Hunger

Jack, eyes full of hatred and sorrow. She brushed tears away. “Jack’s hurt.”
    “What?” Caine demanded. “Jack?”
    Jack wasn’t hurt. He started to get up, ashamed of cowering on the floor. But his left foot gave way. He looked down, mystified, and saw that his pants, from the knee down, were soaking red.
    “He’s losing a lot of blood,” Diana said.
    It was the last thing Jack heard before the floor rushed up and smashed him in the face.

    Lana heard Quinn’s shouts. She heard the truck’s horn. She was no more than two or three hundred feet away, just beyond the reach of the stabbing flashlight beams.
    Cookie walked stolidly beside her, quiet, though he must have had his doubts.
    Lana hoped Quinn and Albert wouldn’t come after her. She didn’t want to have to explain what she was up to.
    Patrick, too, heard the honking horn, so she whispered, “Quiet boy. Shhh.”
    Lana had made sure to wear sturdy boots—a big improvement over the last time she had walked this route. She had her heavy pistol in her shoulder bag, which was another major improvement. And she had Cookie.
    If Pack Leader found them out here, Lana intended one of them—she hoped it was she, not Cookie—to shoot him in the face.
    Also in her bag was a bottle of water, a can of button mushrooms, and an entire cabbage. Not much food, especially for a guy Cookie’s size, but then she expected to find at least a few cans of something in the shed at the mine. Hermit Jim would have stashed at least some food there.
    She hoped.
    The last time she had walked this path she’d gone in search of Jim’s truck, hoping to use it to get to Perdido Beach. By that point she had found the gold and figured out that the eccentric hermit was a prospector. She had followed tire tracks to the tumble-down, abandoned mining town hidden in a crease of the hills. She’d found Jim’s truck but not the keys. Then she had found Jim himself, dead in the mine shaft.
    She knew now where the keys were.
    Back then, back before so much had happened, she would have been terrified of digging through the pockets of a corpse. But that was the old Lana. The new Lana had seen things that were so much worse.
    She knew where to find the keys. And where to find the truck. And she remembered the big LPG—liquid petroleum gas—tank Jim used to fire the smelter.
    Her plan was simple: Retrieve the keys. With Cookie’s help, load the gas tank into Jim’s truck. Drive the truck and the tank to the mine entrance. Open the valve on the gas and let it seep into the mine shaft.
    Then light a fuse and run.
    She didn’t know if the explosion would kill the thing in the mine. But she hoped to bury it under many tons of rock.
    The Darkness had called to her in her dreams and in her waking dreams as well. It had its hook in her and she knew it was drawing her in.
    Come to me. I have need of you.
    It wanted her.
    “Hello darkness, my old friend,” Lana half sang, half whispered. “I’m coming to talk with you again.”

TWENTY-TWO
    18 HOURS , 18 MINUTES
    JACK WOKE TO pain.
    He’d been moved. Someone had turned him over. He sat up too suddenly. His head swam, and for a moment he thought he would pass out again.
    One leg of his trousers had been crudely ripped to expose the wound. There was a blue, blood-soaked bandage tied around his lower thigh. It hurt. It burned like someone was sticking a red-hot poker into his flesh.
    Diana was beside him. It took him a moment to make sense of her shaved head. “I found these in one of the offices. Take them.” She transferred four Advil from her hand to his. “It’s twice the regular dose, but I doubt it will kill you.”
    “What happened?” he rasped.
    “Bullet. But it just grazed you and kept going. It cut a kind of neat little furrow. It’ll hurt, but the bleeding’s already stopped.”
    “Okay, Jack, snap out of it,” Caine said. He sounded harriedand worried. Things weren’t going quite as he had planned. “You know what you’re here for.”
    Two of Drake’s soldiers returned, loudly abusing Mickey Finch and Mike Farmer, who had their hands tied behind them. They’d been found hiding in offices. Cowering under desks. “Oh good,” Caine said breezily, “the hostages are here.”
    “We told them to throw down any guns they had, and this retard just did,” one of the goons crowed. “All we had was a shotgun and a pistol and this kid had a machine gun and he still gave up. Little wussy. The other one didn’t have