Hunger

“Nestor,” Little Pete repeated.

“I’m supposed to get Duck,” Brianna said.

“Duck?” Astrid frowned. “Sam was probably out of his mind.”

“Duck,” Little Pete said.

Astrid stared at him. Brianna saw the look, could almost hear the wheels spinning in Astrid’s brain.

At that moment there was a commotion. Two dozen kids, some cavorting like they were at Mardi Gras, came around the corner into the town plaza. Creeping slowly behind them was a convertible with its top down and its lights flashing. The car’s CD player was blaring a song Brianna didn’t know.

Splayed across the hood of the car was the half-mangled body of a deer.

Walking behind the car, stumbling, dragging one leg like it wasn’t working right, face bloody, came Hunter. His hands were covered with something metallic, and wrapped in duct tape. A rope was around his neck. Holding the rope and sitting atop the backseat, like he was a politician at a parade, was Zil. Lance was driving. Antoine, whom Brianna knew to be a druggie jerk, was riding shotgun. Two other kids she didn’t really know were in the other seats. One of them was holding up a small, hand-lettered sign that read, “Free Food for Normals.”

“What the . . . ,” Brianna said.

“Stay out of it, Brianna,” Astrid said. “Go help Sam.”

“They can’t do this!” Brianna cried.

Astrid grabbed her arm. “Listen to me, Brianna. Your job is to help Sam. Do what he said: get Duck.”

“This is major trouble coming, Astrid.”

“Bad things,” Astrid said. “Very bad things are going on. Listen to me, Breeze. Are you listening?”

Someone must have spotted Brianna because suddenly there were kids rushing toward her from the procession, kids waving baseball bats and tire irons and at least one long-handled ax.

“It’s a freak! Get her!”

“She’s spying on us!”

“Get out of here, Breeze,” Astrid said urgently “Find a way to help Sam. If we lose him, we’re done.”

“These creeps don’t scare me!” Brianna yelled. “Bring it on, you punks!”

To shock her, Astrid grabbed her face. She squeezed it hard, like a very angry mother with a very bad little child. “It’s not about you, Brianna! Now get out of here!”

Brianna pulled back. Her face was flushed from anger. The mob was racing toward her. But “racing” meant one thing to them, and a whole different thing to her.

Astrid was probably right. They didn’t call her Astrid the Genius for nothing. But Brianna knew if the mob lost her, they’d likely take it out on Astrid.

“Take care of yourself, Astrid,” Brianna said.

Brianna zoomed fifty feet away from Astrid and came to a stop. “Hey. Morons. I’m right here. You want a piece? You want a piece of the Breeze?”

The crowd spotted her, turned, and went after her, veering away from Astrid.

“Get her!”

“Get that mutant freak!”

“Yeah, right,” Brianna sneered. “Come and get me.”

She waited, a coldly furious grin on her face, until the first of her pursuers was within ten feet.

Then she gave the mob a middle-finger salute and zoomed away at a speed even a car couldn’t match.

THIRTY-NINE

47 MINUTES

DUCK ZHANG WAS having a fine time if you set aside the fact that no one seemed to be distributing food anymore and he was so hungry, he couldn’t see straight.

He’d reached the point where he bitterly regretted the lost hot dog relish he’d intended to give to Hunter.

But on the plus side he was no longer worried about falling through the earth all the way to its molten core. He had begun to figure out how to control this absurd power he had.

Duck was no genius, but it had finally occurred to him that his was the power of density. He could control the density of his body, without growing larger or smaller. If he went one way, he became so dense, he could fall straight into the ground. Like dropping a marble into a bowl of pudding.

Which, as he had discovered, was a bad thing.

But if he went the other way, as he was learning to do, he could float. Not fly, but float. Like a helium balloon. He could do it now even without having to experience violent mood swings. He could simply decide to sink. Or he could decide to float.

Floating was much better. It turned the whole world into a sort of giant swimming pool. And this time around, no one was going to crash his party.

He was floating now about fifty feet above the plaza. He’d started off over by the school. He’d lifted off and then just . . . drifted. The only concern being that he not drift too far from town and end up having a long walk home. Worse still would be drifting out to sea. That could be bad. He could imagine, say, dozing off up here and waking up to find himself two miles out to sea. In the dark. That was a long, long swim.

“What I need,” he said to the rooftop below him, “is, like, wings or something. Or like a rocket pack. Then I could fly for real.”

“Like Superman.”

It was a happy thought. That did make it a little easier to stay comfortably aloft.

One of the other problems was that, unlike water, air was hard to move around in. Going up or down was easy. Going forward or backward was impossible. And even twisting around, for example, if you were lying on your back, well, that was not an easy thing to do, either.

As he was discovering.

He was, in effect, lying on his side at the moment, trying to come all the way around to face the ground. You couldn’t really push against air.