Hunger

More importantly, it meant falling into the ground. And Duck had not enjoyed that the first time around. It had been sheer luck that he had passed out before he fell right on past the cave. He could have kept falling until he reached the molten core of the earth. That was the image in his head, anyway. Falling through the ground, down through the crust and the mantle and the whatever other layers there were that he had probably learned about in school but couldn’t recall now, all the way down to the big melted metal and rock core.

In his mind’s eye that would look like the scene at the end of The Lord of the Rings. He would be like Gollum, swimming for a few seconds in all that lava, then incinerated.

But that image was almost a relief compared to the other possibility: that he would simply be buried alive. That he would fall a hundred feet into the ground and have no way of extricating himself. He would slowly suffocate as the dirt walls of the hole filled in, clods falling onto his upturned face, dirt filling his eyes, his mouth, his nose . . .

He grabbed the handle of the McClub door to steady himself. The images were waking nightmares. They were in his thoughts more and more often.

It didn’t help that no one else took the problem seriously. Kids laughed at his story. They thought the whole thing was funny. The part about falling through the bottom of the pool. The part about the cave. The radioactive side cave. The blue bats. The emergence from the waves, half naked and shivering. The way he’d had to climb the cliff up from the beach, forcing himself to grin happily lest anger cause him to fall and keep on falling. Climbing had been the easiest part. He’d felt light with relief.

He had told the story and kids roared with laughter. The first day or so he’d played along. He enjoyed making people laugh. But he’d gone very quickly from being a funny storyteller to being an object of ridicule.

“Your power is the power to gain so much weight, you actually sink into the ground?” That had been Hunter, who thought himself a real comedian. “So, you’re basically Fatman?”

After that it was open season: Fatman led to Fall-through Boy, the Spelunker, the Sinker, the Miner, and the one he heard most often, the Human Drill.

Kids didn’t get it: It wasn’t funny. Not really. Not if you thought about it. Not if you spent the night tossing and turning, barely able to sleep because you worried that you might get angry in some dream and fall to a slow, agonizing death.

Hunter had also ridiculed his tale of the blue bats. “Dude—or should I call you the Human Drill? Dude, bats sleep during the day and fly at night. Your blue bats? According to you, they woke up when it got light. How do you figure? Plus, no one but you has ever seen them.”

“They’re blue, like the sky, so you wouldn’t see them flying overhead or through the water,” Duck had pointed out to no avail.

He let go of the club door. Probably better that it was closed. He was lonely, but maybe loneliness wasn’t as bad as the ridicule.

Duck looked around, feeling lost. It was late. No one was out. In the old days his parents would have grounded him for a year if they’d found out he was wandering the streets at night.

No one was in the plaza. It was a creepy place at night. The graves were there. The shattered outline of the church dark against the stars. The burned remains of the apartment building. There were a couple of lights on in town hall—no one bothered going around and turning out lights. The streetlights were still on, although some had burned out and others, especially the ones in the plaza, had been broken either by the battle or by vandals.

The plaza was a place of ghosts now. Ghosts and long shadows.

Duck headed wearily toward home. So-called home. It meant passing by the church. It at least was dark. It was lit nowadays only on meeting nights because the original lighting system had not survived. Lights were strung from the town hall on an extension cord. Someone usually remembered to yank the cord out of the socket when they were done.

Rubble, some of it massive chunks of masonry, blocked the sidewalk on the church side. No one had ever cleaned it up. Probably no one ever would. Duck walked down the middle of the street, mistrusting the shadows on either side.

He heard a scuffling sound in the church. A dog, probably. Or rats.

But then, an urgent whisper, “Hey! Hey, Duck!”

Duck stopped. The voice was coming from the direction of the church.

“Dude!” the whisper, louder now.

“What? Who is that?” Duck asked.

“It’s me, man. Hunter. Keep it down. They’ll kill me if they find me.”

“What? Who?”

“Duck, man, come here, I can’t be yelling back and forth.”

Reluctantly—very reluctantly because he expected some trick—Duck crossed the street.

Hunter was crouched behind a piece of rubble that still held a portion of stained-glass window. He stood up when Duck approached, which brought his face into the light. He didn’t look as if he was planning a prank. He looked scared.

“What’s up?” Duck asked.

“Come back here, man, so no one can see us.”

Duck climbed over the rubble, skinning his shin in the process.

“Okay,” Duck said, once he was in Hunter’s rubble hideaway. “What?”

“Can you hook me up, dude? I didn’t catch any dinner.”

“Uh . . . what?”

“I’m hungry,” Hunter said.

“Everybody’s hungry,” Duck pointed out. “I drank a jar of gravy for dinner.”