Hunger

“I don’t want to die down here,” he said. He was instantly sorry that he had voiced that thought. Saying it made it real.

At that moment he banged his head on something that shouldn’t have been there, banged it hard.

Duck cursed angrily and put his hand to his forehead, feeling for blood, and realized his feet were sinking into the ground. “No!” he yelped.

The sinking stopped. He’d gone up to his knees. But then he had stopped. He had stopped sinking. Carefully, cautiously, he pulled his legs up out of the hard-packed dirt.

“What is happening to me?” he demanded. “Why . . .” But then he knew the answer. He knew it and couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him earlier.

“Oh, my God: I’m a freak.”

“I’m a moof!”

“I’m a moof with a really sucky power.”

What exactly the mutant ability was, he wasn’t sure. It seemed to be the power to sink right down through the earth. Which was crazy. And, besides, he hadn’t intended to do any such thing. He sure hadn’t said, “Sink!”

He started walking again, careful of his head, trying to work through what had happened. Both times he had sunk he’d been angry, that was the first thing. He’d heard the stories of how Sam had discovered his abilities only when he was really scared or really mad.

But Duck had been scared now for quite a while. He’d been scared since the FAYZ. It was only when he got angry that the thing happened.

The thing. Whatever it was.

“If I got mad enough maybe I’d sink clear through the earth. Come out in China. See my great-great grandparents.”

He crept along a bit farther, toward a dim glow.

“Light?” he said. “Is that really light?”

It wasn’t bright, that was for sure. It wasn’t a lightbulb. It wasn’t a flashlight. It wasn’t even a star. It was more like a less dark darkness. Hazy. At a distance that was impossible to guess.

Duck was sure it was a hallucination. He wanted it to be real, but he feared it wasn’t. He feared it was imagination.

But he kept moving and the closer he got the less likely it seemed that it was a mirage. There was definitely a glow. Like a glow-in-the-dark clock face, a sickly, cold, unhealthy-looking light.

Even close up it didn’t glow enough to make out many features, just a few faint outlines of rock. He had to stand and stare hard, straining his eyes for quite some time before he could figure out that the glow was mostly along the ground. And that it came from a side tunnel of the main cave. This second shaft was narrow, far smaller than the main cave, which, it seemed to Duck, had gradually broadened out.

He could follow this new shaft and at least see something. Not much, but something. Some proof that he wasn’t actually blind.

But some little voice in his brain was screaming, “No!” His instincts were telling him to run.

“There’s light down there. It must lead to somewhere,” Duck argued with himself.

But although Duck had never been the most attentive student, and had very little information of a scientific nature in his brain, he was an avid fan of The Simpsons. He’d seen this glow, in cartoon form. And it featured in any number of comics.

“It’s radiation,” he said.

This was wrong, he realized, filled with righteous indignation. Everyone said there was no radiation left from the big accident at the power plant thirteen years ago, when the meteorite hit. But where else would this glow have come from? It must have seeped along underground seams and crevices.

They had lied. Or maybe they just hadn’t realized.

“Not a good idea to go that way,” he told himself.

“But it’s the only light,” he cried, and began to weep with frustration because it seemed he had no choice but to plunge back into absolute darkness.

And then, Duck heard something.

He froze. He strained his senses to listen.

A soft, swishing sound. Very faint.

A long silence. And then, there it was again. Swish. Swish.

He’d missed the sound because he’d been focusing on the glow. It was a sound he knew. Water. And it did not, thank God, come from the radioactive shaft.

Duck hated the ocean. But all things considered, he hated it a bit less than he hated this cave.

Leaving the glow behind, and feeling carefully ahead, cautious about his bruised forehead, he crept on through pitch blackness.

SIX

96 HOURS, 22 MINUTES

“LOOK, ALBERT, DON’T tell me we have a problem and I can’t do anything about it,” Sam said, practically snarling. He marched along at a quick walk from the town hall to the church next door. Albert and Astrid were with him, struggling to keep up.

The sun was setting out over the ocean. The dying light laid down a long red exclamation point on the water. A boat was out there, one of the small motorboats. Sam sighed. Some kid who’d probably end up falling in.

Sam stopped suddenly, causing Albert and Astrid to bump into each other. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound mad. Although I am mad, but not at you, Albert. It’s just I have to go in there and lay down the law, and I’m sorry, but killer worms aren’t making it any easier.”

“Then hold off for a few days,” Albert said calmly.

“Hold off? Albert, you were the one who was saying weeks ago, months ago, we had to make everyone get to work.”

“I never said we should make them work,” Albert countered. “I said we should figure out a way to pay them to work.”