Hunger

Dried blood crusted his cheek and neck. Fresher, redder blood still oozed down his cheek and neck.
    “What happened?” Lana asked.
    “Zekes got him,” Howard answered. He was torn between a kind of low-level panic and relief that he had finally reached the Healer. He held Orc’s elbow as if Orc needed Howard’sfrail strength to support him.
    “Has he got a worm in him?” Lana asked, cautious.
    “No, we got the worm,” Albert reassured her. “We were just hoping you could help him.”
    “I don’t want no more rock on me,” Orc said.
    Lana understood. Orc had been a garden variety thug, unaware of any special power, until the coyotes had gotten to him in the desert. They had chewed him up badly. Very badly. Worse than anything that had happened to Lana, even. Everywhere they had chewed him had filled in with the gravel covering that made Orc nearly indestructible.
    He didn’t want to lose the last of his human body, the patch of pink skin that included his mouth and part of his neck.
    Lana nodded.
    “You need to stop weaving back and forth, Orc. I don’t want you falling on me,” she said. “Sit down on the ground.”
    He sat down too suddenly and giggled a little at it.
    Lana lay her hand against the gruesome hole.
    “Don’t want no more rock,” Orc repeated.
    The bleeding stopped almost immediately.
    “Does it hurt?” Lana asked. “I mean the rock. I know the hole hurts.”
    “No. It don’t hurt.” Orc slammed his fist against his opposite arm, hard enough that any human arm would have been shattered. “I barely feel it. Even Drake’s whip, when we was fighting, I barely felt it.”
    Suddenly he was weeping. Tears rolled from human eyes onto cheeks of flesh and pebbles.
    “I don’t feel nothing except…” He pointed a thick stone finger at the flesh of his face.
    “Yeah,” Lana said. Her irritation was gone. Her burden was smaller, maybe, than Orc’s.
    Lana pulled her hand away to see the progress. The hole was smaller. Still crusted with blood, but no longer actively bleeding.
    She put her hand back in place. “Just a couple minutes more, Orc.”
    “My name’s Charles,” Orc said.
    “Is it?”
    “It is,” Howard confirmed.
    “What were you guys doing going into the worm field?” Lana asked.
    Howard shot a resentful look at Albert, who answered, “Orc was picking cabbage.”
    “My name’s Charles Merriman,” Orc repeated. “People should call me by my real name sometimes.”
    Lana’s gaze met Howard’s.
    Now, Lana thought, now he wants his old name back. The bully who reveled in a monster’s name was now a monster in fact, and wanted to be called Charles.
    “You’re all better,” Lana announced.
    “Is it still skin?” Orc asked.
    “It is,” Lana reassured him. “It’s still human.”
    Lana took Albert’s arm and drew him away. “What are you doing sending him into the worm field like that?”
    Albert’s face went blank. He was surprised at beingreproached. For a moment Lana thought he would tell her to take a jump. But that moment passed, and Albert slumped a little, as if the air had gone out of him.
    “I’m trying to help,” Albert said.
    “By paying him with beer?”
    “I paid him what he wanted, and Sam was okay with it. You were at the meeting,” Albert said. “Look, how else do you think you get someone like Orc to spend hours in the hot sun working? Astrid seems to think people will work just because we ask them to. Maybe some will. But Orc?”
    Lana could see his point. “Okay. I shouldn’t have jumped all over you.”
    “It’s okay. I’m getting used to it,” Albert said. “Suddenly I’m the bad guy. But you know what? I didn’t make people the way they are. If kids are going to work, they’re going to want something back.”
    “If they don’t work, we all starve.”
    “Yeah. I get that,” Albert said with more than a tinge of sarcasm. “Only, here’s the thing: Kids know we won’t let them starve as long as there’s any food left, right? So they figure, hey, let someone else do the work. Let someone else pick cabbages and artichokes.”
    Lana wanted to get back to her run. She needed to finish, to run to the FAYZ wall. But there was something fascinating about Albert. “Okay. So how do you get people to work?”
    He shrugged. “Pay them.”
    “You mean, money?”
    “Yeah. Except guess who had most of the money in theirwallets and purses when they disappeared? Then a few kids stole what was left in cash registers