The New Hunger (13 page)

He turns his sullen gaze back to the moon. “Mom and Dad are mean.”

Nora stares at the joint in her fingers. Addis reaches for it and she reflexively flicks it off the balcony.

“Why’d you
do
that?” he whines, frowning at her. “It made me feel really good.”

“I don’t think it’s…” She’s too rattled to finish. She shakes her head. “No more.”

“Fine.”

They both study the moon, Addis pouting, Nora wondering where the cop got this baggie and if perhaps there were a few other spices mixed into those herbs. That eerie sensation of charged air is gone now, leaving only the familiar fog of a standard high. She settles into it, trying to erase the image of her brother’s eyes flashing like two gold rings in the moonlight.

She aims her flashlight at the moon. She imaginen. trying to s her beam touching its powdery deserts and takes some whimsical comfort from the thought. A small taste of escape from this awful place. Then she swings the beam back to Earth, and it glints off the silver eyes of a rotting bald giant.

She manages not to drop the flashlight and stifles most of her scream. The man is standing in the middle of the yard looking dumbly up at her, his eyes unsquinting in the flashlight’s beam.

“I told you to leave us alone,” she says in a shaky whisper.

The man makes no response. Just stares. He has barely rotted at all since his death. He is grey all over, but the only other sign of decay is his lips, which have gone from full and sensuous to blue and slightly shriveled. It’s a shame. They were his best feature.

“Nora?” Addis says, his eyes wide with fear.

“It’s okay,” she says, scanning the yard with her flashlight and running mental checks on all the doors. “We’re safe up here.” She shines the light back into the big man’s eyes like a cop interrogating a suspect. “Where’s the new guy?” she yells at him in her toughest cop-voice, trying to force some steel into her nerves.

The man looks over his shoulder; Nora follows his gaze with her light and notices the top of a head peeking over the wall of shrubbery that surrounds the fence. She can’t help a little chuckle.

“What’s with him? Shy?”

“Nora…” Addis whimpers, tugging on her shirt.

“I told you it’s okay, Addy, they can’t get up here. Hey,” she calls to the big man. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

He raises his arm and points at the sky.

Nora looks up, frowns, looks back at him. “What’s that mean?”

He continues to point.

“She’s flying?”

He lowers his arm, raises it again.

“Maybe he means she went to Heaven,” Addis offers.

“Do you mean she died?” Nora asks the man.

He lowers his arm and makes no further comment.

“Well hey, I’m real sorry for your loss, but go the fuck away. We’re not letting you eat us.”

He doesn’t respond for a moment, then a low moan rises in his throat. The tone is unmistakably mournful, so resonant with despair it makes Nora shiver. When she shines her light into his eyes she sees pain, and it disturbs her in a way she can’t explain. She feels an urge to
comfort
him. She remembers all the pamphlets she’s read, the stories on the news and the warnings from her parents telling her what these creatures are. The tests done on them, declaring them nothing more than corpses experiencing bizarrely prolonged death spasms. But looking into this corpse’s eyes, she can see that there’s a man in there. And he’s suffering.

She sighs and folds her arms, turning to her brother. “What are we gonna do with these guys?”

“Shouldn’t we kill them? What if they get in?”

“This place is a fortress, Addy. They can’t get in.”

“What if they climb up here?”

“Zombies can’t climb. They have a hard enough time walking.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve got to figure something out, though. They’ll still be there in the morning.”

The big man waits patiently. Nora can hear the new guy pacing anxiously behind the hedge.

“They’re probably just hungry, right?” Addis sht?e big manays. “That one was trying to eat that wolf.”

“They’re always hungry. But they have to eat people; animal energy doesn’t work. Maybe he hasn’t figured that out yet.”

“What about Carbtein?”

“What about it?”

“You said it was like life powder.”

Nora’s eyes drift. “Right…”

“So maybe we could feed some to them? And they’d get full and leave us alone?”

“Addis Horace Greene,” she says in a tone of pleasant surprise. “You
are
super smart.”

He grins.

“Let’s try it. Toss him one.”

Addis pulls a cube out of the backpack and unwraps it. “Hey!” he calls down to the man. “Eat this and leave us alone!” He throws the cube. It hits the man directly in the face. The man backs away, looking up at them in surprise.

Nora giggles. “That’s
food
, dumb-ass!” she says, pointing down to where the cube fell. “It’s human energy! You can eat it.”

He looks down at the cube. He looks up at Nora. He picks up the cube, sniffs it, and stuffs the entire thing in his mouth.

Addis laughs. “He likes it!”

Nora watches him chew. “This could be a big deal, Addy. They could put piles of it all over the city and keep the zombies fed. Then maybe they wouldn’t—”

The man spits out his mouthful in a gooey pile of white shards, then stares up at Nora as if waiting for more.

“What the fuck, man?” She pulls another cube out of her backpack and rubs it hard against her wrist, leaving red abrasions caked with white powder. “
Swallow
it!” She raises it over her head to throw. “It’s human life, it’s what you—”

Something clamps onto her wrist. A withered vise of leather and bone—a hand, but barely. She looks up into a face but finds no eyes, just gluey blobs stuck to the sides of empty sockets. A skeleton shrink-wrapped in flesh is crouching at the edge of the roof like a spider, bracing against the gutter with one hand and gripping Nora’s with the other. Only the tendrils of blonde hair dangling from its scalp tell her this was once a human woman. A warbling hum emanates from its bones.

Nora buckles her knees and yanks against the thing’s grip but it’s shockingly strong—her knees dangle above the balcony floor with her full weight grinding against her wrist. The creature bites the Carbtein cube out of her hand and chews briefly, then tilts its head and lets the chunks drop out in strings of brown saliva. It looks at the man far below on the ground. It looks at Nora. It shoves her hand in its mouth and bites off her ring finger.

What happens then happens so fast it barely reaches Nora’s brain: blurry, disjointed images in flickery black and white. Before the pain in her finger even registers, her brother is standing in front of her and jumping up and swinging his hatchet; the creature’s arm snaps off above the wrist. He is yanking her back into the house and slamming the balcony door and slapping her hand down on the floor and then he is spreading her fingers away from her ring finger and swinging his hatchet down hard. The remainder of her finger jumps away from her hand and rolls into one of the children’s rooms. She stares at it, and when the hoarse scream rises in her throat, she’s not sure if it’s from the pain—a deep, aching agony that radiates through her hand and up into her arm—or from watching her severed finger turn gray, black, then shrivel up and slough away to bone right there in front of her.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry!” Addis is sobbing as he inches away from the blood pooling under Nora’s hand. She wants to tell him it’s okay; she wants to thank him and tell him she loves him so much, but she can see the creature through the balcony door’s windows, crouched on all fours and tearing apart her backpack, crunching greedy mouthfuls of Carbtein and drooling it back out in slimy piles. “
Why
?” she screams hysterically at the door, watching her and her brother’s future disappear into the thing’s gnarled jaws. The thing just glances at her briefly and keeps chewing, and Nora feels her mind sinking into a dark well.

She wobbles to her feet, squeezing her left wrist tight with her right hand. “Come on,” she hisses and staggers down the staircase. When she hits the bottom she pauses to listen. No breaking glass. No crunching wood. Even the sound of the thing’s frenzied chewing has stopped, and the house is silent. Where did it go? Surely one knuckle wasn’t enough to satisfy its hunger. That little nibble of finger food?

An unhinged giggle escapes her throat. Her head is swimming.

Addis dashes down hallways and sweeps his flashlight over doors and windows, checking the perimeter, but the house is still empty except for the family of skeletons reclining in the living room. Their yellowed faces sneer at Nora as Addis passes his light over them, casting all their awful edges in sharp relief.

She smells that burnt odor again. Plastic? Hair?

“Nora?” Addis whispers.

She sees a wisp of smoke pass through his beam and glances around in the dark.

“These skeletons…how come their skulls aren’t open like the ones in the street?”

Nora freezes. She follows her brother’s flashlight beam to where it rests on the father’s cranium. And she notices:

No cracks. No bullet holes. No gaping lobotomy. Inside that skull is an intact brain.

This is when she hears a noise, but not from upstairs. From the kitchen. A dry scraping, then the metallic squeak of an oven door opening.

Nora turns around. A skeleton is straightening up from behind the oven, holding a smoking baking pan in its bare bone hands. The pan’s Teflon peels off the sides in smoldering flakes. Neither Nora or her brother react as the skeleton carries the pan into the dining room and sets it on the table, where it sizzles on the cherrywood, adding more bitter smoke to the already acrid air. The skeleton is wearing an apron. Bits of long hair cling to its thin film of a scalp. The baking pan is empty.

The father rises from its easy chair in a noisy clatter of bones. The two children follow. They all sit at the dining table and begin dipping forks into the empty pan, serving nothing onto their white china plates, shoveling nothing into their mouths, teeth scraping and grinding on the steel tines. Then in mid-bite, as if surprised by a dinnertime doorbell, they all pause in unison and turn their heads to look at Nora.

Addis is the first to scream. Nora grabs his hand, ignoring the stabbing pain in her finger stump, and rushes to the front door. She is reaching for the latch when she sees two decomposing faces peering through the door’s arch window. She whirls around to head for the back door but the skeletal family is lined up at the end of the hall, staring with those grotesquely cheerful grins. The front door rattles violently. The big man is trying to force his way in. Nora has a flash of irrational hope, imagining for a moment that he is coming to save her, but then his fist smashes through the door’s window and she sees the look on his face, no longer pain but pure, mindless hunger. Whatever she sahatmomew in him before is rapidly departing.

The man and his partner are at the front door and the family is planted at the end of the hall, claw-like fingers twitching and pinching the air. There is no exit.

Nora pulls Addis into the hallway half-bathroom, a tiny box containing only a sink, a toilet, and a narrow window looking into the side yard. The room is barely wide enough for two people abreast. A good enough place for a last stand.

“Stay behind me,” she whispers. “If they get me…” She doesn’t finish. There is nothing else to say.

She holds her breath and listens. Louder than anything she hears her heart pummeling her breastbone. Throbbing in her temples and roaring in her ears. The tiny howls of her finger nerves, reaching out into open space and grasping around for their cut endings.

The big man has stopped pounding the door. There is silence in the hall. Then footsteps. Slow, one at a time, bone feet tapping the hardwood like dog claws or stiletto heels. The click of a latch. Squeak of a door. More footsteps, much heavier, but softened by shoes. Then silence.

Nora tenses. She grips the hatchet in both hands despite the growing numbness in her right. Addis is huddled behind her on the toilet seat, breathing hard but too terrified to cry. Her wide stance fills the room’s width, shielding him. She indulges in one selfish thought: if he dies, at least she won’t be here to see it. She is his older sister. She gets to go first.

She glances back to tell him she loves him. A shriveled face is grinning in the window. A spear of bone punches through the glass and through Addis. The spear lifts him, a hand grabs him, and he disappears through the window hole.

Nora is alone in the bathroom, staring into a dark yard of neat grass and trimmed shrubberies, just her and the soft chirp of crickets.

Her face contorts and trembles in a soundless shriek. She kicks open the bathroom door. The hall is empty. She runs through the wide-open front door and dashes around the house, waving her flashlight in wild arcs. She sees the back door swinging open and staggers back inside.

Everyone has gathered in the living room. The big man and the woman are kneeling on the floor in front of the coffee table. Addis lies on its ornate oak slab, his blood pooling in the engraved flowers and paisleys. The man and the woman gaze down on him and the skeletons lean in eagerly, angels in a satanic nativity.

Addis looks at Nora. He coughs wetly and his lips redden; he says something but it’s too faint. The big man scoops him up in his powerful arms and rises to his feet. The man looks at Nora. The spark of awareness is still there, weakened and faded, but there, and so is the pain. Then the creature stands up and touches his arm. Its sharp fingers press until they break his skin. Nora hears that warbling hum rising in the room, vibrating from within the creature and all the skeletons too, a thick and dissonant chord like a hundred cracked wineglasses singing in unison.

Over the top of this noise, the creature speaks. Its jaw opens and a dry, rasping caw emerges, shrill and cruel, full of wordless rage bubbling up and blaring like a dictator’s megaphone into the man’s ear.

The man’s eyes change. His brows and lips go slack. His pain and longing and uncertainty go away.