And it was cold.
Duck noticed the sound of his own sobbing, and was dismayed to realize he was crying. He tried to stop. It wasn’t easy. He wanted to cry. He wanted to cry for his mother and
father and grandmother and aunts and uncles and even his
obnoxious big brother and the whole, whole, whole world that
was gone and had abandoned him to this grave.
“Help! Help!” he cried, and again there was no answer.
Before him were two equally dark choices: The dark tunnel extending to his left. The dark tunnel extending to his right. He felt a slight, almost imperceptible whisper of breeze
on his face. It seemed to come from his left.
Toward air. Not away.
Carefully, Duck made his way down the tunnel, hands
outstretched like a blind person, down the tunnel.
It was so dark, he could not see his hand in front of his
face. No light. None.
He soon found that it was easier if he kept one hand on
the wall. It was rock, pitted and rough, but with bumps and
protrusions that felt worn down. The ground below him was
uneven but not wildly so.
“Cave has to lead somewhere,” Duck told himself. He
found the sound of his own voice reassuring. It was real. It
was familiar.
“I wish it was a tunnel. People don’t build a tunnel for no
reason.” Then, after a while, “At least a tunnel has to go somewhere.”
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65
He tried to make sense of the direction. Was he going
north, south, east, west? Well, hopefully not too far west,
because that would lead him to the ocean.
He walked and occasionally started crying and walked
some more. It was impossible to guess how long he’d been
down there. He had no idea what time of day it might be.
But he soon realized that the place where he’d fallen in was
seeming more and more homey by comparison. There wasn’t
much light back there, but at least there had been some. And
here there was none.
“I don’t want to die down here,” he said. He was instantly
sorry that he had voiced that thought. Saying it made it real.
At that moment he banged his head on something that
shouldn’t have been there, banged it hard.
Duck cursed angrily and put his hand to his forehead,
feeling for blood, and realized his feet were sinking into the
ground. “No!” he yelped.
The sinking stopped. He’d gone up to his knees. But then
he had stopped. He had stopped sinking. Carefully, cautiously, he pulled his legs up out of the hard-packed dirt.
“What is happening to me?” he demanded. “Why . . .” But
then he knew the answer. He knew it and couldn’t believe it
hadn’t occurred to him earlier.
“Oh, my God: I’m a freak.”
“I’m a moof!”
“I’m a moof with a really sucky power.”
What exactly the mutant ability was, he wasn’t sure. It
seemed to be the power to sink right down through the earth.
Which was crazy. And, besides, he hadn’t intended to do any
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such thing. He sure hadn’t said, “Sink!”
He started walking again, careful of his head, trying to
work through what had happened. Both times he had sunk
he’d been angry, that was the first thing. He’d heard the stories of how Sam had discovered his abilities only when he was really scared or really mad.
But Duck had been scared now for quite a while. He’d been
scared since the FAYZ. It was only when he got angry that the
thing happened.
The thing. Whatever it was.
“If I got mad enough maybe I’d sink clear through the
earth. Come out in China. See my great-great grandparents.”
He crept along a bit farther, toward a dim glow.
“Light?” he said. “Is that really light?”
It wasn’t bright, that was for sure. It wasn’t a lightbulb. It
wasn’t a flashlight. It wasn’t even a star. It was more like a
less dark darkness. Hazy. At a distance that was impossible
to guess.
Duck was sure it was a hallucination. He wanted it to be
real, but he feared it wasn’t. He feared it was imagination.
it seemed that it was a mirage. There was definitely a glow.
Like a glow-in-the-dark clock face, a sickly, cold, unhealthy-
looking light.
Even close up it didn’t glow enough to make out many features, just a few faint outlines of rock. He had to stand and stare hard, straining his eyes for quite some time before he
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67
could figure out that the glow was mostly along the ground.
And that it came from a side tunnel of the main cave. This
second shaft was narrow, far smaller than the main cave,
which, it seemed to Duck, had gradually broadened out.
He could follow this new shaft and at least see something.
Not much, but something. Some proof that he wasn’t actually
blind.
But some little voice in his brain was screaming, “No!” His
instincts were telling him to run.
“There’s light down there. It must lead to somewhere,”
Duck argued with himself.
But although Duck had never been the most attentive student, and had very little information of a scientific nature in his brain, he was an avid fan of The Simpsons. He’d seen
this glow, in cartoon form. And it featured in any number of
comics.
“It’s radiation,” he said.
This was wrong, he realized, filled with righteous indignation. Everyone said there was no radiation left from the big accident at the power plant thirteen years ago, when the meteorite hit. But where else would this glow have come from? It must have seeped along underground seams and crevices.
They had lied. Or maybe they just hadn’t realized.
“Not a good idea to go that way,” he told himself.
“But it’s the only light,” he cried, and began to weep with
frustration because it seemed he had no choice but to plunge
back into absolute darkness.
And then, Duck heard something.
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He froze. He strained his senses to listen.
A soft, swishing sound. Very faint.
A long silence. And then, there it was again. Swish. Swish.
He’d missed the sound because he’d been focusing on the
glow. It was a sound he knew. Water. And it did not, thank
God, come from the radioactive shaft.
Duck hated the ocean. But all things considered, he hated
it a bit less than he hated this cave.
Leaving the glow behind, and feeling carefully ahead, cautious about his bruised forehead, he crept on through pitch blackness.
SIX
96 HOURS, 22 MINUTES
“ L O O K , A L B E R T , D O N ’ T tell me we have a problem and
I can’t do anything about it,” Sam said, practically snarling.
He marched along at a quick walk from the town hall to the
church next door. Albert and Astrid were with him, struggling to keep up.
The sun was setting out over the ocean. The dying light
laid down a long red exclamation point on the water. A boat
was out there, one of the small moto
rboats. Sam sighed. Some
kid who’d probably end up falling in.
Sam stopped suddenly, causing Albert and Astrid to bump
into each other. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound mad. Although
I am mad, but not at you, Albert. It’s just I have to go in there
and lay down the law, and I’m sorry, but killer worms aren’t
making it any easier.”
“Then hold off for a few days,” Albert said calmly.
“Hold off? Albert, you were the one who was saying weeks
ago, months ago, we had to make everyone get to work.”
“I never said we should make them work,” Albert countered.
70 M I C H A E L
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“I said we should figure out a way to pay them to work.”
Sam was not in the mood. Not in the mood at all. Losing
a kid was a tragedy to everyone, but to him it was a personal
failure. He’d been handed the job of being in charge, which
meant everything that went wrong was on him. E.Z. had
been under his care and protection. And now E.Z. was a pile
of ash.
Sam sucked in a gulp of air. He shot a baleful look at the
cemetery in the square. Three more graves in just the last
three months since Sam had been officially elected mayor.
E.Z. wouldn’t get a grave, just a marker. At the rate things
were going, they’d run out of room in the square.
The front door of the church stood open. Always open.
That was because it, and much of the church roof, had been
damaged in the big Thanksgiving Battle. The wide wooden
doors had been blown off. The sides of the opening were
shaky, held up by a slab of stone across the top that made the
wreckage look like a lopsided Stonehenge monolith.
Caine had come close to collapsing the entire church, but
it was built strong, so three quarters of it still stood. Some of
the rubble had been cleared, but not much, and even that had
only been pushed into the side street. Like so many ambitious
undertakings that had fallen apart as kids quit working and
could not be convinced to come back.
Sam walked straight to the front of the church and mounted
the three low steps to what he thought of as the stage, although
Astrid had patiently explained that it was called a chancel.
The great cross had not been replaced in its rightful spot, but
stood leaning in a corner. A close examination would reveal
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bloodstains where it had once crushed Cookie’s shoulder.
Not until he turned around did Sam notice how little of
the church was filled. There should have been close to 250
kids, leaving aside the day care and the people on guard in
various locations. There were closer to eighty present, half of
those so young, Sam knew they’d been dumped there by big
brothers or sisters looking for a bit of free babysitting.
Astrid and Albert took seats in the first pew. Little Pete
was at the day care. Now that Mother Mary had more help
at the day care, Astrid could occasionally leave Pete there,
although never for very long. As long as Pete stayed lost in
his video game, anyone could care for him. But if Pete got
upset . . .
Mother Mary Terrafino herself was two rows back, too
humble to insert herself in the leadership area of the church.
Sam was struck by how good Mary looked. Weight loss. Probably from overwork. Or maybe she didn’t enjoy living on the kinds of canned food that, in the old pre-FAYZ days, people
had donated to food drives. But she was quite thin, which was
not an adjective normally applied to Mary. Model thin.
Lana Arwen Lazar slumped in a back row. She looked tired
and a little resentful. Lana often looked resentful. But at least
she had come, which was more than could be said for most
kids.
Sam gritted his teeth, angry that so many had skipped this
town meeting. Just what exactly did they have to do that was
more important?
“First off,” he said, “I want to say I’m sorry about E.Z.
He was a good kid. He didn’t deserve . . .” For a moment he
72 M I C H A E L
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almost lost it as a surge of emotion welled up from nowhere.
“I’m sorry he died.”
Someone sobbed loudly.
“Look, I’m going to get right to it: we have three hundred
and thirty-two . . . I’m sorry, three hundred and thirty-one
mouths to feed,” Sam said. He placed his hands on his hips
and planted his feet wide apart. “We were already pretty bad
off for food supplies. But after the attack by the Coates kids . . .
well, it’s not pretty bad off, anymore, it’s desperate.”
He let that sink in. But how much were six- and eight-yearolds really grasping? Even the older kids looked more glazed than alarmed.
“Three hundred and thirty-one kids,” Sam reiterated,
“And food for maybe a week. That’s not a long time. It’s not a
lot of food. And as you all know, the food we have is awful.”
That got a response from the audience. The younger kids
produced a chorus of gagging and retching sounds.
“All right,” Sam snapped. “Knock it off. The point is, things
are really desperate.”
“How about the food in everyone’s house?” someone yelled.
The light of the setting sun streamed through the damaged façade of the church and stabbed Sam in the eyes. He had to take two steps to the left to escape it. “Hunter? Is that
you?”
Hunter Lefkowitz was a year younger than Sam, long-
haired like just about everyone except the few who had taken
the initiative of cutting his or her own hair. He was not someone who had ever been popular in school before the FAYZ. But then, Sam reflected, the things that had made kids popular in
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the old days didn’t mean much anymore.
Hunter had begun developing powers. Sam was trying to
keep that fact secret—he suspected that Caine was sending
spies into Perdido Beach. He wanted to be able to use Hunter
as a secret weapon if it came to another fight with Caine’s
people. But secrets were tough to keep in a place where everyone knew everyone else.
“Hunter, we’ve searched all of the homes and carried the
food to Ralph’s,” Sam continued. “The problem is that all the
fruit and veggies spoiled while we were all filling up on chips
and cookies. The meat all rotted. People were stupid and
careless, and there’s nothing we can do about that now.” Sam
swallowed the bitterness he felt, the anger he felt at his own
foolishness. “But we have food sitting out in the fields. Maybe
not the food we’d like, but enough to carry us for months—
many months—if we bring it in before it rots and the birds
eat it.”
“Maybe we’ll get rescued, and we won’t have to worry,”
another voice said.
“Maybe we’ll learn to live on air,” Astrid muttered under
her breath but loudly enough to be heard by at least a few.
“Why don’t you go get our food back from Drake and the
chuds up there?”
It was Zil. He accepted a congr
atulatory slap on the back
from a creepy kid named Antoine, part of Zil’s little posse.
“Because it would mean getting some kids killed,” Sam
said bluntly. “We’d be lucky to rescue any of the food, and
we’d end up digging more graves in the plaza. And it wouldn’t
solve our problem, anyway.”
74 M I C H A E L
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“Get your moofs to go fight their moofs,” Zil said.
Sam had heard the term “moof” more and more lately.
“Chud” was a newer term. Each new term seemed just a little
more derogatory than the one it replaced.
“Sit down, Zil,” Sam went on. “We have twenty-six kids
who are in the . . . have we decided? Are we calling it the
army?” he asked Edilio.
Edilio was in the first pew. He leaned forward, hung his
head, and looked uncomfortable. “Some kids are calling it
that, but man, I don’t know what to call it. Like a militia or
something? I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“Mother Mary has fourteen kids working for her, including
one-day draftees,” Sam said, ticking off the list. “Fire Chief
Ellen has six kids at the firehouse, dealing with emergencies.
Dahra handles the pharmacy herself, Astrid is my adviser.
Jack is in charge of technology. Albert has twenty-four kids
working with him now, guarding Ralph’s and distributing
food supplies. Counting me, that’s seventy-eight kids who do
various jobs.”
“When they bother to show up,” Mary Terrafino said
loudly. That earned a nervous laugh, but Mary wasn’t
smiling.
“Right,” Sam agreed. “When they bother to show up. The
thing is, we need more people working. We need people
bringing in that food.”
“We’re just kids,” a fifth grader said, and giggled at his
own joke.
“You’re going to be hungry kids,” Sam snapped. “You’re
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75
going to be starving kids. Listen to me: people are going to
starve. To death.
“To. Death.” He repeated it with all the emphasis he could
bring to bear on the word.
He caught a warning look from Astrid and took a deep
breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that the situation
is really bad.”
A second-grade girl held up her hand. Sam sighed, knowing what to expect, but called on her, anyway.