Hunger

“Astrid. You come with me.” Sam stalked off with Astrid and Little Pete trailing.

“Hey, don’t start getting all high and mighty with me,” Astrid yelled at his back.

“I’d just appreciate it if you’d let me know when some new weirdness breaks out. That’s all.” Sam kept moving, but Astrid grabbed his arm. He stopped, glancing around guiltily to make sure no one was in eavesdropping distance.

“What was I supposed to tell you?” Astrid demanded in a terse whisper. “Little Pete’s hallucinating? He’s floating off the ground? What were you going to do about it?”

He held up his hands in a placating gesture. But his voice was no less angry. “I’m just trying to keep up, you know? It’s like I’m playing a game where the rules keep changing. So today’s rules are, hey, killer worms and hallucinating five-year-olds. I can’t do anything about it, but it’s nice to get a heads up.”

Astrid started to say something, but stopped herself. She took a couple of calming breaths. Then, in a more measured tone, she said, “Sam, I figured you had enough on your shoulders. I’m worried about you.”

He dropped his hands to his sides. His voice dropped as well. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” Astrid said. “You don’t sleep. You never have a minute to yourself. You act like everything that goes wrong is your fault. You’re worried.”

“Yeah, I’m worried,” he said. “Last night we had a kid who killed and ate a cat. The whole time he’s telling me about it he’s weeping. He’s sobbing. He used to have a cat himself. He likes cats. But he was so hungry, he grabbed it and . . .”

Sam had to stop. He bit his lip and tried to shake off the despair that swept over him. “Astrid, we’re losing. We’re losing. Everyone is . . .” He looked at her and felt tears threaten. “How long before we have kids doing worse than killing cats?”

When Astrid didn’t answer, Sam said, “Yeah, so I’m worried. You look around the plaza here. Two weeks from now? Two weeks from now it’s Darfur, or whatever, if we don’t figure something out. Three weeks from now? I don’t want to think about it.”

He started toward his office but plowed into two kids absorbed in yelling at each other. They were brothers, Alton and Dalton. It was clear they’d been fighting for a while.

Under normal circumstances it might not have been a big deal—fights were breaking out all the time—but both boys had submachine guns hanging from their shoulders. Sam lived in fear of one of Edilio’s soldiers doing something stupid with the guns they carried. Ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old kids with guns weren’t exactly the U.S. Army.

“What now?” Sam snapped at them.

Dalton stabbed an accusing finger at his brother. “He stole my Junior Mints.”

The mere mention of Junior Mints made Sam’s stomach rumble.

“You had . . .” He had to stop himself from focusing on the candy. Candy! How had Dalton managed to hoard actual candy? “Deal with it,” Sam said and kept moving. Then he stopped. “Wait a minute. Aren’t you two supposed to be out at the power plant?”

Alton answered. “No, our shift was last night. We came back this morning in the van. And I did not steal his stupid Junior Mints. I didn’t even know he had Junior Mints.”

“Then who stole them?” his brother demanded hotly. “I ate two each shift. One at the beginning, one at the end. I ate one when I got there last night and I counted them all. I had seven left. And then this morning when I went to have another one, the box was empty.”

Sam said, “Did it ever occur to you it might be one of the other kids standing guard?”

“No,” Dalton said. “Heather B and Mike J were at the guardhouse. And Josh was asleep the whole time.”

“What do you mean Josh was asleep?” Sam said.

The brothers exchanged nearly identical guilty looks. Dalton shrugged. “Sometimes Josh sleeps. It’s no big deal—he’ll wake up if anything happens.”

“Doesn’t Josh watch the security cameras?”

“He says he can’t see anything. Nothing ever happens. It’s just like pictures of the road and the hills and the parking lot and all.”

“We stayed up. Mostly,” Alton said.

“Mostly. How much is ‘mostly’?” Sam got no answer. “Get going. Go ahead. And stop fighting. You weren’t supposed to be hoarding food, anyway, Dalton. Serves you right.” He wanted badly to ask where the kid had found candy, and ask if there was more, but that would have been the wrong message. Bad example.

Still, Sam thought, what if there was still candy? Somewhere? Somewhere in the FAYZ?

Edilio’s bus began to pull away. Ellen was onboard and Sam figured Edilio would stop off and grab a couple of his soldiers to help with the drafting of workers for the fields.

Sam could imagine the scenes that would be played out house by house. The whining. The complaining. The running away. Followed by a lazy, mostly wasted effort to pick fruit by kids who didn’t want to work in the hot sun for hours.

He thought briefly of E.Z. Of the worms. Albert was taking Orc to the cabbage field this morning, to test Howard’s suggestion that he would be invulnerable. Hopefully, that would work.

For a brief moment he worried that the worms might have spread. But even if they had, surely not to the melon field. It was a mile from the cabbages.