Hunger: A Gone Novel by Grant Michael

Author:Grant, Michael [Grant, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-05-25T16:00:00+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 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 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.

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