Hunger_A Gone Novel by Michael Grant

Author:Michael Grant [Grant, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopian, Social Issues, Adolescence
ISBN: 9780061911491
Google: hZy2-o-TejIC
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2009-05-26T22:59:43+00:00

The McClub was closed down. There was a sign on the door

that said, “Sorry, We Are Closed. Will Reopen Tomorrow.”

Duck didn’t know why he had been drawn there. Of course

it was closed—it was after midnight. He had just craved company. Hoped someone was hanging around. Pretty much anyone.

In the three days—well, technically four, since it was

tomorrow already—since Duck had fallen through the bottom of the swimming pool, his life had actually managed to 292 M I C H A E L

G R A N T

get worse. First off, he had lost his private oasis of calm. The

pool was obviously unfixable. He had spent some effort looking for another pool, but no other spot had been nearly as great as the one he had lost.

In the second place, no one believed him. He had become

a joke. Kids didn’t bother to go and check out the pool to see

if the hole was really there. And of course Zil and his punk

friends didn’t exactly step up to validate Duck’s story.

When he’d tell people about this weird, un-asked-for

power, they’d demand he demonstrate. But Duck didn’t want

to demonstrate. It meant getting mad, for one thing, and he

wasn’t naturally an angry person.

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

H U N G E R

293

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