Hunger

Another split second to guess that the glowing blue was not a swimming pool.

The remote fell.

Brianna dove.

Her hand gripped the remote just nine inches above the surface of the water.

If she plunged into that water . . .

She tucked her feet, spun around in midair, and hit the rising control rods as hard as she could.

It wasn’t elegant. She cleared the lip of the pool and skidded across the floor.

But she had the remote. She stared at it.

Now what?

“Sam? Sam?”

Sam said nothing. She leapt to him, rolled him over, and only then saw to her horror the mess that Drake had made of him.

“Sam?” It came out as a sob.

“Red button,” Sam managed to gasp.

THIRTY-EIGHT

53 MINUTES

EDILIO’S HANDS WERE gripping the wheel so tightly, his fingers were white. Dekka noticed.

He was gritting his teeth and then forcing himself to unclench in an unsuccessful effort to relax. Dekka noticed that, too.

She didn’t say anything about it. Dekka was not a talkative girl. Dekka’s world was inside her, not locked up but kept private. Her hopes were her own. Her emotions were her business, no one else’s. Her fears . . . Well, nothing good ever came of showing fear.

The kids in Perdido Beach, like the kids at Coates before that, tended to read Dekka’s self-contained attitude as hostile. She wasn’t hostile. But at Coates, that dumping ground for problem children, being just a little scary was a good thing.

At Coates, Dekka had belonged to no clique. She’d had no friends. She didn’t make trouble, kept her grades up, followed most of the rules, kept her nose out of other people’s business.

But she noticed what went on around her. She had known longer than most that some of the kids at Coates were changing in ways that could not logically be possible. She had known that Caine had gained some strange new power. She’d seen Drake Merwin for the dangerously sick creature he was. And Diana, of course, beautiful, seductive, knowing Diana.

Dekka had felt the attraction of the girl. Diana had played her, teased her, mocked her, and left Dekka feeling more vulnerable than she had in a long time. But Diana had told no one Dekka’s secret. In the environment of Coates, that fact would have come back to Dekka very quickly.

Diana knew how to keep secrets. For her own purposes.

In those early days at Coates, Dekka had barely noticed Brianna. That attraction had come later, after Caine and Drake had made their move and imprisoned all the budding freaks at Coates.

Dekka had been stuck beside Brianna, the two of them weighed down by the cement blocks encasing their hands. Side by side they’d eaten from a trough. Like animals. That’s when Dekka had started to admire Brianna’s unbroken spirit.

You could knock Brianna down. But she didn’t stay down. Dekka loved that.

Of course, nothing would ever come of it. Brianna was probably totally straight. And with lousy taste in guys, in Dekka’s opinion.

“Not far,” Edilio said. “The ghost town’s just ahead. Be ready.”

“Ready for what?” Dekka grumbled. “No one’s explained any of this to me. All Sam said is, I’m supposed to crush some cave.”

Edilio had his machine gun on his lap. He clicked the safety to the off position. He had a pistol wedged under his leg. He pulled this out, clicked the safety to off, and handed it to Dekka.

“You’re starting to worry me just a little bit, Edilio.”

“Coyotes,” Edilio said. “And worse, maybe.”

“What’s the ‘worse’?”

They slowed as they drove down the main street of what Dekka realized must have once been a town. All fallen down now. Sticks and dust and faded smears of cracked, ancient paint.

“Don’t you feel it?” Edilio asked.

And she did. Had for several minutes already, without knowing what it was, what to call it.

“How close do you have to be to do your thing?” Edilio asked.

When Dekka tried to answer, she found her mouth was too dry, her throat too tight. She swallowed dust and tried again. “Close.”

The Jeep reached the bottom of the trail. Edilio pulled the car around so that it was facing away. He left the keys in the ignition. “I don’t want to have to fumble for the keys,” he said. “Hopefully the coyotes haven’t learned to steal cars.”

Dekka found she was strangely reluctant to get out of the Jeep. She saw sympathy and understanding in Edilio’s eyes.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I don’t even know what I’m scared of,” Dekka said.

“Whatever it is,” Edilio said, “let’s go kill it.”

They started up the trail. They soon came upon the fly-covered corpse of a coyote.

“We got one at least,” Edilio said.

They stepped carefully past the dead animal. Edilio kept his machine gun at the ready, sweeping the barrel slowly, side to side. The pistol was heavy in Dekka’s hand. She searched each rock, each crevice, waiting, tense, clenching muscles she didn’t know she had.

Slowly they climbed.

And there, at last, the entrance to the mine.

“Can you do it from here?” Edilio whispered.

“No,” Dekka said. “Closer.”

Dragging feet through the dirt and gravel. Like they were walking through molasses. Every molecule of air seemed to drag at them. Slow-mo. Edilio’s finger flexing spasmodically on the trigger. Dekka’s heart thudding.