Hunger (Gone 2)

Quinn had hauled him up on the rope, helped greatly by Caine.

Lana sat in the dirt as the sun came up.

Quinn brought her water. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

She could say the words he wanted to hear, but Lana knew she could not make him believe. “No,” Lana said.

Quinn sat next to her. “Caine and Diana, they took off. Sam is sleeping. Dekka…I don’t think she’s over it yet.”

“I can’t cure a person of memories,” Lana said dully.

“No,” Quinn agreed. “I guess if you could, you’d cure yourself.”

He put his arm around her shoulders, and she started crying then. It felt like she could never stop. But it didn’t feel bad, either. And Quinn did not leave her. Far off there was the sound of a car’s engine.

Quinn said, “Hey, Brianna zipped back to town. Brought Astrid and someone else.”

Lana didn’t care. Lana didn’t think she would ever care about anything again.

But then, there was the sound of a car door opening and closing. And suddenly, Patrick was there, his cold, wet nose thrust insistently against her neck.

Lana put her arms around him, hugged him close, and cried into his fur.

FORTY-SEVEN

IT WAS LATE the next day before Edilio could bring himself to the job at hand. But then he fired up the backhoe and dug two holes in the corner of the plaza.

Mickey Finch. A bullet hole in his back.

Brittney, mangled so badly, no one could look at her. Some sort of slug seemed to have attached itself to her, an eighteen-inch-long thing that could not be pried away from her.

In the end, they buried it with her. She was dead, after all: she wouldn’t care.

There was no hole for Duck Zhang. But they put up a cross for him. They had searched the cavern as best they could. But all they’d found was a hole that went down and down seemingly forever.

The hole was collapsing in on itself as Sam shone his light down. It was already filling with tons of rock and dirt.

“No one knew Duck all that well,” Sam said at the service. “I don’t think anyone would have guessed he’d be a hero. But he saved our lives. He did it willingly. He made the choice to give his life for us.”

They put a few wildflowers on the graves.

After the service Edilio took a can of black spray paint and began to paint over the “HC” tags that had appeared on too many storefronts.

THREE DAYS LATER

“SO, HOW’S IT going to work, Albert?” Sam asked. He wasn’t as interested as he should be. Probably because he hadn’t slept much yet. Too much to do. Too much to figure out.

He was done. He’d told them all: He was done. Done being the Sam Temple. From now on he was just a kid. Like any other. No longer the anything.

But not just yet. Right now there was still too much to do. Kids to feed. A terrible rift to be somehow patched up.

Memories of suffering that would have to be dealt with, somehow, absorbed, accepted.

They were at the edge of the cabbage field. Sam, Astrid, Albert, Edilio, and Quinn.

Quinn was standing in the bed of a pickup truck wearing tall rubber boots. In the truck were a dozen of Duck’s famous blue bats. They kept being hauled in by Quinn and Albert’s fishermen. Perfectly good protein, but so noxious, so foul that even the starving couldn’t gag down the putrid meat.

“We disburse a given amount of gold to every kid,” Albert was explaining. He at least was excited. “Then, if they want, they trade it for paper currency, the McDonald’s game pieces. The gold is kept in a central deposit. They can come back and trade their paper currency for gold anytime they want. This is how they know the paper currency has lasting value.”