Hunger

he was right. He was right, poor Edilio, he was right, she had to do it. She had to collapse that mine. But Edilio wasn’t going to be buried there, no way. No, Edilio would have a place of honor in the plaza.
    The honored dead. Another grave. The first one that Edilio had not dug himself.
    “Hang in there, Edilio, you’re going to make it,” Dekka lied.
    She collapsed at the bottom of the trail, at the edge of the ghost town. Dekka sat on Edilio and pressed down on the wound. The force of the blood was weaker now. She couldalmost hold the blood back now, not a good thing, no, because it meant he was almost finished, his brave heart almost done beating.
    Dekka looked up straight into the glittering eyes of a coyote. She could sense the others around her, closing in. Wary, but sensing that a fresh meal was close at hand.

FORTY-ONE
    33 MINUTES
    DUCK WAS SO high up, he could see smoke rising from the distant power plant.
    He was still shaking from being shot at. Shot at! He had never hurt anyone.
    Now it was like he had been drafted into a war he didn’t even know was going on. It was nuts. He could have been killed. He might still be killed.
    Instead, he had floated away, unharmed.
    While others fought to survive. While others stood up against the evil that was being done.
    Fortunately the slight breeze was wafting him away from the town square, where all the madness was going on. In a few more minutes he would raise his density and drop gently back to earth. Then, hopefully, he would find some food. The smell of cooking meat had left him crazy with hunger.
    “Nothing you could have done, Duck,” he told himself.
    “That’s true,” he agreed. “Nothing.”
    “Not our fault.”
    He made a weak grab at a seagull that hovered just out of reach, floating on its boomerang-shaped wings. He was hungry enough that he would have eaten the bird raw. In midair.
    Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a blur on the ground below. The blur stopped suddenly. He couldn’t see her face, but it could only be Brianna. In her hand she held a pigeon.
    Brianna could do what Duck could not. Brianna could catch and eat birds. Maybe she would share. After all, they were both freaks. Both on the same side. Right?
    “Hey!” he yelled down.
    Brianna stared up at him. “You!” she yelled. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
    “I’m so hungry,” Duck moaned.
    “How did you get up there?”
    He was slowly increasing his density, sinking down to earth.
    “It goes both ways,” Duck said. “It’s all about density. I weigh whatever I want to weigh. I can weigh so much, I sink through the ground, or I can float so—”
    “Yeah, I don’t care. Sam said get you.”
    “Me?”
    “You. Get down here.”
    She ripped a wing off the pigeon and handed a dripping, gelatinous piece of flesh to Duck, who didn’t even hesitate.
    He looked up guiltily after a minute of slavering and grunting. “Don’t you want some?”
    “Nah,” she said. “My appetite…I don’t know. I’m feeling a little sick.”
    Brianna was looking at him in a way that made him distinctly nervous.
    “There’ll be some wind resistance,” Brianna said.
    “Some what?”
    “Say you can control your weight? About ten pounds ought to do.”
    “Do for what?”
    “Jump on my back, Duck. You are going for a ride.”

    The morphine did not eliminate the pain. It merely threw a veil over it. It was still there, a terrible, ravening lion, roaring, awesome, overpowering. But held barely at bay.
    Barely.
    His wounds were shocking to see. Bright red stripes across his back, shoulders, neck, and face. In places the skin had been taken off.
    The morphine nightmare had faded and reality had begun to take on some of its usual definition. The ground was down and the sky was up. The stars were bright, the sound of his shoes on the concrete was familiar, as was the sound of his own breath, rasping in his throat.
    He had a while. How long, he couldn’t guess. A short while, maybe, to stop Caine.
    And kill Drake. Because now, for the first time in his life, Sam wanted to take a life.
    Drake. He was going to kill Drake. More than any high-minded concern for what Caine might do, it was the thought of Drake that kept Sam moving forward. Destroy Drake before the morphine wore off and the awful pain returned and left him crying and screaming and…
    Should have done it the first time he’d had the chance.
    Should have…
    The scene appeared around him, shimmering,