Hunger (Gone 2)

Bug and Diana both turned to leave. The one excited, the other seething. Drake stayed behind.

Caine seemed surprised, maybe even a little worried. “What is it, Drake?”

“Diana,” Drake said. “I don’t trust her.”

Caine sighed. “Yeah, I think I get that you don’t like Diana.”

“It’s not about me not liking the…” He’d been about to use the “b” word, but Caine’s eyes flared and Drake reworded it. “It’s not about me not liking her. It’s about her and Computer Jack.”

That got Caine’s full attention. “What are you talking about?”

“Jack. He’s got powers now. And I’m not just talking about his tech skills. Bug saw him down in Perdido Beach. That backhoe they have? The wetback was digging a grave, and the backhoe toppled into it. Bug says Jack picked it up. Just pulled it up out of the hole like it was no heavier than a bike.”

Caine sat down on the edge of his bed. Drake had the impression Caine had needed to sit down for a while, that standing for more than a few minutes was still heavy work.

“Sounds like he’s at least a two bar. Maybe even a three,” Caine said. Diana had invented the system of bars, copying the idea from cell phones. Diana’s own power was the ability to gauge power levels.

Drake knew that there were only two known four bars: Sam and Caine. There was speculation about Little Pete, who had demonstrated some major stuff, but how dangerous could a half-brain-dead little five-year-old really be?

“Yeah, so Jack could be a three bar. Only not according to Diana, right? Diana says she read him at zero bars. So maybe the power develops late, okay. But from zero to three?” Drake shrugged, not needing to push the issue, knowing that Caine—even a sick, weakened Caine—was connecting the dots in his head.

“We never did get an explanation for why Jack switched sides and ran to Sam,” Caine said softly.

“Maybe someone put him up to it,” Drake said.

“Maybe,” Caine said, not wanting to admit the possibility. “Get someone to watch her. Not you, she knows you watch her. But get someone to keep an eye on her.”

The worst thing about the FAYZ from Duck Zhang’s point of view was the food. It had been great at first: candy bars, chips, soda, ice cream. That had all lasted a few weeks. It would probably have lasted longer but people had wasted it—leaving ice cream to melt; gorging on cookies, then leaving the bag out where dogs could get at it; letting bread mold.

By the time they’d burned through all the sweets and snack food it was too late to do anything about the fact that all of the meat and chicken, with the exception of bacon, sausage, and ham, and all the fresh produce except potatoes and onions was expired or rotten. Duck had been forced to help clean all that out of Ralph’s. A crew of resentful kids had shoveled rotting lettuce and stinking meat for days. But what could you do when Sam Temple looked right at you, pointed his finger, and said, “You.” The boy could fry you. Plus, he was the mayor, after all.

Then had come the canned soup, dry cereal, crackers and cheese period.

Right now Duck would give anything for a can of soup. His breakfast had been canned asparagus. Which tasted like vomit and everyone knew it made your pee stink.

But there were good things about the FAYZ, too. The best thing about the FAYZ, from Duck Zhang’s point of view, was the pool. It wasn’t exactly his pool, but it might as well be because here he was, floating in it. On a Monday morning in early March when he normally would have been in school.

No school. Nothing but pool. It took some of the sting out of hunger.

He was a sixth grader, small for his age, Asian, although his family had been American since the 1930s. Back in the day his folks had worried he was getting fat. Well, no one was very fat in the FAYZ. Not anymore.

Duck loved the water. But not the ocean. The ocean scared him. He couldn’t get past the idea that a whole world was down there below the waves, invisible to him while he was visible to them. Them being squids, octopi, fish, eels, jellyfish and, above all, sharks.

Pools on the other hand were great. You could see all the way to the bottom.

But he’d never had a pool of his own. There was no public pool in Perdido Beach, so he could only swim when he happened to have a friend with a pool, or when he was on vacation with his parents and they stayed at a hotel with a pool.

Now, however, with kids in Perdido Beach able to live pretty much wherever they liked, and go pretty much wherever they liked, Duck had found a perfect, secluded, private pool. Whom it belonged to, he couldn’t say. But whoever they were, they had a great setup. The pool was big, kidney-shaped, with a ten-foot depth at one end so you could dive in headfirst. The whole thing was the prettiest shade of aqua tile with a gold sunburst pattern in the bottom. The water—once he’d figured out how to add chlorine and clean the filters—was as clear as glass.

There was a nice wrought-iron table with an umbrella in the middle and some very comfortable chaise lounges for him to lie out on if he chose. But he didn’t choose to lie out. He chose to lie back on a float. A bottle of water bobbed alongside him on its own separate float. He had a cool pair of Ray-Bans on and a light coating of sunblock and he was—in a word—happy. Hungry, but happy.

Sometimes, when Duck felt particularly good, it almost seemed as if he didn’t even need the raft to hold him up. Sometimes if he was happy e

nough he could actually feel the pressure of his back on the plastic lessen. Like he weighed less or something. In fact he’d once awakened suddenly from a happy dream and had fallen a couple of feet into the water. At least, that’s what it seemed like, although it was obviously just part of the dream.

Other times, if he became angry for some reason, maybe just remembering some slight, it seemed to him that he grew heavier and the float would actually start to sink into the water.

But Duck was seldom either very happy or very angry. Mostly he was just peaceful.