Hunger (10 page)

Furious, Lisa stood mute. How could her father pick Suzanne over her? Did they put him up to this? Had James spoken with her dad about doing this?

Oh God. What else had James been doing behind her back?

"Thanks, Mr. Lewis," Suzanne said.

They stood there, her father and James and Suzanne in the foyer and Lisa on the stairs, none of them saying anything. Lisa had never felt so betrayed, so completely lost. She hated them all, felt that hatred sear her, scar her; she wanted to burn them all into ash, as she'd done with the food in her dream; scorch them off the face of the earth.

Creepers of shadow inched along her vision, and she thought she was going to black out.

Suck them dry
, the Thin voice urged.
They deserve it.
Only now it wasn't the Thin voice, no, but rather the voice from her dream—a large woman in armor, brandishing a sword.
Cut them down where they stand.

Lisa's fists trembled.

"Well," her father said. The sound of his voice snapped Lisa out of the black place, and she blinked furiously, clearing her vision. Her father, unaware of how close his daughter had come to hurting him and the others, kept talking. "I know you girls have been fighting. It's time for you to move past that. Friends forgive each other," he said, looking right at Lisa.

She bit back the hateful things she wanted to spew at her father.

"I know you'll do the right thing," he said to her. "I'll leave you alone to work things out."

Of course
, Lisa thought bitterly. Her father was going to run away, leave her defenseless while her boyfriend and former best friend attacked her.

Lisa was alone. She would always be alone.

She wanted to die.

"I have to head to the office for a while," Mr. Lewis said, as if Lisa actually cared what his excuse was. He grabbed his coat from the closet and walked over to the stairs to where Lisa stood. "I'll see you later, Princess." He kissed her brow.

Lisa couldn't reply, but the confusion and horror and heartache in her eyes spoke volumes for her.

Her father sighed and stiffly patted her shoulder. "You'll work it out," he said somberly, and then he walked toward the kitchen. A moment later, Lisa heard the back door open and close. For a second, she thought she heard a horse neigh before the door shut, cutting off outside noise.

The sound—imagined, surely—gave her strength. "So," she said to James, "I guess
this
is my surprise. I would've liked another pair of earrings much better."

"Leese, come on," he said, his hands out in an appeal. "Give Suzie a chance."

"To do what? Insult me again?"

"Lisa," Suzanne said, "I never meant—"

"I wasn't talking to
you
," Lisa spat. "I have nothing to say to
you.
"

Suzanne cringed.

"Leese," James said imploringly, "this isn't like you. Friends give each other a chance."

Her head was spinning, and her stomach roiled, bubbling with venom. Not like her? Well, maybe she was tired of always being a doormat. She sneered, "Yeah? Well, you can tell
her
that friends don't hurt each other. Friends don't call each other horrible names."

James's gaze was hard, though his voice was soft: a contradiction of affection. "Friends tell each other the truth."

"You didn't hear what she'd called me," she snarled. "Or what she'd said about me."

"Yes, I did. She told me. She thinks you're anorexic," James said, stunning Lisa into silence. But nothing could have prepared her for the rest of what he had to say. "And I agree with her."

The words hit Lisa like a blow, and she sat down hard on the stairs.

James agreed with Suzanne? The world officially made no sense anymore. Her boyfriend was supposed to be supportive; he was supposed to have her back. A mewling sound escaped her mouth—not a cry, not a whine, but caught somewhere in between. Her breath strangled in her throat and her face burned. For the first time in who knew how long, Lisabeth Lewis didn't feel hungry.

She felt nothing at all, except a cold, raw rage simmering in her belly.

"Can we go inside?" James asked. "Sit on the sofa, maybe?"

"No. No, I think you can stay right where you are." Lisa's voice was faint, which was so odd, considering she wanted to scream at the top of her lungs. But she just didn't have the energy. No screaming. No pitching a fit.

No trust. No nothing.

James thought she was anorexic. What a joke. If she were anorexic, she'd actually be thin, and then she wouldn't have to worry about eating all the time. She let out a laugh, one that scraped her throat and bled on her tongue.

"Leese," Suzanne said, her hands fluttering like nervous birds, "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. But I'm worried about you."

"So am I," James said.

They were worried about her? Yeah, right. Listen to them scolding her, accusing her. Turning her own father against her. "You talked about me behind my back." Her voice was flat and so very cold.

"You're not eating," Suzanne said.

"Of course I am."

"You're exercising all the time."

"No I'm not," Lisa said. God knew, she hadn't done anything today.

"You're vomiting in the bathroom," James said.

Lisa balled her hands into fists. "It was one time, and I was sick." She wanted to throw her head back and scream, but all that came out was her queer, toneless voice, as if she were a robot. It was as if James's accusation had sucked all the life out of her.

He didn't understand. No one understood, except maybe Tammy, a little.

"You're not acting like
you
, Lisa," Suzanne said. "We think you need help."

Lisa smiled wanly. "Do you now?" If Tammy were here, she'd laugh her head off before giving James and Suzanne both a piece of her mind. Tammy would be strong and confident.

Unlike Lisa, who could only sit there and play dead.

Suzanne swallowed and bit her lip. James, though, met her gaze without flinching. "We do, Leese. We think you need to go to your doctor and get help."

"Uh-huh."

"Talk to someone," Suzanne said, wringing her hands. "You know, a professional."

Oh yes. That was exactly what Lisa wanted: to tell a stranger her most intimate thoughts. She croaked out a laugh, and tears spilled down her sallow cheeks.

James knelt down before her and took her hand. "Lisa, will you please listen to us?"

Us. James and Suzanne and her father. Probably her mother, too. All of them had turned against her.

She pulled her hand away. "Get out of my house."

James stayed frozen in a parody of proposal. Suzanne looked as if she'd been kicked in the stomach—ill and green and so desperately unhappy.

Lisa lurched to her feet. The room spun drunkenly, and she closed her eyes to find her balance.

Balance
, Death whispered—a memory or a promise, Lisa couldn'tt ell.

It hadn't been a dream, she realized, her eyes snapping open. Death really had come to her and made her Famine. The horse she'd heard was hers, her steed.

Her eyes shone. Yes. She'd find Death. He understood her.

She pushed past James, ignored his protest and Suzanne's cries as she ran to the kitchen, her boots clacking against the linoleum. She yanked open the back door and let out a cry of relief as she saw her steed, black as the darkest night, black as death (even though Death rode a pale horse and not a black one), waiting for her in the garden. Her mother's bushes were noticeably bare.

"Midnight, you're real," she said, relieved.

The horse snorted and flicked its ears. Then it knelt in the grass and nodded to its mistress.

Laughing like a madwoman, Lisabeth Lewis launched herself on the black horse's back and tangled her fingers in its mane. "Death," she said to her steed. "Take me to Death."

The horse snorted again, then leapt into the sky.

On its back, Lisa pretended she didn't hear James and Suzanne calling to her, begging her to come back.

They galloped across the skies, the world streaking beneath them in colorful waves that rippled when Lisa glanced down. Or maybe her tears distorted what she saw. It didn't matter. Her problems were far away, a lifetime away. They rode the path of Famine, and for a time, Lisa didn't think of herself. Instead she lost herself to the thrill of the ride—the way her hair whipped back, the feeling of the horse beneath her. On Midnight's back, Lisa was free.

Freedom, of course, came with a price. And that payment came due as they slowed over a mountainous terrain, passing over verdant jungle: dew-kissed emeralds and lush jades; darkling peridots and sunny chartreuses. Everywhere, it seemed, were green fields, a farmer's delight. The vegetation spoke of life and health, and it lightened Lisa's heart.

But then they swooped low, and she saw that the crops were riddled with desiccated stalks and brown husks, tantalizingly green at their tips but rotted at their bases. Entire fields of maize and paddy had been destroyed before they even had a chance to ripen. Ruined before maturity.

Starved.

Lisa swallowed thickly as she peered at the crops. And her mouth twisted in disgust from the gray-brown bodies that undulated within all the green like a river of cancer. Rats—thousands of them; hundreds of thousands. They devoured the living smorgasbord in an almost lazy way—scavengers, even when sated, never ceased in their hunger for more.

Midnight touched down at the outskirts of a dusty village littered with shacks. Fences separated the fields from the washed-out town, and Lisa realized they were trying to keep the rats out of the crops. It was as fruitless as the trees on the mountain; fences and traps couldn't contain such a plague. Looming poles dangled vermin with snapped necks, but where ten rats were caught, thousands more roamed free.

Free, like her. The thought made her cringe in her seat.

On Midnight's back, Lisa toured the land. She took in the desolate huts, the dilapidated structures that listed in the wind. She watched brown-skinned farmers, barefoot and thin, as they tossed rats into debris piles of shredded wood and dead crops. Men with sinewy arms hoisted line after line of dead rodents, but it did little good. Their crops were ruined, sacrificed to the vermin god.

And as the scavengers feasted in the fields, the villagers starved. Lisa saw mothers ignoring their own raking hunger pangs as they fed their emaciated children, babies with their stomachs bloated and their limbs like twigs. She saw fathers toiling to catch rats or to hunt in the neighboring jungles for food. Even the livestock—pigs and cows and chickens—were scrawny from hunger, their ribs all too clear beneath their bodies as the animals rooted in the dirt. In one large hut, dozens of men and women gathered by cook pots, sharing the little food they had: yams and bananas and leaves from the jungles around the village.

And rats, of course. The villagers ate the very creatures that were forcing them closer to mass starvation.

Lisa could tell what was in the cook pots, even as she could tell the rats from the dirt. She was Famine, and she felt the people's hunger like a monstrous tick burrowing under her skin. Groaning, she wrapped her arms around her stomach. This wasn't incessant appetite or some internal appeal to be fed that she could ignore. This was a tortured beast bellowing, scrabbling toward either survival or surrender.

This was unbearable.

"Why did you bring me here?" she whispered.

Midnight ignored her question and walked on, weaving between ramshackle dwellings and empty storage huts. When the horse came to a halt and knelt, Lisa breathed in a sweet odor like leaf rot and spilled honey. Deeper, though, was the putrid stench of spoiled milk in the sun.

Lisa stared at the scene before her, shocked into wide-eyed silence.

The bodies looked almost like dolls—life-size dolls of flesh stretched too tightly over skeletons. Gravediggers worked, their mouths and noses covered by dusty bandannas as their shovels winked almost merrily in the sunlight. The people watching leaned against one another for support, or out of exhaustion, or maybe because they just couldn't stand upright any longer. One woman sat at the edge of the pit, her tears gleaming like jewels, her sobs silent. On her lap was a doll of a child, its eyes closed.

Numb, Lisa counted the bodies. Six people dead, and five of them were children. Babies. She had asked her steed to take her to Death, and it had—but not the death she'd wished for.

Wishes and horses
, she thought, feeling hollow and sad and mad and sick. Her stomach lurched. Lisa clamped a hand to her mouth and told herself not to vomit.

"You get used to the stench of death," a man said, "but the smell never really leaves you."

Swallowing the bile that had risen in her throat, she pivoted to face a tall man seated on a white horse. Dust hovered around him like a nimbus, but the white of his coat—and of his horse—remained immaculate, untouched.

She stared at him, at his horse, at the silver crown that sparkled on the man's brow, bright against his greasy black hair. His pockmarked face was waxy, his eyes rheumy. Cold sores peppered his mouth like lipsticked kisses.

Yuck.

She focused on the scarred man, even as the smell of death teased her like perfume dancing on a breeze. "You're a Horseman," she said, her voice tremulous from almost vomiting—and, honestly, from being so close to a man who looked so nasty.

His smile was a perfunctory flash. "Pestilence."

Remembering her encounter with War, and how she'd nearly gotten her hand bitten off, Lisa didn't offer to shake hands. Besides, she really didn't want to touch him. She wondered if he had leprosy.

"Of course I do," he snapped. "I bear all diseases. It's my lot in life."

Great, another Horseman who could read her mind. Embarrassed, she bit her lip. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings." It occurred to her, then, that she sounded exactly like Suzanne.

"Of course you didn't. People never mean anything they say or think." He snorted, and snot flew from his nostrils.

She blushed, but the White Rider kept talking—ranting, really.