Hunger (30 page)

But any attempt to make up paper currency would just send everyone running to find a copier. He needed something that could not be duplicated.

An idea hit him. A memory. He ran for the storeroom that had long since been cleaned out of food. There were two boxes on the wire shelves. Each was filled with McDonald’s Monopoly game pieces—tickets—from some long-forgotten promotion.

Twelve thousand pieces per box. Hard to counterfeit.

He would have enough to make change for four thousand slugs at a rate of six Monopoly pieces per slug.

“A slug equals six tickets,” Albert said. “Six tickets equals a slug.”

It was a beautiful thing, Albert thought. Tears came to his eyes. It was a truly beautiful thing. He was reinventing money.

09
HOURS
, 3
MINUTES

BUG WAS LEERY
now. Sam’s people knew about him. They had since the big battle of Perdido Beach. But now they had begun to take countermeasures. The sudden attack with spray paint had shaken Bug’s self-confidence.

So when Caine drew him aside, careful not to let Drake overhear, and gave him a new assignment, Bug was dubious.

“They’re out there waiting for anyone who comes out,” Bug argued. “Dekka’s out there for sure. Bunch of kids with guns. And probably Sam, hiding somewhere maybe.”

“Keep your voice down,” Caine said. “Listen, Bug, you’re doing this: the easy way or the hard way. Your choice.”

So Bug was doing it. Not liking it, but doing it.

He began by drifting into invisibility. Even when he was visible, kids tended to overlook him. They would forget he was there. Once he’d faded, they seldom seemed to remember him.

He stood in the corner of the control room for a while, out
of sight. Making sure no one—by which he meant Drake—was going to miss him.

Things had calmed down a little since it became clear that Sam’s people were not going to rush in, guns and laser hands blazing.

But the room was still tense. Drake and Caine paranoid, waiting for attack from outside, or from each other. Diana sullen, sleepy. Computer Jack obviously in pain from his injuries, popping Advil like crazy, but still pecking away at the keyboard. Drake’s bully boys had found some guy’s handheld game and were taking turns playing it till the batteries failed. Then they’d go off in search of more batteries.

No one missed Bug.

So he slipped out of the room, inches away from Drake, fearing the sudden lash of his whip as he held his breath.

Outside, things were better than he’d expected. Dekka was sitting in the front seat of a car, half dozing, half arguing with Taylor and Howard. Orc was at the far edge of the parking lot idly smashing car windshields with a tire iron. And two, no three, kids with guns, concealed behind cars, around corners, all waiting for trouble. All bored, too.

And in very bad moods. Bug heard fragments of grousing as he passed.

“…Sam just takes off and leaves us here and…”

“…if you’re not some powerful freak, no one gives a…”

“…I swear I am going to cut off my own leg and eat it, I’m so hungry…”

“…rat doesn’t taste as bad as you’d think. The trouble is, finding a rat…”

Bug slipped past them and reached the road. Easy-peasy, as they used to say back in kindergarten.

From there it was a long, long walk. With nothing to eat.

Bug felt like his stomach was trying to kill him. Like it had become this enemy inside him. Like cancer or whatever. It just hurt all the time. He’d found his mouth watering when he heard the kid talking about eating a rat.

Bug would eat a rat. In a heartbeat. Maybe he wouldn’t have even the day before, but now, he hadn’t eaten in a very long time. Maybe the time had come to start eating bugs again. Not as a dare, but simply for a meal.

He wondered how long you could go without food before you died. Well, one way or another, he was going to get some food. He’d managed to slip into Ralph’s before, and it was kind of on the way to Coates.

Had to eat, man. Caine had to understand that.

He’d get to Coates and find the freaky dream girl in plenty of time.

Bug reached into his pocket and pulled out the map Caine had drawn onto a piece of printer paper. It was pretty good, pretty clear. It led from Coates, down around the hills, out into the desert. An “X” marked something Caine had labeled “Ghost Town.” A second “X,” almost on top of the town, was labeled “Mine.”

On the map was a written message to anyone who challenged Bug. It read:

Bug was to gather up the dreamer, Orsay, and, using whatever guys he could round up at Coates, get her to the “X” labeled “Mine.”

“I don’t know if it dreams or not,” Caine had said. “But I think maybe all its thoughts are dreams, kind of. I think maybe Orsay can get inside its head.”

Bug had nodded like he understood, though he didn’t.

“I want to know what it plans for me,” Caine instructed Bug. “You tell her that. If I bring it food, what will it do to me? You tell Orsay that if she can tell me the dreams of the Darkness, the gaiaphage, I will cut her loose. She’ll be free.”

Then Caine had added, “Free from me, anyway.”

It was an important mission. Caine had promised Bug first choice of any food they got in the future. And Bug knew he’d better succeed. People who failed Caine came to bad, bad ends.

It was a very long walk to Ralph’s. The place was still guarded. Bug could see two armed kids on the roof, two by the front door, two by the loading dock in back. And the place was hopping, kids crowding at the door, pushing and yelling.

Many were there to get their daily ration of a couple of cans of horrible food, doled out by bored fourth graders who had already grown cynical.

“Dude, don’t try and play me,” one was saying as he turned a girl away. “You were here two hours ago getting food. You can’t just change clothes and trick me.”

Others were not there to get food but electricity. Ralph’s
was on the highway, outside of the town proper. Obviously it still had electricity, because extension cords had been strung through the front door and power strips attached. Kids were lined up charging iPods, rechargeable flashlights, and lap-tops.

Bug would tell Caine about the electricity at the store. That would earn him some brownie points. Caine would get Jack to find a way to cut it off.

The fact that the power was still on meant that the automatic door also still worked. Bug had to be careful to follow someone else in.

The store was an eerie place. The produce section, which was the first thing he saw, was empty. Most of the rotting produce had been shoveled out, but they had not done a thorough job. A big squash was so rotted, it had been reduced to a liquid smear. There were corn-on-the-cob leaves scattered, onion skins, and on the floors a sticky gray goo that was the residue of the cleanup effort.

The meat section stank, but it was empty nonetheless.

Shelves were acres of emptiness. All the remaining food was gathered into a single aisle in the middle of the store.

Careful to avoid brushing against any of the half dozen or so workers, Bug walked along the aisle.

Jars of gravy. Packets of powdered chili mix. Jars of pimentos and pickled onions. Artificial sweetener. Clam juice. Canned sauerkraut. Wax beans.

In a separate section with its own guard was a slightly more inviting shelf. A sign read, “Day Care Only.” Here, there were
cylinders of oatmeal, cans of condensed milk, boiled potatoes, and cans of V8 juice, though not many.

Things were bad in Perdido Beach, Bug reflected. The days of candy and chips were definitely gone. Not even a cracker to be seen, let alone a cookie. He’d been really lucky to score that handful of Junior Mints on his spy mission to the power plant.

That was luck. And now, Bug had some more luck. It was purely by chance that he discovered the secret of Ralph’s. He had dodged aside to avoid a couple of kids and ended up cowering in front of the swinging doors that led to the storeroom area. A swing of the door had revealed two kids manhandling a plastic tub filled with ice.

Bug couldn’t enter the storeroom without pushing the door and risking discovery. But he figured it might be worth it: anything someone else wanted to hide was something Bug wanted to find out about.

He took a deep breath, ready to run for it if necessary. He pushed the swinging door open and slid through. The kids with the bin were gone. But he heard movement around the corner, behind a wall of cartons marked “plastic cups.”

There was the work area that had once belonged to the butchers. Now four kids, in rubber aprons that dragged to the floor, were wielding knives.

They were cutting up fish.

Bug stood and stared, not believing what he was seeing. Some of the fish were big—maybe three feet long—silver and gray, with white and pink insides. Other fish were smaller,
brown, flat. One of the fish looked so ugly, Bug figured it must be deformed. And two of the fish didn’t look like fish at all, but rather like soggy, featherless blue birds, or maybe like bats.

The aproned kids were chatting happily—like people who were eating well, Bug thought bitterly—as they sliced open the fish and, with many cries of, “Ewww, this is so gross,” sluiced the fish guts into big, white plastic tubs.

Others then took the cleaned fish, cut off their heads and tails, and scraped the scales from them under running water.

Bug hated fish. Really, really hated it. But he would have given anything, done anything, to have a plate full of fried fish. Ketchup would have helped, but even without it, even knowing that ketchup might never be seen again, the idea of a big plate of hot anything seemed wonderful.

It made Bug want to swoon. Fish! Fried, steamed, microwaved, he didn’t care.

Bug considered his options. He could grab a fish and run. But although people couldn’t see him easily, they’d sure be able to see a fish flying through the store and out the door. And those kids at the door and on the roof probably weren’t good shots, but they didn’t have to be when they were firing machine guns.

He could try to conceal a fish down his pants or under his shirt. But that assumed the kids with the gutting knives were slow to react.

A kid Bug recognized came in: Quinn. One of Sam’s
friends, although at one point, he’d been with Caine.

“Hey, guys,” Quinn said. “How’s it going?”

“We’re almost done,” one answered.

“We had a good day, huh?” Quinn said. There was obvious pride in his tone. “Did you guys all get some to eat?”

“It was, like, the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life,” a girl said fervently. She almost choked up with emotion. “I never even used to like fish.”

Quinn patted her on the shoulder. “Amazing what tastes good when you get hungry enough.”

“Can I take some home for my little brother?”

Quinn looked pained. “Albert says no. I know this looks like a lot of fish, but it wouldn’t even be a mouthful per person in the FAYZ. We want to wait till we have some more frozen. And…”

“And what?”

Quinn shrugged. “Nothing. Albert just has a little project he’s working on. When he’s ready, we’ll tell everyone that we have a little fish available.”

“You’ll catch more, though, right?”

“I’m not counting on anything. Listen, though, guys, you know you have to keep this to yourselves, right? Albert says anyone tells about this, they lose their job.”

All four nodded vigorously. The price of disobedience was losing access to a fried-fish meal. That would be enough to scare most kids into behaving.

One of the guys looked around, like he was suspicious. He looked right at Bug, though his eyes slid right over him. Like
he sensed something but couldn’t put his finger on it.

The hunger was terrible. It had been bad when all Bug hoped to get was a can of beets. But the mere existence of fresh fish…he was imagining the smell. He was imagining the flavor. He was slavering, drooling, his stomach…

“If you give me some fish, I’ll tell you a secret,” Bug said suddenly.

Quinn jumped about a foot.

Bug turned off his camouflage.

Quinn reached for one of the knives and yelled, “Guards! Guards, in here!”

Bug held out his hands, showing he had no weapon. “I’m just hungry. I’m just so hungry.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I want some fish. Give me some fish,” Bug pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything. I’ll tell what Caine’s doing. I am so hungry.”

Quinn looked profoundly uncomfortable. Even nervous. Two armed kids rushed into the room. They looked to Quinn for direction, and pointed their guns without any real conviction.

Quinn said, “Oh, man. Oh, man.”

“I just want to eat,” Bug said. He broke down crying. Sobbing like a baby. “I want some fish.”

“I have to take you to Sam,” Quinn said. He didn’t seem to be happy about the idea.

Bug fell to his knees. “Fish,” he begged.

“Give him one bite,” Quinn said, making his decision.
“One single bite. One of you go and bring Sam and Astrid. They can decide whether to give this little creep any more.”

One of the guards took off.

Quinn looked down at the weeping Bug. “Man, you have picked a bad time to switch sides.”

His surfboard was still leaning against the washing machine in the tiny room off the kitchen. A Channel Island MBM.

Sam wanted to touch it, but couldn’t bring himself to. It was everything he had lost in the FAYZ.

His wetsuit hung from a peg. The can of wax was on the rickety shelf next to the laundry detergent and the fabric softener.

The ball of light was still there in his bedroom. Still floating in the air, just outside of Sam’s bedroom closet.

He hadn’t been back to his old home in a long time. He’d forgotten the light would be there.

Strange.

He passed his hand through it. Not much of a sensation.

He remembered when it first happened. He’d been scared of the dark. Back then. Back when he was Sam Temple, some kid, some random kid who just wanted to surf.

No. That wasn’t true, either. He’d already stopped being just some random kid. He’d already been School Bus Sam, the quick-thinking seventh grader who had taken the wheel when the bus driver had had a heart attack.

He’d been that.

And he’d been the kid who had freaked out, not
understanding that the argument between his mother and stepfather was no big thing. He’d thought his stepfather was going to hit his mother.

So, by the time Sam, in a panic, had created the light that would not die, he had already been School Bus Sam, and the person who’d burned a grown man’s hand off.

Not some random teenager.

He hated this house and hated this room. Why had he come here?

Because everyone knew he hated it, so they wouldn’t come looking for him here. They’d search for him everywhere and not find him.