Gone Series Complete Collection (61 page)

Lana Arwen Lazar slumped in a back row. She looked tired and a little resentful. Lana often looked resentful. But at least she had come, which was more than could be said for most kids.

Sam gritted his teeth, angry that so many had skipped this town meeting. Just what exactly did they have to do that was more important?

“First off,” he said, “I want to say I’m sorry about E.Z. He was a good kid. He didn’t deserve . . .” For a moment he almost lost it as a surge of emotion welled up from nowhere. “I’m sorry he died.”

Someone sobbed loudly.

“Look, I’m going to get right to it: we have three hundred and thirty-two . . . I’m sorry, three hundred and thirty-one mouths to feed,” Sam said. He placed his hands on his hips and planted his feet wide apart. “We were already pretty bad off for food supplies. But after the attack by the Coates kids . . . well, it’s not pretty bad off, anymore, it’s desperate.”

He let that sink in. But how much were six- and eight-year-olds really grasping? Even the older kids looked more glazed than alarmed.

“Three hundred and thirty-one kids,” Sam reiterated, “And food for maybe a week. That’s not a long time. It’s not a lot of food. And as you all know, the food we have is awful.”

That got a response from the audience. The younger kids produced a chorus of gagging and retching sounds.

“All right,” Sam snapped. “Knock it off. The point is, things are really desperate.”

“How about the food in everyone’s house?” someone yelled.

The light of the setting sun streamed through the damaged façade of the church and stabbed Sam in the eyes. He had to take two steps to the left to escape it. “Hunter? Is that you?”

Hunter Lefkowitz was a year younger than Sam, long-haired like just about everyone except the few who had taken the initiative of cutting his or her own hair. He was not someone who had ever been popular in school before the FAYZ. But then, Sam reflected, the things that had made kids popular in the old days didn’t mean much anymore.

Hunter had begun developing powers. Sam was trying to keep that fact secret—he suspected that Caine was sending spies into Perdido Beach. He wanted to be able to use Hunter as a secret weapon if it came to another fight with Caine’s people. But secrets were tough to keep in a place where everyone knew everyone else.

“Hunter, we’ve searched all of the homes and carried the food to Ralph’s,” Sam continued. “The problem is that all the fruit and veggies spoiled while we were all filling up on chips and cookies. The meat all rotted. People were stupid and careless, and there’s nothing we can do about that now.” Sam swallowed the bitterness he felt, the anger he felt at his own foolishness. “But we have food sitting out in the fields. Maybe not the food we’d like, but enough to carry us for months—many months—if we bring it in before it rots and the birds eat it.”

“Maybe we’ll get rescued, and we won’t have to worry,” another voice said.

“Maybe we’ll learn to live on air,” Astrid muttered under her breath but loudly enough to be heard by at least a few.

“Why don’t you go get our food back from Drake and the chuds up there?”

It was Zil. He accepted a congratulatory slap on the back from a creepy kid named Antoine, part of Zil’s little posse.

“Because it would mean getting some kids killed,” Sam said bluntly. “We’d be lucky to rescue any of the food, and we’d end up digging more graves in the plaza. And it wouldn’t solve our problem, anyway.”

“Get your moofs to go fight their moofs,” Zil said.

Sam had heard the term “moof” more and more lately. “Chud” was a newer term. Each new term seemed just a little more derogatory than the one it replaced.

“Sit down, Zil,” Sam went on. “We have twenty-six kids who are in the . . . have we decided? Are we calling it the army?” he asked Edilio.

Edilio was in the first pew. He leaned forward, hung his head, and looked uncomfortable. “Some kids are calling it that, but man, I don’t know what to call it. Like a militia or something? I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“Mother Mary has fourteen kids working for her, including one-day draftees,” Sam said, ticking off the list. “Fire Chief Ellen has six kids at the firehouse, dealing with emergencies. Dahra handles the pharmacy herself, Astrid is my adviser. Jack is in charge of technology. Albert has twenty-four kids working with him now, guarding Ralph’s and distributing food supplies. Counting me, that’s seventy-eight kids who do various jobs.”

“When they bother to show up,” Mary Terrafino said loudly. That earned a nervous laugh, but Mary wasn’t smiling.

“Right,” Sam agreed. “When they bother to show up. The thing is, we need more people working. We need people bringing in that food.”

“We’re just kids,” a fifth grader said, and giggled at his own joke.

“You’re going to be hungry kids,” Sam snapped. “You’re going to be starving kids. Listen to me: people are going to starve. To death.

“To. Death.” He repeated it with all the emphasis he could bring to bear on the word.

He caught a warning look from Astrid and took a deep breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that the situation is really bad.”

A second-grade girl held up her hand. Sam sighed, knowing what to expect, but called on her, anyway.

“I just want my mom.”

“We all do,” Sam said impatiently. “We all want the old world back. But we don’t seem to be able to make that happen. So we have to try to make this world work out. Which means we need food. Which means we need kids to harvest the food, and load it into trucks, and preserve it, and cook it, and . . .” He threw up his hands as he realized he was staring at rows and rows of blank expressions.

“You crazy with that stuff about picking vegetables?” It was Howard Bassem, leaning against the back wall. Sam hadn’t seen him come in. Sam glanced around for Orc, but didn’t see him. And Orc wasn’t something . . . no, someone, still some
one
despite everything . . . you overlooked.

“You have another way to get food?” Sam asked.

“Man, you think people don’t know about what happened to E.Z.?”

Sam stiffened. “Of course we all know what happened to E.Z. No one is trying to hide what happened to E.Z. But as far as we know, the worms are just in that one cabbage field.”

“What worms?” Hunter demanded.

Obviously not everyone had heard. Sam would have liked to smack Howard right at that moment. The last thing they needed was a retelling of E.Z.’s gruesome fate.

“I’ve taken a look at one of the worms,” Astrid said, sensing that Sam was reaching the limit of his patience. She didn’t come up onto the chancel but stood by her pew and faced the audience, which was now paying very close attention. Except for two little kids who were having a shoving match.

“The worms that killed E.Z. are mutations,” Astrid said. “They have hundreds of teeth. Their bodies are designed for boring through flesh rather than tunneling through the dirt.”

“But as far as we know, they’re just in that one cabbage field,” Sam reiterated.

“I dissected the worm Sam brought me,” Astrid said. “I found something very strange. The worms have very large brains. I mean, a normal earthworm’s brain is so primitive that if you cut it out, the worm still keeps doing what it normally does.”

“Kind of like my sister,” a kid piped up, and was poked by his sister in retaliation.

Howard drifted closer to the front of the room. “So these E.Z. killer worms are smart.”

“I’m not implying that they can read or do quadratic equations,” Astrid said. “But they’ve gone from brains that were a bundle of cells that did nothing more than manage the organism’s negative phototropism to a brain with differentiated hemispheres and distinct, presumably specialized, regions.”

Sam hid a smile by looking down. Astrid was perfectly capable of simplifying the way she explained things. But when someone was irritating her—as Howard was doing now—she would crank up the polysyllables and make them feel stupid.

Howard came to a stop, perhaps paralyzed by the word “phototropism.” But he recovered quickly. “Look, bottom line, you step into a field full of these E.Z. killers, these zekes, and you’re dead. Right?”

“The large brains confirm the possibility that these creatures are capable of territoriality. My point is, judging by what Sam, Edilio, and Albert observed, the worms may stay perfectly within their territory. In this case, the cabbage field.”

“Yeah?” Howard said. “Well, I know someone who could walk right through that field and not be bothered.”

So that was it, Sam thought. Inevitably with Howard, it all came back to Orc.

“You may be right that Orc would be invulnerable,” Sam said. “So?”

“So?” Howard echoed. He smirked. “So, Sam, Orc can pick those cabbages for you. Of course he’s going to need something in exchange.”

“Beer?”

Howard nodded, maybe a little embarrassed, but not much. “He has a taste for the stuff. Me, I can’t stand it. But as Orc’s manager I’ll need to be taken care of, too.”

Sam gritted his teeth. But the truth was it might be a solution to the problem. They had quite a bit of beer still at Ralph’s grocery.

“If Orc wants to try it, fine with me,” Sam said. “Work something out with Albert.”

It was not fine with Astrid. “Sam, Orc has become an alcoholic. You want to give him beer?”

“A can of beer for a day’s work,” Sam said. “Orc can’t get very drunk on—”

“No way,” Howard said. “Orc needs a case a day. Four six-packs. After all, it’s hot work out there in the field picking cabbage.”

Sam shot a glance at Astrid. Her face was set. But Sam had the responsibility for feeding 331 kids. Orc was probably invulnerable to the zekes. And he was so strong, he could yank up thirty thousand pounds of cabbage in a week’s work. “Talk to Albert after the meeting,” Sam said to Howard.

Astrid fumed but sat down. Howard did a jaunty little finger-pointing thing at Sam, signifying agreement.

Sam sighed. The meeting wasn’t going the way he’d planned. They never did. He understood that kids were kids, so he was used to the inevitable disruptions and general silliness of the younger ones. But that even so many of the older kids, kids in seventh, eighth grade, hadn’t bothered to show up was depressing.

To make things worse, all this talk of food was making him hungry. Lunch had been grim. The hunger was almost always present now. It made him feel hollow. It occupied his brain, when he needed to be thinking of other things.

“Look, people, I’m announcing a new rule. It’s going to seem harsh. But it’s necessary.”

The word “harsh” got almost everyone’s attention.

“We can’t have people sitting around all day playing Wii and watching DVDs. We need people to start working in the fields. So, here’s the thing: everyone age seven or older has to put in three days per week picking fruit or veggies. Then Albert’s going to work with the whole question of freezing stuff that can be frozen, or otherwise preserving stuff.”

There was dead silence. And blank stares.

“What I’m saying is, tomorrow we’ll have two school buses ready to go. They hold about fifty kids each and we need to have them mostly full because we’re going to pick some melons and it’s a lot of work.”

More blank stares.

“Okay, let me make this simple: get your brothers and sisters and friends and anyone over age seven and be in the square tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”

“But how about—?”

“Just be there,” Sam said with less firmness than he’d intended. His frustration was draining away now, replaced by weariness and depression.

“Just be there,” someone mimicked in a singsong voice.

Sam closed his eyes, and for a moment he almost seemed to be asleep. Then he opened them again and managed a bleak smile. “Please. Be there,” he said quietly.

He walked down the three steps and out of the church, knowing in his heart that few would answer his call.

SEVEN

88
HOURS
, 54
MINUTES

“PULL OVER
HERE
, Panda,” Drake said.

“Why?” Panda was behind the wheel of the SUV. He was getting more and more confident as a driver, but being Panda, he still wouldn’t go more than thirty miles an hour.

“Because that’s what I said to do, that’s why,” Drake said irritably.

Bug knew why they were stopping. And Bug knew why it bothered Drake. They couldn’t risk driving down the highway to the power plant. In the three months Caine had spent hallucinating and yelling crazy stuff, the Coates side had grown steadily weaker while the Perdido Beach side cruised right along. Drake had pulled off his raid at Ralph’s, but he didn’t dare do anything more.

Bug knew. He’d been in and out of Perdido Beach many times. They might be running low on food in town but they still had more than Coates. It was frustrating for Bug because he should have been able to steal more of that food, but his chameleon powers didn’t work that well on things he was carrying. The best he could do was slip a package of dried soup or a rare PowerBar inside his shirt. Not that there were PowerBars to be found nowadays. Or dried soup.

“Okay, Bug, we hike from here,” Drake said. He swung his door open and stepped out onto the road. Bug slid across the seat and stood beside Drake.

Bug’s real name was Tyler. His fellow Coates kids assumed he had earned his nickname from his willingness to accept crazy dares—specifically, eating insects. Kids would dare him and he’d say, “What do I get if I do it?” Mostly, in the old days, he’d gotten kids to give him money or candy.

He didn’t mind most bugs. He kind of liked the way they would squirm before he would bite down on them, ending their little insect lives.

But Bug had been called that before ever coming to Coates, before he’d gotten a reputation as the kid who would try anything. The nickname Bug had stuck to him after he was caught recording parent-teacher conferences at his old school. He’d posted the conversations on Facebook, embarrassing any kid with a psychological issue, a learning disability, a bedwetting problem—about half his class.