Hunger

“Don’t slack off,” Drake warned. “We’ll take care of whoever is on the other side.”

Jack heard the sound of a gun being cocked. And a low, mean laugh from Drake.

He wedged his feet tight. One more big push. And drop.

Suddenly he was scared. Getting shot at was not part of the deal.

He shoved hard. All his might.

The door collapsed suddenly, but not the way Jack had expected. It snapped at the top hinge and the deadbolt broke. The door was still in the doorway, bent at an angle but held in place by one hinge. Another push and it would swing in.

The sound of the gun was shocking.

Jack dropped to the floor. He covered his head, covered his ears.

He yelled, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!” but no one could possibly have heard because now the firing was coming from both sides. Whoever was in the control room was firing short bursts through the gaps. BlamBlamBlam!

Drake was firing back in rapid-fire single rounds.

Bullets pinged off the steel and ricocheted in the hallway.

Drake yelled, Caine yelled, Jack yelled, and from beyond the doorway a girl’s voice was screaming in rage and fear.

Then Caine struck. He hit the weakened door with a blast of his own.

The steel door exploded inward.

It skidded across the floor beyond and knocked the legs out from under a girl who kept firing as she fell, spraying automatic weapons fire wildly in the air.

Jack hugged the ground, sobbing, “Don’t kill me!” Drake leaped over him, gun in one hand, whip hand unfurled.

Lying on his side, Jack saw a crazy tableau, the girl, unable to move, her legs twisted at impossible angles but bringing the still-firing gun around toward Drake.

Drake’s whip hand snapping.

The girl pointed her gun straight at Drake’s chest.

Click.

Empty.

Drake’s whip connected.

A scream of pain.

Another.

“Stop it!” Diana cried.

Caine, accidentally kicking Jack’s head as he rushed into the room.

Again, the lash of Drake’s whip, and now he was yelling in wild glee, crowing and cursing.

Jack crawled forward, blinded by tears. He knew the girl. He knew her. Brittney. She’d been in history with him. Three rows back.

Again Drake struck.

The empty gun fell from Brittney’s hand.

She was cut, bleeding, legs shattered from the impact of the door, her face a mess of tears and blood and Diana screaming abuse at Drake and Caine saying nothing to stop the psychopath and Jack wanting to cry, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but unable to find the words.

Diana reached Drake and grabbed his whip hand at the shoulder. “Enough, you sick piece of—”

Drake spun around, face-to-face with Diana. He bared his teeth and roared at her, roared like an animal, spit flying.

“She’s right: enough,” Caine said at last.

“Keep your girlfriend out of my face!” Drake bellowed at Caine.

Caine looked coldly at Drake. “I let you have your fun. We’re not here for your entertainment.”

Jack was stunned. He was unable to tear his eyes away from Brittney. She moaned, tried to move, then slumped to the floor. Unconscious or dead. Jack didn’t know which.

She’d been in his class.

He knew her.

“Get to work, Jack,” Caine said.

Diana turned bloodshot eyes on Jack, eyes full of hatred and sorrow. She brushed tears away. “Jack’s hurt.”

“What?” Caine demanded. “Jack?”

Jack wasn’t hurt. He started to get up, ashamed of cowering on the floor. But his left foot gave way. He looked down, mystified, and saw that his pants, from the knee down, were soaking red.

“He’s losing a lot of blood,” Diana said.

It was the last thing Jack heard before the floor rushed up and smashed him in the face.

Lana heard Quinn’s shouts. She heard the truck’s horn. She was no more than two or three hundred feet away, just beyond the reach of the stabbing flashlight beams.

Cookie walked stolidly beside her, quiet, though he must have had his doubts.

Lana hoped Quinn and Albert wouldn’t come after her. She didn’t want to have to explain what she was up to.

Patrick, too, heard the honking horn, so she whispered, “Quiet boy. Shhh.”

Lana had made sure to wear sturdy boots—a big improvement over the last time she had walked this route. She had her heavy pistol in her shoulder bag, which was another major improvement. And she had Cookie.

If Pack Leader found them out here, Lana intended one of them—she hoped it was she, not Cookie—to shoot him in the face.

Also in her bag was a bottle of water, a can of button mushrooms, and an entire cabbage. Not much food, especially for a guy Cookie’s size, but then she expected to find at least a few cans of something in the shed at the mine. Hermit Jim would have stashed at least some food there.

She hoped.

The last time she had walked this path she’d gone in search of Jim’s truck, hoping to use it to get to Perdido Beach. By that point she had found the gold and figured out that the eccentric hermit was a prospector. She had followed tire tracks to the tumble-down, abandoned mining town hidden in a crease of the hills. She’d found Jim’s truck but not the keys. Then she had found Jim himself, dead in the mine shaft.

She knew now where the keys were.

Back then, back before so much had happened, she would have been terrified of digging through the pockets of a corpse. But that was the old Lana. The new Lana had seen things that were so much worse.