Hunger

by Michael Grant

  Someone would probably come and wake him up, soon, only he wouldn’t be asleep. They came almost every night. Sam, something’s burning. Sam, someone’s hurt. Sam, a kid crashed a car. Sam, we caught Orc all drunk and breaking windows for no reason.

  It wouldn’t be Sam, the pizza’s here.

  It wouldn’t be Astrid saying Sam, I’m here.

  Sam drifted off to sleep. Astrid came in. She stood in the doorway, beautiful in her gauzy nightgown, and said, Sam, it’s okay, E.Z.’s alive.

  Even asleep, Sam knew that was a dream.

  An hour later Taylor simply appeared, teleported into his room—she called it “bouncing”—and said, “Sam, wake up.”

  No dream, this time. It was often Taylor who brought the bad news. She or Brianna, if either was available. They were the fastest means of communication.

  “What is it, Taylor?”

  “You know Tom? Tom O’Dell?”

  Sam didn’t think he did. His brain was not focusing. He couldn’t seem to quite wake up.

  “Anyway, there was a fight between Tom and the girls who live next door—Sandy and…and I forget the other girl. Tom got hurt pretty bad from Sandy hitting him with a bowling ball.”

  Sam swung his legs over the side of the bed, but could not keep his eyes open. “What? Why did she hit him with a bowling ball?”

  “She says Tom killed her cat,” Taylor said. “And then he was cooking it on the barbecue in his backyard.”

  That at last penetrated Sam’s bleary brain. “Okay. Okay.” He stood up and fumbled around for his jeans. He had gotten over the embarrassment of being seen in his underwear.

  Taylor handed him his pants. “Here.”

  “Bounce back. Tell them I’m coming.”

  Taylor disappeared, and for a moment Sam tried to tell himself that this was just another dream. There was nothing, after all, that he could do about a dead cat.

  But it was his duty to show up. If he started blowing off his duties, it would look bad.

  “Set a good example,” he muttered under his breath as he crept silently past Astrid’s door.

  EIGHT

  88 HOURS, 52 MINUTES

  ORSAY PETTIJOHN STOOD transfixed. Two kids, the first human beings she had seen in three months, and both were bizarre, creepy. In the one boy’s case, monstrous.

  One was some sort of a demon with a thick tentacle where his right arm should have been.

  The other…she wasn’t even sure the other was there for a moment. He appeared, then he disappeared.

  The boy with the frightening tentacle stared after the invisible one. Not quite invisible, Orsay realized when the boy stepped into a pool of light, but close enough. Then the boy with the python arm sighed, cursed under his breath, and opened the creaking door of a Toyota that had unaccountably run fifty feet off the road.

  The boy evidently wanted the window open, but the battery was dead. So he drew a gun, aimed it at the driver’s side window, and fired. The bang was so loud that Orsay gasped. She would have given away her position, but the sound of the explosion also camouflaged the sound of her cry.

  Orsay squatted in the dark, in the dirt, and waited. The boy with the python arm would almost certainly go to sleep.

  And then it would begin again.

  Orsay had been living at the ranger station in the Stefano Rey National Park on the day everyone disappeared.

  She had been mystified. She had been frightened.

  She had also been relieved.

  Just about three months earlier, she had been begging her father for help.

  “What do you mean?” he had asked. He’d been busy poring over paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork involved in being a ranger. It wasn’t just about helping find lost hikers and making sure campers didn’t set the woods on fire while they were toasting marshmallows.

  She had wanted to make him pay attention to her. Just to her. Not phony attention where he was really focused on his work. “Dad, I’m going nuts or something.”

  That declaration had earned her a dubious glance. “Is this about going to see your mom? Because I told you, she’s still not ready. She loves you very much, but she’s not ready for the responsibility.”

  That was a lie, but a well-intentioned one. Orsay knew about her mother’s drug addiction. She knew about her mother’s trips to rehab, each of which was followed by a period of normalcy where she would take Orsay, and put her in school, and arrange tidy little family dinners. Always just enough normal time for Orsay to think, maybe this time, before she would once again find her mother’s “works” stashed in the back of a cupboard, or find her mother barely conscious and sprawled across the couch.

  Her mother was a heroin addict. She’d been a secret heroin addict for a long time, faking it well during the early years when she’d still been married to Orsay’s father and they’d lived in Oakland. Orsay’s father had worked out of the park service regional headquarters.

  But Orsay’s mother’s addiction grew ever worse, and soon there was no hiding it. There was a divorce. Orsay’s mother did not fight for custody. Her father took a job at Stefano Rey, wanting to get far away from the city and far away from his ex-wife.

  Orsay had lived a lonely life since then. School was a once-a-day video link with a classroom all the way off in Sunnyvale.

  Occasionally she’d make a short-term friend with one of the kids who came with their parents to camp. Maybe a nice couple of days of swimming and fishing and hiking. But never more than a day here and a day there.

  “Dad. I’m trying to tell you something important here. It’s not about Mom. It’s about me. There’s something wrong with me. There’s something very, very weird in my head.”

  “Sweetheart, you’re a teenager. Of course there’s something wrong in your head. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be a teenager. It’s normal for you to start thinking about…well, diff—”

  And that’s when her father had simply disappeared.

  There.

  Not there.

  She’d thought she was hallucinating. She had thought the craziness had suddenly overtaken her.

  But her father was really gone. So were Ranger Assante and Ranger Cruz and Ranger Swallow.

  So was everyone in the Main West campground.

  The satellite uplink was dead. The cell phones were dead.

  All that first day she had searched, but there was no one. Not in any of the campgrounds she could reach easily, anyway.

  She had been terrified.

  But that night she had felt silence descend on her battered mind. For the first time in weeks.

  The creepy, lurid, crazy-quilt visions of people and places she didn’t know were gone. In its place…not peace, exactly. But quiet. Her mind and dreams were her own again.

  Despite her fear, Orsay slept. Reality had become a nightmare, but at least now it was her own nightmare.

  On the second day, Orsay had hiked until she’d encountered the barrier. And then she knew that whatever was happening to her, it was real.

  The barrier was impassable. It hurt to touch it.

  There was no going north. The only way open was to the south, toward the distant town of Perdido Beach, almost twenty miles away.

  Orsay had resisted. She was desperately lonely, but then she had been for a long time. And the compensation for feeling sane again was almost enough to make up for the utter isolation.

  She found enough food in the storehouse and, when that was used up, in the campgrounds.

  For a while she thought she might be the only person left alive. But then she had chanced upon a group of kids hiking through the forest. There were five of them. Four boys and a girl, all about Orsay’s age, except for one younger boy, maybe four or five years old.

  She followed them a while, keeping out of sight. They were noisy enough to hear from a distance. They lacked Orsay’s well-developed woodsman’s skills.

  That night, as they began to sleep, Orsay crept closer, wondering, hoping…
/>   And then it started.

  The first dream was from a boy named Edilio. Flashes of a day filled with insane action: a huge boat that flew through the air and crashed down on his head; a hotel atop a cliff; a race around a marina.

  Crowding behind Edilio’s dream came visions from a boy named Quinn. These were sad dreams, dark and gloomy and full of emotion, with only a few dark shapes to give them life.

  But then the little boy, the four-year-old, fell into an REM state, and his dreams had blown away the others. It was as if the others’ dreams were on small TVs while the little boy’s dream was on an IMAX movie screen with surround sound.

  Images of terrible menace.

  Images of staggering beauty.

  Things that were somehow both beautiful and terrifying.

  None of it was logical. None of it made sense. But there was no looking away, no chance of hiding from the cascade of pictures, sounds, feelings. It was as if Orsay had tried to stand in front of a tornado.

  The boy, Little Pete, had seen her. Dreamers often did, although they usually weren’t sure who she was or why she was there. They usually ignored her as just another nonsensical element of a random dream.

  But Little Pete had stepped into his own dream and he had come to her. He had stared right at her.

  “Be careful,” Little Pete said. “There’s a monster.”

  And that was when Orsay had sensed a dark presence, looming up behind her. A presence that was like a black hole, eating the light of Little Pete’s dream.

  There was a name for the dark thing. A word Orsay couldn’t make sense of. A word she had never heard. In the dream she had turned away from Little Pete to face the darkness, to ask it its name. To ask it what “gaiaphage” meant.

  But Little Pete had smiled, just a little. He shook his head no, as if chiding a foolish child who’d been about to touch a hot stove.

  And she had awakened, expelled from the dream like an unwelcomed guest at a party.

  Now, months later, she still winced at the memory. But she also craved it. She had spent every night since wishing that she could touch Little Pete’s sleeping mind once more. She savored the fragments she could recall, tried to get that same rush but always failed.

  She was almost out of food, down to MREs—meals ready to eat, the overly salted meals in a pouch that soldiers and some campers ate. She told herself that she was coming down from the forest at long last for food. Just for food.

  Now Orsay watched from a safe distance, concealed by darkness, as a real-life monster, a boy with a thick, powerful tentacle in place of one arm, said good-bye to a boy who simply disappeared.

  She waited as he lost the fight with sleep.

  And then, ah yes, such strange visions.

  Drake. That was his name. She could hear the echo of that sound in her head.

  Drake Merwin.

  Whip Hand.

  For what felt like a very long time she wandered through dreams of pain and rage. She had to shield herself from the physical agony, memories of which kept flooding the boy’s dreams.

  In Drake’s dream Orsay saw a different boy, a boy with piercing eyes, a boy who made things fly through the air.

  And she saw a boy with fire coming from his hands.

  Then she saw the girl, the dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. And the angry, resentful visions took a turn to something worse still.

  Far worse.

  For weeks before the great disappearance Orsay had been tortured by dreams she couldn’t shut out, many of them the dreams of adults filled with disturbingly adult imagery.

  But she had never entered a dream like this.

  She was shaking. Feeling as if she couldn’t breathe.

  She wanted to look away, spare herself from witnessing the sick boy’s vile nightmares. But it was the curse of her condition: She had no power to block the dreams out. It was like she was strapped into a chair, eyes pried open, forced to look at images that made her sick.

  Only distance would protect her. Sobbing, Orsay crawled away, crawled toward the desert, indifferent to the stones that cut her knees and palms.

  The dreams faded. Gradually, Orsay steadied her breathing. This had been a mistake, coming down from the forest, a terrible mistake.

  She had told herself she was going in search of food. But in her heart she knew there was a deeper reason for leaving the forest. She missed the sound of a human voice.

  No, that wasn’t the whole truth, either.

  She missed the dreams. The good ones, the bad ones. She found herself longing for them. Needing them. Addicted.

  But not this. Not this.

  She sat with eyes closed tight, rocking slowly back and forth in the sand, trying to—

  The tentacle was around her, squeezing her tight, squeezing the air out of her lungs before she could even scream.

  He was behind her. Her movement had awakened him, and he’d found her and now, now…Oh, God…

  He lifted her up and turned her around to face him. His face would have been handsome if she had not known what lurked behind those icy eyes.

  “You,” he whispered, his breath in her face. “You were in my head.”

  Duck had found the cause of the ocean sounds. It was, in fact, the ocean.

  At least that’s what it seemed like. He couldn’t see it. It was as black as everything else. But it smelled of salt. And it moved like a heaving body of water should, rolling up to his toes and receding. But he could see nothing.

  He told himself it was dark outside, out beyond the mouth of the cave. That’s why he couldn’t see anything. It was obvious now that this had to be a sea cave, a cave cut into the land by the constant motion of water over a long, long period of time. Which meant there had to be a way out.

  In his mind he pictured it opening onto the beach below Clifftop. Or somewhere near there. Anyway, the important word was: opening.

  Had to be.

  “You keep saying ‘had to be’ like that makes it so,” he said.

  “No, I don’t,” he argued. “I was thinking it, I didn’t say it out loud.”

  “Great. Now I’m arguing with myself.”

  “Not really, I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “Well, try thinking more and arguing less.”

  “Hey, I’ve been down here for, like, a hundred hours! I don’t even know what time it is. It could be three days from now!”

  He bent down and touched wet sand. Water surged over his fingers. It was cold. But then, everything was cold. Duck had been cold for a long time now. It was slow work walking when you couldn’t see where you were going.

  He raised wet fingers to his tongue. Definitely salt. So yes, it was the ocean. Which meant that yes, this cave opened onto the ocean. Which meant there was a pretty good mystery as to why he couldn’t see any light at all.

  He shivered. He was so cold. He was so hungry. He was so thirsty. He was so scared.

  And suddenly, he realized, he was not alone.

  The rustling sound was different from the water-sloshing sound. Very different. It was a distinctly dry sound. Like someone rubbing crinkly leaves together.

  “Hello?” he called.

  “No answer,” he whispered.

  “I know: I heard. I mean, I didn’t hear,” he said. “Is someone there?”

  The rustling sound again. It was coming from overhead. Then a chitter-chitter-chitter noise, soft but definite. He didn’t miss many sounds now, not with his eyes useless. Hearing was all he had. If something made a sound, he heard it. And something had made a sound.

  “Are you bats?” he asked.

  “Because if they were bats, they would totally answer.”

  “Bats. Bats are not a problem.” He chattered.

  “Bats have to have a way out, right? They can’t live in a cave all the time. They have to be able to fly out and…and drink blood.”

  Duck stood frozen, awaiting the bat attack. He would never see it coming. If they came after him, he would jump into the water.
Yes. Or…or he could get mad and maybe sink through the ground and be safe in the dirt.

  “Yeah, that’s a great plan: bury yourself alive.”

  The bats—if that’s what they were—demonstrated no interest in attacking him and drinking his blood. So Duck returned to the question of what exactly he should do next. In theory he could jump into the water and swim out into the ocean.

  In theory. In reality he could not see his own hand in front of his face.

  He squatted in a dry corner of the cave, well away from the water. And in an area that seemed somewhat less populated by weird rustling sounds.

  He hugged himself and shivered.

  How had he ended up here? He’d never hurt anyone. He wasn’t some evil guy, he was just a kid. Like any other kid. He just wanted to go online and play games and watch TV and listen to music. He wanted to read his comics. He didn’t want to be able to sink through the ground.

  What kind of a stupid power was that, anyway?

  “The Sinker,” he muttered.

  “Weightman,” he countered.

  “The Human Drill.”

  There was no chance he would ever be able to sleep. But he did. Through the worst night of his life, Duck Zhang drifted into and out of a weird nightmare, asleep, awake, and something in between that made him wonder if he was going slowly crazy. He dreamed of food. At one point he dreamed of a pizza chasing him, trying to eat him. And him wishing the pizza just would.

  Then at last he woke up and saw…

  Saw!

  The light was dim, but it was bright enough.

  “Hey! I can see!” he cried.

  The first thing he could see was that the cave did not open onto the outside. The mouth of the cave was underwater. That was the source of the light, it filtered up through the blue-green water itself. The open air couldn’t be too terribly far away, no more than a hundred feet maybe, but he would have to swim underwater to get there.

  The second thing he saw was that the cave was bigger than he’d imagined. It had widened out and was large enough that you could park five or six school buses and have space left over.