Hunger

“Nothing you could have done, Duck,” he told himself.

“That’s true,” he agreed. “Nothing.”

“Not our fault.”

He made a weak grab at a seagull that hovered just out of reach, floating on its boomerang-shaped wings. He was hungry enough that he would have eaten the bird raw. In midair.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a blur on the ground below. The blur stopped suddenly. He couldn’t see her face, but it could only be Brianna. In her hand she held a pigeon.

Brianna could do what Duck could not. Brianna could catch and eat birds. Maybe she would share. After all, they were both freaks. Both on the same side. Right?

“Hey!” he yelled down.

Brianna stared up at him. “You!” she yelled. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“I’m so hungry,” Duck moaned.

“How did you get up there?”

He was slowly increasing his density, sinking down to earth.

“It goes both ways,” Duck said. “It’s all about density. I weigh whatever I want to weigh. I can weigh so much, I sink through the ground, or I can float so—”

“Yeah, I don’t care. Sam said get you.”

“Me?”

“You. Get down here.”

She ripped a wing off the pigeon and handed a dripping, gelatinous piece of flesh to Duck, who didn’t even hesitate.

He looked up guiltily after a minute of slavering and grunting. “Don’t you want some?”

“Nah,” she said. “My appetite . . . I don’t know. I’m feeling a little sick.”

Brianna was looking at him in a way that made him distinctly nervous.

“There’ll be some wind resistance,” Brianna said.

“Some what?”

“Say you can control your weight? About ten pounds ought to do.”

“Do for what?”

“Jump on my back, Duck. You are going for a ride.”

The morphine did not eliminate the pain. It merely threw a veil over it. It was still there, a terrible, ravening lion, roaring, awesome, overpowering. But held barely at bay.

Barely.

His wounds were shocking to see. Bright red stripes across his back, shoulders, neck, and face. In places the skin had been taken off.

The morphine nightmare had faded and reality had begun to take on some of its usual definition. The ground was down and the sky was up. The stars were bright, the sound of his shoes on the concrete was familiar, as was the sound of his own breath, rasping in his throat.

He had a while. How long, he couldn’t guess. A short while, maybe, to stop Caine.

And kill Drake. Because now, for the first time in his life, Sam wanted to take a life.

Drake. He was going to kill Drake. More than any high-minded concern for what Caine might do, it was the thought of Drake that kept Sam moving forward. Destroy Drake before the morphine wore off and the awful pain returned and left him crying and screaming and . . .

Should have done it the first time he’d had the chance.

Should have . . .

The scene appeared around him, shimmering, unreal. The battle on the steps of town hall. Orc and Drake, the hammering fist of the gravel boy, and the slashing whip of the true monster.

Sam had been busy with Caine. He’d barely survived. But he could have, should have, destroyed the psychopath Drake then and there. Put him down like the rabid animal he was.

Reality was wobbly as Sam crossed the parking lot. No one there, now. Dekka gone to . . . gone to do what? His mind was foggy.

Gone to destroy the mine shaft. Her and Edilio.

Lana. If Lana was in there . . . If she . . .

Sam’s step faltered. Lana was his only hope. Without her, he would not survive. She could heal him. She could end the pain. Renew him.

So that he could . . .

He sagged into a car. For a while, he couldn’t know how long, his mind went away. Consciousness failed. Not quite sleep, though, just a waking nightmare of memories and images and always the pain in his belly, the pain of his scarred flesh.

Keep moving, he told himself. Which way? The town was ten miles away. But that’s not where Caine was heading.

The side of the hill behind the power plant was glowing. Like it was burning in patches. A hallucination.

He would never be able to walk that far. The drug would never last that long. Faster. He needed to move faster.

He needed help. Someone . . .

“Someone help me,” he whispered.

He began the long, wearying walk up the sloping road toward the security gate. No way he could move overland. Not a chance. And even . . .

Even . . .

Sam’s head was playing tricks on him now. He saw a light. Like a flashlight. But coming from the ocean.

He sat down hard. The light swept slowly over the parking lot, like someone out at sea was car shopping.

The light crawled over the side of the power plant. It climbed the hill, then came back down. Someone was searching.

But he was just a crumpled form on a road, too small to be spotted. The light would never land on him. It was like some sick game. The light would come his way and then veer off.

He was invisible.

“No, Sam,” he told himself as the realization dawned with ridiculous slowness on his addled brain. “Stupid moron. The one thing you have is light.”

Sam raised his hands high. A pillar of pure green light pierced the night sky.

The searchlight zoomed instantly toward him.

“Yeah, here I am,” Sam said.

It took Quinn a few minutes to beach the boat and climb up the rocks to reach Sam.