Lies by Michael Grant Read Free Book Online

little apart. You could take your fish or meat or vegetables there and have them cooked for a small charge. Once grilled over the coals, pretty much everything—venison, raccoon, pigeon, rat, coyote—tasted the same: smoky and burned. But none of the stoves or microwaves worked anymore, and there was no more cooking oil, certainly no more butter, so even the kids who chose to cook their own food ended up duplicating the same experience. The only alternative was boiling, and the two girls who ran the place kept a big pot simmering. But everyone agreed that grilled rat was far superior to boiled.
    The “restaurant” changed names every few days. It had already been Smokey Sue’s, Perdido I Can’t Believe It’s Not Pizza Kitchen, Eat and Urp, In ’n’ Get Out, Smokey Tom’s, and Le Grand Barbecue. Today the sign read “WTF?” and in smaller letters, “What the Food?”
    Kids lounged at two of the three rickety dining tables, chairs tilted back, feet up. Some were eating, some just hanging out. They looked like a junior version of some kind of end-of-the-world movie, Sam thought, not for the first time. Armed, dressed in bizarre outfits, topped with strange hats, men’s clothing, women’s clothing, tablecloth capes, barefoot or wearing ill-fitting shoes.
    Drinkable water now had to be trucked from the half-empty reservoir up in the hills outside of town. Gasoline was strictly rationed so that the water trucks could be kept running as long as possible. The Council had a plan for when the last of the gas was gone: relocate everyone to the reservoir. If there was still any water there.
    They calculated they had six months till they ran out of water. Like most council decisions it seemed like bull to Sam. The council spent at least half their time concocting scenarios they would then argue over without ever reaching a decision. They’d been supposedly drafting a set of laws for pretty much the whole time they’d been in existence. Sam had done his best to be patient, but while they were dawdling and debating he still had to keep the peace. They had their rules, he had his. His were the ones most kids lived by.
    The Mall lined the western wall of the school gym so as to take advantage of the shade. As the day wore on and the sun rose, the food stalls would run out of stuff and close down. Some days there was very, very little food. But no one had starved to death—quite.
    The water was brought down in five gallon plastic jugs and given away free—a gallon per person per day. There were 306 names on the water list.
    There was rumor of a couple of kids living out of town in a farmhouse. But Sam had never seen evidence of it. And made-up people were not his problem.
    The remaining sixteen known people in the FAYZ were up the hill at Coates Academy, all that was left of Caine’s isolated band. What they ate and drank was not Sam’s concern.
    Away from the school’s wall, over in the lesser shade of a “temporary” building, a different group was at work. A girl read tarot cards for one ’Berto. The ’Berto was short for “Albert.” Albert had created a currency based on gold bullets and McDonald’s game pieces. He’d wanted to call the currency something else, but no one remembered what. So, ’Bertos they were, a play on “Albert,” coined by Howard, of course, who had also come up with “the FAYZ” to describe their weird little world.
    Sam had thought Albert was nuts with his obsession with creating money. But the evidence was in: Albert’s system was producing just enough food for kids to survive. And a lot more kids were working. Far fewer were just hanging out. It was no longer impossible to get kids to go into the fields and do the backbreaking work of picking crops. They worked for ’Bertos and spent ’Bertos, and for now at least starvation was just a bad memory.
    The tarot reader was ignored. No one had money to wasteon that. A boy played a guitar of sorts while his little sister played a