Hunger (Gone 2)

“Ah!”

She had crushed the cup. Hot coffee all over her arm.

Lana was sweating. Her breathing was labored. She took a deep breath and it was as if she’d forgotten how until that very moment.

It was in her head still, that monster in the mine shaft. It had its hook in her. Sometimes she was sure she heard its voice. A hallucination, surely. Surely not the Darkness itself. It was miles away. Far beneath the ground. It couldn’t…

Come to me.

“I can’t forget it,” she whispered to Patrick. “I can’t get away from it.”

In the early days after she had come out of the desert and joined this strange community of children, Lana had felt almost at peace. Almost. There had been, from the start, a sense of damage done, an invisible wound with no specific location except that it was inside her.

That unseen, unreal, unhealed wound had reopened. She told herself at first that it would go away. It would heal. A psychic scab would form. But if that was true, if she was healing, why did it hurt more with each passing day? How had that dreadful voice grown from faint, distant whisper to insistent murmur?

Come to me. I need you.

It had words now, that urgent, demanding voice.

“I’m going crazy, Patrick,” Lana told her dog. “It’s inside me, and I am going crazy.”

Mary Terrafino woke up. She rolled out of bed. Morning. She should go back to sleep: she was exhausted. But she would not fall back to sleep, she knew that. She had things to do.

First things first, she stumbled to her bathroom and used her bare foot to pull the scale across the tile floor. There was a special spot for the scale: aligned with the center of the mirror over the sink, upper-right corner of the scale precisely in line with the tile.

She removed her sleep shirt and stepped onto the scale.

First reading. Step off.

Second reading. Step off.

Three times made it official.

Eighty-one pounds.

She’d been 128 pounds when the FAYZ came.

She still looked fat. There were still pockets of chubbiness here and there. No matter what anyone else said. Mary could see the flab. So no breakfast for her. Which was fine, given that breakfast at the day care would be oatmeal made with powdered milk and sweetened with pink packets of Sweet’n Low. Healthy enough—and much, much better than what most people were getting—but not exactly worth gaining weight over.

Mary popped her Prozac, plus two tiny red Sudafed and a multivitamin. The Prozac kept depression at bay—mostly—and the Sudafed helped keep her from getting hungry. The vitamin would keep her healthy, she hoped.

She dressed quickly, T-shirt, sweatpants, sneakers. Each was roomy. She was determined not to wear anything more body-conscious until she had really lost some weight.

She went to the laundry room and spilled a dryer full of cloth diapers into a plastic bag. There were still a few disposable diapers in storage, but they were saving those for emergencies. They had made the switch to cloth a month earlier. It was gross and everyone hated it, but as Mary had pointed out to her grumbling workers, the Pampers factory wasn’t exactly delivering anymore.

Down the stairs with the bag bump-bumping along.

Sam was with Astrid and Little Pete in the kitchen. Mary didn’t want to interrupt—or be nagged about having breakfast—so she let herself quietly out the front door.

Five minutes later she was at the day care.

The day care had fared badly in the battle. The wall it shared with the hardware store had been blown out. So now the gaping hole was covered by plastic sheeting that had to be retaped just about every day. It was a reminder of how close they had come to disaster. The coyote pack had been in this very room, holding these same children hostage, while Drake Merwin preened and gloated.

Mary’s brother, John, was already at the day care waiting for her.

“Hey, Mary,” John sa

id. “You shouldn’t be here. You should be sleeping.”