The New Hunger (8 page)

“What’s he
talking
about?” Nora shouts, but no one answers her. Her friends stand with their backs to her, staring at the blank screen, unblinking. A warbling hum begins to fill the room.

She glances out the window and sees her baby brother playing alone in the mud of the playground. A gaunt black wolf stands behind him, tongue lolling out, grinning. Her teachers and teammates stare at the blank TV, ignoring her screams as the wolf’s jaws stretch open.

• • •

“ {gn=e wor
Nora
!”

Her eyes snap open just in time to see Addis shutting the window curtain and dashing back to the bed, his eyes wide with panic.

“It’s okay, Addy,” she murmurs groggily.

“There’s a…there’s a—”

“I know. He was there last night. He can’t get in.”

She climbs out of bed and approaches the window, fingering the Colt’s trigger. She opens the curtain. The big man doesn’t seem to have moved all night.

“Go away!” she shouts, her face mere inches from his. No reaction. She waves her hands in aggressive shooing motions. “Get the fuck out! Leave us alone!”

Nothing.

She raises the pistol and points it at his forehead.

Addis jams his hands against his ears. But before Nora can give her brother his next lesson on the brutality of modern life, the man pulls back. His expression remains blank, but he backs away from the window and steps aside like a gentleman holding a door for a lady. It unnerves Nora more than she would have expected.

“Get your stuff,” she says to her brother, still aiming the gun.

“Aren’t you gonna shoot him?”

“Not yet.”

“Why?”

“Because he backed up.”

“But isn’t he a zombie?”

Nora hesitates before answering. “I don’t know what he is. No one does.”

She slips her backpack on and undoes the door locks, keeping her eyes and pistol trained on the man through the window. Addis huddles close behind her, gripping his hatchet.

“We’re coming out!” she yells, having no idea if the man still understands language. “You stay away from us or I’m shooting you!”

She opens the door a crack. He doesn’t move. She opens it the rest of the way and steps out, keeping him firmly sighted. “All clear, Addis?”

Addis runs to each corner of the motel and peeks around, securing the perimeter like a seasoned police officer. His father taught him at least one thing well.

“All clear.”

Nora walks backward toward him, not taking her eyes off the big man’s empty silver gaze.

“Nora?” Addis says quietly.

“What.”

“You should shoot him.”

She glances back at her brother to make sure the voice really came from him.

“Auntie Shirley said we’re not supposed to let them stay alive. If you don’t kill him he’s gonna kill someone else.”

“I know what Auntie said.” She keeps her sights on the center of the man’s forehead. “And Dad said don’t waste bullets on other people’s problems.”

“But Dad is mean.”

Her teeth are grinding. The gun is getting slippery in her hands. The big man watches her calmly, standing a safe twenty feet away, arms hanging at his sides.

She doesn’t want to shoot him.

She doesn’t know what possible good it could do to spare his life, but she knows she wants to. Is it as simple as empathy? That uniquely human reluctance to kill? It can’t be. She’s killed two people since her fourteenth birthday. Yes, she did it in self-defense to protect her family, but does that really matter? Is the difference between killing with satisfaction and killing with horror nothing more than context?

“I can look away,” Addis offers.

“What?”

“If you don’t want to shoot him ‘cause of me, I can look away when you do it.”

“Addis, just shut up, okay?”

He shuts up. There is a long silence.

“Hey!” Nora shouts at the man. “You’re infected right? You’re not just mute or sleepwalking or something? You’re capital-D Dead?”

No response. As if she needs one. As if his skin, his eyes, and the gaping wound in his stomach weren’t enough. She knows exactly what he is, but…

“Hey,” she almost pleads, knowing she is talking to no one, nothing. “Can you understand me?”

He nods.

Nora gasps. Her gun lowers.

She hears the creak of a door behind her and whirls around. A naked woman is standing three feet from her face, skin gray and mottled and split open in places, head tilted to the side, a beard of brown blood running down her mouth and neck. Her jaw creaks open and she moans, a hollow sound of pain and hunger, and she lunges.

Nora is a good shot. She has excellent spatial recognition and eye-hand coordination, making her naturally talented with guns. But she is not a killer. She is not a war vet, she is not trained by the Army or National Guard or even local militias. The art of murder is not embedded in her muscle memory and she is not immune to shock. So when this drooling wreck of rotting flesh surges toward her, she doesn’t calmly fire a round into its frontal lobe and walk away. She screams like a teenage girl and empties all seven rounds into its chest.

She doesn’t have time to pull out her hatchet. The bullets slow the corpse about as much as paintballs. Its fingertips swipe for her face. She stumbles backward and trips, falls on her butt, kicks hard at the corpse’s ankle and feels it snap like brittle plastic. The corpse topples onto its side and Nora scrambles to her feet, sprints to her brother and stands protectively in front of him while the corpse staggers upright. It takes two steps toward her with its loose, floppy foot dragging against the pavement, then stops, looks down at the broken foot, steps on it with the other, and heaves. Its foot tears off like a stubborn shoe. The corpse advances, stumping forward on its bare tibia like a peg leg.

Nora has seen all she can handle. Without premeditation or planning, she grabs Addis’s wrist and runs back toward downtown Seattle, not because there is shelter or food or ammo there, but because it’s downhill. She manages one final glance toward the motel. The Dead woman is giving slow pursuit, but the man hasn’t moved. He stands where Nora left him, just watching her go.

The tall man
has been cheated. Some of the information he bartered for is false. He knows that he is in a North American forest and that there should be things like wolves and bears and deer in it but instead there are strange things that shouldn’t be here or anywhere. Floating eyes and trees that breathe and snakes with silky blue fur. He does not know where to send his complaints. He does not know how he’ll ever get a grasp on this world if it keeps changing.

He has been walking in the dark for six hours. His mind is losing what little rigidity it had, melting into mercury and oozing through the cracks. The brute in his belly is in a panic, screaming at him over and over, and he is growing weary of its ranting.

~ aly anTAKE GET STEAL HAVE FILL

Shut up!
he finally snaps.
I can’t do it until you tell me what it is! So shut up!

To his surprise, the brute shuts up. The man walks onward, his mind ringing in the sudden silence. And then, in a sour grumble, as if pried out of a pouting child, a specific imperative finally emerges:

Eat.

The man stops walking and slaps a palm over his face. That was it?
Eat
? He remembers eating. He even remembers some foods.
Steak. Sushi. Sashimi…
Eating is easy.

Why did you dance around it so long?

The brute is silent.

Still in disbelief, the man begins foraging. He finds a huckleberry bush and pops a handful of the plump red globes in his mouth. He bites down, expecting juicy sweetness—and feels the sensation of biting into a dead moth. The juice tastes like attic dust. The texture is dry and flaky, despite how the berries feel in his hands. He spits them out and stares with horror at the pulpy mess on his shirt.

The brute smirks.

He searches until he finds some wild mushrooms and shoves one in his mouth. Although he can feel its fleshy softness in his fingers, his mouth tells him he’s crunching into a ball of dead wasps. He spits it out with a moan.

The brute laughs.

The cloud of hands mobilizes again, darting deeper into the forest, and a rich new scent pulses back to him through the cloud.
Blood. Flesh.
He follows it into a small clearing and discovers the source: a young deer hobbling through the underbrush, blood pouring from its claw-raked haunches.

This?
he asks the brute, and the response is a mumbled, slightly sarcastic
maybe.

The deer’s dark, round eyes regard him with desperation. Part of him recoils from the impulses surging into his hands and teeth, but that part is no longer in charge. He seizes the deer and bites into its neck.

Blood pours down his throat. He rips out big chunks of meat and his mouth plays no tricks on him. The meat tastes like meat. The blood tastes like blood, salty and metallic. But when it hits his stomach, there is no spreading warmth of satiety. He drops the deer and stands up, waiting for it, but when his stomach finally responds, it’s not the answer he expected. A dark rush of wrenching, twisting hunger knifes into him, as if he’s suddenly minutes from starvation.

Eyes bulging, he leans over and vomits.

Wrong!
the brute giggles into his ears.
Wrong wrong wrong.

He vomits until it feels like his stomach will twist inside out, then stands over the deer gasping and shuddering.
What do you want?
Tell me!

Eat,
the brute purrs, retreating back into the shadows, as if the answers to all questions are contained in this single word.

The cloud of hands drifts toward an opening in the trees, beckoning him with long, curling fingers, and he follows. He squints as he emerges from the graveyard musk of the forest into crisp air and blinding light. He is on a hill overlooking a valley, and there is something amazing in this valley. Towering rectangles of concrete and glass. A tangled web of streets winding through
houses
and
businesses
and
banks
and
bars
.

City.

andalign="left">All these words return to him at once, conjuring a wild spray of images.
People swarming in shopping malls, flashing plastic cards, putting paint on their faces and metal things on their fingers. People sleeping in alleys, sticking bottles in their mouths and metal things in their arms. People naked in beds, kissing. People naked in showers, crying. A man pouring gasoline on a leather couch. A man in a tie screaming into a radio. A blonde woman touching the man’s face, then dying beside a river.

THERE,
the brute shouts, interrupting his daydream, and the images fade.
GO. TAKE. EAT.

The cloud of hands surges down into the city like a squid on the hunt. With his head bowed, the man goes where he’s led.

“Are we going back
to the Space Needle?” Addis asks when the motel has vanished from sight and they have recovered some composure.

“No.”

“Why are we going over this bridge again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Surprise. Big sister doesn’t know everything.”

Silence.

“Maybe we should go up there.” He points east, toward a distant hill topped by three radio towers.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you want to go places for no reason, just keep following me. You get to be our new leader when you come up with a plan.”

“Maybe there’s people up there. Look at all the houses.”

Nora considers the plateau of palatial Colonials, balconies and roof decks, stunning water views. That must be where all Seattle’s money used to go. Surely those estates have good enough security to keep out a few shambling corpses.

“Okay,” Nora says, shrugging. “Let’s go find Bill Gates’s house.”

“Who’s Bill Gates?”

“A super rich guy.”

“What’s ‘rich’ mean?”