Suddenly, there was silence. Zil had laid the challenge out there.
Sam nodded, as if to himself. Like he was agreeing. But then, moving as slowly as an old man, he climbed up onto the passenger seat of the Jeep, and stood where everyone could see him.
Sam felt anger building inside him. Resentment. Rage.
It wouldn’t be good to let it out. He knew that. He kept his voice calm, kept his expression blank. He now towered over Zil. “You want to be in charge, Zil? Last night you were running around trying to get a lynch mob together. And let’s not even pretend that wasn’t you responsible for graffiti I saw driving into town just now.”
“So what?” Zil demanded. “So what? So I said what everyone who isn’t a freak is thinking.”
He spit the word “freak,” making it an insult, making it an accusation.
“You really think what we need right now is to divide up between freaks and normals?” Sam asked. “You figure that will get the lights turned back on? That will put food on people’s tables?”
“What about Hunter?” Zil said. “Hunter murders Harry with his mutant freak powers and you don’t do anything.”
“I had kind of a busy night,” Sam said, his voice now poisonous with sarcasm.
“So let me and my boys go find him,” Zil said. “You’re so busy not getting any food, and not stopping Caine and all, not keeping the lights on, so me and my crew will get Hunter.”
“And do what with him?” It was Astrid. The crowd had backed up just enough to give her some breathing room. “What’s your big plan, Zil?”
Zil spread his hands in a gesture of innocence. “Hey, all we want to do is get him before he hurts someone else. You want to, like, give him a trial or whatever? Fine. But let us go and get him.”
“No one is stopping you from finding him,” Sam said. “You can walk around town all you like. You can admire your graffiti and count the number of windows you broke.”
“We need guns,” Zil said. “I’m not going up against a killer freak without guns. And your wetback friend there says we regular people can’t carry guns.”
Sam glanced down at Edilio to see how he had registered the insult. Edilio looked grim but calm. Calmer than Sam felt.
“Hunter is a problem,” Sam acknowledged. “We have a big list of problems. But you trying to make trouble between people with powers and people without powers is not helping anything. Neither is calling people names. We have to stick together.”
When Zil didn’t immediately answer, Sam went on, looking past Zil to speak to the whole group. “Here’s the thing, people: We have some serious problems. The lights are off. And it seems like that’s affecting the water flow in part of town. So, no baths or showers, okay? But the situation is that we think Caine is short of food, which means he’s not going to be able to hold out very long at the power plant.”
“How long?” someone yelled.
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Why can’t you get him to leave?”
“Because I can’t, that’s why,” Sam snapped, letting some of his anger show. “Because I’m not Superman, all right? Look, he’s inside the plant. The walls are thick. He has guns, he has Jack, he has Drake, and he has his own powers. I can’t get him out of there without getting some of our people killed. Anybody want to volunteer for that?”
Silence.
“Yeah, I thought so. I can’t get you people to show up and pick melons, let alone throw down with Drake.”
“That’s your job,” Zil said.
“Oh, I see,” Sam said. The resentment he’d held in now came boiling to the surface. “It’s my job to pick the fruit, and collect the trash, and ration the food, and catch Hunter, and stop Caine, and settle every stupid little fight, and make sure kids get a visit from the Tooth Fairy. What’s your job, Zil? Oh, right: you spray hateful graffiti. Thanks for taking care of that, I don’t know how we’d ever manage without you.”
“Sam . . . ,” Astrid said, just loud enough for him to hear. A warning.
Too late. He was going to say what needed saying.
“And the rest of you. How many of you have done a single, lousy thing in the last two weeks aside from sitting around playing Xbox or watching movies?
“Let me explain something to you people. I’m not your parents. I’m a fifteen-year-old kid. I’m a kid, just like all of you. I don’t happen to have any magic ability to make food suddenly appear. I can’t just snap my fingers and make all your problems go away. I’m just a kid.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam knew he had crossed the line. He had said the fateful words so many had used as an excuse before him. How many hundreds of times had he heard, “I’m just a kid.”
But now he seemed unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “Look, I have an eighth-grade education. Just because I have powers doesn’t mean I’m Dumbledore or George Washington or Martin Luther King. Until all this happened I was just a B student. All I wanted to do was surf. I wanted to grow up to be Dru Adler or Kelly Slater, just, you know, a really good surfer.”
The crowd was dead quiet now. Of course they were quiet, some still-functioning part of his mind thought bitterly, it’s entertaining watching someone melt down in public.
“I’m doing the best I can,” Sam said.