Hunger

a gun.”
    Mickey and Mike looked miserable and very afraid. Their expressions grew bleaker still when they saw Brittney on the floor in a puddle of blood.
    Drake strode toward them, pushed Mike aside, and grabbed the machine gun. He ran his tentacle over the stock, over the cocking mechanism, holding it almost reverently. There was an expression not far from love in his cold, blue eyes. “I like this. The girl’s gun was a piece of crap, but this is cool. Very cool.”
    “Maybe you two should get a room,” Diana said.
    “None of the freaks has power enough to mess with me if I’m carrying one of these,” Drake said.
    “Yeah, not even Caine,” Diana agreed brightly. “Now you can be the boss, right?”
    Jack stood rooted in place watching all this, still unable to focus on his so-called job.
    How had he let himself be dragged into this? There was agirl not ten feet away from him who might die, if she wasn’t dead already. He could take three steps and be standing in her blood, as he was sitting in his own.
    “Jack,” Caine said. “Snap out of it. Get to work. Now!”
    Jack moved like he was in a dream, shaking his head, his ears still ringing from the gunfire. His leg burned. And the material of his trousers, wet, clung to him. He stepped gingerly to the nearest computer console and sat down heavily in a swivel chair. The monitor was old. The look of the software was old. The computer didn’t even have a mouse, it was all keyboard-controlled.
    His heart sank further still. Old software meant all kinds of keystrokes, nothing he was used to. He slid open a drawer hoping to find a manual, or at least a cheat sheet.
    “How’s it look?” Caine asked. He laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder, a friendly gesture meant to reassure Jack. For the first time in his life it occurred to Jack that he wanted to spin around and punch Caine. Punch him hard.
    “It’s totally unfamiliar software,” Jack said.
    “Nothing you can’t handle, though. Right?”
    “I can’t do it very fast,” Jack said. “I have to work through it.”
    The hand on his shoulder tightened its grip. “How long, Jack?”
    “Hey, I’m hurt, all right? I got shot!” When Caine just stared at him, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know. It depends.”
    He could sense Caine’s tension, the bottled-up rage that fed on fear. “Then don’t waste time.”
    Caine released him and turned back to Drake. “Put the hostages in the corner.”
    “Uh-huh,” Drake said absently. He was still fondling the submachine gun.
    Caine strode quickly up to him and smacked the barrel of the gun. “Hey. Take care of business. Brianna could be back here at any second. If it’s not her, it’ll be Taylor. You’d better not be screwing around.”
    Brittney lay on the floor, not moving, not making a sound. Was she alive? Jack wondered. Given how badly she was hurt, and knowing now how much pain even a grazing wound could cause, he wondered if she might not be better off dead.
    Jack found an ancient loose-leaf binder, smallish, with torn page ends sticking out here and there, festooned with age-curled Post-it notes marking pages.
    He started to work his way through it. He was looking for a guide to the function keys. Without that he had nothing. The lack of a mouse was crippling: he’d never seen, let alone used, a computer without a mouse. It was amazing that such things still existed.
    “Diana,” Caine ordered. “Read our two hostages. I don’t want to find out they’re hiding some power. Drake? How’s it going?”
    “I’m going to string the wire,” Drake said.
    “Good,” Caine said.
    Jack stole a glance and saw that Drake was holding a spool of bare wire, quite thin but strong looking. He was surveyingthe doorway, looking for something.
    Drake shrugged, dissatisfied with what he was seeing. He began to wrap one end of the wire around the broken middle hinge where it was still attached to the wall. It was a tall door with three hinges, one that was just above head level, one at ankle height, one splitting the difference.
    Drake stretched the wire from the hinge to a heavy metal filing cabinet against the wall. He passed the spool through a drawer handle and pulled it tight. He cut the wire with a pair of needle-nose pliers and wrapped the wire back on itself, tightening it further.
    Diana stepped back from the two hostages and said, “They’re both clear. The one may be a one bar, but at that level he doesn’t even know what powers he has.