Hunger (Gone 2)

Ruthless and unafraid. Like he had been with Diana.

With both Dianas.

“Have to,” he whispered to himself.

“Have to cut it,” he said.

“Maybe I will,” he muttered.

But he doubted very much that he could.

“He’s hungry,” Little Pete said.

“You mean you’re hungry,” Astrid corrected automatically. Like Little Pete’s major problem was bad grammar.

She was in Sam’s office at town hall. People were coming and going. Kids with requests or complaints. Some Astrid dealt with herself. Some she wrote down for Sam.

One thing Sam was right about: This couldn’t go on. Kids coming in to ask for someone to arbitrate sibling rivalries, or asking whether it was okay for them to watch a PG-13 DVD, or asking Sam to decide whether t

hey could stop wearing their retainer. It was ridiculous.

“He’s hungry,” Little Pete said. He was hunched over his Game Boy, intent on the game.

“Do you want something to eat?” Astrid asked absentmindedly. “I could maybe find something.”

“He can’t talk.”

“Sure you can talk, Petey, when you try.”

“I won’t let him. His words are bad.”

Astrid looked over at him. There was a slight smile on Little Pete’s face.

“And he’s hungry,” Little Pete said, whispering now. “Hungry in the dark.”

“Because Sam said so, that’s why,” Edilio said for maybe the millionth time. “Because if we don’t pick the food, we’re all going to get very, very hungry, that’s why.”

“Can I do it another time?” the kid asked.

“Little dude, that’s when everyone wants to do it: some other time. But we got melons need picking. So just get on the bus. Bring a hat, if you have one. Let’s go.”

Edilio stood holding the front door of the house, waiting for the kid to find his Fairly OddParents cap. His mood, already gloomy, was not improving as the morning wore on. He had twenty-eight kids on the bus, all complaining, all wanting to go to the bathroom, all hungry or thirsty, squabbling, whining, crying.

It was almost eleven already. By the time he got them to the fields it would be noon and they’d be asking for lunch. He was determined to tell them to pick their lunch. Pick your lunch, it’s right there in front of you. Yes, I mean melons. I don’t care if you don’t like melons, that’s your lunch.

Thirty kids, counting himself. If they worked hard for four hours they could harvest maybe seventy, eighty melons each. Which sounded like a lot until you divided it by three hundred-plus hungry mouths and you started to realize that it took a whole lot of cantaloupe before you felt full.

What worried Edilio was the way so many of the melons were already rotting in the field. The way the birds were getting at them. And the fact that no one was thinking far enough ahead to wonder what they should be planting for the next season.

Food rotting. No planting. No irrigating.

Even if they harvested the available crops, it was just a matter of time before everyone was starving. Then, good luck keeping it all together.

It turned out he’d been optimistic. It was almost one in the afternoon before they made it to the field after a hellishly unpleasant bus trip during which a full-on fistfight broke out between two sixth graders.

Sure enough, the first words out of the kids’ mouths were, “I’m hungry.”

“Well, there’s your lunch,” Edilio said, sweeping his hand toward the field and feeling great personal satisfaction at being able to rub their noses in it.