Hunger_A Gone Novel
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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?
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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.
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
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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—”
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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
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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.
FOURTEEN
36 HOURS, 47 MINUTES
“ S H E ’ S B E E N L I K E 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.
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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