The New Hunger (14 page)

“No,” Nora croaks. “
No!
”

The man bites into Addis’s shoulder. Addis begins to shake.

Nora clamps her eyes shut so hard it hurts. She runs backward, she bumps into a chair then a wall then stumbles out onto the lawn. All she sees is blackness and sparks but nd s bacin her mind the house is crumbling, brick disintegrating, walls toppling in on themselves and then a black cloud of dust that chokes the air and hides everything, erases everything, makes everything gone.

She grips her face in her hands, squeezing out all thought.

No.

Julie’s eyes
open halfway. Morning sun refracts through the water in them, making abstract art in her lashes and salts. She has just woken from a long night of dreams, bad like they always are now. She dreamt she was a monster. She dreamt she was alone in an empty school. She dreamt a skeleton had stolen her mother’s white dress and was dancing on a roof with her father.

She feels a rumbling under her and realizes the truck is moving. She sits up and wipes the crust out of her eyes. The sun has the shy, tentative angle of early dawn.

“Mom?” she says, and her mother’s eyes appear in the mirror, blue like hers but paler.

“Hi, honey,” she says.

Julie stretches her limbs. “Where are we?”

“Just coming up on Seattle. See?”

They crest a hill and the city skyline sweeps into view. She sees the Space Needle, still pointing straight and true, lights blinking calmly like nothing is wrong. The freeway begins to congest as they get closer to downtown. A permanent traffic jam of derelict cars crashed or abandoned in the street. Julie’s father slows to weave through the mess, carefully bulldozing cars aside when necessary. Julie keeps her eyes on the sky to avoid seeing whatever is inside those cars. She feels too fragile to take in more death right now. She is already filled to the brim.

This upward gaze is why, as they approach an overpass, she notices a girl stumbling across it.

“Dad!” she shouts and points wildly. “Look!”

“Oh God…” her mother whispers.

Her father stops the truck but says nothing. They all watch the girl make her way toward the other side of the freeway. Slow, shuffling steps. Empty, dull-eyed stare. A blood-smeared hand with a missing finger swinging against her hip.

Julie’s father looks back at the road and drives forward.

“Dad!”

“She’s Dead.”

“We don’t know that,” his wife says.

“You saw how she’s walking. You saw her hand. Alone in an exed city without even a backpack? She’s Dead.”

“What if she’s just hurt?” Julie demands.

“It’s clearly a bite. If she’s hasn’t converted yet, she will in a few minutes.”

Julie cranes her neck to look back at the overpass. “Dad, we have to at least check!”

“What’s the point, Julie?” For the first time this morning his eyes appear in the mirror, and Julie glimpses pain in them. “Do you want to make another new friend just to watch her become a corpse? Are you going to shoot her or will I have to?”

Julie’s eyes sting and her mouth trembles. She looks at the girl, older than her, older than the boy she killed yesterday, maybe closer to Nikki’s age, walking alone on a bridge.

She opens the truck’s door and jumps out.

The truck is not moving fast but the pavement sweeps her feet out from under her and she falls, land s he opens tnds on her elbows and then her mouth, feels a few teeth loosen. Heedless of the salty flood pouring down her throat, she scrambles to her feet and runs toward the overpass, screaming, “Hey! Hey!”

The girl on the overpass doesn’t seem to hear her. She continues stumbling forward.

“You’re not Dead!” Julie chokes through her tears. “You’re
not
Dead! You can come with us!”

Steely arms wrap around her from behind and pull her off her feet. “
Julie
,” her father hisses. “Jesus Christ, Julie.”

She collapses into her father’s grip, sobbing uncontrollably as blood streams down her chin and onto her t-shirt. She feels the cracks in the world widening. She feels it breaking.

Her father looks up at the girl on the overpass. “Miss?” he shouts like a weary cop reciting procedure. “Have you been bitten?”

The girl stares at him.

“Are you infected?”

She wobbles on her feet and says nothing.

Julie’s father scans the streets leading to the overpass, sizing up the risk and difficulty of reaching the girl, and shakes his head. He pulls Julie back toward the truck.

Julie tries to fight him but her body has gone limp. She feels his logic tugging at her brain but she fights that, too. His logic is sound. He’s not incorrect. But he’s wrong.

“Follow us!” Julie shouts hoarsely.

The girl on the overpass finally looks at her. Her gaze is unsteady, but so is Julie’s, blurred by hot streams of tears.

“We’re going to South Cascadia! There’s a stadium with people in it!”

Her father shoves her into the truck and slams the door. She rolls down the window and sticks her head out. “If you’re not Dead, come south! Meet us there!”

Without a word or a pause her father starts driving, resuming their slow crawl through traffic as if nothing has happened, but his face is harder that she has ever seen it. Her mother reaches back and dabs at her chin with a rag, soaking up the pink mixture of blood and tears. Julie’s eyes lock with hers, pleading for something she can’t articulate. Her mother’s lips tremble briefly, then they stiffen. She breaks away from Julie’s gaze.

“Your teeth might end up a little crooked,” she says, staring straight ahead. “But you’ll be okay. We’ll bandage your elbows at the next safe stop.” The Tahoe grinds against a rusted convertible and pushes it out of the way. A man-sized pile of rags crunches under the tires. “John, stop at the next department store please.”

“Why?”

Julie leans forward to find her mother’s face in the mirror, but all she can see is the white dress, her mother’s fingers tugging at the holes.

“I need some real clothes.”

The sky is a pale, dry blue like it always is now, even on perfect, cloudless afternoons. Smog, dust, airborne radiation; Julie doesn’t know what it is. But from old photos she knows the blue was deeper, once. Her father tells her it’s just a trick of photography, but she doesn’t believe him. She sees it in her dreams. Even when they’re nightmares.

Julie has had many nightmares in her short life. She is twelve, but she has seen death from more angles than her grandfather did in forty years of military service. She will grow up quickly. She will harden in places she shouldn’t and break apart in others, and she will bury both her parents before she’s old enough to buy beer. But even now she knows: this is living. She wolivrden in pln’t object to it or call it unfair, even though it is very, very, unfair. Life is only fair for the Dead, who get what they want because they want nothing. Julie wants everything, no matter how much it costs, and this is why she will change the world.

She watches the girl on the overpass shrinking into the distance. Their eyes meet across a river of cars. Just before the girl disappears, Julie drops something out the window.

• • •

“You’re not dead!”

The tall man watches the short girl stumble toward him on the street below, blood trickling down her chin and arms, bright red instead of black because she is alive. The brute is screaming again because there is another Living girl even closer to him, this one tall with black hair and brown skin and life that smells like liquor. The brute wants to take it and drink it, but the tall man is not moving. He hides behind a rusty truck, peering through its windows at the mystery unfolding in front of him. The tall girl is only a few yards away, but he ignores the commands throbbing in his hands and teeth and just watches the tiny blonde creature below.

She spits a mouthful of blood onto the asphalt and sucks in a lungful of air. “You’re not dead!” she shouts in a voice so very different from the melodic tones he heard in the forest yet in its own way beautiful, a broken sound of grief and desperate hope. Somehow these emotions ring clear to him despite his growing inability to feel them, and he wonders with some amazement why the girl is talking to him.

“Dead…” he croaks, slowly molding his tongue into the necessary shapes.

“You’re
not
dead!”

His eyes widen. He is more confused than the day he woke up near a river surrounded by corpses with a mind as dark as deep space. What does she mean? What is she trying to tell him? He knows he is not alive. If he were alive, everything would be different. If he were alive he would be sitting on a park bench with a mug of hot coffee reading his favorite dog-eared book for the tenth or twentieth time, glancing up now and then to watch the people stroll by, and the city would smile and lean in and whisper:
That bench was shaped for your body. That book was written for your mind. This city was built for your life, and all these people were born to share it with you. You are part of this, Living man. Go live.

If he were alive, he would not be walking through a concrete graveyard with a crowd of corpses, looking for lives to erase.

So why does this girl insist he’s not dead? He knows she is wiser than him. He heard it in her singing. Can he somehow believe her? He is not alive, that much is clear, but he
is
walking. He
does
have eyes, unlike the big man’s shriveled girlfriend, who is barely distinguishable from all the person-shaped piles littering the streets. He hasn’t fully surrendered to rot.

“Not…dead?” he murmurs, pressing his face against the truck’s grimy glass.

“You can come with us!”

The girl’s father has her now, dragging her away, and the tall man feels a sting in his eyes. After all this time and all the things he’s given up, it seems there are still things he wants. The brute tries relentlessly to shove them aside, hammering down every desire that isn’t hunger, but they remain. And he finds, to his surprise, that he wants them to.

Behind him, he hears the scraping of dry bone on pavement. He leaves the tall girl on the bridge and intercepts the others as they emerge from an alleyway. The big man, the small boy, and five boyentiethcreaking skeletons, their withered bones humming with the strange darkness that drives them. They would have killed the boy. They would have gleefully devoured his brain, a tiny sun hot and dense with life. But they restrained themselves for one simple reason: they need him to help kill others. They need to grow their terrible family, to add more teeth to their mouth so that someday it can eat the world.

As they sniff the air in the direction of the overpass, the tall man feels something move inside him.

It is not the brute.

“Guns,” he wheezes.

They regard him blankly.

“Too…many guns.”

He starts walking away from the overpass and after a brief hesitation, dazzled by the decisiveness of his movements, the others follow him.

The big man walks alongside him, giving him a curious look. The tall man returns it, unblinking.

“Name?” he wheezes at the big man.

The big man considers this with a troubled expression, as if he’s been asked to do something unnatural. Finally, a hum builds between his lips. “Mmmm.”

The tall man nods. “Rrrrr.”

The big man nods. They keep walking.

They walk away from the tall girl on the bridge, away from the short girl and her family disappearing into the distance, away from this beautiful city and its silent condemnation. The tall man doesn’t know where they’re going and doesn’t care. He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass.

But he did feel them. They did happen. They rest on the murky seabed of his mind, buried under sand and silt and miles of grey waves. Patient seeds waiting for light.

“You’re not Dead!”

Nora watches the apparition move toward her on the street below. Golden hair, azure eyes, fair skin like the saints on her mother’s candles, except those saints never had blood running down their chins.