Albert shrugged. “Same person who told me I could run the McDonald’s until we ran out of food: no one. I just did it.”
“Fine, but you gave away the food. Now you’re charging people. That’s not cool, Albert.”
“You’re trying to profit?” This from Astrid, who had followed Sam, Little Pete in tow.
Inside, the music had shifted from hip-hop to a song Sam happened to love: the ridiculously hooky Tim Armstrong tune “Into Action.” If he ever were to dance, this might be the tune that did it.
Albert considered Astrid and Sam. “Yes. I’m trying to make a profit. I’m using batteries, toilet paper, and paper towels as currency. Each is something that will eventually be in short supply.”
“You’re trying to get all the toilet paper in town?” Astrid shrilled. “Are you kidding?”
“No, Astrid, I’m not kidding,” Albert said. “Look, right now, kids are playing with the stuff. I saw little kids throwing rolls of it around on their lawns like it was a toy. So—”
“So your solution is to try and take it all away from people?”
“You’d rather see it wasted?”
“Yeah, actually,” Astrid huffed. “Rather than you getting it all for yourself. You’re acting like a jerk.”
Albert’s eyes flared. “Look, Astrid, now kids know they can buy their way into the club with it. So they’re not going to waste it anymore.”
“No, they’re going to give it all to you,” she shot back. “And what happens when they need some?”
“Then there will still be some left because I made it valuable.”
“Valuable to you.”
“Valuable to everyone, Astrid.”
“It’s you taking advantage of kids dumb enough not to know any better. Sam, you have to put a stop to this.”
Sam had drifted away from the conversation, his head full of the music. He snapped back. “She’s right, Albert, this isn’t okay. You didn’t get permission—”
“I didn’t think I needed permission to give kids what they want. I mean, I’m not threatening anyone, saying, ‘Give me your toilet paper, give me your batteries.’ I’m just playing some music and saying, ‘If you want to come in and dance, then it’ll cost you.’”
“Dude, I respect you being ambitious and all,” Sam said. “But I have to shut this down. You never got permission, even, let alone asked us if it was okay to charge people.”
Albert said, “Sam, I respect you more than I can even say. And Astrid, you are way smarter than me. But I don’t see how you have the right to shut me down.”
That was it for Sam. “Okay, I tried to be nice. But I am the mayor. I was elected, as you probably remember, since I think you voted for me.”
“I did. I’d do it again, man. But Sam, Astrid, you guys are wrong here. This club is about all these kids have that can get them together for a good time. They’re sitting in their homes starving and feeling sad and scared. When they’re dancing, they forget how hungry and sad they are. This is a good thing I’m doing.”
Sam stared hard at Albert, a stare that kids in Perdido Beach took seriously. But Albert did not back down.
“Sam, how many cantaloupes did Edilio manage to bring back with kids who were rounded up and forced to work?” Albert asked.
“Not many,” Sam admitted.
“Orc picked a whole truckload of cabbage. Before the zekes figured out how to get at him. Because we paid Orc to work.”
“He did it because he’s the world’s youngest alcoholic and you paid him with beer,” Astrid snapped. “I know what you want, Albert. You want to get everything for yourself and be this big, important guy. But you know what? This is a whole new world. We have a chance to make it a better world. It doesn’t have to be about some people getting over on everyone else. It can be fair to everyone.”
Albert laughed. “Everyone can be equally hungry. In a week or so, everyone can starve.”
A group of kids were leaving, pushing open the door. Sam recognized them, of course. He knew everyone in town now, at least by sight if not by name.
They came out laughing, giggling, happy.
“Hey, Big Sam,” one of them said.
Another said, “You should go in, dude, it’s great.”
Sam just nodded in acknowledgment.
The decision could no longer be put off. Close down the club or let it go. If he didn’t close it down he was giving ground to Albert and would probably have another stupid fight with Astrid, who would feel as if he’d ignored her.
Not for the first time, or even the hundredth time, Sam wished he had never, ever agreed to become anyone’s leader.
Sam stole a glance at the watch on Albert’s wrist. It was almost nine p.m.
“Close it down,” Sam said firmly. “Close it. At ten thirty. Kids need sleep.”
Inside the club Quinn relaxed into the beat. Some ska-punk, sure. Maybe later some hip-hop. Some classic old tunes, maybe.
Give it up for Albert: the guy had turned the Mac’s into a decent dance club. The main lights were all off, just the menu boards were illuminated. But they didn’t show Happy Meals and combos. Albert had covered them with pink tissue paper so they gave off a mellow glow, just enough to light the whites of people’s eyes and their teeth when they smiled.
Hunter, what was he, seventh grade? He was the one spinning the CDs and scratching the turntable. He wasn’t exactly a professional, but he was good enough. Cool enough kid, Quinn thought, even though the rumor was he was developing some killer powers. Time would tell if he would stay cool, or turn as arrogant as some of the freaks. Like Brianna, who was suddenly calling herself “the Breeze” and demanding everyone else play along. Like she was a comic book superhero. The Breeze. And he’d kind of liked her, once.
Speaking of which, there she was, dancing like a crazy person, speeding herself up, feet flying, bouncing up and down so fast, she looked like she might start flying around the room.
She’d been telling everyone who would listen how she beat a bullet. “I’m now officially faster than a speeding bullet. Me and Superman.”
In another corner the weird little kid named Duck was peddling some crazy story involving fish-bats and an underground city or whatever.
And then there was Dekka, sitting by herself, nodding almost imperceptibly to the beat, eyes on Brianna. No one really knew much about Dekka. She was one of the Coates kids, one of the ones who had been rescued from Caine and Drake’s cruel cinderblock torture.
She had a vibe to her, Dekka, a feeling she gave off that she was strong and a little dangerous. There was some history there, Quinn thought, something in her past, like with almost all the Coates kids. Coates was known as a school for troubled rich kids. They weren’t all rich, they weren’t all troubled, but the majority had some serious issues.
Quinn slid between two fourth graders, a guy and a girl, dancing. Together. When Quinn was that age he would never have danced with a girl like they were on a date. In fact, he still didn’t. But things were different now, he supposed. Fourth grade was like…like middle-aged or something. He himself was old. Old, old, old at almost fifteen.
Birthday coming up. The question was, what would he do? Stay or step outside?
Mostly, ever since Sam had survived, kids who had hit the Fatal Fifteen had survived. Sam had told them how to do it.
Computer Jack, who back in those days was with Caine, had used high-speed photography to record a captive kid up at Coates hitting the moment, the AoD, the Age of Destruction. Jack had come to Perdido Beach with the tale of the tape, the great revelation that in that fateful moment your world would slow down, slow down to a crawl as you approached infinity. And there, in that moment, would come a tempter to beckon to you, call to you, ask you to cross over.
But the tempter was a fraud. A liar. Like a devil, Quinn thought, like a devil. He backed into someone and turned to apologize.
“Hey, Quinn.” It was Lana, shouting over the music so that it was halfway to lip-reading
for Quinn. The Healer actually speaking to him.
“Oh. Hi, Lana. This is cool, huh?” He indicated the room with an awkward motion.
Lana nodded. She looked a little bleak, a little forlorn. Which seemed impossible to Quinn. Lana was second only to Sam in hero status. And the difference was that some people really kind of hated Sam, while no one hated Lana. Sam might make you do something—pick up garbage, take care of the prees at the day care, shoot someone with a machine gun—but all Lana ever did was heal people.
“Yeah. It’s kind of cool,” Lana said. “But I don’t really know anyone.”
“No way. You know everyone.”
Lana shook her head ruefully. “No. Everyone knows me. Or at least they think they do.”
“Well, you know me,” Quinn said, and made a kind of slanted grin so she’d know he wasn’t trying to get above himself and act like her equal.
But that wasn’t how she took it. She nodded, so serious that she looked like she might cry. “I miss my parents.”
Quinn felt the sudden, sharp pang he’d felt about every hour back when all this started, and now felt only a couple of times a day. “Yeah. Me too.”
Lana held out her hand, and Quinn, after a moment’s amazed hesitation, took it.
Lana smiled. “Is it okay if I just hold your hand and don’t, you know, heal you of anything?”
Quinn laughed. “Whatever’s wrong with me, it isn’t something even you can heal.” Then, “You want to dance?”
“I’ve been waiting to talk to Albert, standing around here for like, an hour, and you are the first person to ask me,” she said. “Yeah. I would kind of like to dance.”
The song had just changed to a hip-hop tune, a raucous, flatly obscene rap. It was a few years old, but still catchy, and had the added attraction of being a song no one in the room had been allowed to listen to three months earlier.
Quinn and Lana danced, even bumped hips a couple of times. Then Hunter changed the mood to a moderately slow, dreamy song by Lucinda Williams. “I love this song,” Lana said.
“I…I don’t know how to dance slow,” Quinn said.
“Me neither. Let’s try it, though.”
So they held each other awkwardly and just swayed back and forth. After a while Lana laid her face against Quinn’s shoulder. He could feel her tears on his neck.
“This is kind of a sad song,” Quinn said.
“Do you dream, Quinn?” Lana asked.
The question took him aback. She must have felt him flinch because she looked at his face, looking for the explanation in his eyes.
“I have nightmares,” he said. “The battle. You know. The big battle.”
“You were really brave. You saved those kids in the day care.”
“Not all of them,” Quinn said shortly. He fell silent for a moment, back in the dream. “There was this coyote. And this kid, right? And…and…Okay, so I could have shot him, maybe, a little sooner, right? But I was scared of hitting the kid. I was so scared I’d hit that little kid, so I didn’t shoot. And then it was, like, too late. You know?”
Lana nodded. She didn’t show any sympathy, and strangely Quinn thought that was a good thing because if it wasn’t you, and you hadn’t been there, and you hadn’t been holding a machine gun with your finger frozen on the trigger, and you hadn’t heard your voice coming out of your throat in a scream like an open artery, and you hadn’t seen what he had seen, then you didn’t have a right to be sympathetic because you didn’t understand anything. You didn’t understand anything.
Anything.
Lana just nodded and put her palm against his heart and said, “I can’t heal that.”
He nodded, fighting back the tears that had come…how many times since that horrible night? Let’s see, three months, thirty days in a month, that would make it about a thousand times. Maybe more. Not less, not if you counted the times he had wanted to cry but had plastered on his happy-go-lucky Quinn smile because the alternative was falling down on the ground and sobbing.
“That’s my sad stuff,” he said after a while. “What’s yours?”
She cocked her head sideways as if sizing him up, asking herself if she wanted to share with him. Him of all people. Unsteady Quinn. Unreliable Quinn. Quinn, who had sold Sam out to end up being tortured by Caine and Drake. Quinn, who had almost gotten Astrid killed. Quinn, who was only tolerated now because when it had all hit the fan in the big battle he had finally stepped up and pulled that trigger and…
“You ever meet someone you can’t quite forget?” Lana asked him. “Someone who you meet them and forever after it’s like they own a piece of you?”
“No,” Quinn said. He felt a little disappointed. “I guess he’s a lucky dude.”
Lana was so startled, she laughed. “No. Not that kind of guy. Maybe not a guy at all. Maybe not…well, not a dude the way you mean. More like someone took a fishing hook, right? Like they took that hook and stuck it in me like I was a worm. You know how on the end of a fishhook there’s this barb? So you can’t pull it out without ripping a big hole in yourself?”
Quinn nodded without really understanding.
“And then, maybe, here’s what’s weird, right: You almost want the fisherman to reel you in. It’s like, okay, you have that hook in me, and it hurts, but I can’t get it out, I’m stuck. So just reel me in. Just get it over with and stay out of my dreams because they’re all nightmares.”
Quinn still didn’t understand what she meant, but the image of a fish, reeled in, helpless, stuck with him. Quinn knew hopelessness when he heard it. He’d just never expected to hear it from the most beloved person in the FAYZ.
The musical tempo changed again. Enough with the slow music, kids wanted to rock out, so Hunter dialed up some techno that Quinn didn’t recognize. He started to move to the rhythm, but Lana wasn’t into it.
She put her hand on his shoulder and said, “I see Albert’s free, and I have to talk to him.”
She turned away without a further word. Quinn was left with the feeling that however bad his nightmares were, the Healer’s were worse.
TWELVE
61 HOURS, 3 MINUTES
THE ARGUMENT WITH Astrid about Albert’s club had not been pretty.
Most nights Sam slept at the house Astrid shared with Mary. Not this night.
It wasn’t their first argument. It probably wouldn’t be their last.
Sam hated arguing. When he added up the total number of people he could really talk to, the number came to two: Edilio and Astrid. His conversations with Edilio were mostly about official business. His conversations with Astrid used to be about deeper stuff, and lighter stuff, too. Now they seemed to be always talking about work. And arguing about it.
He was in love with Astrid. He wanted to talk to her about all the stuff she knew, the history, the math even, the big cosmic issues that she would explain and he would kind of almost understand.
And he wanted to make out with her, to tell the truth. Kissing Astrid, stroking her hair, having her nuzzle close to him, that was all that kept him from going crazy sometimes.
But instead of making out and talking about the stars or whatever, they argued. It reminded him of his mother and stepfather. Not happy memories.
He spent the night on the lumpy cot in his office and woke early, before the sun was even up. He dressed and crept out before kids could start arriving to bug him with more problems.
The streets were quiet. They usually were nowadays. Some kids had been given permission to drive, but only on official business. So there was no traffic. On the rare occasions there was a car or a truck, you’d hear it long before you saw it.
Now Sam heard a motor. Far off. But it didn’t sound like a car.
He reached the low concrete wall that defined the edge of the beach. He jumped atop it and immediately spotted the source of the sound. A low-slung motorboat, a bass boat they were often called, was putt-putting along at no more than walking speed. With dawn just graying the night sky Sam c
ould make out a silhouette. He was pretty sure he recognized the person.
Sam walked down to the water’s edge, cupped his hands around his mouth to form a megaphone, and yelled, “Quinn.”
Quinn seemed to be fiddling with something Sam couldn’t see. He yelled back, “Is that you, brah?”
“Yeah, man. What are you doing out there?”
“Wait a second.” Quinn stooped down, dealing with something. Then he turned the boat toward shore. He beached the shallow craft and killed the engine. He hopped out onto the sand.
“What are you doing, man?” Sam asked again.
“Fishing, brother. Fishing.”
“Fishing?”
“People are looking for food, right?” Quinn said.
“Dude, you can’t just decide to take a boat and go off fishing,” Sam said.
Quinn seemed surprised. “Why not?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? No one’s using the boat. I found the fishing gear. And I’m still putting in my guard-duty hours with Edilio.”
Sam was at a loss for words. “Did you catch anything?”
Quinn’s teeth showed white in the darkness. “I found a book on fishing. Just did what they said in there.” He reached down into the boat and lifted something heavy. “Here. You can’t see it in the dark. But I’ll bet it weighs twenty pounds. It’s huge.”
“No way.” Despite his foul mood, Sam grinned. “What is it?”
“I think it’s a halibut. I’m not sure. It doesn’t look exactly like the fish in the book I got.”
“What do you plan to do with it?”
“Well,” Quinn said thoughtfully. “I guess I’m going to try and catch some more, and then I’m going to eat a bunch of it, and then maybe see if Albert will trade me something for whatever I don’t eat. You know Albert: he’ll figure out some way to fry them up at Mickey D’s and do fish sticks or whatever. I wonder if he still has any ketchup.”
“I’m not sure that’s the best idea,” Sam said.
“Why?”
“Because Albert doesn’t just give stuff away. Not any more.”
Quinn laughed nervously. “Look, brah, don’t tell me I can’t do this, okay? I’m not hurting anyone.”