Hunger_A Gone Novel, Page 6

  through the water and just kept going.”

  “I almost got sucked down,” Antoine said, practically in

  tears.

  “More like you almost got flushed,” Hank said. “You

  looked like a big pink turd going down the bowl.”

  Zil didn’t feel like laughing at the joke. He had been humiliated. He’d been made a fool of. He’d been hanging on for dear life, scared to death. He turned his hands palm-up and

  looked at his scraped, ragged fingertips. They burned.

  He could imagine what he must have looked like, dangling

  from the end of the board, his swimsuit halfway down his

  butt as the water tugged at him.

  There was nothing funny about it.

  Zil would not allow there to be anything funny about it.

  “What are you two laughing at?” Zil demanded.

  “It was kind of—” Antoine began.

  Zil cut him off. “He’s a freak. Duck Zhang is a mutant

  freak. Who tried to kill us.”

  H U N G E R

  53

  Hank looked sharply at him, hesitating, but only for a

  moment before he picked up Zil’s line. “Yeah. Freak tried to

  kill us.”

  “This stuff isn’t right, man,” Antoine agreed. He sat up

  and wrapped his hands around his bruised ankle. “How were

  we supposed to know he was a mutant freak? We were just

  playing around. It’s like anything we do now we have to be

  worried about whether someone is normal or some kind of

  freak.”

  Zil stood and looked down into the empty pool. The hole

  was ragged with broken tile teeth. A mouth that had opened

  and swallowed Duck and almost gotten Zil as well. Alive or

  dead, Duck had made a fool of Zil. And someone was going

  to have to pay for that.

  FIVE

  104 HOURS, 5 MINUTES

  “ B U L L E T S A R E F A S T . That’s why they work,” Computer

  Jack said condescendingly. “If they moved slowly, they

  wouldn’t be worth much.”

  “I’m fast,” Brianna said. “That’s why I’m the Breeze.” She

  shaded her eyes from the sun and squinted at the target she

  had in mind, a real estate sign in front of an empty lot pushed

  up against the slope of the ridge.

  Jack pulled out his handheld. He punched in the numbers.

  “The slowest bullet goes 330 meters per second. Say 1,100 feet

  per second in round numbers. I found a book full of useless

  statistics like that. Man, I miss Google.” He seemed to actually choke up with emotion. The word “Google” caught in his throat.

  Brianna laughed to herself. Computer Jack was just

  so Computer Jack. Still, he was cute in his own awkward,

  maladjusted, twelve-year-old and barely into puberty, voice-

  breaking kind of way.

  H U N G E R

  55

  “Anyway, 3,600 seconds in an hour, right? So about four

  million feet per hour, divided by 5,280 feet in a mile. So call

  it 750 miles an hour. Just one side or the other of the speed of

  sound. Other bullets are faster.”

  “I bet I can do that,” Brianna said. “Sure, I can.”

  “I do not want to shoot that gun,” Jack said, looking dubiously at the gun in her hand.

  “Oh, come on, Jack. We’re across the highway, we’re aiming toward the ridge. What’s the worst that happens? You shoot a horned toad?”

  “I’ve never shot a gun,” Jack said.

  “Any idiot can do it,” Brianna assured him, although she

  had never fired a weapon, either. “But I guess it kicks a little,

  so you have to grip it firmly.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I have a strong grip.”

  It took Brianna a few seconds to figure out his ironic tone.

  She remembered hearing someone say that Jack had powers.

  That he was extremely strong.

  He didn’t look strong. He looked like a dweeb. He had

  messy blond hair and crooked glasses. And it always seemed

  like he wasn’t really looking through those glasses but was

  seeing his own reflection in the lenses.

  “Okay. Get ready,” Brianna instructed. “Hold the gun

  firmly. Aim it at the sign. Let’s do a—”

  The gun exploded before she could finish. An impossibly

  loud bang, a cloud of bluish smoke, and a strangely satisfying

  smell.

  “I was going to say let’s do a test shot,” Brianna said.

  56 M I C H A E L

  G R A N T

  “Sorry. I kind of squeezed the trigger.”

  “Yeah. Kind of. This time just aim it. At the sign over there,

  not at me.”

  Jack leveled the gun. “Should I count down?”

  “Yes.”

  “On zero?”

  “On zero.”

  “Ready?”

  Brianna dug her sneakers into the dirt, bent down,

  cocked one arm forward, the other back, like she was frozen

  in midrun.

  “Ready.”

  “Three. Two. One.”

  Brianna leaped, just a split second ahead of Jack pulling

  the trigger. Instantly she realized her mistake: the bullet was

  behind her, coming after her.

  Much better to be chasing the bullet rather than have it

  chasing you.

  Brianna flew. Almost literally flew. If she spread her arms

  and caught some wind she’d go airborne for fifty feet because

  she was moving faster, quite a bit faster, than a jet racing

  down the runway toward take-off.

  She ran in an odd way, pumping her arms like any runner,

  but turning her palms back with each stroke. For almost all

  the mutants of the FAYZ, the hands were the focus of their

  powers.

  The air screamed past her ears. Her short hair blew straight

  back. Her cheeks vibrated, her eyes stung. Breathing was a

  H U N G E R

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  struggle as she gasped at hurricane winds.

  The world around her became a smear of color, objects flying past at speeds her brain could not process. Streaks of light without definite form.

  She knew from experience that her feet would need to

  be iced down afterward to stop the swelling. She’d already

  popped two Advil in anticipation.

  She was fast. Impossibly fast.

  But she was not faster than a speeding bullet.

  She risked a glance back.

  The bullet was gaining. She could see it, a blur, a small

  gray blur spiraling after her.

  Brianna dodged right, just half a step.

  The bullet zoomed languidly by.

  Brianna chased it, but it hit the dirt—not really anywhere

  near the target—while Brianna was still a dozen feet back.

  She dropped speed quickly, used the upward slope to slow

  herself gently, and came to a stop.

  Jack was three hundred yards away. The whole race had

  lasted just over a second, though it had felt longer in Brianna’s

  subjective experience.

  “Did you do it?” Jack shouted.

  She trotted back to him at a pace she now thought of as

  pokey—probably no more than eighty or ninety miles an

  hour—and laughed.

  “Totally,” she said.

  “I couldn’t even see you. You were here. And then you were

  there.”

  58 M I C H A E L

  G R A N T

  “That’s
why they call me the Breeze,” Brianna said, giving him a jaunty wink. But then her stomach reminded her that she had just burned up the day’s calories. It rumbled so

  loudly, she was sure Jack must hear it.

  “You know, of course, that a breeze is actually a slow,

  meandering sort of wind,” Jack said pedantically.

  “And you know, of course, that I can slap you eight times

  before you can blink, right?”

  Jack blinked.

  Brianna smiled.

  “Here,” Jack said cautiously. He handed the gun to her,

  butt first. “Take this.”

  She stuffed it into the backpack at her feet. She drew out a

  can opener and the can of pizza sauce she’d saved up. She cut

  the lid from the can and drank the spicy slop inside.

  “Here,” she handed the can to Jack. “There’s a little left.”

  He didn’t argue but tilted the can up and patiently waited

  as no more than an ounce of red paste slid into his mouth.

  Then he licked the inside of the can and used his forefinger

  to spoon out whatever he hadn’t been able to reach with his

  tongue.

  “So, Jack. Whatever happened to you getting the phones

  working again?”

  Jack hesitated, like he wasn’t sure he should tell her anything. “They’re up and running. Or will be as soon as I get the word from Sam.”

  Brianna stared at him. “What?”

  “It was a pretty simple problem, really. We have three

  H U N G E R

  59

  towers, one here in Perdido Beach, one more up the highway,

  and one on top of the ridge. There’s a program that checks

  numbers to make sure the bill has been paid and so on, so

  that the number is authorized. The program isn’t in the

  tower, obviously, it’s outside the FAYZ. So I fixed it so that all

  phones are authorized.”

  “Can I call my mom?” Brianna asked. She knew the answer,

  but she couldn’t quash the bounce of hope in time to stop

  herself from asking.

  Jack stared in confusion. “Of course not. That would mean

  penetrating the FAYZ barrier.”

  “Oh.” The disappointment was like a sharp pain. Brianna,

  like most of the kids in the FAYZ, had learned to deal with

  the loss of parents, grandparents, older siblings. But the hope

  of actually speaking with them . . .

  It was her mother Brianna missed most. There was a big

  age gap between Brianna and her little sisters. Brianna’s father

  had been out of her life since the divorce. Her mother had

  remarried—a jerk—and then had had twins with him. Brianna liked the twins okay, but they were eight years younger than she was, so it wasn’t like they hung out together.

  It was Brianna’s stepfather who had insisted on sending

  her to Coates. His reason was that her grades were falling.

  Which was a lame excuse. Lots of kids had trouble with math

  and didn’t end up getting shipped off to a place like Coates.

  Brianna had talked her mother into standing up to her

  stepfather. This was going to be her last year at Coates. Next

  year she was going to be back at Nicolet Middle School, in

  60 M I C H A E L

  G R A N T

  Banning. Back where she belonged. Not that there weren’t

  some tough kids at Nicolet, but there were no Caines, no Ben-

  nos, no Dianas, and definitely no Drakes.

  No one at Nicolet had ever encased her hands in a block of

  cement and then left her to starve.

  Besides, it would be so cool to blow all her old friends away

  with her new power. Their heads would explode. Their brains

  would melt. She could be a whole track team all by herself.

  “There are no satellites to link to,” Jack was going on in his

  pedantic way. He was definitely kind of cute. And she thought

  he was kind of interesting. Kind of cute mostly because he

  was so clueless while at the same time being scary smart. She

  had noticed him even before, back when Coates was just a

  miserable hellhole and Jack was only on the periphery of the

  Caine clique.

  “Why hasn’t Sam told anyone?” Brianna asked. “Why

  hasn’t he turned the system back on?”

  “There’s no way to stop the Coates kids from using it, too,

  unless we disable the tower up on the ridge. Or unless I figure out a way to replace the entire authorization protocol and then authorize only certain numbers. Which would be a big

  programming job since I would be starting from scratch.”

  “Oh.” Brianna peered closely at him. “Well, we don’t want

  to do anything that will help Caine and Drake and that witch,

  Diana. Do we?”

  Jack shrugged. “Well, I was scared of Drake. I mean, everyone is scared of Drake. But Caine and Diana, they were okay to me.”

  Brianna didn’t like that answer. The “interested” smile

  H U N G E R

  61

  she’d worn for him evaporated. She held up her hands. The

  scars from Drake’s cruel “plastering” were gone. But the memory of that abuse, and the horror of starvation, especially now that it was back, were still fresh. “They weren’t so nice to me.”

  “No,” Jack admitted. He looked down at the ground. “But

  still. I mean, they all—Sam and Astrid and all—they asked

  me to figure it out, the phones I mean, and I did. I want . . . I

  mean . . . I mean, I did it. I did it. It works. So we should turn

  it back on.”

  Brianna’s expression hardened. “No. If it helps the Coates

  people in any way, then no. I don’t want their lives to be any

  easier. I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer in every

  way they can suffer. And then I want them to die.”

  She saw shock register behind those askew glasses. Jack

  was no different from most people, Brianna admitted to

  herself with some bitterness: he didn’t take her seriously. Of

  course she maintained an aura of cool and everything—after

  all, she was the Breeze. She was a superhero, so she had some

  obligation to carry off a certain style. But she was also Brianna. Regular girl.

  “Oh, did that sound too harsh?” she asked, letting annoyance resonate in her tone of voice.

  “A little bit,” Jack said.

  “Yeah? Well, thanks for helping. Later,” Brianna said. And

  she was gone before he could say something else stupid.

  Duck woke up.

  He was completely disoriented. He was flat on his back.

  Wet. Wearing nothing but a bathing suit. In the dark.

  62 M I C H A E L

  G R A N T

  He was cold. His fingertips were numb. He was shivering.

  He felt something hard and sharp beneath his shoulder

  blades and he shifted to lessen the pain. He looked around,

  bewildered. There was a faint light from above. Sunlight

  bouncing weakly down a long dirt shaft.

  Duck tried to make sense of it. He remembered everything:

  sinking to the bottom of the pool, then sinking through the

  bottom of the pool. He remembered choking on water and

  his lungs burning. There were scrapes down his sides, and

  along the underside of his arms.

  And now, here he was, in a hole. A deep hole. At the bottom of a mud-sided shaft that he had somehow caused by falling into the earth.

  Falling
into the earth?

  It was impossible to be sure how far down underground

  he was. But from the faraway look of the light, he had to be at

  least twenty feet down. Twenty feet. Underground.

  Fear stabbed at his heart. He was buried alive. There was

  no way he’d be able to clamber back up through that narrow

  muddy shaft to the surface.

  No way.

  “Help!” he yelled. The sound echoed faintly.

  Duck realized that he was not in a confined space. There

  was air. And the surface beneath him was too hard and too

  rough to be dirt. He got to his knees. Then, slowly, stood up.

  There was a ceiling just inches above his head. He stretched

  his arms to either side and touched a wall to his left, nothing

  to his right.

  H U N G E R

  63

  “It’s a pipe,” Duck said to the darkness. “Or a tunnel.”

  It was also pitch black in both directions.

  “Or a cave.”

  “How did this happen?” Duck demanded of the cave. His

  teeth chattered from cold. From fear as well. There was a faint

  echo, but no answer.

  He looked up toward the light and yelled, “Help! Help!”

  a couple more times. But there was zero chance of anyone hearing. Unless of course Zil and the boys who’d been harassing him had gone for help. That was possible, wasn’t it?

  They might be jerks, but surely they would go for help. They

  wouldn’t just leave him down here.

  And yet, there were no anxious faces peering down at him

  from above.

  “Come on, Duck: Think.”

  He was in a tunnel, or whatever, far underground. The

  tunnel floor was muddy and wet. Despite this, the tunnel did

  not feel particularly damp, not like it was a sewer. And he

  himself was far less muddy than he should have been.

  “I fell down through the ground. Then I practically

  drowned and passed out and stopped. The water kept flowing past me and mostly cleaned me off.”

  He was pleased to have even figured that out.

  Gingerly he took steps down the tunnel, holding his hands

  out ahead of him. He was scared. More scared than he had

  been in his life. More scared even than the day the FAYZ had

  happened, or the day of the big battle, when he had hidden in

  a closet with a flashlight and some comic books.

  64 M I C H A E L

  G R A N T

  He was down here now, alone. No Iron Man. No Sandman. No Dark Knight.