Hunger (14 page)

Mary Terrafino blundered into the hallway. “What is happening!”

“Mary! Back! Backbackback!” Sam yelled.

Mary jumped back into her room as the mustard-colored, eyeless dog with antennae attacked, feet clicking and scrabbling on the hardwood.

It had two tubes on its head. Sam was sure it hadn’t had
them just moments earlier.

Something pale blue shot from the tubes. Slime covered one of Sam’s hands, thick as oatmeal, sticky as rubber cement.

With the other hand, Sam fired again. The thing burned, slowed, but did not stop.

And now all the nightmares were pushing and shoving to get through the door, jostling for the chance to attack, and then—

Then they were gone.

Simply gone.

All but the still-sizzling remains of the six-winged bug and the goo-spraying canine. Astrid rushed into Little Pete’s room. Sam was only a step behind. Little Pete was sitting up in bed, eyes open, unfocused.

Astrid threw herself onto the bed and put her arms around him.

“Oh, Petey, Petey,” she cried.

Sam crossed quickly to the window. The curtain that had been singed was now burning. He yanked at it, pulled it down to stomp on it, and in the process knocked a shelf full of nesting dolls to the floor. Sam stamped the fire out. One foot crushed one of the gaily painted red nesting dolls. The outer doll splintered. The doll nestled within rolled free into the flame.

Sam stamped it all out.

“You have a fire extinguisher?” he asked. He was trying to wipe the mucousy substance from his hand and not having much luck. “Just to be safe, we should—”

But then, through the window he saw something almost as frightening as the monsters. There was a girl standing across the street. She was gazing up at him.

She had huge dark eyes, and an abundance of brown hair pulled back into a ponytail.

The girl from his dream.

Sam ran from the room, tumbled down the steps, and burst out onto the street.

The girl was nowhere to be seen.

Sam ran back inside to face a terrified Mary and Astrid, who, to his amazement, was taking notes on a pad of paper even as she hugged her brother.

“What in the—” Sam began.

“They were adapting, Sam,” Astrid interrupted urgently. “Did you see? They were changing as we watched them. Altering their physical shapes. Evolving.”

She scribbled, wiped tears from her face, and scribbled some more.

“What is going on?” Mary Terrafino asked in an abashed, diffident whisper, like she was intruding.

Sam turned to her. “Mary. You don’t talk about this.”

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Mary asked, looking at Little Pete, who was yawning now and beginning to drift back to sleep. “There’s something about him.”

“There are a lot of things about him, Mary,” Sam confessed wearily. “But it stays between us. I need to be able to trust you on this.”

Mary nodded. She seemed torn between staying and
arguing and returning to the relative sanity of her room. Sanity won out.

“This isn’t right,” Astrid whispered as she laid her brother back on his pillow.

“You think?” Sam asked shrilly.

Astrid stroked Little Pete’s forehead. “Petey, you can’t do that again. You might hurt someone. You might hurt me. And then who would take care of you?”

“Yeah, no more monsters, Petey,” Sam said.

“No more monsters,” Astrid echoed.

Little Pete closed his eyes. “No more monsters,” he said through a huge yawn.

“I made him be quiet,” Little Pete added.

“Made who be quiet?” Sam asked.

“Petey. Who?” Astrid pleaded. “Who? Who was it? What did he want to say?”

“Hungry,” Little Pete said. “Hungry in the dark.”

“What does that mean?” Astrid pleaded.

But Little Pete had fallen asleep.

36
HOURS
, 47
MINUTES

“
SHE’S BEEN LIKE
this ever since.” Bug—the visible Bug—waved his hand at Orsay, who sat knock-kneed and slump-shouldered on the front steps of Coates Academy.

Caine stared down at her with more than casual interest. He touched the top of Orsay’s head and noted the way she flinched. “Been there. I think,” he said.

Diana yawned. She was still dressed in her silk pajamas with a robe pulled around her as if it was cold. It was never really cold in the FAYZ.

Bug swayed back and forth, barely able to stay awake.

“What was happening when she started zoning out?” Caine asked Bug.

“What?” Bug snapped his head forward, jerking himself awake. “She was in one of Sam’s dreams. Something about cans of food. Then all of a sudden there’s this, like, creepy light show going on in one of the other rooms in the house and then it was like Orsay was on drugs or something.”

“What do you know about drugs?” Diana asked.

Bug shrugged. “Joe junior, my big brother, he got high a lot.”

Caine knelt down in front of Orsay. Gently he lifted her face. “Snap out of it,” he said.

There was no response. So he slapped her once, hard but with no malice. His palm left a pink stain on her cheek.

Orsay’s eyes flickered. She looked like a person waking up many hours too early.

“Sorry,” Caine said. He was very close to her. Close enough to inhale her breath. Close enough to hear her heart pounding like a cornered rabbit’s. “I need to know what you saw.”

The corner of her mouth turned down, like a crudely drawn cartoon of fear and sadness and something else.

“Come on,” Caine cajoled. “Whatever dreams you had, I’ve had worse. Terrible stuff you don’t even want to know about.”

“They weren’t terrible,” Orsay said in a small voice. “They were…overpowering. They made me want more.”

Caine shifted his weight away from her. “Then why are you all freaked out?”

“In his dreams…in his dreams the world…Everything is so…” She formed her hands as if trying to make a shape out of something that defied definition.

“Sam’s dreams?” Caine demanded, half skeptical, half angry.

Orsay looked sharply at him. “No. No, not Sam. Sam’s dreams are easy. There’s no magic in them.”

“Then tell me about them. That’s what I sent you to find out.”

Orsay shrugged. “He’s…I don’t know. Like, worried. He’s distracted,” she said dismissively. “He thinks he’s screwing up and, anyway, he just wants to get away from it all. And of course, he thinks about food a lot.”

“Poor baby,” Diana said. “All that power. All that responsibility. Boo-hoo.”

Caine laughed. “I guess being the boss isn’t what Sam thought it would be.”

“I think it’s exactly what he thought it would be,” Diana argued. “I don’t think he ever wanted any of this. I think he just wanted to be left alone.” That last sentence she spoke pointedly.

“I don’t leave people alone when they screw with me,” Caine said. “Useful information, Diana.”

He stood up. “So. Sam is running scared. But not scared of me. Good. He’s worried about his silly job as mayor of loserville. Good.” He tapped the top of Orsay’s head. “Hey. Anything about the power plant in Sam’s dreams?”

Orsay shook her head. She was off again, off in some zombie trance reliving some strange hallucination of her own or maybe someone else’s.

Caine clapped his hands together. “Good. Sam isn’t obsessing over the power plant. The enemy,” he said with a grand flourish, “is looking inward, not outward. In fact, we could strike at any time. Except.”

He stared hard at Diana.

“I’ll get him,” she said.

“I can’t do it without Jack, Diana.”

“I’ll get him,” she said.

“You want Jack? I’ll get him,” Drake said.

Caine said, “You’re thinking of the old Jack, Drake. You have to remember that Jack has powers now.”

“I don’t care about his powers,” Drake snarled.

“Diana will give me Jack,” Caine said. “And then we will turn off the lights and feed the—” He stopped very abruptly. He blinked in confusion.

“Feed?” Drake echoed, puzzled.

Caine almost didn’t hear him. His brain seemed to trip, to skip a step, like a scratch in a DVD when the picture pixilates for a moment before starting up again. The familiar grounds of Coates Academy swam before his eyes.

Feed?

What had he meant?

Who
had he meant?

“You can all go,” he said, distracted.

No one moved, so he made it clear: “Go away. Go away and leave me alone!”

Then he added, “Leave her.”

With Diana and Drake gone, Caine knelt before Orsay again. “You saw him, didn’t you? You felt him there. He touched your mind. I can tell.”

Orsay didn’t deny. She met his gaze, unflinching. “He was in the little boy’s dreams.”

“The little boy?” Caine frowned. “Little Pete? Is that who you mean?”

“He needed the little boy. The dark thing, the gaiaphage, he was…” She searched for a word, and when she found it, it surprised her. “He was learning.”

“Learning?” Caine gripped her arm tightly, squeezing meaning from her. She flinched. “Learning what?”

“Creation,” Orsay said.

Caine stared at her. He should ask. He should ask what she meant. What would the Darkness create? What would he learn from the mind of a five-year-old autistic?

“Go inside,” Caine whispered. He let go of her arm. “Go!”

Alone, he searched his mind, his memory. He stared into the trees at the edge of the campus as though the explanation might be hiding there in the early morning shadows.

“And then we will turn off the lights and feed the—”

He had not just misspoken. It wasn’t just…nothing. There had been a definite idea there, something tangible. Something that needed doing.

Hungry in the dark.

It felt like someone had a rope wrapped around his brain. Someone he couldn’t see, someone standing far off in the dark, invisible. The rope disappeared into gloom and mystery, but at this end it was attached to him.

And out there, the Darkness held the other end. Yanked it whenever it liked.

Like Caine was a fish on a hook.

He crawled up onto the step. The granite was cold. He felt exposed and ridiculous sitting there, almost doubled over, beads of sweat forming on his brow.

It still had its hook in him. It was playing him, letting the line go slack, letting him think he was free, then yanking back hard, making sure the hook was still set, wearing him out.

Playing him.

Caine flashed on a memory almost forgotten. He saw his “father,” seated in a deck chair with salt spray darkening his tan jacket, holding the long, supple pole, sawing it back and forth.

Caine had gone fishing that one time, with his “father.” It hadn’t been a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn kind of experience. Caine’s father—the man he’d grown up calling his father—was not a man for small, intimate moments, for worms in a bucket and bamboo poles.

They were on a trip down to Mexico. Caine’s “mother” had been left to shop in Cancún, and Caine had been granted the high privilege of accompanying his father on what amounted to a business trip disguised as a father-son fishing trip.

Caine and his father; a kid named Paolo and his father; a girl named…well, he couldn’t recall her name. The three fathers were doing business and fishing for swordfish aboard a seventy-foot power boat.

The girl, what was her name?

Oh, my God, her name had been Diana. Not the same Diana, of course, a very different girl, not very attractive, red hair, bulging eyes, not at all the same.

Diana had led them, Caine and Paolo, down into the tight forward space where the anchor and ropes and so on were stored. There she had produced a joint, a small, tightly rolled marijuana cigarette.

Paolo, an Italian kid a couple of years older than Caine, had shrugged and said, “No problem,” using his American slang. Caine had felt trapped. Trapped on the boat. Trapped in the company of the two kids. Trapped into getting high.

Trapped.

It wasn’t Caine’s favorite feeling.

He’d sat there in that dark, damp, cramped space taking hits of the joint and wishing he was anywhere else.

Paolo had tried to hook up with the girl, the pre-Diana Diana. She’d discouraged him and eventually Paolo had gone off in search of food. The girl had sidled up beside Caine and made it clear that she’d like to make the most of their privacy and the drug’s effects.

Caine had rebuffed her, but she’d said, “Oh, you think you’re too cool, right? You think you’re out of my league, don’t you?”

“You said it, not me.”

“Yeah? Guess what? Your dad needs my dad. What if I go up on deck and tell my dad you forced me to smoke pot? I do that and guess what? Your dad loses this deal and he blames you.”

Her eyes shone with triumph. She had him. She had her hook in him, no different from the loudly laughing men up on deck and their stupid fish.

She was sure of it, that Diana.

But Caine had laughed. “Go ahead.”

“I will,” she said.

“Fine. Go.”

He had come to realize a basic truth that day: You can’t be trapped by other people, you can only be trapped by your own fear. Defy and win.

On that day, that day on the boat, Caine had been less afraid than the girl. And he’d known intuitively that he held the winning hand.

Defy and win.

The problem now was that Caine was truly, deeply afraid of the creature in that mine. Afraid all the way down to his bones. Afraid down to the smallest, farthest, most secret recesses of his mind.

He couldn’t bluff the Darkness. The Darkness knew he was afraid.

There was a rope wrapped tightly around his mind and soul. The other end of that rope was held by the dark thing at the bottom of that mine shaft. Caine imagined himself cutting that rope, picking up an ax, raising it high above his head, bringing it down with all his might….

Ruthless and unafraid. Like he had been with Diana.

With both Dianas.

“Have to,” he whispered to himself.

“Have to cut it,” he said.

“Maybe I will,” he muttered.

But he doubted very much that he could.

“He’s hungry,” Little Pete said.

“You mean you’re hungry,” Astrid corrected automatically. Like Little Pete’s major problem was bad grammar.

She was in Sam’s office at town hall. People were coming and going. Kids with requests or complaints. Some Astrid dealt with herself. Some she wrote down for Sam.

One thing Sam was right about: This couldn’t go on. Kids coming in to ask for someone to arbitrate sibling rivalries, or asking whether it was okay for them to watch a PG-13 DVD, or asking Sam to decide whether they could stop wearing
their retainer. It was ridiculous.

“He’s hungry,” Little Pete said. He was hunched over his Game Boy, intent on the game.

“Do you want something to eat?” Astrid asked absentmindedly. “I could maybe find something.”

“He can’t talk.”

“Sure you can talk, Petey, when you try.”

“I won’t let him. His words are bad.”

Astrid looked over at him. There was a slight smile on Little Pete’s face.

“And he’s hungry,” Little Pete said, whispering now. “Hungry in the dark.”

“Because Sam said so, that’s why,” Edilio said for maybe the millionth time. “Because if we don’t pick the food, we’re all going to get very, very hungry, that’s why.”

“Can I do it another time?” the kid asked.

“Little dude, that’s when everyone wants to do it: some other time. But we got melons need picking. So just get on the bus. Bring a hat, if you have one. Let’s go.”

Edilio stood holding the front door of the house, waiting for the kid to find his
Fairly OddParents
cap. His mood, already gloomy, was not improving as the morning wore on. He had twenty-eight kids on the bus, all complaining, all wanting to go to the bathroom, all hungry or thirsty, squabbling, whining, crying.

It was almost eleven already. By the time he got them to the fields it would be noon and they’d be asking for lunch. He was determined to tell them to pick their lunch. Pick your
lunch, it’s right there in front of you. Yes, I mean melons. I don’t care if you don’t like melons, that’s your lunch.

Thirty kids, counting himself. If they worked hard for four hours they could harvest maybe seventy, eighty melons each. Which sounded like a lot until you divided it by three hundred-plus hungry mouths and you started to realize that it took a whole lot of cantaloupe before you felt full.

What worried Edilio was the way so many of the melons were already rotting in the field. The way the birds were getting at them. And the fact that no one was thinking far enough ahead to wonder what they should be planting for the next season.

Food rotting. No planting. No irrigating.

Even if they harvested the available crops, it was just a matter of time before everyone was starving. Then, good luck keeping it all together.

It turned out he’d been optimistic. It was almost one in the afternoon before they made it to the field after a hellishly unpleasant bus trip during which a full-on fistfight broke out between two sixth graders.

Sure enough, the first words out of the kids’ mouths were, “I’m hungry.”

“Well, there’s your lunch,” Edilio said, sweeping his hand toward the field and feeling great personal satisfaction at being able to rub their noses in it.

“Those round things?”

“They’re called cantaloupes,” Edilio said. “And they’re very tasty, actually.”

“What about zekes?” one of the girls asked.

Edilio sighed. “That’s the cabbage field, not here. That’s, like, a mile from here.”

But no one moved. They all lined up obediently but kept close to the bus and far from the edge of the field.

Edilio sighed. “Okay. Let the wetback show you how.”

He sauntered out into the field, bent over, gave a twist to one of the melons, and held it up high so they could see.

It was luck that saved him. The fact that he dropped the melon.

He looked down at the cantaloupe and saw the dirt move.