The New Hunger (5 page)

She focuses deep into the trees as they drive back to the freeway, searching for wildlife. Birds, deer, something stupid and innocent that she can pretend to be for a while. Surely creatures that simple know how to be happy.

The tall man
is in pain.

The feeling that began in his stomach has now spread throughout his entire body and somehow beyond it. It radiates out from him like a cloud of ghosts, countless hands clutching at the air, reaching out for…something. He wishes he knew what it wanted, but it is a mindless brute. It lashes him onward with unintel Fhlingligible grunts of need.

In some distant compartment of his mind, he is aware that the forest is beautiful. Despite the darkness and musty tomb smell, there is a silence and softness that he finds comforting. He runs his hands along mossy tree trunks as he passes, enjoying their texture.
Like wool,
he thinks.
Like blankets. Her skin was—

Something shifts. He can still feel the moss but it has been reduced to information:
Soft. Cool. Damp.
He no longer understands why he is wasting energy touching a tree, so he drops his hands and walks faster.

He is in a forest. He is surrounded by trees. He is wearing a tie the color his blood used to be, and slacks the color his blood is now. He is tall and thin but strong for his build—he surprises himself by snapping a branch as thick as his wrist. He carries it for a while like a club, because the forest is dark and he has seen creatures that aren’t like him lurking in the shadows. Things that walk on four legs, covered in soft stuff like moss—fur—
wolves.
The forest is full of wolves, which he remembers are dangerous, and
he feels afraid. But after a few hours the fear fades; he loses interest in the branch and tosses it aside.

It is becoming harder for him to maintain interest in anything but the hollowness
.
He is aware that tools and weapons might help him get what he wants, but what does he want? The hollowness seems to know, but it can’t be bothered to explain. It pulses and pounds with one vague agenda, reflexively vetoing all other initiatives, even ones that might help it achieve its goals—such as carrying a weapon. The tall man will get no help from these impulses. He must decipher himself by himself.

He thinks about the wolves. He understands that they are not like him and that they want to hurt him. Maybe he wants to hurt them too. Maybe that’s what he wants. Maybe creatures that are not like each other are supposed to hurt each other to find out which one is stronger, so that the stronger one can take the things it wants. A competition. A game.
War! Sex! Football!

His eyes widen with these sudden bursts of insight.
He is happy that he is remembering things. Perhaps soon he will have enough information to do whatever the brute in his belly is demanding.

“Hello?”

The thing under the tablecloth continues to heave. The bloodstain in the middle of the cloth is bright red. Spreading.

“Hey. Are you alive?”

Nora stands in the bathroom doorway with her hatchet at the ready. Addis stands behind her, trembling despite all his noble ideals.

Nora takes a step inside.

“Listen. If you’re still alive, you need to give me some kind of sign or we’re gonna leave.”

The cloth shifts slightly. A hand slides out from under it, palm down on the floor.

“Okay, that shows me you’re still moving, but I need to know you’re capital-L
Living.
So if you’re not Dead, tap twice.”

There is a long hesitation. The hand taps twice.

Addis grabs her shirt hem. She rubs his head.

“Okay,” she says under her breath and approaches the heaving mound. Holding her hatchet high, ready to strike, she pulls the tablecloth away.

Addis hides his eyes behind his hands and starts whimpering.

The man under the cloth is a certified giant. At least six foot five, probably two hundred-fifty pounds of the kind of hard bulk that looks like fat until you see it flex. He is bald except for some light stubble on the sides of his head, which expands into a beard surrounding big, soft lips. But what Nora notices most is the gaping hole in his stomach, slowly saturating his white t-shirt. It appears to be a gunshot wound, but it has been sliced open with two crude, crisscrossing incisions. A steak knife lies on the floor next to him, as well as two bloody dinner forks. Someone was trying to perform surgery using dinnerware for a scalpel and clamps.

“Hey,” she says. “What happened? Who shot you?”

The man’s pale blue eyes fixate on her, dilating unsteadily. He opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a croak. He makes a vague waving motion and closes his eyes as if to say,
Doesn’t matter.

Nora lowers her voice. “Are they still here?”

He faintly shakes his head, eyes still closed.

“Who tried to take the bullet out? Is someone else with you?”

His eyes open. His hand moves like he’s trying to point somewhere, but he can’t summon the strength. He moves his lips on his next exhalation, and Nora hears the outline of a word, perhaps a name, but it’s too faint. A ghost. He closes his eyes again. Tears glint in the corners.

Nora feels her stomach clenching. She stares at the hole in his belly, its ragged edges and dark center, a well of blood leading down into his inner depths. A wave of nausea sweeps through her; drops of perspiration pop out on her forehead.

“Listen,” she says, “I’m not…I don’t know how to…” She gingerly touches the edge of the wound. The sliced flaps of skin spread apart and she shudders. “I don’t know what to do.”

The man’s head moves slightly. Nora would like to think it’s a nod. That he understands. His eyes roll into his head, then return to hers, still dilating. He is drenched in sweat.

Nora glances back at Addis. He is standing in the doorway, wringing his hands in front of his crotch and biting his lip.

He wasn’t wrong. They did the right thing. But they shouldn’t have.

She touches the man’s fiery forehead. “I’m sorry.”

He holds her gaze for a moment longer, then closes his eyes. A long, slow breath comes out of him and doesn’t come back.

Nora stands up. “Addis, wait outside for a sec. I need to do something.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yeah. Wait outside.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to do something.”

Addis looks at the hatchet clenched in her hand. His lips tremble a little and he backs out of the room.

Nora stands over the man, staring at his shiny bald head. She has never done this before. Her mind moves ahead to the sensations that will vibrate up her arms through the hatchet when it cracks the skull and sinks into the dense, rubbery tissues inside. She raises the hatchet. She shuts her eyes. The toilet stall behind her creaks open and something groans and Nora screams and runs. She doesn’t turn around to see what’s there, she just runs. She grabs her brother’s hand and drags him down the hall at a full sprint. Standing in the elevator pounding the “door close” button, she sees movement reflected in the restaurant’s windows and hears a ragged howl, low and guttural but distinctl Sbutves y female. Then the doors slide shut, and they descend.

• • •

Addis is crying. Nora can’t believe he still cries so easily after all the things they’ve been through. He cried when his mother dragged them out of bed and hid them in the bathroom while their father killed a looter with a crowbar. He cried when their apartment and the rest of Little Ethiopia went up in flames, his snot smearing against the window of the family Geo. He cried all the way from D.C. to Louisiana and then again when he saw New Orleans, yelling at his mother that the Bible said God would never again destroy the earth with a flood. He cried when his father said God is a liar.

Crying. Expelling grief from the body in the form of saltwater. What’s its purpose? How did it evolve, and why are humans the only creatures on Earth that do it? Nora wonders how many years it takes to dry up that messy urge.

“It’s okay, Addy,” she says as the elevator settles on the ground floor. “We’re okay.”

His sniffles don’t completely subside until the Space Needle is hidden behind buildings far in the distance.

“What
was
that?” he finally asks as they trek north on Highway 99, the first words out of his mouth in thirty minutes.

“Guess,” she says.

He doesn’t.

They cross the Aurora Bridge just as the sun disappears behind the western mountains. Nora stops, although she knows she shouldn’t. They are standing on a narrow sidewalk hundreds of feet above what was once a busy waterway, now a graveyard for sunken and sinking boats, million-dollar yachts floating on their sides, palaces for king crabs.

“Where are we going?” Addis asks.

“I’m not sure.”

He pauses to think about this. “How far are we gonna have to walk?”

“I don’t know. Probably a million miles.”

He sags against the railing. “Can we go find somewhere to sleep? I’m really tired.”

Nora watches the last red glow of the sunset glitter on the water. Just before the sky goes completely dark, she catches movement out of the corner of her eye and glances back the way they came. On the edge of the hill, just before the bridge leaps out over the chasm, she sees a silhouette. A big silhouette of a big man, standing in the street and swaying slightly.

“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Let’s go.”

The cloud of hands
has grown so large and strong it has begun to feel like an extra sense. Some warped hybrid of sight and smell and intuition. The tall man feels it reaching through the forest, its wispy fingers brushing through ferns and poking under rocks, seeking whatever it seeks. He struggles to ignore its constant moaning, which has begun to form words but is still too simple to be understood.

Get. Take. Fill.

He tries to distract himself by remembering more things.
What is your name?
Nothing.
How old are you?
Nothing. He hesitates before his next question.
Who was the woman by the river?
Something surges up from his core, a surprise heave of emotional vomit, but he gags it back down.
Her name was—the weight in your hand, the trigger—

GUNS CAN KILL YOU! YOUR BRAIN I Vbutvee wS IMPORTANT! DO NOT GET SHOT IN THE HEAD!

He is deeply relieved when this second voice interrupts. Its simple information is much easier to process than that terrifying eruption of feeling.

What you did—all the people you—

FIND OTHER THINGS LIKE YOU! THEY CAN HELP YOU GET THINGS YOU WANT!

And so a strange bartering session begins in his mind. He gives up the grief he felt upon seeing the woman and remembers what guns do and that he should avoid people who have them. He hands over the aching desire to see his mother again and receives the knowledge that he will be safer if he can find a group to join. It seems a very fair bargain.

A jolt ripples through the cloud of hands and his eyes snap open wide. His new sense has found something. The hands have reached very far, perhaps miles, and touched something that arouses them. They stretch off into the darkness of the woods, sending pulses of excitement back to him like morse code.