Hunger

by Michael Grant

“He knows people have to work,” Quinn argued. “He just doesn’t want you getting over on everyone, making yourself the rich guy.”

  Albert wiped sweat from his forehead. “Quinn, why do you think people work hard? Just to get by? You think your folks worked just to get by? Did they buy just enough food? Or did they get just barely enough house? Or a car that barely runs?” Albert’s voice was urgent. “No, man, people like a good life. They want more. What’s wrong with that?”

  Quinn laughed. “Dude, okay, you’ve thought about all this and you’re probably right. I mean, what do I know? Anyway, look, am I going to go running straight to Sam and tell him what we did? No. As far as I know, I don’t have to do that.”

  “That’s all I’m asking, Quinn,” Albert said. “I wouldn’t ever ask you to lie.”

  “Uh-huh,” Quinn said cynically. “What about the Healer? She…” He looked around, suddenly aware that he hadn’t heard her or Cookie in quite a while.

  “Lana!” he yelled.

  Then, “Healer!”

  The night was silent.

  Quinn aimed the flashlight into the truck cab. Maybe she was in there. Asleep, maybe. But the cab was empty.

  He swiveled the light around the area, picking out the poles that had once held Hermit Jim’s water tower.

  “Lana? Lana? We’re ready to go,” Quinn yelled.

  “Where is she?” Albert wondered. “I don’t see her or Cookie. Or her dog.”

  “Lana! Healer!” Quinn shouted. No answer came.

  He and Albert exchanged looks of horror.

  Quinn leaned into the truck, intending to sound the horn. She’d have to hear that. He froze when he saw the Post-it note. He tore it from the steering wheel and read it aloud by flashlight.

  “‘Don’t try to follow us,’” Quinn read. “‘I know what I’m doing. Lana.’”

  “Okay,” Albert said, “Okay, now we have to tell Sam.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  18 HOURS, 23 MINUTES

  JACK STRAINED AGAINST the door.

  It was built strong. Very strong. Steel in steel.

  But it creaked and groaned, and Jack could see the seam between door and jamb growing.

  His strength was shocking to him. He’d done very little to learn to control it. He hadn’t really tested it much. In fact, he kept forgetting he had it because it was not, it never would be, part of who he really was.

  Jack had grown up being a brain. He liked being a brain. He wore the geek label proudly. He had no interest in being some superstrong mutant. In fact, even as he pushed against the door, he was wondering if there wasn’t an electronic control of some sort on the door. Wondering where the control panel might be. Wondering whether he could cut a wire, or solder another wire, and open the door. Wondering whether it might be computer-controlled, in which case it would be a question of hacking.

  Those thoughts engaged Jack’s mind. And that gave Jack pleasure.

  Pushing on a steel door like some kind of ox? That was stupid. It was what stupid people did. And Jack was not stupid.

  “Keep at it, Jack,” Caine encouraged him. “It’s starting to give.”

  Jack heard Diana saying to Drake, “I told you he was strong. And you thought you’d just go and pick him up and bring him to Coates? Hah.”

  The door would give way in another few seconds, Jack could feel it.

  “When it goes, Jack, you need to drop to the floor,” Caine said.

  Jack would have asked why, but the exertion was popping the veins in his neck, squeezing his lungs, bulging his eyes, and generally making it hard to imagine engaging in conversation.

  “Soon as it goes, Jack, drop to the floor,” Caine reiterated. “Someone in there might start shooting.”

  What? Shooting?

  Jack lessened his effort.

  “Don’t slack off,” Drake warned. “We’ll take care of whoever is on the other side.”

  Jack heard the sound of a gun being cocked. And a low, mean laugh from Drake.

  He wedged his feet tight. One more big push. And drop.

  Suddenly he was scared. Getting shot at was not part of the deal.

  He shoved hard. All his might.

  The door collapsed suddenly, but not the way Jack had expected. It snapped at the top hinge and the deadbolt broke. The door was still in the doorway, bent at an angle but held in place by one hinge. Another push and it would swing in.

  The sound of the gun was shocking.

  Jack dropped to the floor. He covered his head, covered his ears.

  He yelled, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!” but no one could possibly have heard because now the firing was coming from both sides. Whoever was in the control room was firing short bursts through the gaps. BlamBlamBlam!

  Drake was firing back in rapid-fire single rounds.

  Bullets pinged off the steel and ricocheted in the hallway.

  Drake yelled, Caine yelled, Jack yelled, and from beyond the doorway a girl’s voice was screaming in rage and fear.

  Then Caine struck. He hit the weakened door with a blast of his own.

  The steel door exploded inward.

  It skidded across the floor beyond and knocked the legs out from under a girl who kept firing as she fell, spraying automatic weapons fire wildly in the air.

  Jack hugged the ground, sobbing, “Don’t kill me!” Drake leaped over him, gun in one hand, whip hand unfurled.

  Lying on his side, Jack saw a crazy tableau, the girl, unable to move, her legs twisted at impossible angles but bringing the still-firing gun around toward Drake.

  Drake’s whip hand snapping.

  The girl pointed her gun straight at Drake’s chest.

  Click.

  Empty.

  Drake’s whip connected.

  A scream of pain.

  Another.

  “Stop it!” Diana cried.

  Caine, accidentally kicking Jack’s head as he rushed into the room.

  Again, the lash of Drake’s whip, and now he was yelling in wild glee, crowing and cursing.

  Jack crawled forward, blinded by tears. He knew the girl. He knew her. Brittney. She’d been in history with him. Three rows back.

  Again Drake struck.

  The empty gun fell from Brittney’s hand.

  She was cut, bleeding, legs shattered from the impact of the door, her face a mess of tears and blood and Diana screaming abuse at Drake and Caine saying nothing to stop the psychopath and Jack wanting to cry, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but unable to find the words.

  Diana reached Drake and grabbed his whip hand at the shoulder. “Enough, you sick piece of—”

  Drake spun around, face-to-face with Diana. He bared his teeth and roared at her, roared like an animal, spit flying.

  “She’s right: enough,” Caine said at last.

  “Keep your girlfriend out of my face!” Drake bellowed at Caine.

  Caine looked coldly at Drake. “I let you have your fun. We’re not here for your entertainment.”

  Jack was stunned. He was unable to tear his eyes away from Brittney. She moaned, tried to move, then slumped to the floor. Unconscious or dead. Jack didn’t know which.

  She’d been in his class.

  He knew her.

  “Get to work, Jack,” Caine said.

  Diana turned bloodshot eyes on Jack, eyes full of hatred and sorrow. She brushed tears away. “Jack’s hurt.”

  “What?” Caine demanded. “Jack?”

  Jack wasn’t hurt. He started to get up, ashamed of cowering on the floor. But his left foot gave way. He looked down, mystified, and saw that his pants, from the knee down, were soaking red.

  “He’s losing a lot of blood,” Diana said.

  It was the last thing Jack heard before the floor rushed up and smashed him in the face.

  Lana heard Quinn’s shouts. She heard the truck’s horn. She was no more than two or three hundred feet away, just beyond the reach of the stabbing flashlight beams.

  Cookie walked stolidly be
side her, quiet, though he must have had his doubts.

  Lana hoped Quinn and Albert wouldn’t come after her. She didn’t want to have to explain what she was up to.

  Patrick, too, heard the honking horn, so she whispered, “Quiet boy. Shhh.”

  Lana had made sure to wear sturdy boots—a big improvement over the last time she had walked this route. She had her heavy pistol in her shoulder bag, which was another major improvement. And she had Cookie.

  If Pack Leader found them out here, Lana intended one of them—she hoped it was she, not Cookie—to shoot him in the face.

  Also in her bag was a bottle of water, a can of button mushrooms, and an entire cabbage. Not much food, especially for a guy Cookie’s size, but then she expected to find at least a few cans of something in the shed at the mine. Hermit Jim would have stashed at least some food there.

  She hoped.

  The last time she had walked this path she’d gone in search of Jim’s truck, hoping to use it to get to Perdido Beach. By that point she had found the gold and figured out that the eccentric hermit was a prospector. She had followed tire tracks to the tumble-down, abandoned mining town hidden in a crease of the hills. She’d found Jim’s truck but not the keys. Then she had found Jim himself, dead in the mine shaft.

  She knew now where the keys were.

  Back then, back before so much had happened, she would have been terrified of digging through the pockets of a corpse. But that was the old Lana. The new Lana had seen things that were so much worse.

  She knew where to find the keys. And where to find the truck. And she remembered the big LPG—liquid petroleum gas—tank Jim used to fire the smelter.

  Her plan was simple: Retrieve the keys. With Cookie’s help, load the gas tank into Jim’s truck. Drive the truck and the tank to the mine entrance. Open the valve on the gas and let it seep into the mine shaft.

  Then light a fuse and run.

  She didn’t know if the explosion would kill the thing in the mine. But she hoped to bury it under many tons of rock.

  The Darkness had called to her in her dreams and in her waking dreams as well. It had its hook in her and she knew it was drawing her in.

  Come to me. I have need of you.

  It wanted her.

  “Hello darkness, my old friend,” Lana half sang, half whispered. “I’m coming to talk with you again.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  18 HOURS, 18 MINUTES

  JACK WOKE TO pain.

  He’d been moved. Someone had turned him over. He sat up too suddenly. His head swam, and for a moment he thought he would pass out again.

  One leg of his trousers had been crudely ripped to expose the wound. There was a blue, blood-soaked bandage tied around his lower thigh. It hurt. It burned like someone was sticking a red-hot poker into his flesh.

  Diana was beside him. It took him a moment to make sense of her shaved head. “I found these in one of the offices. Take them.” She transferred four Advil from her hand to his. “It’s twice the regular dose, but I doubt it will kill you.”

  “What happened?” he rasped.

  “Bullet. But it just grazed you and kept going. It cut a kind of neat little furrow. It’ll hurt, but the bleeding’s already stopped.”

  “Okay, Jack, snap out of it,” Caine said. He sounded harried and worried. Things weren’t going quite as he had planned. “You know what you’re here for.”

  Two of Drake’s soldiers returned, loudly abusing Mickey Finch and Mike Farmer, who had their hands tied behind them. They’d been found hiding in offices. Cowering under desks. “Oh good,” Caine said breezily, “the hostages are here.”

  “We told them to throw down any guns they had, and this retard just did,” one of the goons crowed. “All we had was a shotgun and a pistol and this kid had a machine gun and he still gave up. Little wussy. The other one didn’t have a gun.”

  Mickey and Mike looked miserable and very afraid. Their expressions grew bleaker still when they saw Brittney on the floor in a puddle of blood.

  Drake strode toward them, pushed Mike aside, and grabbed the machine gun. He ran his tentacle over the stock, over the cocking mechanism, holding it almost reverently. There was an expression not far from love in his cold, blue eyes. “I like this. The girl’s gun was a piece of crap, but this is cool. Very cool.”

  “Maybe you two should get a room,” Diana said.

  “None of the freaks has power enough to mess with me if I’m carrying one of these,” Drake said.

  “Yeah, not even Caine,” Diana agreed brightly. “Now you can be the boss, right?”

  Jack stood rooted in place watching all this, still unable to focus on his so-called job.

  How had he let himself be dragged into this? There was a girl not ten feet away from him who might die, if she wasn’t dead already. He could take three steps and be standing in her blood, as he was sitting in his own.

  “Jack,” Caine said. “Snap out of it. Get to work. Now!”

  Jack moved like he was in a dream, shaking his head, his ears still ringing from the gunfire. His leg burned. And the material of his trousers, wet, clung to him. He stepped gingerly to the nearest computer console and sat down heavily in a swivel chair. The monitor was old. The look of the software was old. The computer didn’t even have a mouse, it was all keyboard-controlled.

  His heart sank further still. Old software meant all kinds of keystrokes, nothing he was used to. He slid open a drawer hoping to find a manual, or at least a cheat sheet.

  “How’s it look?” Caine asked. He laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder, a friendly gesture meant to reassure Jack. For the first time in his life it occurred to Jack that he wanted to spin around and punch Caine. Punch him hard.

  “It’s totally unfamiliar software,” Jack said.

  “Nothing you can’t handle, though. Right?”

  “I can’t do it very fast,” Jack said. “I have to work through it.”

  The hand on his shoulder tightened its grip. “How long, Jack?”

  “Hey, I’m hurt, all right? I got shot!” When Caine just stared at him, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know. It depends.”

  He could sense Caine’s tension, the bottled-up rage that fed on fear. “Then don’t waste time.”

  Caine released him and turned back to Drake. “Put the hostages in the corner.”

  “Uh-huh,” Drake said absently. He was still fondling the submachine gun.

  Caine strode quickly up to him and smacked the barrel of the gun. “Hey. Take care of business. Brianna could be back here at any second. If it’s not her, it’ll be Taylor. You’d better not be screwing around.”

  Brittney lay on the floor, not moving, not making a sound. Was she alive? Jack wondered. Given how badly she was hurt, and knowing now how much pain even a grazing wound could cause, he wondered if she might not be better off dead.

  Jack found an ancient loose-leaf binder, smallish, with torn page ends sticking out here and there, festooned with age-curled Post-it notes marking pages.

  He started to work his way through it. He was looking for a guide to the function keys. Without that he had nothing. The lack of a mouse was crippling: he’d never seen, let alone used, a computer without a mouse. It was amazing that such things still existed.

  “Diana,” Caine ordered. “Read our two hostages. I don’t want to find out they’re hiding some power. Drake? How’s it going?”

  “I’m going to string the wire,” Drake said.

  “Good,” Caine said.

  Jack stole a glance and saw that Drake was holding a spool of bare wire, quite thin but strong looking. He was surveying the doorway, looking for something.

  Drake shrugged, dissatisfied with what he was seeing. He began to wrap one end of the wire around the broken middle hinge where it was still attached to the wall. It was a tall door with three hinges, one that was just above head level, one at ankle height, one splitting the difference.

  Drake stretched the wire from the hinge to a heavy me
tal filing cabinet against the wall. He passed the spool through a drawer handle and pulled it tight. He cut the wire with a pair of needle-nose pliers and wrapped the wire back on itself, tightening it further.

  Diana stepped back from the two hostages and said, “They’re both clear. The one may be a one bar, but at that level he doesn’t even know what powers he has. If he even has anything at all useful.”

  “Good,” Caine said.

  Diana sauntered over and flopped into the swivel chair closest to Jack. She stared moodily at the monitor in front of her.

  “What’s Drake doing?” Jack whispered.

  Diana turned her languid eyes on him. “Hey. Jack wants to know what you’re doing, Drake. Why don’t you tell him?”

  “Jack is supposed to be working,” Caine interrupted. “He’s busy.”

  Jack turned hastily back to the notebook. There it was: a list of function keys. He frowned and began to work his way through the keys, pressing, seeing the results, moving on methodically to the next key.

  Drake had finished with the wire. He ducked beneath it and disappeared down the hallway from the direction they had come, uncoiling wire as he went.

  “I’m in the main directory,” Jack announced. “This is so old. This is, like, DOS or something.”

  Despite himself he was becoming fascinated by the challenge at hand. It was computer archaeology. He was deciphering a language that was pre-Windows, pre-Linux, pre-everything. It took his mind off the pain. Mostly.

  “I hope you weren’t too madly in love with Brianna, Jack,” Diana said.

  “What? No. No way.” Jack could feel himself blushing. “No. That’s stupid.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He felt his way, step by step, through the directory, looking for controls that might not even be there, commands that might not even exist.

  Drake reappeared. He was whistling happily to himself. “Slice and dice,” he said. “Slice and dice.”

  “Good,” Caine said. “That’s one. Now set up for Taylor. Remember, we don’t want anyone shooting Jack or hitting any of the equipment.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Drake said. He pointed his tentacle at one of his two thugs. “You. Bring the shotgun.” When the boy had complied, Drake spent a few minutes moving him around the room, checking sightlines. “Okay. You have a simple job. You see Taylor popping in here, you shoot.”