying through the air, smacking into a solid wall, hitting it so hard, he actually went through it. Man, that had been something to see.

  After that, no one—including Drake—had been crazy enough to be arou
nd Caine. Even now Drake was wary. Only Diana was desperate enough to stay and change Caine’s soiled sheets and spoon-feed him soup.

  “You look good, Caine,” Drake said.

  “I look like hell,” Caine said. “But my head is clear.”

  Drake thought that probably wasn’t true. He’d spent just a few hours with the Darkness himself, and his head still wasn’t clear of it, not by a long shot. He heard the voice in his head, sometimes. He heard it. And he was pretty sure Caine did, too.

  Once you heard that voice, you never stopped hearing it, Drake thought. He found the idea comforting.

  “Bug, are you in here?” Caine asked.

  “Right here.”

  Drake almost jumped. Bug was just three feet away, not quite invisible but not quite visible, either. He had the mutant power of camouflage, like a chameleon. Looking at Bug when he was using his power, the most you might notice was a sort of ripple in the scenery, a bending of light.

  “Knock it off,” Caine growled.

  Bug became visible as the snot-nosed little creep he was. “Sorry,” he said. “I just…I didn’t…”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not in the mood to throw anyone into a wall,” Caine said dryly. “I have a job for you, Bug.”

  “Go into Perdido Beach again?”

  “No. No, that’s what Sam is expecting,” Caine said. “We stay out of Perdido Beach. We don’t need the town. They can have the town. For now, anyway.”

  “Yeah, let them keep what we can’t take away. That’s very generous,” Diana said, mocking them.

  “It’s not about territory,” Caine said. “It’s about power. Not powers, Drake, power.” He put his hand on Bug’s shoulder. “Bug, you’re the key person on this. I need your skills.”

  “I don’t know what else I can see in Perdido Beach,” Bug said.

  “Forget Perdido Beach. Like I said, it’s about power. Nuclear power.” Caine winked at Diana and slapped Drake’s shoulder, working his old charm, getting them to believe in him again. But Drake wasn’t fooled: Caine was weak in his body and disturbed in his mind. The old confidence was subdued: Caine was a shadow. Although he was a shadow who could throw a person through a wall. Drake’s whip hand twitched against the small of his back.

  “That power plant is the town’s lifeline,” Caine said. “Control the electricity and Sam will give us whatever we want.”

  “Don’t you think Sam knows this? And probably has guards at the power plant?” Diana said.

  “I’m sure there are guards. But I’m sure they won’t see Bug. So, fly now, little Bug. Fly away and see what you can see.”

  Bug and Diana both turned to leave. The one excited, the other seething. Drake stayed behind.

  Caine seemed surprised, maybe even a little worried. “What is it, Drake?”

  “Diana,” Drake said. “I don’t trust her.”

  Caine sighed. “Yeah, I think I get that you don’t like Diana.”

  “It’s not about me not liking the…” He’d been about to use the “b” word, but Caine’s eyes flared and Drake reworded it. “It’s not about me not liking her. It’s about her and Computer Jack.”

  That got Caine’s full attention. “What are you talking about?”

  “Jack. He’s got powers now. And I’m not just talking about his tech skills. Bug saw him down in Perdido Beach. That backhoe they have? The wetback was digging a grave, and the backhoe toppled into it. Bug says Jack picked it up. Just pulled it up out of the hole like it was no heavier than a bike.”

  Caine sat down on the edge of his bed. Drake had the impression Caine had needed to sit down for a while, that standing for more than a few minutes was still heavy work.

  “Sounds like he’s at least a two bar. Maybe even a three,” Caine said. Diana had invented the system of bars, copying the idea from cell phones. Diana’s own power was the ability to gauge power levels.

  Drake knew that there were only two known four bars: Sam and Caine. There was speculation about Little Pete, who had demonstrated some major stuff, but how dangerous could a half-brain-dead little five-year-old really be?

  “Yeah, so Jack could be a three bar. Only not according to Diana, right? Diana says she read him at zero bars. So maybe the power develops late, okay. But from zero to three?” Drake shrugged, not needing to push the issue, knowing that Caine—even a sick, weakened Caine—was connecting the dots in his head.

  “We never did get an explanation for why Jack switched sides and ran to Sam,” Caine said softly.

  “Maybe someone put him up to it,” Drake said.

  “Maybe,” Caine said, not wanting to admit the possibility. “Get someone to watch her. Not you, she knows you watch her. But get someone to keep an eye on her.”

  The worst thing about the FAYZ from Duck Zhang’s point of view was the food. It had been great at first: candy bars, chips, soda, ice cream. That had all lasted a few weeks. It would probably have lasted longer but people had wasted it—leaving ice cream to melt; gorging on cookies, then leaving the bag out where dogs could get at it; letting bread mold.

  By the time they’d burned through all the sweets and snack food it was too late to do anything about the fact that all of the meat and chicken, with the exception of bacon, sausage, and ham, and all the fresh produce except potatoes and onions was expired or rotten. Duck had been forced to help clean all that out of Ralph’s. A crew of resentful kids had shoveled rotting lettuce and stinking meat for days. But what could you do when Sam Temple looked right at you, pointed his finger, and said, “You.” The boy could fry you. Plus, he was the mayor, after all.

  Then had come the canned soup, dry cereal, crackers and cheese period.

  Right now Duck would give anything for a can of soup. His breakfast had been canned asparagus. Which tasted like vomit and everyone knew it made your pee stink.

  But there were good things about the FAYZ, too. The best thing about the FAYZ, from Duck Zhang’s point of view, was the pool. It wasn’t exactly his pool, but it might as well be because here he was, floating in it. On a Monday morning in early March when he normally would have been in school.

  No school. Nothing but pool. It took some of the sting out of hunger.

  He was a sixth grader, small for his age, Asian, although his family had been American since the 1930s. Back in the day his folks had worried he was getting fat. Well, no one was very fat in the FAYZ. Not anymore.

  Duck loved the water. But not the ocean. The ocean scared him. He couldn’t get past the idea that a whole world was down there below the waves, invisible to him while he was visible to them. Them being squids, octopi, fish, eels, jellyfish and, above all, sharks.

  Pools on the other hand were great. You could see all the way to the bottom.

  But he’d never had a pool of his own. There was no public pool in Perdido Beach, so he could only swim when he happened to have a friend with a pool, or when he was on vacation with his parents and they stayed at a hotel with a pool.

  Now, however, with kids in Perdido Beach able to live pretty much wherever they liked, and go pretty much wherever they liked, Duck had found a perfect, secluded, private pool. Whom it belonged to, he couldn’t say. But whoever they were, they had a great setup. The pool was big, kidney-shaped, with a ten-foot depth at one end so you could dive in headfirst. The whole thing was the prettiest shade of aqua tile with a gold sunburst pattern in the bottom. The water—once he’d figured out how to add chlorine and clean the filters—was as clear as glass.

  There was a nice wrought-iron table with an umbrella in the middle and some very comfortable chaise lounges for him to lie out on if he chose. But he didn’t choose to lie out. He chose to lie back on a float. A bottle of water bobbed alongside him on its own separate float. He had a cool pair of Ray-Bans on and a light coating of sunblock and he was—in a word—happy. Hungry, but happy.

  Sometimes, when Duck felt particularly good, it almost seemed as if he didn’t even need the raft to hold him up. Sometimes if he was happy e
nough he could actually feel the pressure of his back on the plastic lessen. Like he weighed less or something. In fact he’d once awakened suddenly from a happy dream and had fallen a couple of feet into the water. At least, that’s what it seemed like, although it was obviously just part of the dream.

  Other times, if he became angry for some reason, maybe just remembering some slight, it seemed to him that he grew heavier and the float would actually start to sink into the water.

  But Duck was seldom either very happy or very angry. Mostly he was just peaceful.

  “Yeee-ahhh!”

  The shout was completely unexpected. As was the huge splash that followed it.

  Duck sat up on his raft.

  Water sloshed over him. Someone was in the water. His water.

  Two more blurs raced toward the pool’s edge and there were two more shouts, followed by two more cannonball splashes.

  “Hey!” Duck yelled.

  One of the kids was a jerk named Zil. The other two Duck didn’t recognize right away.

  “Hey!” he yelled again.

  “Who are you yelling at?” Zil demanded.

  “This is my pool,” Duck said. “I found it and I cleaned it. Go get your own pool.”

  Duck was aware that he was smaller than any of the three. But he was angry enough to feel bold. The float sank beneath him and he wondered if one of the boys had poked a hole in it.

  “I’m serious,” Duck yelled. “You guys take off.”

  “He’s serious,” one of the boys mocked.

  Before he knew it Zil was leaping up from beneath the water and had grabbed Duck by the neck. Duck was plunged underwater, gasping, choking, sucking water into his nose.

  He surfaced with difficulty, fighting with suddenly leaden arms to stay afloat.

  They hit him again, just roughhousing, not really trying to hurt him, but forcing him under once more. This time he touched down on the bottom of the pool and had to kick his way back to the surface to gasp for air. He clutched at the float, but one of the boys yanked it away, giggling loudly.

  Duck was filled with sudden rage. He had one good thing in his life, this pool, one good thing, and now it was being ruined.