Hunger Page 2

  What they left behind was no longer recognizable as a human being.

  “There’s a rope here,” Albert said, stepping down at last from the Jeep. He tried to tie a lasso, but his hands were shaking too badly. He handed the rope to Edilio, who formed a loop and after six misses finally snagged what was left of E.Z.’s right foot. Together they dragged the remains from the field.

  A single tardy worm crawled from the mess and headed back toward the cabbages. Sam snatched up a rock the size of a softball and smashed it down on the worm’s back. The worm stopped moving.

  “I’ll come back with a shovel,” Edilio said. “We can’t take E.Z. home, man, he’s got two little brothers. They don’t need to be seeing this. We’ll bury him here.

  “If these things spread…,” Edilio began.

  “If they spread to the other fields, we all starve,” Albert said.

  Sam fought a powerful urge to throw up. E.Z. was mostly bones now, picked not quite clean. Sam had seen terrible things since the FAYZ began, but nothing this gruesome.

  He wiped his hands on his jeans, wanting to hit back, wishing it made sense to blast the field, burn as much of it as he could reach, keep burning it until the worms shriveled and crisped.

  But that was food out there.

  Sam knelt beside the mess in the dirt. “You were a good kid, E.Z. Sorry. I…sorry.” There was music, tinny, but recognizable, still coming from E.Z.’s iPod.

  Sam lifted the shiny thing and tapped the pause icon.

  Then he stood up and kicked the dead worm out of the way. He held his hands out as though he were a minister about to bless the body.

  Albert and Edilio knew better. They both backed away.

  Brilliant light shot from Sam’s palms.

  The body burned, crisped, turned black. Bones made loud snapping noises as they cracked from the heat. After a while Sam stopped. What was left behind was ash, a heap of gray and black ashes that could have been the residue of a backyard barbecue.

  “There was nothing you could have done, Sam,” Edilio said, knowing that look on his friend’s face, knowing that gray, haggard look of guilt. “It’s the FAYZ, man. It’s just the FAYZ.”

  TWO

  106 HOURS, 16 MINUTES

  THE ROOF WAS on crooked. The blistering bright sun stabbed a ray straight down into Caine’s eye through the gap between crumbled wall and sagging roof.

  Caine lay on his back, sweating into a pillow that had no case. A dank sheet wrapped around his bare legs, twisted to cover half his naked torso. He was awake again, or at least he thought he was, believed he was.

  Hoped he was.

  It wasn’t his bed. It belonged to an old man named Mose, the groundskeeper for Coates Academy.

  Of course Mose was gone. Gone with all the other adults. And all the older kids. Everyone…almost everyone…over the age of fourteen. Gone.

  Gone where?

  No one knew.

  Just gone. Beyond the barrier. Out of the giant fishbowl called the FAYZ. Maybe dead. Maybe not. But definitely gone.

  Diana opened the door with a kick. She was carrying a tray and balanced on the tray was a bottle of water and a can of Goya brand garbanzo beans.

  “Are you decent?” Diana asked.

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t understand the question.

  “Are you covered?” she asked, putting some irritation into her tone. She set the tray on the side table.

  Caine didn’t bother to answer. He sat up. His head swam as he did. He reached for the water.

  “Why is the roof messed up like that? What if it rains?” He was surprised by the sound of his own voice. He was hoarse. His voice had none of its usual persuasive smoothness.

  Diana was pitiless. “What are you, stupid now as well as crazy?”

  A phantom memory passed through him, leaving him feeling uneasy. “Did I do something?”

  “You lifted the roof up.”

  He turned his hands around to look at his palms. “Did I?”

  “Another nightmare,” Diana said.

  Caine twisted open the bottle and drank. “I remember now. I thought it was crushing me. I thought something was going to step on the house and crush it, squash me under it. So I pushed back.”

  “Uh-huh. Eat some beans.”

  “I don’t like beans.”

  “No one likes beans,” Diana said. “But this isn’t your neighborhood Applebee’s. And I’m not your waitress. Beans are what we have. So eat some beans. You need food.”

  Caine frowned. “How long have I been like this?”

  “Like what?” Diana mocked him. “Like a mental patient who can’t tell if he’s in reality or in a dream?”

  He nodded. The smell of the beans was sickening. But he was suddenly hungry. And he remembered now: food was in short supply. Memory was coming back. The mad delusion was fading. He couldn’t quite reach normal, but he could see it.

  “Three months, give or take a week,” Diana said. “We had the big shoot-out in Perdido Beach. You wandered off into the desert with Pack Leader and were gone for three days. When you came back you were pale, dehydrated, and…well, like you are.”

  “Pack Leader.” The words, the creature they represented, made Caine wince. Pack Leader, the dominant coyote, the one who had somehow attained a limited sort of speech. Pack Leader, the faithful, fearful servant of…of it. Of it. Of the thing in the mine shaft.

  The Darkness, they called it.

  Caine swayed and before he rolled off the bed, Diana caught him, grabbed his shoulders, kept him up. But then she saw the warning sign in his eyes and muttered a curse and managed to get the wastebasket in front of him just as he vomited.

  He didn’t produce much. Just a little yellow liquid.

  “Lovely,” she said, and curled her lip. “On second thought, don’t eat any beans. I don’t want to see them come back up.”

  Caine rinsed his mouth with some of the water. “Why are we here? This is Mose’s cottage.”

  “Because you’re too dangerous. No one at Coates wants you around until you get a grip on yourself.”

  He blinked at another returning memory. “I hurt someone.”

  “You thought Chunk was some kind of monster. You were yelling a word. Gaiaphage. Then you smacked Chunk through a wall.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Caine. In the movies a guy can get knocked through a wall and get up like it’s no big deal. This wasn’t a movie. The wall was brick. Chunk looked like roadkill. Like when a raccoon gets run over and over and over and keeps getting run over for a couple of days.”

  The harshness of her words was too much even for Diana herself. She gritted her teeth and said, “Sorry. It wasn’t pretty. I never liked Chunk, but it wasn’t something I can just forget, okay?”

  “I’ve been kind of out of my mind,” Caine said.

  Diana wiped angrily at a tear. “Answer the question: Can you give an example of understatement?”

  “I think I’m better now,” Caine said. “Not all the way better. Not all the way. But better.”

  “Well, happy day,” Diana said.

  For the first time in weeks Caine focused on her face. She was beautiful, Diana Ladris was, with enormous dark eyes and long brown hair and a mouth that defaulted to smirk.

  “You could have ended up like Chunk,” Caine said. “But you’ve been taking care of me, anyway.”

  She shrugged. “It’s a hard new world. I have a choice: stick by you, or take my chances with Drake.”

  “Drake.” The name conjured dark images. Dream or reality? “What’s Drake doing?”

  “Playing junior Caine. Supposedly representing you. Secretly hoping you’ll just die, if you ask me. He raided the grocery store and stole some food a few days ago. It’s made him almost popular. Kids don’t have a lot of judgment when they’re hungry.”

  “And my brother?”

  “Sam?”

  “I don’t have another long-lost brother, do I?”

  “Bug’s
gone into town a couple of times to see what’s going on. He says people still have a little food but they’re getting worried about it. Especially since Drake’s raid. But Sam is totally in charge there.”

  “Hand me my pants,” Caine said.

  Diana did as he asked, then ostentatiously turned away as he pulled them on.

  “What defenses do they have up?” Caine asked.

  “They keep people all over the grocery store now, that’s the main thing. Now Ralph’s always has four guys with guns sitting on the roof.”

  Caine nodded. He bit at his thumbnail, an old habit. “How about freaks?”

  “They have Dekka and Brianna and Taylor. They have Jack. They may have some other useful freaks, Bug isn’t sure. They have Lana to heal people. And Bug thinks they have a kid who can fire some kind of heat wave.”

  “Like Sam?”

  “No. Sam’s like a blowtorch. This kid is like a microwave. You don’t see any flames or anything. It’s just that suddenly your head is cooking like a breakfast burrito in a Kitchen-Aid.”

  “People are still developing powers,” Caine said. “Any here?”

  Diana shrugged. “Who knows for sure? Who’s going to be crazy enough to tell Drake? Down in town a new mutant gets some respect. Up here? Maybe they get killed.”

  “Yeah,” Caine said. “That was a mistake. Coming down on the freaks, that was a mistake. We need them.”

  “Plus, in addition to some possible new moofs, Sam’s people still have machine guns. And they still have Sam,” Diana said. “So how about if we don’t do something stupid like try and fight them again?”

  “Moofs?”

  “Short for mutant. Mutant freaks. Moofs.” Diana shrugged. “Moofs, muties, freaks. We’re out of food, but we’ve got plenty of nicknames.”

  Caine’s shirt was laid over the back of a chair. He reached for it, wobbled, and seemed about to fall over. Diana steadied him. He glared at her hand on his arm. “I can walk.”

  He glanced up and caught sight of his reflection in a mirror over the dresser. He almost didn’t recognize himself. Diana was right: He was pale, his cheeks were concave. His eyes seemed too large for his face.

  “I guess you are getting better: you’re becoming a prickly jerk again.”

  “Get Bug in here. Get Bug and Drake. I want to see them both.”

  Diana made no move. “Are you going to tell me what happened to you out there in the desert with Pack Leader?”

  Caine snorted. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes,” Diana insisted, “I do.”

  “All that matters is I’m back,” Caine said with all the bravado he could manage.

  Diana nodded. The movement caused her hair to fall forward, to caress her perfect cheek. Her eyes glittered moistly. But her lush lips still curled into an expression of distaste.

  “What’s it mean, Caine? What does ‘gaiaphage’ mean?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard the word before.”

  Why was he lying to her? Why did it seem so dangerous that she should know that word?

  “Go get them,” Caine said, dismissing her. “Get Drake and Bug.”

  “Why don’t you take it easy? Make sure you’re really…I was going to say ‘sane,’ but that might be setting the bar kind of high.”

  “I’m back,” Caine reiterated. “And I have a plan.”

  She stared at him, head tilted sideways, skeptical. “A plan.”

  “I have things I have to do,” Caine said, and looked down, incapable, for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp, of meeting her gaze.

  “Caine, don’t do this,” Diana said. “Sam let you walk away alive. He won’t do that a second time.”

  “You want me to bargain with him? Work something out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, that’s just what I’m going to do, Diana. I’m going to bargain. But first I need something to bargain with. And I know just the thing.”

  Astrid Ellison was in the overgrown backyard with Little Pete when Sam brought her the news and the worm. Pete was swinging. Or more accurately he was sitting on the swing as Astrid pushed him. He seemed to like it.

  It was dull, monotonous work pushing the swing with almost never a word of conversation or a sound of joy from her little brother. Pete was five years old, just barely, and severely autistic. He could talk, but mostly he didn’t. He had become, if anything, even more withdrawn since the coming of the FAYZ. Maybe it was her fault: she wasn’t keeping up with the therapy, wasn’t keeping up with all the futile, pointless exercises that were supposed to help autistics deal with reality.

  Of course Little Pete made his own reality. In some very important ways he had made everyone’s reality.

  The yard was not Astrid’s yard, the house not her house. Drake Merwin had burned her house down. But one thing there was no shortage of in Perdido Beach was housing. Most homes were empty. And although many kids stayed in their own homes, some found their old bedrooms, their old family rooms, too full of memories. Astrid had lost track of how many times she’d seen kids break down sobbing, talking about their mom in the kitchen, their dad mowing the lawn, their older brother or sister hogging the remote.

  Kids got lonely a lot. Loneliness, fear, and sadness haunted the FAYZ. So, often kids moved in together, into what amounted almost to frat or sorority houses.

  This house was shared by Astrid; Mary Terrafino; Mary’s little brother, John; and more and more often, Sam. Officially Sam lived in an unused office at town hall, where he slept on a couch, cooked with a microwave, and used what had been a public restroom. But it was a gloomy place, and Astrid had asked him more than once to consider this his home. They were, after all, a family of sorts. And, symbolically at least, they were the first family of the FAYZ, substitute mother and father to the motherless, fatherless kids.

  Astrid heard Sam before she saw him. Perdido Beach had always been a sleepy little town, and now it was as quiet as church most of the time. Sam came through the house, letting himself in, calling her name as he went from room to room.

  “Sam,” she yelled. But he didn’t hear her until he opened the back door and stepped out onto the deck.

  One glance was all it took to know something terrible had happened. Sam wasn’t good at concealing his feelings, at least not from her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, just strode across the weedy, patchy grass and put his arms around her. She hugged him back, patient, knowing he’d tell her when he could.

  He buried his face in her hair. She could feel his breath on her neck, tickling her ear. She enjoyed the feel of his body against hers. Enjoyed the fact that he needed to hold her. But there was nothing romantic about this embrace.

  At last he let her go. He moved to take over pushing Little Pete, seeming to need something physical to do.

  “E.Z.’s dead,” he said without preamble. “I was touring the fields with Edilio. Me, Edilio, and Albert, and E.Z. along for entertainment. You know. No good reason for E.Z. to even be there, he just wanted to ride along and I said okay because I feel like all I ever do is say no, no, no to people, and now he’s dead.”

  He pushed the swing harder than she’d been doing. Little Pete almost fell backward.

  “Oh, God. How did it happen?”

  “Worms,” Sam said dully. “Some kind of worm. Or snake. I don’t know. I have a dead one in there on the kitchen counter. I was hoping you’d…I don’t know what I was hoping. I figure you’re our expert on mutations. Right?”

  He said the expert part with a wry smile. Astrid wasn’t an expert on anything. She was just the only person who cared enough to try and make sense in a systematic, scientific way of what was happening in the FAYZ.

  “If you keep pushing him, he’ll be fine,” Astrid said of her brother.

  She found the creature in a Baggie on the kitchen counter. It looked more like a snake than a worm, but not like any normal snake, either.

 
She pressed gingerly on the bag, hoping it really was dead. She spread waxed paper on the granite counter and dumped the worm out. She rummaged in the junk drawer for a tape measure and did her best to follow the contours of the creature.

  “Eleven inches,” she noted.

  Then she found her camera and took a dozen photos from every angle before using a fork to lift the monstrous thing back into the Baggie.

  Astrid loaded the pictures onto her laptop. She dragged them into a folder labeled “Mutations—Photos.” There were dozens of pictures. Birds with strange talons or beaks. Snakes with short wings. Subsequent pictures showed larger snakes with larger wings. One, taken at a distance, seemed to show a rattlesnake the size of a small python with leathery wings as wide as a bald eagle’s.

  She had a blurry photo of a coyote twice the size of any normal coyote. And a close-up of a dead coyote’s mouth showing a strangely shortened tongue that looked creepily human. There was a series of grotesque JPEGs of a cat that had fused with a book.

  Other photos were of kids, most just looking normal, although the boy called Orc looked like a monster. She had a picture of Sam with green light blazing from his palms. She hated the picture because the expression on his face as he demonstrated his power for her camera was so sad.

  Astrid clicked opened the worm pictures and used the zoom function to take a closer look.

  Little Pete came in, followed by Sam.

  “Look at that mouth,” Astrid said, awestruck. The worm had a mouth like a shark. It was impossible to count the hundreds of tiny teeth. The worm seemed to be grinning, even dead, grinning.

  “Worms don’t have teeth,” Astrid said.

  “They didn’t have teeth. Now they do,” Sam said.

  “See the things sticking out all around its body?” She squinted and zoomed in closer still. “They’re like, I don’t know, like minuscule paddles. Like legs, only tiny and thousands of them.”

  “They got into E.Z. I think they went right through his hands. Right through his shoes. Right through his body.”

  Astrid shuddered. “Those teeth would bore through anything. The legs push it forward once it’s inside its victim.”