Hunger

She imagined them seeing her. As if she were bacteria on a slide and her mother and father were looking down through a gigantic microscope. Seeing their daughter like this. Crawling in the dark. Terrified. Hungry. So afraid.

Crawling toward the Darkness. Slave to the gaiaphage.

She stopped moving, commanded by the voice in her head. She panted, waiting, sweat pouring off her.

Place your hand on me.

“What?” she whispered. “Where? Where are you?”

She swung her weary head around, peering into the radioactive dark, seeing nothing but faintly glowing rock.

No. Looking closer, forcing herself to look, she saw that it was not rock. Her unwilling eyes seemed to bore into the faint green glow and there began to see not a single mass of rock but a seething, pulsating swarm. Thousands, maybe millions of tiny crystalline shapes, hexagons, pentagons, triangles. The largest were perhaps half the size of her smallest fingernail. The smallest were no bigger than a period on a page. Each sprouted countless tiny legs, so that what Lana saw appeared as a vast ant colony, an insect hive, all green and glittering, pulsing like an exposed heart.

Place your hand on me.

She resisted. But she knew, even as she fought the gaiaphage’s will, that she was doomed to lose. Her hand moved. Trembling, it moved. She saw her fingers dark against the green glow.

She touched it, felt it, and it was like touching rough sand on the beach. Only this sand moved, vibrated.

For a moment there was only that simple sensation.

Then, the gaiaphage showed her what he wanted.

She saw creatures. A creature of living fire. A clockwork snake. Monsters.

And she saw a Russian nesting doll.

One doll . . . inside another . . . inside another . . . and another . . .

Now she knew him, knew in a moment of blinding clarity what he was. Now she could feel his hunger. And now she sensed his fear.

He needed her, this foul creature made of human and alien DNA, of stone and flesh, nurtured on hard radiation in the depths of space and now in the depths of the earth. The glowing food had all been consumed in the thirteen years the gaiaphage had grown and mutated down here in the darkness.

It was hungry. Food was coming. When the food came, he would be strong enough to use Lana’s power to create a body. He had used her power to give Drake his whip hand, to make a monster of him. He would use her now, once he had fed, to create a monstrous body of his own. Bodies inside of bodies, bodies that could be used and then cast aside as another emerged.

To move.

To escape the mine. That was his goal.

To walk the FAYZ and destroy all who resisted him.

Sam’s day was a series of wild mood swings.

Taylor bounced in to tell him that Mickey Finch had been killed escaping from Caine. But that Mike Farmer had survived. And now Caine was without hostages.

Then a fire broke out in a house where two five-year-olds shared a place with two nine-year-olds. One of the nine-year-olds had been smoking pot.

Fire Chief Ellen got the fire truck to the scene in time to keep the fire from spreading to the house next door. Water pressure still held strong at that end of town.

The kids had all made it out alive.

Then, as he was standing on the street with the sun rising and smoke pouring from the burned house, trying to decide how, or if, he should punish a kid for smoking weed and starting a fire, he felt a slight gust of wind.

“Hey, Sammy,” Brianna said.

Sam stared at her. She grinned at him.

Sam breathed a big sigh of relief. “I should kill you, disappearing like that.”

“Come on,” Brianna said, stretching her arms wide, “Hug it out.”

She embraced Sam—quickly—then stepped back. “That’s all, big boy, I don’t want Astrid mad at me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, when do we go take out Caine and get the lights back on?”

Sam shook his head. “Can’t do it, Breeze.”

“What? What?” What do you mean you can’t do it? He’s sitting there with no hostages. We can take him.”

“There are other issues,” Sam said. “We’ve got trouble here between freaks and normals.”

Brianna made a dismissive sound. “I’ll run around and slap some of them a few times, they’ll get over themselves, and we’ll get busy at the power plant.” She leaned close. “I found a way in through the roof.”

That was interesting news. Interesting enough to make Sam reconsider. “A way into what? The turbine room?”

“Dude, there’s a door on the roof. I don’t know where it goes, but it has to go into the turbine room. Probably.”

Sam tried to shake himself out of his funk, but he couldn’t quite do it, couldn’t quite focus. He felt deflated. Weary beyond belief. “You’re hurt,” he observed.

“Yeah, and it stings, too. Where’s Lana? I need some curing. Then we can do some butt-kicking.”

“We lost Lana. She took off.”

That piece of news rocked even Brianna’s eager confidence. “What?”

“Things are not going well,” Sam said.

He felt Brianna’s worried gaze. He wasn’t setting a good example. He wasn’t exactly taking charge. He knew all that. But he couldn’t shake off the indifference that sapped his every attempt to formulate a plan.

“You need some rest,” Brianna said at last.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “No doubt.”

The voices were familiar. Dekka. Taylor. Howard.