Hunger (Gone 2)

The mere mention of Junior Mints made Sam’s stomach rumble.

“You had…” He had to stop himself from focusing on the candy. Candy! How had Dalton managed to hoard actual candy? “Deal with it,” Sam said and kept moving. Then he stopped. “Wait a minute. Aren’t you two supposed to be out at the power plant?”

Alton answered. “No, our shift was last night. We came back this morning in the van. And I did not steal his stupid Junior Mints. I didn’t even know he had Junior Mints.”

“Then who stole them?” his brother demanded hotly. “I ate two each shift. One at the beginning, one at the end. I ate one when I got there last night and I counted them all. I had seven left. And then this morning when I went to have another one, the box was empty.”

Sam said, “Did it ever occur to you it might be one of the other kids standing guard?”

“No,” Dalton said. “Heather B and Mike J were at the guardhouse. And Josh was asleep the whole time.”

“What do you mean Josh was asleep?” Sam said.

The brothers exchanged nearly identical guilty looks. Dalton shrugged. “Sometimes Josh sleeps. It’s no big deal—he’ll wake up if anything happens.”

“Doesn’t Josh watch the security cameras?”

“He says he can’t see anything. Nothing ever happens. It’s just like pictures of the road and the hills and the parking lot and all.”

“We stayed up. Mostly,” Alton said.

“Mostly. How much is ‘mostly’?” Sam got no answer. “Get going. Go ahead. And stop fighting. You weren’t supposed to be hoarding food, anyway, Dalton. Serves you right.” He wanted badly to ask where the kid had found candy, and ask if there was more, but that would have been the wrong message. Bad example.

Still, Sam thought, what if there was still candy? Somewhere? Somewhere in the FAYZ?

Edilio’s bus began to pull away. Ellen was onboard and Sam figured Edilio would stop off and grab a couple of his soldiers to help with the drafting of workers for the fields.

Sam could imagine the scenes that would be played out house by house. The whining. The complaining. The running away. Followed by a lazy, mostly wasted effort to pick fruit by kids who didn’t want to work in the hot sun for hours.

He thought briefly of E.Z. Of the worms. Albert was taking Orc to the cabbage field this morning, to test Howard’s suggestion that he would be invulnerable. Hopefully, that would work.

For a brief moment he worried that the worms might have spread. But even if they had, surely not to the melon field. It was a mile from the cabbages.

A mile was a long distance to cover if you were a worm.

“Beer me,” Orc bellowed.

Albert handed Howard a red and blue can of beer. A Budweiser. That’s what Albert had the most of, and Orc didn’t seem to have any particular brand loyalty.

Howard popped the tab and extended it out of the driver’s side window, reaching back. Orc snatched it as they drove down the pitted dirt road.

Orc sat in the bed of the pickup truck. He was too big to fit in anything smaller, too big to fit inside the truck’s cab. Howard was driving. Albert was in the front seat, squeezed in beside a large polystyrene cooler. The cooler had the logo of the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was full of beer.

“You know, we should have hung out more, back in the old days,” Howard said to Albert.

“You didn’t know I existed, back in the old days,” Albert said.

“What? Come on, man. There’s, like, a dozen brothers in the whole school and I didn’t notice one?”

“We’re the same shade, Howard. That doesn’t make us friends,” Albert said coolly.

Howard laughed. “Yeah, you were always a grind. Reading too much. Thinking too much. Not having much fun. Good little family boy, make your momma proud. Now look at you: you’re a big man in the FAYZ.?

?

Albert ignored that. He wasn’t interested in reminiscing. Not with Howard, for sure, not really with anyone. The old world was dead and gone. Albert was all about the future.

As if reading his mind, Howard said, “You’re always planning, aren’t you? You know it’s true. You are all business.”