Hunger (Gone 2)

The tool chest was crumpled, the door barely scratched.

Caine drew the chest back and hurled it forward again. This time more tools spilled out and the chest was crushed to half its size. But the door was undamaged.

Caine felt Diana’s hand on his arm. “Hey. Why don’t you see what Jack can do.”

Caine was torn between the fear of failing if he continued to batter away ineffectually, and the

fear of being shown up by the computer geek. This had become as much a contest between him and Drake as it was an attack on the power plant.

“Show us what you got, Jack,” Caine said.

Computer Jack advanced uncertainly, urged on by Diana.

He placed his hands against the door and tried to get a good grip on the floor with his sneakers. He pushed against the door, and his feet slid away beneath him. He fell to one knee.

“It’s too slippery,” Jack said.

“We have to be through that door before Sam shows up,” Caine said. “We need hostages, and we need that control room.”

His gaze rested on a heavy wrench. “Look out.”

Caine levitated the wrench, lifted it to the ceiling, turned it vertical, and with a sudden sweep of his hands plunged the wrench into the floor. It crunched through tile and concrete and stood like a climbing piton that had been hammered into a cliff face.

Caine repeated the move three more times, driving heavy-gauge stainless steel into the floor.

“Okay, use those.”

Jack braced his feet against the tools, placed his hands against the door, and heaved with all his might.

Edilio did not find Hunter. Instead he found Zil and a crowd of a dozen kids. They in turn had found Hunter. They had Hunter cornered on the porch of the house Astrid and Mother Mary shared.

Why Hunter had gone there, Edilio could guess: Astrid would be calm and reasonable. She would shelter him, for a while at least.

The scene, however, was anything but calm or reasonable. Astrid was wearing a nightgown. Her blond hair was untethered and wild. She stood at the top of the porch stairs and stabbed an angry finger at Zil.

Hunter was behind Astrid. Not exactly cowering, but not getting out in front of her, either.

Zil and his friends, who—Edilio noted with a sinking heart—were all normals, were angry. Or most were angry, some were just goofing around, glad of an excuse to get out and run around town in the middle of the night.

Most had some kind of weapon or other, baseball bats, tire irons. One, Edilio noted grimly, carried a shotgun. The kid with the shotgun, Hank, had been a quiet kid back in the old days. He didn’t look quiet now.

Edilio pulled his Jeep up to the curb. He hadn’t had time to round up any of his own people, he was alone. All eyes registered Edilio’s arrival, but no one stopped yelling.

“He’s a murdering chud,” Zil was yelling.

“What do you want to do? Lynch him?” Astrid demanded.

That stopped the flow for a second as kids tried to figure out what “lynch” meant. But Zil quickly recovered.

“I saw him do it. He used his powers to kill Harry.”

“I was trying to stop you from smashing my head in!” Hunter shouted.

“You’re a lying mutant freak!”

“They think they can do anything they want,” another voice shouted.

Astrid said, as calmly as she could while still pitching her voice to be heard, “We are not going down that path, people, dividing up between freaks and normals.”