Fear: A Gone Novel

laugh.
    Had he ever laughed before?
    He laughed now. And that was enough for a while, at least.
    Albert had made the decision early on to play Caine’s ridiculous game of royalty. If Caine wanted to call himself king, and if he wanted people to call him “Your Highness,” well, that didn’t cost Albert a single ’Berto.
    The truth was Caine did keep the peace. He enforced rules, and Albert liked and needed rules.
    There had been very little shoplifting at the mall, the ironically named stalls and card tables that were the market outside the school.
    There had been fewer fights. Fewer threats. Albert had even seen a decline in the number of weapons being carried. Not much of a decline, but every now and then you could actually see a kid forgetting to carry his nail-studded baseball bat or machete.
    Those were good signs.
    Best of all, kids showed up for work and they put in a full day.
    King Caine scared kids. And Albert paid them. And between the threat and the reward, things were running more smoothly than they ever had under Sam or Astrid.
    So if Caine wanted to be called king…
    “Your Highness, I’m here with my report,” Albert said.
    He stood patiently while Caine, seated at his desk, pretended to be absorbed in reading something.
    Finally, Caine looked up, affecting an expression of unconcern.
    “Go ahead, Albert,” Caine said.
    “The good news: Water continues to flow from the cloud. The stream is clean—most of the dirt and debris and old oil and so on has been washed away. So it’s probably drinkable down at the beach reservoir as well as directly from the rain. Flow rate is twenty gallons an hour. Four hundred and eighty gallons a day, which is more than we need for drinking, with enough left over to water gardens and so on.”
    “Washing?”
    Albert shook his head. “No. And we can’t have kids showering in the rain as it falls, either. Kids are washing their butts in what will end up being drinking water once we open the reservoir.”
    “I’ll make a proclamation,” Caine said.
    There were times Albert almost couldn’t resist the impulse to laugh. Proclamation. But he kept a straight, impassive face.
    “Food is not as good,” Albert went on. “I made a graph.” He drew a nine-by-twelve poster board from his briefcase and held it so Caine could see it.
    “Here’s food production over the last week. Good and steady. You see a drop today because we have nothing from the fishing crews. And this dotted line is the food supply over the next week, projected.”
    Caine’s face darkened. He bit at his thumbnail, then stopped himself.
    “As you know, Cai—Your Highness … sixty percent of our vegetables and fruit comes from worm-infested fields. Eighty percent of our protein comes from the sea. Without Quinn we have nothing to feed the worms. Which means picking and planting basically stop. To make matters worse, there’s a crazy story going around about one of the artichoke pickers being turned into a fish.”
    “What?”
    “It’s just a crazy rumor, but right now no one is harvesting artichokes.”
    Caine cursed and shook his head slowly.
    Albert put away the graph and said, “In three days we’ll have major hunger. A week from now kids will start dying. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous things get when kids get hungry.”
    “We can replace Quinn. Get other kids out in other boats,” Caine said.
    Albert shook his head. “There’s a learning curve. It took Quinn a long time to get to be as good and efficient as he is. Plus he has the best boats, and he has all the nets and poles. If we decided to replace him, it would be probably five weeks before we would get production back up to nonstarvation levels.”
    “Then we’d better get started,” Caine snapped.
    “No,” Albert said. Then added, “Your Highness.”
    Caine slammed his fist down on the desk. “I’m not giving in to Quinn! Quinn is not the king! I am! Me!”
    “I offered him more money. He isn’t looking for more money,” Albert said.
    Caine jumped up from his chair. “Of course not. Not everyone is you, Albert. Not everyone is a money-grubbing…” He decided against finishing that thought, but kept ranting. “It’s power he wants. He wants to bring me down. He and Sam Temple are friends from way, way back. I should have never let him stay. I should have made him go with Sam!”
    “He fishes in the ocean, and we’re on the ocean,” Albert pointed out. This kind of outburst irritated