Hunger

“Hi, Breeze,” Dekka said. She almost smiled.

“Sam in there?”

“Yep.”

Brianna appeared suddenly before Sam, who took it less calmly than Dekka had.

“Sam. Caine. He’s at the plant. I already found Edilio, he’s getting his guys together. Give me a gun, I’ll go keep Caine busy.”

Sam cursed loudly. It took a while before he was ready to stop. Then, “I knew it! I knew it, and I let myself get distracted.”

“Sam. Give me a gun.”

“What? No, Breeze, I need you. And not dead.”

“I can get back there in, like, two minutes,” Brianna pleaded.

Sam put a hand on her shoulder. “Breeze? You have a job. You’re the messenger. Right? We have other people for fighting. Go help Edilio get the troops together. Then go see if you can find Lana. I don’t know where she is and we’re going to need her.”

“She’s driving around in a truck with Quinn and Albert,” Brianna reported.

“What?”

“They’re in a truck, heading out on the highway.”

Sam threw up his hands. “Maybe they heard about Caine, somehow. Maybe they’re on the way there.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so. Albert wouldn’t be with them. Also, someone smacked Astrid.”

Sam’s face froze. “What?”

“She’s fine, but there was some kind of problem over at her house.”

“Zil,” Sam said through gritted teeth. He kicked savagely at a chair. Then, “Go, Breeze. Do what I told you to do.”

“But—”

“I don’t have time to argue, Breeze.”

“Guys? Guys?” Quinn reached across to shake Albert’s shoulder. He had fallen asleep.

“What? I’m awake. What?”

“Dude, we are lost.”

“We’re not lost,” Lana said from the backseat.

Quinn glanced in the rearview mirror. “I thought you were asleep, too.”

“We’re not lost,” Lana said.

“Well, all due respect, we’re not exactly not lost, either. This isn’t even a dirt road anymore, it’s just, like, you know, flat. And not even all that flat.” They had left the highway and turned onto a side road. From there onto a dirt road. And that had gone on and on forever, without so much as a twinkle of light anywhere. Then the dirt road had become more and more dirt and less and less road.

“If the Healer says we’re not lost, we’re not lost,” Cookie grumbled.

“It’s not far,” Lana said.

“How do you know? I couldn’t find my way back here in the middle of the day. Let alone at night.”

She didn’t answer.

Quinn glanced down at the road, then back into the rearview mirror. The only light came from the dashboard, so he could see only the faintest outline of her face. She was looking out of the window, not the direction they were traveling but northeast.

He couldn’t read her expression. But he got a feeling off her. It was in the occasional sigh. In the absent way she stroked Patrick’s ruff. The distant tone of her voice when she spoke.

“You okay?” Quinn asked.

She didn’t answer. Not for a while. Too long. Then, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Lana said nothing.

Albert, by contrast, was easy to read. Albert—when he managed to stay awake—was all about the goal. He focused his gaze straight ahead. Sometimes Quinn noticed him nodding to himself, as if he was commenting on some internal dialogue.

Quinn was envious of Albert. He seemed to be so sure of himself. He seemed to know just where he wanted to go, who he wanted to be.

For his part, Cookie had his own goal: to serve Lana. The big ex-bully would do anything Lana told him to do.

There were two kinds of kids in the FAYZ, Quinn reflected, and the types were not “freak” and “normal.” They were kids who had been changed for the worse, and the kids who had been changed for the better. The FAYZ had changed them all. But some kids had become more than they were. Albert was one of those. Cookie, in a very different way, was another.

Quinn knew himself to be the first type. He was one of the kids who had never recovered from the FAYZ. The loss of his parents was like a wound that had never healed. Never stopped hurting. How could it?

It went beyond the loss of his mom and dad, too, a loss that encompassed everything he had known, everything he had been. He’d been cool, once. The memory brought a sad smile to his lips. Quinn was cool. One of a kind. Everyone knew him. They didn’t all like him, they didn’t all get his act, but Quinn had carried an aura of specialness with him.

And now . . . now he was an afterthought in the FAYZ. Kids knew he had betrayed Sam to Caine. They knew that Sam had taken him back. They knew that he had gone a little crazy on the day of the big battle. Maybe more than a little crazy.

The memories of his mom and dad, his old life, they were far away. Like photos in an old album. Not quite real. Someone else’s memories, his pain; someone else’s life, his loss.

The memories of the battle—those couldn’t even be called memories because weren’t memories something from the past? That day might have happened three months ago, but it wasn’t the past to Quinn, it was right here, right now, always. Like a parallel life happening simultaneously with this life. He was driving through the night and feeling the gun buck buck buck in his hands and seeing the coyotes and the kids, all mixed up together, all crisscrossing, weaving through the arcs of the bullets.