Hunger (Gone 2)

Hunter had also ridiculed his tale of the blue bats. “Dude—or should I call you the Human Drill? Dude, bats sleep during the day and fly at night. Your blue bats? According to you, they woke up when it got light. How do you figure? Plus, no one but you has ever seen them.”

“They’re blue, like the sky, so you wouldn’t see them flying overhead or through the water,” Duck had pointed out to no avail.

He let go of the club door. Probably better that it was closed. He was lonely, but maybe loneliness wasn’t as bad as the ridicule.

Duck looked around, feeling lost. It was late. No one was out. In the old days his parents would have grounded him for a year if they’d found out he was wandering the streets at night.

No one was in the plaza. It was a creepy place at night. The graves were there. The shattered outline of the church dark against the stars. The burned remains of the apartment building. There were a couple of lights on in town hall—no one bothered going around and turning out lights. The street-lights were still on, although some had burned out and others, especially the ones in the plaza, had been broken either by the battle or by vandals.

The plaza was a place of ghosts now. Ghosts and long shadows.

Duck headed wearily toward home. So-called home. It meant passing by the church. It at least was dark. It was lit nowadays only on meeting nights because the original lighting system had not survived. Lights were strung from the town hall on an extension cord. Someone usually remembered to yank the cord out of the socket when they were done.

Rubble, some of it massive chunks of masonry, blocked the sidewalk on the church side. No one had ever cleaned it up. Probably no one ever would. Duck walked down the middle of the street, mistrusting the shadows on either side.

He heard a scuffling sound in the church. A dog, probably. Or rats.

But then, an urgent whisper, “Hey! Hey, Duck!”

Duck stopped. The voice was coming from the direction of the church.

“Dude!” the whisper, louder now.

“What? Who is that?” Duck asked.

“It’s me, man. Hunter. Keep it down. They’ll kill me if they find me.”

“What? Who?”

“Duck, man, come here, I can’t be yelling back and forth.”

Reluctantly—very reluctantly because he expected some trick—Duck crossed the street.

Hunter was crouched behind a piece of rubble that still held a portion of stained-glass window. He stood up when Duck approached, which brought his face into the light. He didn’t look as if he was planning a prank. He looked scared.

“What’s up?” Duck asked.

“Come back here, man, so no one can see us.”

Duck climbed over the rubble, skinning his shin in the process.

“Okay,” Duck said, once he was in Hunter’s rubble hideaway. “What?”

“Can you hook me up, dude? I didn’t catch any dinner.”

“Uh…what?”

“I’m hungry,” Hunter said.

“Everybody’s hungry,” Duck pointed out. “I drank a jar of gravy for dinner.”

Hunter sighed. “I’m starving here. I didn’t get dinner. I barely got any lunch. I was trying to save up.”

“Why are you here?”

“Zil. He and the normals are after me.”

Duck had the definite feeling he was either being elaborately punked, or had wandered into someone else’s crazy dream. “Man, if you’re here to bust on me, just get it over with.”