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While others fought to survive. While others stood up against the evil that was being done.
Fortunately the slight breeze was wafting him away from the town square, where all the madness was going on. In a few more minutes he would raise his density and drop gently back to earth. Then, hopefully, he would find some food. The smell of cooking meat had left him crazy with hunger.
“Nothi
ng you could have done, Duck,” he told himself.
“That’s true,” he agreed. “Nothing.”
“Not our fault.”
He made a weak grab at a seagull that hovered just out of reach, floating on its boomerang-shaped wings. He was hungry enough that he would have eaten the bird raw. In midair.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a blur on the ground below. The blur stopped suddenly. He couldn’t see her face, but it could only be Brianna. In her hand she held a pigeon.
Brianna could do what Duck could not. Brianna could catch and eat birds. Maybe she would share. After all, they were both freaks. Both on the same side. Right?
“Hey!” he yelled down.
Brianna stared up at him. “You!” she yelled. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“I’m so hungry,” Duck moaned.
“How did you get up there?”
He was slowly increasing his density, sinking down to earth.
“It goes both ways,” Duck said. “It’s all about density. I weigh whatever I want to weigh. I can weigh so much, I sink through the ground, or I can float so—”
“Yeah, I don’t care. Sam said get you.”
“Me?”
“You. Get down here.”
She ripped a wing off the pigeon and handed a dripping, gelatinous piece of flesh to Duck, who didn’t even hesitate.
He looked up guiltily after a minute of slavering and grunting. “Don’t you want some?”
“Nah,” she said. “My appetite…I don’t know. I’m feeling a little sick.”
Brianna was looking at him in a way that made him distinctly nervous.
“There’ll be some wind resistance,” Brianna said.
“Some what?”
“Say you can control your weight? About ten pounds ought to do.”
“Do for what?”
“Jump on my back, Duck. You are going for a ride.”
The morphine did not eliminate the pain. It merely threw a veil over it. It was still there, a terrible, ravening lion, roaring, awesome, overpowering. But held barely at bay.
Barely.
His wounds were shocking to see. Bright red stripes across his back, shoulders, neck, and face. In places the skin had been taken off.
