Hunger (5 page)

He surfaced with difficulty, fighting with suddenly leaden arms to stay afloat.

They hit him again, just roughhousing, not really trying to hurt him, but forcing him under once more. This time he touched down on the bottom of the pool and had to kick his way back to the surface to gasp for air. He clutched at the float, but one of the boys yanked it away, giggling loudly.

Duck was filled with sudden rage. He had one good thing in his life, this pool, one good thing, and now it was being ruined.

“Get out!” he shrieked, but the last word glub-glub-glubbed as he sank like a rock.

What was going on? Suddenly he couldn’t swim. He was on the bottom of the pool, in the deep end, under ten feet of water. He kicked at the tile bottom, trying to shoot back up, but his foot shattered the tile and sent pieces of it spinning through the water.

Now panic took hold. What were they doing to him?

He kicked again, both feet as hard as he could. But he did not rise to the surface. Instead, both feet punched through the tile. He rose not at all. In fact, he was still sinking. His feet were sinking through the tile, scraping through jagged mortar and crumbled concrete, down into mud beneath.

It was impossible.

Impossible
.

Duck Zhang was falling through the bottom of the pool. Through the ground beneath the bottom of the pool. It was as if he were standing in quicksand.

Up to his knees.

Up to his thighs.

Up to his waist.

He thrashed madly but he only fell faster.

Broken tile scraped his flanks. Mud slithered into his bathing suit.

His lungs burned. His vision was blurring now, head pounding, and still he fell through solid earth, as if the ground itself were nothing but water.

As the tile reached his chest he slammed his arms down to block himself falling farther, but his arms plowed through the tile and the concrete beneath and the dirt beneath that, and all of it swirled around his head in a cloud of murk and mud.

The pool water was now rushing down around him, pushing into his mouth and nose. He was a loose plug caught in a drain.

Duck Zhang’s world swirled, crazy flashes of feet kicking
above him, sparkling sunlight, then his vision tunneled, narrowed, and darkness crowded out the light.

It had been funny for the first minute or so. Zil Sperry had enjoyed sneaking up on Dork Zhang: he and Hank and Antoine creeping around the side of the house, shoving one another playfully, suppressing giggles.

It was Hank who’d found out about Duck’s secret swimming pool. Hank was a born spy. But it was Zil’s idea to wait until Duck had it all cleaned up, until he adjusted the chlorine and got the filter working.

“Let him do the work first,” Zil had argued. “Then we take it from him.”

Antoine and Hank were cool, Zil realized, but if there was serious thinking or planning to be done, it was up to him.

They had achieved total surprise. Duck had probably wet himself. Stupid dork. Big, whiny baby.

But then things had gone wrong. Duck had sunk like a rock. And kept sinking. And suddenly the sun-dappled water had turned into a whirlpool of shocking power. Hank had been standing on the steps and managed to leap up and out of the pool. But Antoine was with Zil in the deep end when Duck pulled the plug.

Zil had managed, just barely, to grab on to the end of the diving board. The water sucked at him, practically pulled his bathing suit off. He barely held on, fingertips scrabbling at the sandpapery surface of the board.

Antoine had been swept away, drawn into the circular
motion. The force of the water had rammed him into the chrome ladder, and Antoine had managed to wedge one fat leg between the ladder, and the side of the pool. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his ankle.

Hank hauled Zil to safety. The two of them together helped Antoine clamber awkwardly up where he collapsed like a beached whale on the deck.

“Dude, we almost drowned,” Antoine gasped weakly.

“What happened?” Hank asked. “I couldn’t see.”

“Duck, man,” Zil said, his voice shaky. “He, like, sank 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.”

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.

104
HOURS
, 5
MINUTES

“
BULLETS ARE FAST.
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.

“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.

“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
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.”

“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
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
Banning. Back where she belonged. Not that there weren’t some tough kids at Nicolet, but there were no Caines, no Bennos, 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
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.

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.

“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.

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

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.