The New Hunger (11 page)

Life.

And all he can hear is the brute screaming at him to take it.

THIS,
it bellows over and over as its myriad fingers jab at the two bodies.
THIS THIS THIS.

While the rotten woman gnaws on a thigh, the tall man kneels beside the head. Glazed eyes stare up at him, a mouth frozen open in surprise, as if gasping,
What happened? How did I get here? How could I have known that my choices mattered?

The tall man sees his hands reaching out and picking up the dead man’s remaining arm. He feels the brute prying his mouth open and shoving his head down. He feels himself chewing. And yes, he feels relief, a warm river of energy washing over his dried-up cells and reconstituting them, pooling in his chest and inflating him like a sad, sagging party balloon. But he feels no pleasure. He wishes he could feel nothing at all. He wishes he could trade everything for information, the dullest, numbest information feelings can buy, but the trading floor is closed. He bangs on the door as he satiates himself with hiasure. this person’s dwindling life, but the only answer is the thin, cold voice of his own thoughts.

This is what you are and why you’re here. You are not a person. You are not even a wolf. You are nothing, and no city was ever built for you.

He looks up from his meal and sees the big man watching him through the book-fire’s flames. He understands that they will travel together now. They will look for other creatures like themselves and gather more and more so that they can eat more and more. And he understands that no matter how many they gather, even if they become a mob of thousands, each and every one of them will be alone.

The carnage thickens
as Nora and her brother work their way up Pine Street. The bodies are so dense she has to walk with eyes to the ground to avoid tripping over them, or worse: stepping in them. Her earlier impulse to shield Addis from the sight of death feels even more absurd now. He picks his way through the corpses with practical care, as if they’re nothing more than fallen branches to be avoided. Is he indifferent to the dead? Does he make no connection between these husks and the living people he loves? Or is he simply too hungry to care?

Nora can feel her own hunger slowly consuming her loftier concerns, grinding layer after layer off the hierarchy of needs. The grand pyramid of a fully realized life eroded long ago into a practical trapezoid, and may soon collapse to the baseline of an animal.

“A police station!” Addis yelps, pointing to a blue and white building a few blocks up the hill. “Maybe there’s guns!”

Nora rouses herself from her bleak forecasting and pastes on a smile for her brother. “Maybe. Should we start our own police department?”

He grins.

“Want to be sheriff? I’ll be your deputy.”

“No, you have to start out as a regular officer and then maybe I’ll promote you.”

“Oh really? Do I have a lot of competition?” She points at a uniformed corpse slumped over a police motorcycle. “That guy, maybe?”

“That’s…Sergeant Smith. He’s our best guy, he’ll probably beat you.”

“I don’t know, he looks kinda lazy.”

Addis laughs.

“Sleeping on the job again, Smith?” she says in her best tough-chief growl and begins frisking the dead cop. “That does it! I want your badge on my desk,
pronto
!” She’s not surprised that his gun is gone—if he still had it, why would he be dead?—but she does find a few things of interest in his pockets. A magnetic keycard of some sort and a baggie of pot. She confiscates both and they approach the station entrance.

The door is locked, which is an auspicious sign. Most easily accessed areas are stripped of anything useful. The harder a place is to reach, the more likely reaching it will be worthwhile. Nora and Addis work together to lift an empty Seattle Times kiosk and ram it through the tempered-glass street windows.

Once inside the lobby, her hopes sink a little. The reception desk is bare and there are no posters or placards on the walls, as if the station closed down officially instead of being abandoned intact like most businesses these days. They roam through empty hallways and locker rooms, past ceramic-tiled holding cells smeared with graffiti in various mediums. The anarchy “A” drawn in blood. The Fire Church’s burning Earth drawn in ash. A gigantic f horown face drawn in what looks like vomit. This one strikes Nora as the most eloquent. It should replace the American flag and fly proudly over City Hall, the first raw honesty to touch that place in years.

“Why didn’t Dad take us here?” Addis asks as they dig through a pile of blue uniforms.

“Probably didn’t know where it was.”

“But he was a policeman. He should have known about it.”

“He should have a lot of things.”

“What if him and Mom came here? What if they took all the bullets and stuff already?”

“Addy, there are plenty of people for us to worry about without bringing Mom and Dad into it.”

“No there aren’t.”

“Well…maybe not here. But other places.”

“Why is everywhere always empty? Where do people go?”

“Some of them find shelter. Like skyscrapers or stadiums.”

“And the other ones die, right? Like all those people out in the road?”

She pauses. “Right.”

“Okay.”

He finds a riot helmet and crams it down over his springy hair. “Halt!” he orders in cop-voice, and Nora smiles through a sudden rush of bittersweet sadness that takes her a moment to understand. She feels ashamed when she realizes it’s nostalgia. She has already begun missing him.

“I like this place,” he says. “Maybe we should stay here tonight.”

Nora looks around the station, considering it. “We broke the window. Anything could come in here and get us.”

“We could lock ourselves in the jail!” He starts giggling halfway through this idea.

“We need a simple building we can lock from the inside and get out of easily if we have to. This place has too many places to get trapped in. Once we’re done in here, we’ll go find a house.”

“Aww,” he says with genuine disappointment, and Nora wonders if being in the police station feels like being with his father. She wonders if he remembers the time Ababa Germame—aka Bob Greene—showed his kids around the D.C. precinct when Nora was twelve and Addis was three. The man was so proud. He had worked so hard, overcome such odds. None of his friends from the neighborhood could believe he had made it through the academy, even in its drastically simplified mid-apocalyptic form. Neither could his wife, who mocked and resented every forward step he took. And maybe all that doubt finally convinced him, too, because it was less than a year before he decided his shift would be easier with some amphetamines in his veins and shot a teenager for flipping him off, ending his brief foray into the world of unbroken people living unbroken lives.

Nora glances over her shoulder. One dark thought leads to another and she feels shadows creeping across her back. “Wait here a second,” she tells her brother. “I’m gonna go check outside.”

“Why?”

“To see if those things are still following us.”

“But they’re slow. We can just walk away from them.”

“Not if they trap us in a cramped building like this. And there might be more of them around here.”

“Really?” Addis’s eyes widen as if he’s never considered this, which worries Nora.

“Of course, Addy, duh. What do you think ate the brains out of all those people in the street?”

“If there’s more, where are they?”

“Couldlef he sa be anywhere. I don’t think there’s a hive in Seattle, so they’ll just be wandering around. That’s why we have to be super careful.”

“Okay.”

“Be right back.”

She jogs out into the lobby and crawls through the shattered window. The street is still motionless, just a desolate garden of sun-wrinkled corpses. Could it be that Boney and Clyde finally gave up? Went off in search of easier heists?

She hurries back to the station locker room, but her brother is not there. “Addis!” she shouts down the hall. She runs back into the lobby, then through the briefing room. “
Addis
!”

She finds him on the basement level, in a corner of the station they haven’t yet explored.

“Look at this,” he says, staring through the bars of a holding cell.

“I told you to wait,” she hisses at him, but something in the way he’s looking into the cell distracts her from her discipline.

“What is that?” he says, and Nora moves in behind him to see.

“Holy shit…” she whispers. In the corner of the cell sits a pile of small cubes, glittering like diamonds in their foil wrappers. “I think that’s…”

She scans the wall around the cell door, finds the lock mechanism and slips the cop’s keycard into it. The steel door unlocks with a loud
clack
and Nora heaves it open.

“What is it, what is it?” Addis demands, hopping on his toes.

Nora picks up one of the cubes and studies the wrapper. “Carbtein,” she reads incredulously. “Oh my God Addy this is
Carbtein
!”

“What’s Carbtein!”

“It’s…
food.
Like…
super
food, for soldiers and cops and stuff. Oh my God I can’t believe this.”

“What’s super food?”

“Here, just shut up and eat one.” She tears open the wrapper and hands the white cube to Addis. He regards it skeptically.

“This is food?”

“It’s like…concentrated food. They break stuff down to the basic nutrients and it just…goes right into your cells.”

Addis turns the cube in his hand, grimacing. He licks it cautiously. “It’s salty.” He nibbles a tiny bite off the corner. “But kinda sour, too.” He swallows hard, then closes his eyes and shudders. “Gross.”

Nora unwraps a cube and bites it in half. It has the texture of moist chalk, like a candy Valentine heart, but its flavor is a disorienting mix of dissonant notes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and a few that her mind can’t quite label. She concurs with her brother’s review.

“This is what we’re gonna eat?” Addis moans.

Nora is still chewing her first bite. The stuff resists her saliva; it won’t dissolve. She keeps chewing it into smaller and smaller particles until she finally convinces her throat to swallow. She gags, but when it hits her stomach she feels something remarkable. A wave of warmth spreads out from her core like she’s just taken a shot of whiskey. It will stay in her belly for hours, slowly releasing nutrients like an IV drip feed, and despite the awful taste lingering in her mouth, she smiles. Up until this moment, her plans for their future have been very small. Walk a little farther. Live a few more days. She has not allowed her mind to wander past tomorrow because tomorrow was a wall and beyond it a smothering black void she dared not approach. But a horizon has appeared.

“Eat aseft/p>

He moans again and takes a halfhearted bite.

Nora begins cramming the little foil packages into her backpack. Addis watches in dismay.

“Hey,” she says. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to us.”

“Is not,” he mumbles.

“There’s probably two hundred cubes here! We can live off this for
months
!”

He groans.

“Oh so you’d rather starve?”

“Maybe.”

She stops packing and fixes him with a hard stare. She knows he’s just a seven-year-old whining about food just like any seven-year-old in any era, but she is suddenly filled with rage. “You listen to me,” she says. “We are not at Auntie’s house, okay? It is not your fucking birthday. We are
dying.
Do you understand that?”

Addis is quiet.

“You get a few bites to eat and you forget what starving feels like. Well I don’t. It’s my job to take care of you now and I’m doing the best I can, but I’m scared shitless and all I ever dream about is failing. So don’t you fucking tell me you’d rather starve.”

He looks at the ground. “Sorry.”

“I’ll let you know next time I find pizza and ice cream but for now let’s just try to stay alive, okay?”

He sighs and takes another bite of his cube.

“Okay,” Nora says. “Let’s go find somewhere to sleep.”

When they emerge from the police station the sun is all the way down, leaving only a residual orange glow as it journeys west. Down where Pine intersects Broadway, a few street lamps flicker on. Nora sees the big man and his woman trudging steadily up the hill. And now someone else. Another man trailing an awkward distance behind them, like a surly teen who doesn’t want to be seen with his parents. So they’re gaining converts. Trying to start a hive. Even the Dead want a family.

Well you can’t have mine,
she mutters under her breath, and pulls Addis the other way.