Hunger (Gone 2)

Sam had been too late, too slow, too distracted, too unsure. He hadn’t moved in time to ration food. He hadn’t motivated enough people to help out. He’d let the resentment between freaks and normals get ugly. He hadn’t protected Ralph’s from Drake, or the power plant from Caine.

Kids were sitting in the dark in Perdido Beach, thinking thoughts of cannibalism. And he was in charge, so it was on him.

Even now, Sam had the nagging feeling that he had missed something vital. Something. A resource.

A weapon.

Well, if he survived this day, he was finished. Let Astrid be in charge. Or Albert. Or Dekka. Best of all, probably, Edilio.

If he won this day, if he stopped Caine, and if Dekka closed the mine shaft, then that was enough. More than enough.

And if one of them failed? If Caine got through and Dekka did not kill the gaiaphage? It had Lana. It had been inside Caine’s mind. It knew what Lana knew, what Caine knew. Drake as well, no doubt. It knew all their strengths and all their limits. And if it became what it wanted to become, then what?

He was missing something.

But what else was new? Soon, it would be someone else’s problem. He was going surfing.

He didn’t need waves, not really. He could just paddle his board out and lie there. Just lie there. That would be fine.

But first…

Sam crossed the parking lot to the door of the turbine room. He expected to be challenged. He expected to be shot. But he reached the door and found it unguarded.

A relief. But not a good thing. Caine would have someone watching the door. If he was still inside.

He stepped through into the eerie and unexpected silence. The plant was shut down. The turbines were no longer turning. Normally you couldn’t hear anything. Now he could hear his own footsteps.

He found the passageway to the control room with the door forced inward. It took him a moment to make sense of the tools driven into the floor and bent back.

The control room itself was empty and darker than usual. Emergency lights glowed. The instruments and computer screens were all still on. But there was no sign of life.

A puddle of sticky, drying blood had been tracked all over. Red footprints.

It was not what he expected, this silence. Where was Caine? Where was Drake?

The power plant was a vast complex and they might be anywhere. They could wait for him in a hundred different locations, wait in ambush until he stumbled onto them. Caine could hit him before he had a chance to react.

Sam stood poised, uncertain. What was going on? He wished he had asked Edilio to send Brianna here. She could search the entire plant in two minutes.

Think it through, he ordered himself. They were here to steal uranium. They were going to take their prize to the mine. So how would they do it? Where would they be?

The reactor, of course. That’s where the deadly metal was.

“Not a happy thought,” Sam said to the empty room.

He headed down the hallway, following the helpful wall signs.

A massive steel door guarded the entry to the reactor. Caine had not bothered to close it behind him.

Down a long, echoing, dimly lit, long hallway. A second massive steel door, this one open as well, though there was

a security keypad beside it and surely it must normally be kept closed and locked.

It had been deliberately left open, Sam realized. For him. Was it because Caine had released radioactivity into the area? Was that it? Was his body already absorbing a fatal dose?

No. Caine wouldn’t be shortsighted enough to contaminate the whole place so that the power could never be turned back on. The one thing he was sure of was that Caine would want the electricity back on someday, if only so that he could control it.

That made sense. It did not, however, put an end to Sam’s fears. If Caine had contaminated the place, then Sam was a dead kid walking.