Hunger (29 page)

Something landed on the pavement next to Dekka. She stared at what looked a great deal like chicken bones. Cooked chicken bones.

Dekka looked up. She moved back and back to get a clear view.

Ten stories up, eerie in the blazing light atop the turbine building, someone was waving her arms. Very fast.

Time seemed to stand still. Dekka couldn’t breathe. She stared hard, not wanting to be wrong, not willing to believe until she was sure.

“Breeze?” Dekka whispered, amazed.

Dekka lowered her head for just a moment and thanked God. Brianna. Alive.

Alive and as impatient as ever, by the look of it.

No way Brianna could hear her over the noise of the plant. How Brianna had managed to get herself up there was a mystery, but judging from her frantic semaphore of waving arms, she wanted to get down.

Dekka waved. She even displayed a rare smile. Brianna, alive.

Brianna stuck her hands on her hips as if to say, “What’s keeping you?”

Dekka considered for a moment. Then she pointed to a spot just at the base of the wall, well away from the door where Caine’s boys crouched hidden with guns.

Brianna nodded.

Dekka raised her hands.

Brianna leaped into midair. And stayed in midair. No gravity dragged her down.

Dekka took a deep breath. She switched off her power for a second and Brianna fell. On again and Brianna stopped falling. Off. On. Until Brianna floated just a few feet off the pavement.

Dekka released her and Brianna landed lightly, taking the shock in her knees. Dekka steadied her.

“What is going on down here?” Brianna demanded. “I heard guns. Woke me up.”

“Good to see you, too, Brianna,” Dekka said dryly. “Everyone thought you were dead.”

“Well, I’m not. Duh.”

Dekka shook her head in tolerant amazement.

They joined Mike behind the truck, leaving Edilio’s soldiers in place watching the door, guns leveled.

Mike was surprised. “Hey, Drake told Jack you were dead! Jack totally lost it believing him.”

Brianna grinned. “Oh he did, did he?”

“Totally. He went all Aragorn on Drake. Tried to kill him. That’s how we…I mean, how I, got away.” He burst into tears then, weeping uncontrollably and covering his face with his hands.

“You have a thing with Computer Jack?” Dekka asked. She carefully modulated her voice, giving nothing away of her inner turmoil. This was no time to burden Brianna with feelings she wouldn’t reciprocate. Feelings that might even make her mad at Dekka. The two of them hadn’t exactly been friends while they were at Coates. Dekka wasn’t sure Brianna even knew Dekka was gay.

“I didn’t think I did,” Brianna answered, looking pleased with herself. “I guess I do.”

“Okay,” Dekka said, swallowing hard. The important thing was Brianna was alive. And Mickey and Brittney were not.
Dekka was in charge here, she had to make some decisions. “You going to tell me how you came to be up on the roof?”

“Um…no. But here’s the thing: There’s a door up there that leads down inside. If I had a crowbar or something, I could get it open, get in and out of there before they know it. Smack the—”

“No, no,” Mike said through heaving sobs. “The wires are still up.”

“What wires?” Brianna demanded.

“Drake. He stretched wires all over the place so if you came in, they’d cut you up.”

Dekka noted the look of shock on Brianna’s usually cocky face.

“That’s why Jack was trying to kill Drake,” Mike said. “Jack told him he had to take them all down, and Drake pretended like he did, but he didn’t.”

Dekka said, “Guess it’s a good thing Jack likes your act, Breeze. Mike here got away.”

Brianna had no answer.

“Don’t let it shake you up, girl,” Dekka said. “You had a bad day. We’ve all had a very bad day.” She sat down beside Mike and put her arm around his shoulders. “I’m so sorry about Mickey. I know you guys were buds.”

Mike shook her off. “You don’t care about Mickey. You care about her because she’s a freak, like you.”

Dekka decided to let that go. Couldn’t blame Mike for being a little crazed. Couldn’t really blame him if he fell apart completely.

To Brianna, Dekka said, “You had a close call. But right now the important thing is you start listening to other people and not do crazy stuff that leaves you trapped on a roof when we need you. Or worse yet, sliced up.”

“Yeah,” Brianna said, abashed. Then, recovering a little of her usual sass, she added, “Thanks,
Mom.”

Dekka loved that. Brianna’s wild recklessness. She loved that. So much the opposite of Dekka herself. She didn’t let Brianna know she loved it because right now Dekka was in charge, responsible. But Brianna wouldn’t be Brianna without the crazy part.

Alive. She was alive.

And had a thing for Jack.

But alive.

13
HOURS
, 35
MINUTES

COME TO ME
. I have need of you.

“I can’t breathe,” Lana said, although if she spoke with her mouth, she heard no sound from it, nor did she feel her tongue and lips moving.

The gas compound deprives you of oxygen.

Yes. That was it. The gas. One spark and…somewhere she had a lighter. One spark and she would be free. Dead. Dead-free.

She laughed and the laughter became crimson daggers stabbing into her brain. She clutched her head and cried out in pain. She heard no sound. She did not feel her hands pressed against her temples.

Crawl to me.

Body not working. Was it? Was she on her hands and knees? Was her body still real?

Was she blind, or was it too dark to see?

Had she been unconscious? How long?

Moving, she was sure she was moving. Only maybe it was a breeze blowing past her.

I expel the carbon-hydrogen compound.

The…what? Carbon…what? Her mind was reeling, swirling, round and round and as it swirled out came the knives of pain to stab at her, to torture her. Head exploding. Heart hammering in her chest, trying to escape, ripping her ribs apart to get out of her.

No, all hallucination. Madness and lies.

But the pain was real. She could feel that, the pain. And the fear.

The oxygen-nitrogen mix flows.

Air. Replacing the gas. It did nothing to lessen the pain in her head. But her heart slowed.

She could see again, just a little, the headlights of the truck throwing the faintest light down the mine shaft to where she lay face down on rock. Lana brought her hand up in front of her face. Fingers. She could not quite make them out, but she knew they were there.

She touched her face. She could feel her hand. She could feel her cheek. Wet with tears.

Come to me.

No.

But she was on hands and knees now, moving. The rock tore the flesh of her palms and knees.

No. I won’t come to you.

But she came. Moved. Hands and knees. Crawled.

Had it ever been possible to resist it?

No.

I am the gaiaphage.

You are mine.

I am Lana Arwen Lazar. My mother named me for…For something. Someone…My…

I hunger.

You will help me feed.

Leave me alone, Lana protested feebly as her arms and legs kept moving, her head hung down like a dog. Like…like someone…

I am the gaiaphage.

What does that mean? Lana asked.

She had more sense of herself now. She could reach into her memory and remember who she was and why she was here. She could recall the foolish hope she had nurtured of destroying the Darkness. The gaiaphage.

But now she saw its hand in everything she had done. From the start it had been calling to her. Twisting her thoughts and actions to its will.

She’d never had a chance.

And now she crawled.

Superman’s other girlfriend, Lana. Aragorn’s true love, Arwen. Lazar, shortened from Lazarevic. Lazarus, who rose from the dead. Lana Arwen Lazar. That’s who she was.

She was unable to stop crawling. Down and down the mine shaft.

Come to me.

I have need of you.

What need? Why me?

You are the Healer.

You have the power.

Are you hurt? A flicker of hope at the thought that the creature might be wounded.

Lana’s limbs were so heavy now, she could barely move. Barely slide her knees two inches across rough stone. Barely push her palms forward. But her eyes now registered the faint green glow she had remembered always from her first trip down this awful mine shaft.

A glow like luminescent watch dials. A glow like the glow-in-the-dark stars Lana’s dad had pasted to her ceiling when she was little.

The thought of her father tore at Lana’s soul. Her mother. Her father. So far away. Or dead. Or, who knew? Who would ever know?

She imagined them seeing her. As if she were bacteria on a slide and her mother and father were looking down through a gigantic microscope. Seeing their daughter like this. Crawling in the dark. Terrified. Hungry. So afraid.

Crawling toward the Darkness. Slave to the gaiaphage.

She stopped moving, commanded by the voice in her head. She panted, waiting, sweat pouring off her.

Place your hand on me.

“What?” she whispered. “Where? Where are you?”

She swung her weary head around, peering into the radioactive dark, seeing nothing but faintly glowing rock.

No. Looking closer, forcing herself to look, she saw that
it was not rock. Her unwilling eyes seemed to bore into the faint green glow and there began to see not a single mass of rock but a seething, pulsating swarm. Thousands, maybe millions of tiny crystalline shapes, hexagons, pentagons, triangles. The largest were perhaps half the size of her smallest fingernail. The smallest were no bigger than a period on a page. Each sprouted countless tiny legs, so that what Lana saw appeared as a vast ant colony, an insect hive, all green and glittering, pulsing like an exposed heart.

Place your hand on me.

She resisted. But she knew, even as she fought the gaiaphage’s will, that she was doomed to lose. Her hand moved. Trembling, it moved. She saw her fingers dark against the green glow.

She touched it, felt it, and it was like touching rough sand on the beach. Only this sand moved, vibrated.

For a moment there was only that simple sensation.

Then, the gaiaphage showed her what he wanted.

She saw creatures. A creature of living fire. A clockwork snake. Monsters.

And she saw a Russian nesting doll.

One doll…inside another…inside another…and another…

Now she knew him, knew in a moment of blinding clarity what he was. Now she could feel his hunger. And now she sensed his fear.

He needed her, this foul creature made of human and alien DNA, of stone and flesh, nurtured on hard radiation in the
depths of space and now in the depths of the earth. The glowing food had all been consumed in the thirteen years the gaiaphage had grown and mutated down here in the darkness.

It was hungry. Food was coming. When the food came, he would be strong enough to use Lana’s power to create a body. He had used her power to give Drake his whip hand, to make a monster of him. He would use her now, once he had fed, to create a monstrous body of his own. Bodies inside of bodies, bodies that could be used and then cast aside as another emerged.

To move.

To escape the mine. That was his goal.

To walk the FAYZ and destroy all who resisted him.

Sam’s day was a series of wild mood swings.

Taylor bounced in to tell him that Mickey Finch had been killed escaping from Caine. But that Mike Farmer had survived. And now Caine was without hostages.

Then a fire broke out in a house where two five-year-olds shared a place with two nine-year-olds. One of the nine-year-olds had been smoking pot.

Fire Chief Ellen got the fire truck to the scene in time to keep the fire from spreading to the house next door. Water pressure still held strong at that end of town.

The kids had all made it out alive.

Then, as he was standing on the street with the sun rising and smoke pouring from the burned house, trying to decide how, or if, he should punish a kid for smoking weed and
starting a fire, he felt a slight gust of wind.

“Hey, Sammy,” Brianna said.

Sam stared at her. She grinned at him.

Sam breathed a big sigh of relief. “I should kill you, disappearing like that.”

“Come on,” Brianna said, stretching her arms wide, “Hug it out.”

She embraced Sam—quickly—then stepped back. “That’s all, big boy, I don’t want Astrid mad at me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, when do we go take out Caine and get the lights back on?”

Sam shook his head. “Can’t do it, Breeze.”

“What? What?” What do you mean you can’t do it? He’s sitting there with no hostages. We can take him.”

“There are other issues,” Sam said. “We’ve got trouble here between freaks and normals.”

Brianna made a dismissive sound. “I’ll run around and slap some of them a few times, they’ll get over themselves, and we’ll get busy at the power plant.” She leaned close. “I found a way in through the roof.”

That was interesting news. Interesting enough to make Sam reconsider. “A way into what? The turbine room?”

“Dude, there’s a door on the roof. I don’t know where it goes, but it has to go into the turbine room. Probably.”

Sam tried to shake himself out of his funk, but he couldn’t quite do it, couldn’t quite focus. He felt deflated. Weary beyond belief. “You’re hurt,” he observed.

“Yeah, and it stings, too. Where’s Lana? I need some curing. Then we can do some butt-kicking.”

“We lost Lana. She took off.”

That piece of news rocked even Brianna’s eager confidence. “What?”

“Things are not going well,” Sam said.

He felt Brianna’s worried gaze. He wasn’t setting a good example. He wasn’t exactly taking charge. He knew all that. But he couldn’t shake off the indifference that sapped his every attempt to formulate a plan.

“You need some rest,” Brianna said at last.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “No doubt.”

The voices were familiar. Dekka. Taylor. Howard.

“Sun’s coming up,” Taylor said. “The sky’s turning gray.”

“We have to do something about Brittney and Mickey,” Dekka said.

“I don’t deal with dead bodies.” Howard.

“I guess we could, you know, send them back to town for Edilio to bury,” Dekka said.

Taylor sighed. “Things are bad back there. I’ve never seen Sam like that. I mean, he’s just…”

Dekka said, “He’ll get over it.” She didn’t sound too sure of that. “But yeah, maybe this isn’t the time to ask him to speak at a burial.”

“Maybe we could just cover them up. You know, haul Mickey over here, maybe just put a blanket over them or something for now.”

“Yeah. One of these cars around here must have a blanket in the trunk. A tarp. Something. Get Orc to pop some trunks open, huh?”

Which was how Brittney ended up nestled next to Mickey, under the shelter of a painter’s drop cloth.

She felt no pain.

She saw no light.

She heard, but barely.

Her heart was still and silent.

Yet she did not die.

Albert had no time to waste. He and Quinn had finally told Sam about their gold mission. About Lana going off with Cookie.

They’d found Sam listless, not as mad as either of them had expected. He’d listened with his eyes closed and a couple of times Albert thought he might have nodded off.

It had been a relief not to have Sam rage at them. But also disturbing. After all, they were delivering very bad news. Sam’s nonreaction was unreal. Sam wasn’t acting like Sam.

All the more reason for Albert to get his act together. He’d sent a disbelieving Quinn off to fish.

“I don’t care how tired you are, Quinn: we have a business to run.”

And then he’d gotten down to work.

The problem for Albert was melting the gold. The melting point for gold was three times higher than the melting point for lead, and nothing Albert could find achieved
that temperature. Certainly none of the equipment at his McDonald’s, none of which was working now anyway, with the power out.

Albert despaired until, rummaging through the hardware store looking for a solution, he noticed the acetylene torch.

He hauled two torches and all the spare acetylene tanks he could find to the McDonald’s. He locked the door.

He placed a large cast-iron pot on the stove and heated it to maximum. It wouldn’t melt the gold, but it would slow down the cooling process.

He placed one of the gold bars into the pot, fired the torch, and aimed the blue pencil point flame at the gold. Instantly the metal began to sweat. Then to run off in a tiny river of molten gold.

An hour later he popped his first six gold bullets from the bullet mold.

It was exhausting work. Hot work. But he got so he could produce twenty-four bullets an hour. He worked without pause for ten hours straight and then, exhausted, starving and dehydrated, he counted out 224 of the .32-caliber bullets.

Kids knocked on the door, demanding to be let in for the McClub. But Albert just posted a sign saying, “Sorry: We Are Closed This Evening, Please Come Back Tomorrow.”

He drank some water, ate a meager meal, and did some calculations. He had enough gold to produce perhaps four thousand bullets, which, equally distributed, would mean just over ten bullets for each person in Perdido Beach. The job would take weeks.

But he didn’t have nearly enough acetylene to manage it. Which would mean that in order to melt all the gold he would need the help of the one person least likely to want to help: Sam.

Albert had seen Sam burn through brick. Surely he could melt gold.

In the meantime Albert intended to distribute a single bullet to each person. Sort of as a calling card. A sign of what was coming.

And then, a paper currency backed up by the gold, and finally, credit.

Despite his weariness, Albert hummed contentedly as he sat with a yellow legal pad and a pen, writing out possible names for the new currency.

“Bullets” was obviously not the appropriate term. He wanted people thinking “money,” not “death.”

Dollars? No. The word was familiar, but he wanted something new.

Euros? Francs? Doubloons? Marks? Chits? Crowns?

Alberts?

No. Over the top.

Units?

It was functional. It meant what it said.

“The problem is, whatever we call them, we don’t have enough,” Albert muttered. If there were going to be just four thousand of the new…whatevers…they’d obviously have to be worth a lot, each one. Like, to start with, ten slugs should…

Slugs?

They were slugs, after all.

To start with, if a kid had the original ten slugs he was given, then each slug would have to be worth more than, say, a single one-can meal. So he needed, in addition to the slugs, smaller units. A currency that would be worth, say, one tenth of a slug.