Lies

They were on it like tigers. Bug, suddenly visible right there next to them, tearing at the wool, desperate to expose the flesh. But with bare hands and brittle fingernails, even with their dull loose teeth, they couldn’t reach the meat.

“We need something sharp,” Caine said.

Pe

It was messy. But it worked. And the four of them ripped and tore at chunks of raw mutton.

“Kind of hungry, huh?”

Two kids were standing there like they had appeared out of thin air. The taller one had spoken. His eyes were intelligent, mocking, and wary. The other kid’s face was impassive, expressionless.

Both were dressed in bandages. Bandages wrapped around their hands. The shorter kid had a bandana around his lower face.

The silence stretched as Caine, Diana, Pe

“What are you supposed to be, mummies?” Diana asked. She wiped sheep’s blood from her mouth and then realized that it had saturated her shirt and that there would be no wiping it away.

“We’re lepers,” the tall kid said.

Diana felt her heart skip several beats.

“My name is Sanjit,” the tall boy said, and extended a hand that seemed to be stumps of fingers bound with gauze. “This is Choo.”

“Stay back!” Caine snapped.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Sanjit said. “It’s not always contagious. I mean, sure, sometimes. But not always.”

He dropped his hand to his side.

“You have leprosy?” Caine demanded.

“Like at Sunday school?” Bug said.

Sanjit nodded. “It’s not that bad. It doesn’t hurt. I mean, if your finger falls off, you kind of don’t even feel it.”

“I felt it when my penis fell off, but it didn’t hurt that bad,” the one called Choo said.

Pe

“But people are scared of leprosy, anyway,” Sanjit said. “Silly. Kind of.”

“What are you doing here?” Caine asked warily. He had put down his food, keeping his hands ready.

“Hey, I should ask you that,” Sanjit said. Not harsh but definitely not willing to be pushed around by Caine, either. “We live here. You just got here.”

“Plus, you killed one of our sheep,” Choo said.

“This is the San Francisco de Sales leper colony,” Sanjit said. “Didn’t you know?”

Diana began to laugh. “A leper colony? That’s where we are? That’s what we half killed ourselves getting to?”

“Shut up, Diana,” Caine snapped.

“You guys want to come back to the hospital with us?” Sanjit offered hopefully. “All the adult patients and the nurses and doctors are gone, they just disappeared one day. We’re all by ourselves.”

“We heard there was some movie star’s mansion out here.”

Sanjit’s dark eyes narrowed. He glanced right, as if trying to make sense of what she was saying. Then he said, “Oh, I know what you’re thinking of. Todd Chance and Je

Diana couldn’t stop giggling. A leper colony. That’s what Bug had read about. A leper colony paid for by two rich movie stars. Their charity thing.

“I think Bug may have gotten just a few of the details wrong,” she managed to say between dry, racking laughs that were indistinguishable from sobs.

“You can have the sheep,” Choo said.

Diana stopped laughing. Caine’s eyes narrowed.

Sanjit quickly said, “But we’d rather just have you come back with us. I mean, we’re kind of lonely.”

Caine stared at Choo. Choo stared back, then looked away. “He doesn’t seem to want us to come to this hospital,” Caine said, indicating Choo.

Diana saw fear in the younger boy’s eyes.

“Have them take off their bandages,” Diana said. All urge to laugh was gone now. Both boys had bright eyes. The visible parts of them seemed healthy. Their hair wasn’t brittle and broken like hers.

“You heard her,” Caine said.

“No,” Sanjit said. “It’s not good for our leprosy to be exposed.”

Caine took a deep breath. “I’m going to count to three and then I’m going to throw your little lying friend there straight into a tree. Just like I did with this sheep.”

“He’ll do it,” Diana warned. “Don’t believe he won’t.”

Sanjit hung his head.

“Sorry,” Choo said. “I screwed it up.”

Sanjit began unwinding the gauze from his perfectly healthy fingers. “Okay, you got us. So, allow me to welcome you to San Francisco de Sales Island.”

“Thanks,” Caine said dryly.

“And yes, we do have some food. Maybe you’d like to join us? Unless you want to stick with your sheep sushi.”

Throughout the morning and early afternoon, the shell-shocked kids of Perdido Beach milled around, lost and confused.

But Albert was neither lost nor confused. Throughout the day kids came to his office in the McDonald’s. He had a booth there, in a corner by the window so he could look out on the plaza and see what passed by.

“Hunter came in with a deer,” a kid reported. “And some birds. About seventy-five pounds of usable meat.”

“Good,” Albert said.

Qui

“That’s good work,” Albert said. He calculated in his head. “We have about six ounces a head of meat. Nothing from the fields.” He tapped the table, thinking. “It’s not worth opening the mall. We’ll do a cookout in the plaza. Roast up the meat, make a stew out of the fish. Charge a ’Berto a head.”

Qui

Albert thought that over. “We don’t have time to open the mall and we need to get this product out there.”

Qui

Albert nodded in agreement, accepting the flattery as a simple statement of fact. “I keep my focus.”

“Yes. You do,” Qui

“Hey, by the way, one of my guys thinks he saw Sam. Up on the rocks, just down from the power plant,” Qui

“Sam’s not back here yet?”

Qui

Albert curled his lip. “I think Sam’s having some kind of breakdown.”

“Well, he’s got a right, doesn’t he?” Qui

“Maybe,” Albert allowed. “But mostly I think he’s just pouting. He’s mad because he’s not the only person in charge anymore.”

Qui

“Yeah. But that’s his job, isn’t it? I mean, the council pays him twenty ’Bertos a week, which is twice what most people make.”

Qui

“Yes. The only single person. But what we need is more people doing it. With less power.”

“You’re not getting anti-freak, are you?”

Albert pushed the idea away. “Don’t accuse me of being an idiot, okay?” It irritated him, Qui