Hunger

Enough responsibility. She was not a responsible person, and she was sick of having it forced on her.
    Various adult vices were spreading through the population of the FAYZ. Some as benign as coffee. Others—pot, cigarettes, and alcohol—were not so harmless. Lana knew of six kids who were confirmed drinkers. They had tried to get her to cure their hangovers.
    Some others were smoking their way through bags of weed found in their parents’ or older siblings’ bedrooms. And onjust about any day you could see kids as young as eight choking on cigarettes and trying to look cool. She’d once spotted a first grader trying to light a cigar.
    Lana couldn’t cure any of that.
    Sometimes she wished she was back at Hermit Jim’s cabin.
    It was not the first time she’d had that thought. She had often thought of the strange cabin in the desert with its quirky little lawn—now all brown and dead, most likely.
    It’s where she had found sanctuary after the crash. And then again, briefly, after escaping from the coyote pack.
    The cabin itself had been burned to the ground. It was nothing but ash. And gold, of course. Hermit Jim’s stash of gold might have been melted, but it would still be there beneath the floorboards.
    The gold. From the mine.
    The mine…
    She took a big gulp from the Styrofoam cup and burned her tongue. The pain helped her focus.
    The mine. That day was clear in her memory, but it was the clarity of a well-remembered nightmare.
    At the time she hadn’t known that the FAYZ meant the disappearance of all adults. She’d gone to the mine in search of the hermit, or hoping at least to find his missing truck and use it to get to town.
    She’d found the hermit, dead in the mouth of the mine. Not disappeared, dead. Which meant he’d been killed before the FAYZ.
    The coyotes had come after her then and driven her deeper into the mine. And there she’d found…it. The thing. TheDarkness, the coyotes called it: the Darkness.
    She remembered the way her feet had felt heavy as bricks. The way her heart had slowed down and thudded, each beat like a blow from a sledgehammer. The dread that went deeper than simple fear. The sickly green glow that made her think of pus, disease, a cancer.
    The dream state that had overtaken her…the heavy-lidded eyes and mind gone blank and the feeling of being invaded, of…
    Come to me.
    “Ah!”
    She had crushed the cup. Hot coffee all over her arm.
    Lana was sweating. Her breathing was labored. She took a deep breath and it was as if she’d forgotten how until that very moment.
    It was in her head still, that monster in the mine shaft. It had its hook in her. Sometimes she was sure she heard its voice. A hallucination, surely. Surely not the Darkness itself. It was miles away. Far beneath the ground. It couldn’t…
    Come to me.
    “I can’t forget it,” she whispered to Patrick. “I can’t get away from it.”
    In the early days after she had come out of the desert and joined this strange community of children, Lana had felt almost at peace. Almost. There had been, from the start, a sense of damage done, an invisible wound with no specific location except that it was inside her.
    That unseen, unreal, unhealed wound had reopened. She told herself at first that it would go away. It would heal.A psychic scab would form. But if that was true, if she was healing, why did it hurt more with each passing day? How had that dreadful voice grown from faint, distant whisper to insistent murmur?
    Come to me. I need you.
    It had words now, that urgent, demanding voice.
    “I’m going crazy, Patrick,” Lana told her dog. “It’s inside me, and I am going crazy.”

    Mary Terrafino woke up. She rolled out of bed. Morning. She should go back to sleep: she was exhausted. But she would not fall back to sleep, she knew that. She had things to do.
    First things first, she stumbled to her bathroom and used her bare foot to pull the scale across the tile floor. There was a special spot for the scale: aligned with the center of the mirror over the sink, upper-right corner of the scale precisely in line with the tile.
    She removed her sleep shirt and stepped onto the scale.
    First reading. Step off.
    Second reading. Step off.
    Three times made it official.
    Eighty-one pounds.
    She’d been 128 pounds when the FAYZ came.
    She still looked fat. There were still pockets of chubbiness here and there. No matter what anyone else said. Mary could see the flab. So no breakfast for her. Which