Hunger

by Michael Grant

  “Not me, I’m getting out of here,” Mickey said. He turned and ran.

  “You want to run, too?” Brittney challenged Mike.

  “Lana’s not exactly here right now,” Mike said. “What if they shoot me? I’m just a kid, you know.”

  Brittney tightened her grip on her machine gun. It hung from a strap over her shoulder. She’d long since gotten used to the weight of it. She had test-fired it four times, following Edilio’s training program. The first time she’d dropped it and burst into tears and Edilio had asked her if she wanted to quit.

  But then Tanner had made his presence known, a soft voice that spoke to her when she was scared and told her not to worry, that he was in Heaven with Jesus and the angels. And he was so happy, not hurt or afraid or lonely anymore.

  The next time she’d held on as the gun kicked in her hands. After that she’d more or less hit what she aimed at.

  “If that’s Caine out there, I’m going to get him,” Brittney said.

  “I hate him,” she said. “I mean, I hate what he did. Hate the sin, not the sinner. And I’m going to shoot him so he won’t hurt anyone else.”

  The banging had stopped. Now something different was happening. The door seemed to be bulging inward. It creaked and groaned. There was a loud snap.

  It was going to give way.

  “Run away, Mike,” Brittney said. He was weak. Well, kids were, sometimes. She had to forgive that. “But leave your pistol.”

  “Where do you want me to put it?”

  Brittney stared at the door. It was bulging, straining. Something or someone very, very strong was pushing against it.

  “On the floor. Underneath the last console. Back where no one can see it.”

  “You should come,” Mike pleaded.

  Brittney’s finger curled around the trigger. “No. I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

  She heard his footsteps retreating down the hallway. She expected the door to give way in a few seconds. And then she figured she would be in Heaven with her little brother.

  “Lord? Please help me to be brave,” Brittney said. “In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  “It’s okay if I die, Tanner,” she said, in a different sort of prayer, one she knew her dead brother could hear. “As long as Caine dies first.”

  TWENTY

  18 HOURS, 29 MINUTES

  BRIANNA HAD NOT found Sam on the road to the power plant as she raced back to town. He was not on any of the roads. The only vehicle she had seen had Quinn, Albert, Cookie, and Lana out for a ride in a giant pickup truck. She’d thought about stopping them, telling them to go to the power plant, but none of the four was much of a fighter. Quinn and Cookie were both supposed to be soldiers, but the person she needed to find was Sam, not his useless old surfing buddy.

  Sam wasn’t at the gas station. He wasn’t at town hall or in the plaza. He wasn’t anywhere she looked.

  And Brianna was burning out fast. The speed was exhausting. Not as tiring as it should have been, probably, given that she had just run something like fifteen miles or so, dodging back and forth, up and down streets and alleyways. But exhausting. And the hunger was like a lion inside her, tearing at her insides.

  Her sneakers were in tatters. Again. They didn’t build Nikes for going as fast as a race car.

  Then she heard a loud bang. It was hard to guess where it had come from. But then suddenly there were kids running. Slow. Very slow. But as fast as they could run, poor things.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded, screeching to a stop.

  No one answered. If anything, they seemed scared of her.

  It was clear, though, that they were running away from, and not toward something. So she zipped back up the street and in less time than it would have taken a normal heart to beat twice she was standing in Astrid’s open doorway.

  “Hey. Anybody home?”

  Astrid came out, followed by Edilio. It was obvious that neither was having a good night. Astrid had a red welt on the side of her face next to her eye. Edilio was rubbing his head gingerly and holding a massive shotgun.

  “Where is Sam?” Brianna demanded. “What happened to you guys?”

  “You missed the fun,” Edilio said sourly.

  “No. No, I didn’t. You did!” Brianna yelled. “Caine is attacking the power plant.”

  “What?”

  “He’s there. He and Drake and some other guys.”

  “What about our kids up there?” Edilio demanded.

  “I didn’t see any of them. Look, Caine threw a car through the front gate. He’s real serious about this.”

  “You know where Hunter lives?” Edilio asked.

  Brianna nodded. But too fast to be seen. So she said, “Yeah.”

  “Go there. Sam was there last I saw him. Tell him I’m getting my guys. It’ll take me half an hour to get everyone assembled again. Tell Sam I’ll meet him at the highway.”

  “Your shoes,” Astrid said, pointing down at Brianna’s feet. “What size do you wear?”

  “Six.”

  “I’ll get you a pair from my closet.” But before Astrid could move, Brianna was up the stairs and back, sitting on the porch and tying on a pair of New Balance.

  “Thanks,” she said to s startled Astrid.

  “Don’t forget to—,” Astrid said, but between “don’t” and “forget” Brianna had arrived at Hunter’s house.

  Dekka was just coming down the steps looking like a thundercloud. The girl barely flinched when Brianna appeared suddenly before her.

  “Hi, Breeze,” Dekka said. She almost smiled.

  “Sam in there?”

  “Yep.”

  Brianna appeared suddenly before Sam, who took it less calmly than Dekka had.

  “Sam. Caine. He’s at the plant. I already found Edilio, he’s getting his guys together. Give me a gun, I’ll go keep Caine busy.”

  Sam cursed loudly. It took a while before he was ready to stop. Then, “I knew it! I knew it, and I let myself get distracted.”

  “Sam. Give me a gun.”

  “What? No, Breeze, I need you. And not dead.”

  “I can get back there in, like, two minutes,” Brianna pleaded.

  Sam put a hand on her shoulder. “Breeze? You have a job. You’re the messenger. Right? We have other people for fighting. Go help Edilio get the troops together. Then go see if you can find Lana. I don’t know where she is and we’re going to need her.”

  “She’s driving around in a truck with Quinn and Albert,” Brianna reported.

  “What?”

  “They’re in a truck, heading out on the highway.”

  Sam threw up his hands. “Maybe they heard about Caine, somehow. Maybe they’re on the way there.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so. Albert wouldn’t be with them. Also, someone smacked Astrid.”

  Sam’s face froze. “What?”

  “She’s fine, but there was some kind of problem over at her house.”

  “Zil,” Sam said through gritted teeth. He kicked savagely at a chair. Then, “Go, Breeze. Do what I told you to do.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t have time to argue, Breeze.”

  “Guys? Guys?” Quinn reached across to shake Albert’s shoulder. He had fallen asleep.

  “What? I’m awake. What?”

  “Dude, we are lost.”

  “We’re not lost,” Lana said from the backseat.

  Quinn glanced in the rearview mirror. “I thought you were asleep, too.”

  “We’re not lost,” Lana said.

  “Well, all due respect, we’re not exactly not lost, either. This isn’t even a dirt road anymore, it’s just, like, you know, flat. And not even all that flat.” They had left the highway and turned onto a side road. From there onto a dirt road. And that had gone on and on forever, without so much as a twinkle of light anywhere. Then the dirt road had become more and more dirt and less and less road.

  “If the Healer says we’re not lost, we’re not lost,” C
ookie grumbled.

  “It’s not far,” Lana said.

  “How do you know? I couldn’t find my way back here in the middle of the day. Let alone at night.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Quinn glanced down at the road, then back into the rearview mirror. The only light came from the dashboard, so he could see only the faintest outline of her face. She was looking out of the window, not the direction they were traveling but northeast.

  He couldn’t read her expression. But he got a feeling off her. It was in the occasional sigh. In the absent way she stroked Patrick’s ruff. The distant tone of her voice when she spoke.

  “You okay?” Quinn asked.

  She didn’t answer. Not for a while. Too long. Then, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Lana said nothing.

  Albert, by contrast, was easy to read. Albert—when he managed to stay awake—was all about the goal. He focused his gaze straight ahead. Sometimes Quinn noticed him nodding to himself, as if he was commenting on some internal dialogue.

  Quinn was envious of Albert. He seemed to be so sure of himself. He seemed to know just where he wanted to go, who he wanted to be.

  For his part, Cookie had his own goal: to serve Lana. The big ex-bully would do anything Lana told him to do.

  There were two kinds of kids in the FAYZ, Quinn reflected, and the types were not “freak” and “normal.” They were kids who had been changed for the worse, and the kids who had been changed for the better. The FAYZ had changed them all. But some kids had become more than they were. Albert was one of those. Cookie, in a very different way, was another.

  Quinn knew himself to be the first type. He was one of the kids who had never recovered from the FAYZ. The loss of his parents was like a wound that had never healed. Never stopped hurting. How could it?

  It went beyond the loss of his mom and dad, too, a loss that encompassed everything he had known, everything he had been. He’d been cool, once. The memory brought a sad smile to his lips. Quinn was cool. One of a kind. Everyone knew him. They didn’t all like him, they didn’t all get his act, but Quinn had carried an aura of specialness with him.

  And now…now he was an afterthought in the FAYZ. Kids knew he had betrayed Sam to Caine. They knew that Sam had taken him back. They knew that he had gone a little crazy on the day of the big battle. Maybe more than a little crazy.

  The memories of his mom and dad, his old life, they were far away. Like photos in an old album. Not quite real. Someone else’s memories, his pain; someone else’s life, his loss.

  The memories of the battle—those couldn’t even be called memories because weren’t memories something from the past? That day might have happened three months ago, but it wasn’t the past to Quinn, it was right here, right now, always. Like a parallel life happening simultaneously with this life. He was driving through the night and feeling the gun buck buck buck in his hands and seeing the coyotes and the kids, all mixed up together, all crisscrossing, weaving through the arcs of the bullets.

  Finger off the trigger. Too close to shoot. He’d hit the kid. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t take that chance, and so the coyote had leaped, jaws open, and—

  And that wasn’t long ago and far away to Quinn. It was right now. Right here.

  “Okay,” Lana said, bringing him back to reality. “Slow down, we’re almost there.”

  The headlights lit scruffy bushes and dirt and scatterings of rock. Then a wooden beam, badly charred. Quinn swerved to avoid it.

  He stamped on the brakes. Then, much more slowly crept forward again.

  The headlights illuminated a section of wall, just a few feet. Charred wood was everywhere. Two blackened cans of fruit or beans or whatever lay on their sides in the dirt.

  Despite himself Quinn wondered if there was anything edible left. He remembered that terrifying night spent cowering in the cabin, waiting for the coyotes to drag them out and kill them.

  That was when Sam had finally revealed the extent of his powers. For the first time he had been able to control the devastating light that shot from his hands.

  Quinn stopped the vehicle. He put it into park.

  “It was here,” Quinn said softly.

  “What happened here?” Albert asked.

  Quinn killed the lights, and the four of them climbed from the SUV. It was silent. So much quieter than the last time Quinn had been there.

  Quinn slung his machine pistol over his shoulder and fished a flashlight from under the seat. Albert had a flashlight of his own. The two beams stabbed here and there, highlighting this jagged beam, that singed bit of rug, a kitchen utensil, a twisted metal chair.

  “This is where we met Lana for the first time,” Quinn said. “We’d escaped from Caine. Run away into the woods up north. Decided to go back to town and make a fight of it. Anyway, Sam decided.”

  He bent down to pick up a hefty number-ten can. The label was charred. It might be pudding, though. Roasted pudding, maybe, but the can looked intact. He walked it back to the SUV and tossed it into the back.

  “How was it destroyed?” Albert pressed.

  “Partly it was Sam. First time he ever used his power deliberately. Not out of panic, or whatever, just cold-blooded, knowing what he was doing. You should have seen that, man.” Quinn recalled the moment perfectly. It was the moment when his old friend was clearly revealed as something far, far beyond Quinn. “Partly the coyotes had set the place on fire.”

  “Where’s the gold?” Albert asked, not really caring about the story.

  Quinn waited for Lana to show the way, but she seemed rooted to where she stood. Looking down at the brown, dead remains of Hermit Jim’s quirky attempt to keep a lawn in the midst of this dry, empty land. Cookie stood just behind her, big pistol stuck in his belt, ready, scowling at the threatening night, ready to lay down his life for the girl who had saved him from agony beyond enduring.

  Patrick was busily running around to anything remotely vertical, smelling carefully. He didn’t mark anything himself, just smelled. He seemed subdued, tail down almost between his legs. The scent of Pack Leader must still be strong.

  “This way,” Quinn said when it was clear that Lana wasn’t going to respond.

  He threaded his way through the wreckage. There wasn’t much, really; most of it had burned down to ash. But the surviving bits of shattered lumber were stuck with nails, so Quinn moved cautiously.

  He bent down when he reached what seemed like the right place and began pushing two-by-fours and shingles aside. He was surprised to find the plank floor mostly intact. It had been singed but not consumed by the fire. He found the hatch.

  “Let me see if I can get it open.” He tried, but the fire had warped the hinges. It took both of them, him and Albert, to raise the hatch. One hinge broke, and the hatch flopped awkwardly to one side.

  Albert aimed his flashlight down into the hole.

  “Gold,” Albert said.

  Quinn was a little surprised by Albert’s matter-of-fact tone. He’d half expected a Gollum-like “My precioussss,” or something.

  “Yeah. Gold,” Quinn agreed.

  “It didn’t melt,” Albert said. “Heat rises and all that. Like they taught us in school.”

  “Let’s start loading, huh? This place gives me the creeps,” Quinn said. “Bad memories.”

  Albert reached down and lifted out a brick. He set it down with a thud. “Heavy, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Quinn said. “What are you going to do with it all?”

  “Well,” Albert said. “I’m going to see if I can melt it down and make coins or something out of it. Except I don’t have any kind of coin mold. I had thought about using muffin tins. I have a cast-iron muffin tin that makes the small-sized muffins.”

  Quinn grinned and then laughed. “We’re going to use gold muffins for money?”

  “Maybe. But, actually, I found something better. One of the kids searching houses found where the guy had made his own am
munition. He found some bullet molds.”

  They kept busy lifting the gold out and onto the ground. They stacked it crisscross, like kids playing with blocks.

  “Gold bullets?” Quinn stopped laughing. “We’re going to make gold bullets?”

  “It doesn’t matter what shape they are, so long as they’re consistent. All the same, you know?”

  “Dude. Bullets? You don’t think that’s maybe, you know…weird?”

  Albert sighed, exasperated. “Gold slugs, not the gunpowder part, just the slug part.”

  “Jeez, man, I don’t know.” Quinn shook his head.

  “Thirty-two caliber,” Albert said. “That was the smallest size the guy had.”

  “Why isn’t Cookie helping us?” Quinn wondered.

  In answer, Lana, from somewhere outside, said, “Guys, I’m going to look around for food. Cookie will help me.”

  “Cool,” Quinn said.

  In a few minutes they had all the gold up out of the hole.

  They began walking the gold to the truck, a few bars at a time. The gold bars were not big, but they were heavy. By the time Albert and Quinn had finished hauling the gold they were sweating despite the chill of the night.

  Albert climbed in and pulled a canvas tarp over the gold.

  “Listen, man,” Albert said as he worked to tie down the corners, “this isn’t something we want anyone talking about. Right? This is just between the four of us here tonight.”

  “Hold up, dude. You’re not telling Sam?”

  Albert climbed down to stand face-to-face with Quinn. “Look, I’m not trying to get over on Sam. I have the most total respect for Sam. But this plan works better if it all comes out at once.”

  “Albert, I’m not going to lie to Sam,” Quinn said flatly.

  “I’m not asking you to lie to Sam. If he asks you, tell him. If he doesn’t ask…”

  When Quinn still hesitated, Albert said, “Look, man, Sam is a great leader. Maybe he’s our George Washington. But even Washington was wrong about some things. And Sam doesn’t get what I’m talking about. How people all have to work.”