Hunger (13 page)

“So?”

“So, I give you six of my best people. The most reliable six
guys I can come up with. You take them and train them to fish.”

“Yeah?” Quinn frowned, still not getting it.

“And you and me, we’re partners in the fish business. Seventy-thirty. I give you workers, I haul the fish, preserve it, prepare it, distribute it. And whatever we bring in, I take seventy percent and you take thirty.”

Quinn arched a brow. “Excuse me? How come you get seventy percent?”

“I pay everyone under me,” Albert explained. “Your thirty percent is just for you.”

“It’s thirty percent of nothing,” Quinn said.

“Maybe. But not for long.” Albert grinned and slapped Quinn on the shoulder. “You have to stay hopeful, man. Things are looking up. We have fish.”

Mother Mary smelled it before she saw it.

Fish. Fried fish.

The kids smelled it, too. “What is that smell?” Julia cried, and ran forward, black ponytail flying behind her.

There followed a near riot. Preschoolers surged around Quinn, who was carrying the fried fish piled on a napkin-covered McDonald’s tray.

“Okay, okay, okay, everyone gets some,” Quinn yelped.

Mary could not move. She knew she should, she knew she had to step in and impose order, but the smell had paralyzed her.

Fortunately, Francis—who had made such a scene over
hating to work at the preschool—had decided after the first day that he wouldn’t mind working a second day. Then a third. He was on his way to becoming a regular. Once he’d gotten over his attitude, he had proved to be really good with the children.

“Okay, little creatures,” Francis yelled, “back away. Back slowly away from the food.”

“Sorry, I probably should have warned you I was coming,” Quinn said sheepishly as he waded through a sea of kids and held the fish high above dozens of grabbing hands.

Mary twisted her fingers together as she watched Francis and the other helpers get the kids into line. The smell of the fish was unbelievable. It made her stomach grumble. It made her mouth water.

It made her sick.

“Okay, guys, we have thirty-two pieces,” Quinn said. “How do you want to do this?”

Francis glanced at Mary, but she could not respond. It was as if she were frozen in place.

“Everyone starts with half a piece,” Francis decided. Then he warned, “And anyone who gets grabby gets nothing.”

“Mary, there’s enough for you and your workers to have some, too,” Quinn said.

Mary nodded. She couldn’t. Not for herself. For the others, yes. Of course.

“You okay?” Quinn asked her.

Mary gritted her teeth and forced a shaky smile. “Of course. Thanks for bringing this. The children haven’t
had…they need the protein…they…”

“Okay,” Quinn said, obviously nonplussed.

“Save some for the babies,” Mary urged Francis. “We’ll purée it in the blender.”

The sounds of gobbling filled the room. Many of these kids probably hated fish. Back in the old days. Even two weeks ago they would have turned up their noses. But now? No one would turn away protein. They felt the need way down inside. Their bodies were ordering them to eat.

But Mary’s body was ordering her not to.

It would be a sin, she told herself. A sin to consume the fish only to vomit it back up later. She couldn’t do that to the littles.

Mary knew there was something wrong with the way she was behaving. She was surrounded by hunger that kids couldn’t avoid, and she alone was the cause of her own hunger. A warning sounded, but distant, barely audible. Like someone shouting to her from two blocks away.

“Come on, Mary, you have to try this,” Francis urged. “It’s amazing.”

Unable to manage a reply, Mary turned away, silent, and headed for the bathroom pursued by the slavering sounds of hungry children.

45
HOURS
, 36
MINUTES

SAM KNOCKED AT
the front door. He didn’t usually do that. Astrid had told him many times he could just walk in.

But he knocked, anyway.

It took her a while to answer.

She must have just come from the shower. Astrid worked out after dinner, when Little Pete usually liked to watch DVDs. Her blond hair was plastered down her neck, strands of it swooping down across one eye to give her a vaguely piratical look. She was wearing a bathrobe and carrying a towel.

“So. You came crawling back, eh?” Astrid said.

“Would it help if I were on hands and knees?” Sam asked.

Astrid considered that for a moment. “No, the abject look is enough.”

“I didn’t see you all day.”

“It would have been surprising if you had. I wasn’t interested in being seen.”

“Can I come in?”

“Are you asking if you
may
come in? ‘Can’ is meant to suggest ability. ‘May’ is proper when the question is one of permission.”

Sam smiled. “You know you just get me hot when you do that.”

“Oh? Then maybe I should go on to point out that both ‘can’ and ‘may’ are considered ‘modal verbs.’ There are nine modal verbs. Would you like me to tell you what they are?”

“You’d better not,” he said. “I can’t take too much excitement.”

Sam put his arm around her, drew her close, and kissed her on her lips.

“Wimp,” she teased when he drew back. “Well, come on in. I have some delicious canned okra, a burned homemade graham-flour tortilla, and half a head of Orc’s cabbage left over from dinner if you’re hungry. If you wrap the tortilla around some shredded cabbage and a bit of okra and microwave it for thirty seconds you have something really disgusting but kind of healthy.”

Sam stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Little Pete was camped out in front of the TV watching a DVD of
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
. Jim Carrey, completely obscured by makeup, was rubbing his hands gleefully.

“It was one of his Christmas presents,” Astrid explained.

“I remember,” Sam said.

Christmas had not been a great time for anyone. Christmas without parents. Without older siblings. Or grandparents. Without all the weird relatives you saw only at holiday time.

Astrid’s parents had an artificial tree that Sam had found in the attic and hauled downstairs to set up. It was still set up, although they’d taken the ornaments off and put them back in boxes.

Everyone had done what they could. Albert had put on a feast, though nothing to rival his great Thanksgiving production. By Christmas there were no pies to be had, no cookies, and fresh fruit or vegetables were all in the half-forgotten past.

“We can’t fight over…you know…politics,” Sam said.

“You mean you want me to just agree with you on everything?” Astrid asked, her voice signaling readiness to start it all over again.

“No. I want you to tell me what you think. I need you,” Sam admitted. “But that’s kind of the point: I need you. So when we disagree, we can’t get mad at each other. As people, you know?”

Astrid seemed ready to argue. Instead she exhaled a long, weary breath. “No, you’re right. We have enough to deal with.”

“Cool,” he said.

“Did you get any sleep last night? You look tired.”

“I guess I am,” he said. “Long day. Hey, did you know Quinn is fishing? He caught something big this morning.”

“I didn’t know. That’s good.” She looked troubled. “We should have thought of that. Fishing, I mean.”

“We’re not going to think of everything, I guess,” Sam said wearily. That was the problem with having one person in
charge. People expected you to come up with all the answers. They stopped coming up with answers for themselves. Quinn had opened up a new possibility all by himself. And now he was turning to Albert for help, not to Sam.

“What’s he doing with the fish?”

“We sent a lot of it over to the day care this morning. We got some protein to the littles, at least.”

“A lot of it?” She raised an eyebrow. “What’s Quinn doing with the rest? He’s not hoarding it, I hope.”

“He’s…” Sam stopped himself. The last thing he wanted was to argue about Quinn and Albert and fish. “Actually, can we talk about that tomorrow? The important thing is that the littles got some protein today. Can we just be happy about that?”

Astrid laid her hand against his cheek. “Go to bed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He trudged upstairs, feeling better than he had all day. He passed Mary coming down. “Hey, Mary. Back to work?”

“What else would I be doing?” she said. “Sorry, that sounded cranky.”

“If you can’t be cranky, who can?” Sam said. “But hey, are you getting enough to eat?”

Mary seemed startled. “What?”

“I was wondering if you were getting enough food. You’ve lost some weight. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you look good.”

“Thanks,” Mary managed to say. “I’m um…Yes, I’m getting plenty to eat.”

“Did you get some of the fish this morning?”

Mary nodded. “Yes. It was really great.”

“Okay. Later.”

Sam had the use of what had once been a guest room. It was nicely made up, had its own bathroom, with very soft matching towels. He kept the room very neat and clean because it was still somehow not his room. He couldn’t imagine it ever being his room. This house belonged to…well, that was a good question. But it sure wasn’t his.

Which did not stop him from sliding between the sheets and passing almost instantly from hectic consciousness to sleep.

But there was no peace in his dreams. He had a dream of his mother. Only she wasn’t really his mother in the dream, not the real person. She was the creature who had called for him in the midst of what would have been the poof.

Happy fifteenth birthday, Sam, now step out of the FAYZ into…into no one knew what.

Some kind of illusion. Seeing what you wanted to see. And yet, it had seemed so real at the time. In his dream, Sam relived that moment.

He saw Caine, his fraternal twin, within a circle of blistering light. He saw their mother. And he saw a girl, maybe twelve, thin, with a lot of thick ponytail. He wondered in a vague sort of way about the girl. There had been no girl there during the poof. Not inside the distortion. No girl.

But now that dream was dissolving into another. Sam was standing at the bottom of the town hall front steps and there
were cans as big as trash barrels rolling down the steps. It started with a can of beans. And then another. And then a can of ravioli. The cans started coming faster and now Sam was trying to climb the steps but he couldn’t because every time he lifted a foot to set it down on a step, he found another can hurtling toward him.

Now a cascade of little cans, almost like insects scurrying around under his feet. He was tripping, slipping and sliding in a cascade of cans, unable to rise.

In his dream he looked up and saw a girl, the same girl again. Lots of brown hair drawn back in a long ponytail. The girl. She was at the top of the stairs. But she wasn’t throwing the cans.

The cans became Junior Mints. In cans, oddly, but with the familiar green Junior Mints label. Cans of them rolling and tumbling and tripping Sam, who now was buried under them.

Sam was aware of someone standing beside him. Not a person, an insect, a bug of indistinct shape.

The giant bug picked up a Junior Mint, which now was not a can but a big, novelty-sized box.

Sam woke suddenly.

Astrid was shaking him, yelling right in is face, scared. “Wake up!”

He was up in a flash, almost knocking Astrid over.

“What?”

“Petey,” Astrid cried. Her eyes were wild with fear.

Sam ran for Pete’s room. He stopped dead in the hallway
outside it. The door was open.

Pete was in his bed. He wasn’t moving. His eyes were shut. His face was peaceful. He was asleep. But how he could sleep was beyond Sam, because the room around Pete was filled with monsters.

Literally filled. Wall to wall. Up to the ceiling.

Monsters. A hundred nightmares’ worth of monsters. They slithered from under his bed. They crawled from his closet. They floated like they were helium balloons. Like an entire Macy’s Thanksgiving parade in miniature had floated into Little Pete’s room. But instead of cartoon Shrek and the Cat in the Hat there were things much more sinister in their place.

One of the smaller ones had purple wings in three pairs, grasping tendrils hanging from its belly, a head like the end of a syringe with bloodred eyeballs perched on top.

The largest was a shaggy monstrosity like a grizzly bear with eighteen-inch spikes at the ends of its paws.

There were creatures that were all sharp edges, as if they’d been assembled out of razor blades and kitchen knives. There were creatures of glowing magma. There were creatures who flew and others who slithered.

“Like the other day? In the plaza?” Sam asked in a shaky whisper.

“No. Look: they cast shadows,” Astrid said urgently. “They’re making sounds. They smell.”

The big shaggy monster shifted shape as they watched. The brown fur lightened toward white, then veered suddenly to green.

Its mouth moved.

Opened.

A sound came from it, like a strangling cat. An eerie mewling.

Then the mouth snapped shut with an audible click. The mouth melted and disappeared beneath new-grown fur.

“It was trying to speak,” Astrid whispered.

A mustard-colored creature with a vaguely canine shape, pickax head, antennae, and twin tubes mounted on its eyeless head was changing shape as it floated. Its feet were shifting, from mere pads to sharp-ended, fishhook-barbed spears. The barbs clicked in and out. Like the creature was practicing with them, discovering their use.

And then, with its shape determined at last, it too attempted to speak. This time the sound was even less coherent, a chittering, insect sound that died out suddenly when a fleshy membrane grew over its mouth.

“Do they see us?” Sam wondered aloud.

“I don’t know. See how they’re staring at Petey?”

It was absurd to think about reading the faces of the monsters—some had five eyes; some had a single eye; some had gnashing, razor teeth and no eyes at all. But to Sam they seemed to be gazing with something like awe at Little Pete, who snored softly, oblivious.

A snake as long as a python slithered by, twisting in midair. Tiny centipede legs grew from it, reminiscent almost of the zekes, though these legs looked like they were made for sticking like Velcro.

The snake’s mouth hissed. The hissing grew in volume, then stopped abruptly: the snake’s entire head had simply disappeared.

“They’re trying to communicate,” Astrid said. “Something is stopping them. Something won’t let them speak.”

“Or someone,” Sam said. “If they attack us…” He raised his hands, palms out.

Instantly Astrid pressed his hands down. “No, Sam. You might hit Petey.”

“What happens if he wakes up?”

“The other times the visions just disappeared. But this is different. Look. Look at the curtains, they’re singed where that…that lava thing got near them.”

Sam made up his mind. “Wake him up.”

“What if—” she began.

“Look, maybe they’re not a threat. But maybe they are. If they are, I’m not just going to let them hurt you, I’m going to burn them.”

Then he added, “If I can.”

“Pete,” Astrid called in a quavering voice.

Until that moment none of the creatures had taken any notice of the two frail-looking humans standing there gawking. But now every eye, every set of eyes, every quivering antenna, turned toward them. It was so sudden, Sam imagined he heard their eyeballs click.

Red eyes, black eyes, yellow-slitted eyes, globular blue eyes, maybe fifty eyes in all, stared straight at Sam and Astrid.

“Try again,” Sam whispered. He stretched out his arms
again, opened his palms toward the monsters, ready.

“Petey,” Astrid said more urgently.

Now monstrous bodies shifted. They moved almost as one, some clumsy, some like lightning, but all moving as if they were Disney animatronics operating off the same signal. They turned to face Sam and Astrid.

One after another their mouths opened. Sounds came from those mouths. Grunts and hisses, hoots and growls; sounds like steel dragged on porcelain, sounds like the chirping of crickets, sounds like mad dogs barking. Not words, but sounds that wanted to be words, were struggling to be words.

It was a chorus of fury and frustration. And it stopped as suddenly as if someone had yanked the plug from a stereo.

The monsters glared at Sam and Astrid, as though they were to blame for the silencing.

Sam cursed softly.

“Walk backward. Down the hall,” Sam ordered. “They’ll have to come at us one by one and Pete won’t be in the line of fire.”

“Sam…”

“Not really a good time for a debate, Astrid,” Sam said through gritted teeth. “Back slowly away.”

She did. He followed, one foot directly behind the other, arms up, his mutant’s weapons at the ready.

But no way he’d get them all if they came. No way. He could get a few, maybe, if they could even be burned. How did you burn a creature made of magma?

Step by step till they were halfway down the hall. Ten feet. Fifteen. The monsters would have to come at him down that hallway. That gave him all the advantage he was going to get. Pete was out of the direct line of fire.

“Call him again. Louder this time.”

“He doesn’t always respond.”

“Try.”

“Pete,” Astrid shouted, fear giving volume to her voice. “Petey, wake up! Wake up, wake up!”

Through the doorway Sam saw the floating creatures, all those that didn’t have wings anyway, suddenly land with convincing weight on the floor. The floorboards jumped from the impact.

The six-winged creature was first. Fast as a dragonfly it zoomed straight for Astrid.

A scorching green-white light shot from Sam’s hands. The winged thing burst into flame. But it already had too much momentum.

Sam dropped, reached back to yank Astrid down, found that she had already ducked. The flaming corpse, wings shriveled like burning leaves, blew over their heads.