Hunger

by Michael Grant

  From Clifftop she would walk down toward Town Beach. Then she would cut through town, but away from the plaza, join the highway, and complete the circle back to Clifftop. Unless she was too weak from hunger. Then she would cut that short.

  She knew she should probably not burn unnecessary calories. But she couldn’t bring herself to stop. To stop, to spend a day lying on the bed, was to surrender. Lana didn’t like the idea of surrender. She hadn’t surrendered to pain, or to Pack Leader, or to the Darkness.

  I don’t surrender, she told herself.

  Come to me. I have need of you.

  As she got beyond the Clifftop approach road and headed down the slope, Lana punched the iPod’s touchscreen and her ears were filled with a Death Cab for Cutie song.

  But it was the other lyrics she heard, like a whisper, like a second track beneath this song.

  She’d gone no more than a hundred yards along when two little kids intercepted her, waving their hands to get her attention.

  They looked healthy enough to her. She gave them a short wave and hoped that would be enough.

  But the two littles moved to block her way. She stopped, panting a little, even though she shouldn’t be, and ripped off her headphones.

  “What?” she snapped.

  There was some hemming and hawing before the kids could blurt it out.

  “Joey’s got a loose tooth.”

  “So what? He’s supposed to be getting new teeth.”

  “But it hurts. You’re supposed to fix things that hurt.”

  “Supposed to?” Lana echoed. “Look, kids, if you’re bleeding from some big gaping wound you can bug me. I’m not here for every little headache or skinned knee or loose tooth.”

  “You’re mean,” the kid said.

  “Yeah. I’m mean.” Lana settled her headphones back in place and started off, feeling angry at the kids and angrier at herself for yelling at them. But kids came after her wherever she was. They interrupted her while she was eating. They harassed her when she was sitting on her balcony reading a book. They banged on her door while she was pooping.

  It was almost never something that needed a miracle. And increasingly that’s what Lana was starting to think about her powers, that they were something miraculous. No one had any better explanation.

  And miracles shouldn’t be wasted.

  Anyway, she had a right to have a life of her own. She wasn’t everyone’s servant. She belonged to herself.

  Come to me.

  Lana bit her lip. She was ignoring it, the voice, the hallucination, whatever it was.

  Just going to ignore it.

  She cranked up the volume on the music.

  She veered away from the beach as she approached town. Maybe if she went along the back streets more. Maybe she could vary her route more and make it harder for people to track her down.

  So long as she ended the same way: back up the hill to Clifftop. Up to the FAYZ wall. Not to touch it, but to get very close to it as she panted and sweated and nursed the inevitable stitch in her side.

  She felt she needed to see that barrier up close every day. It was a devotion, somehow. A touchstone. A reminder that she was here, and this was now. Whatever she had been before, she wasn’t that person anymore. She was trapped in this place and in this life. Not her choice: the wall’s choice.

  Come to me. I have need of you.

  “It’s not real,” Lana shouted.

  But it was real. She knew it was real. She knew the voice. Where it came from.

  She knew she could not shut the voice out of her mind. The only way to silence the voice was to silence it forever. She could be its victim, or she could make it her victim.

  Madness. Suicidal madness. She skipped a slow song and went to something manic. Something loud enough to banish crazy thoughts.

  She walked harder, faster, almost running, pumping her arms and forcing Patrick into a long lope to keep up. But she wasn’t fast enough to outrun a truck that zoomed crazily up to her honking its horn.

  Again she tore off her headphones and yelled, “What?”

  But this was no loose tooth or skinned knee.

  Albert and Howard piled out. Howard helped pull Orc from the back. The boy…the creature…staggered as if drunk. He probably was, Lana thought. Then again, maybe he had a pretty good excuse.

  There was a hole in one of the last human parts of him, his cheek. Dried blood crusted his cheek and neck. Fresher, redder blood still oozed down his cheek and neck.

  “What happened?” Lana asked.

  “Zekes got him,” Howard answered. He was torn between a kind of low-level panic and relief that he had finally reached the Healer. He held Orc’s elbow as if Orc needed Howard’s frail strength to support him.

  “Has he got a worm in him?” Lana asked, cautious.

  “No, we got the worm,” Albert reassured her. “We were just hoping you could help him.”

  “I don’t want no more rock on me,” Orc said.

  Lana understood. Orc had been a garden variety thug, unaware of any special power, until the coyotes had gotten to him in the desert. They had chewed him up badly. Very badly. Worse than anything that had happened to Lana, even. Everywhere they had chewed him had filled in with the gravel covering that made Orc nearly indestructible.

  He didn’t want to lose the last of his human body, the patch of pink skin that included his mouth and part of his neck.

  Lana nodded.

  “You need to stop weaving back and forth, Orc. I don’t want you falling on me,” she said. “Sit down on the ground.”

  He sat down too suddenly and giggled a little at it.

  Lana lay her hand against the gruesome hole.

  “Don’t want no more rock,” Orc repeated.

  The bleeding stopped almost immediately.

  “Does it hurt?” Lana asked. “I mean the rock. I know the hole hurts.”

  “No. It don’t hurt.” Orc slammed his fist against his opposite arm, hard enough that any human arm would have been shattered. “I barely feel it. Even Drake’s whip, when we was fighting, I barely felt it.”

  Suddenly he was weeping. Tears rolled from human eyes onto cheeks of flesh and pebbles.

  “I don’t feel nothing except…” He pointed a thick stone finger at the flesh of his face.

  “Yeah,” Lana said. Her irritation was gone. Her burden was smaller, maybe, than Orc’s.

  Lana pulled her hand away to see the progress. The hole was smaller. Still crusted with blood, but no longer actively bleeding.

  She put her hand back in place. “Just a couple minutes more, Orc.”

  “My name’s Charles,” Orc said.

  “Is it?”

  “It is,” Howard confirmed.

  “What were you guys doing going into the worm field?” Lana asked.

  Howard shot a resentful look at Albert, who answered, “Orc was picking cabbage.”

  “My name’s Charles Merriman,” Orc repeated. “People should call me by my real name sometimes.”

  Lana’s gaze met Howard’s.

  Now, Lana thought, now he wants his old name back. The bully who reveled in a monster’s name was now a monster in fact, and wanted to be called Charles.

  “You’re all better,” Lana announced.

  “Is it still skin?” Orc asked.

  “It is,” Lana reassured him. “It’s still human.”

  Lana took Albert’s arm and drew him away. “What are you doing sending him into the worm field like that?”

  Albert’s face went blank. He was surprised at being reproached. For a moment Lana thought he would tell her to take a jump. But that moment passed, and Albert slumped a little, as if the air had gone out of him.

  “I’m trying to help,” Albert said.

  “By paying him with beer?”

  “I paid him what he wanted, and Sam was okay with it. You were at the meeting,” Albert said. “Look, how else do you think you get someone like Orc to spend hours in the hot sun working? Astrid
seems to think people will work just because we ask them to. Maybe some will. But Orc?”

  Lana could see his point. “Okay. I shouldn’t have jumped all over you.”

  “It’s okay. I’m getting used to it,” Albert said. “Suddenly I’m the bad guy. But you know what? I didn’t make people the way they are. If kids are going to work, they’re going to want something back.”

  “If they don’t work, we all starve.”

  “Yeah. I get that,” Albert said with more than a tinge of sarcasm. “Only, here’s the thing: Kids know we won’t let them starve as long as there’s any food left, right? So they figure, hey, let someone else do the work. Let someone else pick cabbages and artichokes.”

  Lana wanted to get back to her run. She needed to finish, to run to the FAYZ wall. But there was something fascinating about Albert. “Okay. So how do you get people to work?”

  He shrugged. “Pay them.”

  “You mean, money?”

  “Yeah. Except guess who had most of the money in their wallets and purses when they disappeared? Then a few kids stole what was left in cash registers and all. So if we start back using the old money we just make a few thieves powerful. It’s kind of a problem.”

  “Why is a kid going to work for money if they know we’ll share the food, anyway?” Lana asked.

  “Because some will do different stuff for money. I mean, look, some kids have no skills, right? So they pick the food for money. Then they take the money and spend it with some kid who can maybe cook the food for them, right? And that kid maybe needs a pair of sneakers and some other kid has rounded up all the sneakers and he has a store.”

  Lana realized her mouth was open. She laughed. The first time in a while.

  “Fine. Laugh,” Albert said, and turned away.

  “No, no, no,” Lana hastened to say. “No, I wasn’t making fun of you. It’s just that, I mean, you’re the only kid that has any kind of a plan for anything.”

  Albert actually looked embarrassed. “Well, you know, Sam and Astrid are working their butts off.”

  “Yeah. But you’re looking ahead. You’re actually thinking about how we put it all together.”

  Albert nodded. “I guess.”

  “Good for you, man,” Lana said. “I gotta go. Orc will be okay. As okay as he can be, anyway.”

  “Thanks,” Albert said, and seemed genuinely grateful.

  “Hey, let me see that hand,” Lana said.

  Albert seemed puzzled. He looked at his own hand, swollen and discolored from punching Orc’s stone face.

  “Oh, yeah,” Albert said as Lana briefly took his hand in hers. “Thanks again.”

  Lana put her headphones back on and trotted a few steps. Then she stopped. She turned and took them off. “Hey. Albert. The money thing.”

  “Yes?”

  She hesitated, knowing that in this moment she was perhaps starting a chain reaction. Knowing that it was dangerous to the point of madness. It was eerie, as if fate had intervened in the person of Albert, showing her the way to her half-formed goal. “Wouldn’t gold work? I mean, as money?”

  Albert’s sharp eyes found hers. “Should we get together and talk?”

  “Yeah,” Lana said.

  “Stop by the club tonight.”

  “The what?”

  Albert grinned. He fished a half sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

  Lana glanced at it. Then at him. She laughed and handed it back. “I’ll be there.”

  She started running again. But her thoughts were taking a different tack than before. Albert was planning for the future, not just letting it happen to him. That was the thing to do. To plan. To act. Not just to let things happen.

  She was right to plan.

  Come to me.

  Maybe I will, Lana thought. And maybe you won’t like it much when I do.

  ELEVEN

  70 HOURS, 11 MINUTES

  “MOTHER MARY WANTS to draft two more kids,” Astrid told Sam.

  “Okay. Approved.”

  “Dahra says we’re running low on kids’ Tylenol and kids’ Advil, she wants to make sure it’s okay to start giving them split adult pills.”

  Sam spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “What?”

  “We’re running low on kid pills, Dahra wants to split adult pills.”

  Sam rocked back in the leather chair designed for a grown man. “Okay. Whatever. Approved.” He took a sip of water from a bottle. The wrapper on the bottle said “Dasani” but it was tap water. The dishes from dinner—horrible homemade split-pea soup that smelled burned, and a quarter cabbage each—had been pushed aside onto the sideboard where in the old days the mayor of Perdido Beach had kept framed pictures of his family. It was one of the better meals Sam had had lately. The fresh cabbage tasted surprisingly good.

  There was little more than smears on the plates: the era of kids not eating everything was over.

  Astrid puffed out her cheeks and sighed. “Kids are asking why Lana isn’t around when they need her.”

  “I can only ask Lana to heal big things. I can’t demand she be around 24/7 to handle every boo-boo.”

  Astrid looked at the list she had compiled on her laptop. “Actually, I think this involved a stubbed toe that ‘hurted.’”

  “How much more is on the list?” Sam asked.

  “Three hundred and five items,” Astrid said. When Sam’s face went pale, she relented. “Okay, it’s actually just thirty-two. Now, don’t you feel relieved it’s not really three hundred?”

  “This is crazy,” Sam said.

  “Next up: the Judsons and the McHanrahans are fighting because they share a dog, so both families are feeding her—they still have a big bag of dry dog food—but the Judsons are calling her Sweetie and the McHanrahans are calling her BooBoo.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Astrid said.

  “What is that noise?” Sam demanded.

  Astrid shrugged. “I guess someone has their stereo cranked up.”

  “This is not going to work, Astrid.”

  “The music?”

  “This. This thing where every day I have a hundred stupid questions I have to decide. Like I’m everyone’s parent now. I’m sitting here listening to how little kids are complaining because their older sisters make them take a bath, and stepping into fights over who owns which Build-A-Bear outfit, and now over dog names. Dog names?”

  “They’re all still just little kids,” Astrid said.

  “Some of these kids are developing powers that scare me,” Sam grumbled. “But they can’t decide who gets to have which special towel? Or whether to watch The Little Mermaid or Shrek Three?”

  “No,” Astrid said. “They can’t. They need a parent. That’s you.”

  Sam usually handled the daily dose of nonsense with equanimity, or at least with nothing worse than grouchy humor. But today he was feeling it was finally too much. Yesterday he’d lost E.Z. This morning he’d seen almost no one show up for work. And Edilio had been forced to track kids down for two hours. Even then they had come back with a pitiful amount of cantaloupes, barely enough to feed the day care. All of that followed by Duck Zhang and some crazy story about falling through the ground into a radioactive tunnel full of water bats.

  The only person who’d been productive was Orc. He had picked several hundred cabbages before the worms had nearly killed him.

  “What is that music?” he demanded, angry and needing to yell at someone or something. Sam stomped to the window and threw it open. Immediately the volume of the music, most of it vibrating bass, increased dramatically.

  Down in the square things were dark but for the streetlights and a strobe light blinking through the front window of McDonald’s.

  “What in the…”

  Astrid came and stood beside him. “What is that? Is Albert throwing a party?”

  Sam didn’t answer. He left without a word, annoyed, angry, and secretly glad of any excuse to get out of
answering kids’ stupid questions and handling their stupid problems.

  He took the steps two at a time. Down to the ground floor, out through the big front door, ignoring a “Hello” from the kid Edilio had guarding the town hall, and down the big marble steps to the street.

  Quinn was passing by, clearly heading toward McDonald’s.

  “Hey, brah,” Quinn said.

  “What is going on, do you know?” Sam asked.

  “It’s a club.” Quinn grinned. “Man, you must be working too hard. Everyone knows about it.”

  Sam stared at him. “It’s a what?”

  “McClub, brah. All you need is some batteries or some toilet paper.”

  This announcement left Sam baffled. He considered asking Quinn for clarification, but then Albert appeared, formally dressed, like he thought it was graduation or something. He actually had on a dark sports coat and slacks in a lighter shade. His shirt was pale blue, collared, and ironed. Spotting Sam, he extended his hand.

  Sam ignored the hand. “Albert, what is going on here?”

  “Dancing, mostly,” Albert said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Kids are dancing.”

  Quinn caught up then and stepped in front of Sam to shake Albert’s still-extended hand. “Hey, dude. I have batteries.”

  “Good to see you, Quinn. The price is four D cells, or eight double As, or ten triple As, or a dozen Cs. If you have a mix, I can work it out.”

  Quinn dug in his pocket and produced four triple A batteries and three D cells. He handed them to Albert, who agreed to the price and dropped the batteries into a plastic bag at his feet.

  “Okay, the rules are no food, no alcohol, no attitude, no fights, and when I call ‘time,’ there’s no arguing about it. Do you agree to these rules?”

  “Dude, if I had any food, would I be here? I’d be home eating it.” Quinn put his hand over his heart like he was pledging allegiance to the flag and said, “I do.” He jerked a thumb back at Sam. “Don’t bother with him: Sam doesn’t dance.”

  “Have a good time, Quinn,” Albert said, and swung open the door to admit him.

  Sam stared in absolute amazement. He was torn between outrage and an urge to laugh in admiration.

  “Who told you you could do this?” Sam asked.