Read The New Hunger Online

Authors: Isaac Marion

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Romance, #Paranormal, #General, #Dystopian

The New Hunger (9 page)

BOOK: The New Hunger
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Nora opens her mouth to answer, then chuckles, pondering the vocabulary of future generations.

“Nothing, Addy,” she says. “Nothing much.”

• • •

 

When they reach the bottom of the highway hill, she looks back to see how far they’ve come and notices two figures in the distance, cresting the peak. They are so far away they’d be invisible except that they are the only things in her entire field of vision that are moving. She can’t make out any details of their faces or features, but one of them is much taller than the other and the short one is limping severely, as if missing a foot, perhaps.

So they travel together on their little murder spree. Boney and Clyde. How cute.

“Those things are following us,” Nora tells Addis as they exit the highway and start heading east, toward the trio of radio towers that tops the hill like a tiara. “We need to find more bullets.”

“I’m really hungry,” Addis says.

“Did you finish your leftovers?”

“Yeah.”

“Check mine.”

He unzips her backpack and digs around in

Nora frowns at it. “Is that all I saved?”

“Yeah.”

“God. What a fatty.”

Addis opens it and squeezes a clump of tofu into his mouth. He offers the bag to her and she starts to take it, then looks at her brother’s face. His cheekbones.

“You have it,” she says. “I’m not hungry.”

Her stomach chooses that moment to growl ferociously.

“Are too,” Addis says.

“Okay I’m lying. But you’re a growing boy and I’m just a lazy old teenager. You eat it.”

“Do you think there’s food in those houses?”

“Probably. Hopefully.”

He relents. He squeezes out another precious helping of tofu and cold margarine and they keep walking.

They pass a small Airstream trailer turned on its side, napkins and plastic forks spewed out into the street. A menu Sharpied onto its steel panels advertises grass-fed burgers on locally baked brioche, but the stench emanating from it advertises maggots.

“Cheeseburgers,” Addis points out.

“Yummy.”

Addis sighs and digs his face into the Ziploc, licking out the last of the tofu.

“We’ll look for food as soon as we get safe,” Nora says. “Bullets before burgers.”

He gives her an accusatory glare that’s somewhat undermined by the globs of margarine in his eyebrows. “Are you gonna kill them next time?”

“I’m at least gonna kill the lady one.”

“Why not the man?”

“I don’t know. I’ll probably kill him too. But he’s a little different.”

“Because he didn’t try to eat us?”

“Maybe.”

“Why didn’t he?”

Nora doesn’t answer right away. She is in good shape, but the hill is steep and stealing her breath. “Remember when we stayed with Auntie Shirley on our way out here?”

He watches the pavement under his feet. “Yes.”

“Remember how when she got bitten, she just stood in the kitchen all day, washing the dishes over and over?”

“Yes.”

“And she didn’t try to eat Mom until three days later?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes when people turn into…‘zombies’ or whatever…it takes a while for them to figure out what they’re supposed to do. Maybe their personalities don’t disappear right away, so at first they’re just confused, and they don’t know who they are or what’s happening to them.”

Addis is quiet for a while, digesting this. “So why is that one following us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ’cause his girlfriend wants to eat us. Or maybe just ’cause I was the last person he saw before he died.”

Addis smiles. “Maybe he likes you.”

“Maybe the girl likes you.”

His smile vanishes.

• • •

 

By the time they reach the hill’s main thoroughfare, Broadway Ave, the sun is on its way down. Nora realizes they must have slept a lot later than she intended. She can’t remember if they ever actually slept the night before. The days of scheduled meals and bed meway down. times feel like ancient myths. She struggles to remember the color of her mother’s eyes.

They have entered a neighborhood that looks like it was once vibrant. Colorful storefronts with artful graffiti, concert posters smothering every pole, and dozens of stylishly dressed corpses littering the streets, their scooped-out skulls brimming with rainwater.

Nora opens her mouth to tell Addis not to look at them, then realizes how absurd that is. She lets him quietly absorb the massacre, hoping he will somehow process all his horrible experiences without too much damage. That he will find a way to bathe in poison without letting it inside.

“Look!” he says, pointing toward the park on the other side of the street. “A swimming pool!”

The park is huge, and may once have been beautiful. Rolling hills of grass, now overgrown with weeds. Tall, elegant lamp posts, now rusted. Its towering central fountain still produces a trickling stream where it must have once cascaded. The stream flows into a shallow pool less than a foot deep and fully accessible, none of the usual municipal railings and warnings, as if the city actually wanted people to play in it. Perhaps that headless couple holding hands in the bus stop used to sit on the benches here and watch their toddlers splash. Perhaps the college kids now feeding flies in the street used to get drunk and lie on their backs in this pool late at night, staring up at the stars, dreaming big dreams for themselves and for each other. Nora is going to cry again. This fucking city. This fucking world. When will she harden to it?

She watches Addis peel off his shoes and socks, sweaty and filthy, spotted red from bleeding blisters. She watches him cool his feet in the algae-slimed water. She wants to join him—she is drenched in sweat and the summer air seems to ripple around her in little pulses—but she needs to stay ready. They are not safe.

“Oh! Fuck!” she gasps as Addis palms a huge spray of water down the front of her tank-top. Addis almost falls over laughing.

“You
ass
hole!” she snaps, but she can’t hide the smile on her face and Addis keeps laughing. She whips off her shoes and runs into the pool. Addis squeals and flees. Nora kicks water at his back as he hops out of the pool and sprints off into the shaggy grass.

“Hey!” Nora shouts. “Come back!”

“Can’t catch me!” he giggles, and keeps running. Nora can see in the blurring speed of his feet that he’s beyond her discipline. The feeling of running barefoot in a field of grass, tendons flexed tight, feet bouncing off the ground like springs. Like running on a beach.

She lets him run. He won’t get far; he’s going in circles. She tries not to think about the precious calories he’s burning right now, maybe a whole meal’s worth. If they can’t spare the energy for a brief sprint in a park, they might as well go join the corpses on Broadway.

She hears a low growl behind her. Not a groan, not a moan, not a shout or a war cry; none of the sounds she’s used to hearing when something wants to kill her. Just a wet, rattling growl, like seashore rocks tumbling in the undertow. She turns around. A wolf is staring at her from under a nearby picnic table. Its eyes are ice blue. Like her mother’s, she suddenly recalls.

It creeps slowly from under the table, eyes fixed on hers. A big Canadian timber wolf, thin and desperate, fur caked in mud, too weary to bother cleaning itself anymore. Another phantasm pulled from the dying world’s fever dreams. Next will be dragons. Vampires. Devils. Ghosts. By the time the last human being—and there
will
be a last one, if only for a moment—realizes she is alozes time tne, the world will be nothing but the sum of her nightmares. Why should reality hold together with no minds left to force it?

Nora reaches for her hatchet and the wolf snarls as if it knows what a hatchet is. She glances right and sees Addis watching from a distant knoll, frozen with terror. She glances left and sees two more wolves slinking out from the trees near the edge of the park, leafy shadows stretching toward her as the sun sinks to the rooftops. Is this really how she’s going to die? In a world with so many options for exit, wandering a ruined city with no food or medicine, surrounded by murderers and the hungry Dead, she’s going to be killed by
wolves?

And yet it fits. It’s appropriate. If the Library of Congress can be destroyed by arson, the Louvre by mold and neglect, if all the cultural accomplishments of ten thousand years on this planet can be erased by a few decades of carelessness, why shouldn’t this young American be devoured by wild animals in the middle of a city park?

Her bare feet dip into the warm water of the wading pool. Her back bumps against the fountain and she feels the thin trickle of regurgitated rainwater flowing down her spine. The wolves circle in, grinning.

The big man steps around the fountain and stands between her and the wolves. He groans loudly at them and it almost sounds like a word, but too hoarse to understand.

The nearest wolf leaps at him. It’s no doubt aiming for his throat, but his throat is nearly six feet high so it gets a mouthful of his t-shirt instead. He grabs the animal and strangles it, or maybe breaks its neck—it takes only a few seconds for the wolf to go limp. The other two bite into his legs. He reaches down, seizes them by the scruff of the neck, and hammers their heads into the concrete until their yelps go quiet. Everything goes quiet. The big man, his bald head gleaming gray in the evening light, looks at the dead predators at his feet. He looks at Nora.

Nora runs.

“Did you
see
that?” Addis squeals when she comes to a stop next to him on the hill.

“Uh, no. I was watching the sunset.”

“It was just like in
Beauty and the Beast
!”

The man picks up one of the wolves, sniffs it, tears off a leg and rips out a bite of the hot muscle, chews for a moment, then casually vomits into the fountain.

“Yeah…” Nora mumbles. “Kind of.”

The man drops the wolf and looks up at Nora. There is plenty of distance between them and plenty of directions for her to run, so she stays put for now, waiting to see what he does. But he doesn’t do anything. He just stands there, looking at her.

“Why’d you do that?” she shouts.

He doesn’t react. She glances around, making sure his girlfriend can’t spring any more horror-movie shock-entrances on her, maybe popping out of a garbage can this time since there are no doors nearby.

“Stop following us, okay? Leave us alone!”

A sound gurgles in his throat and passes through his lips. It’s faint and he’s far away, but this time she’s sure it was a word.

“Did you hear him?” she asks Addis. “Did he just say something?”

Addis is squinting at the man, a queer expression on his face. “I think he said ‘please.’”

“What the fuck…” Nora mutters.

Out from behind the fountain, the man’s girlfriend staggers into view, still visibly female but hard to call a woman anymore. Its shoulders are now bare bone with nearly e w I watransparent scraps of skin dangling off. Its internal organs have shrunk away from the bullet wounds in its chest; Nora can see the lovely sunset shining through the holes. Since she last encountered this creature just a few hours ago, its decay has advanced about a month.

“Leave us
alone
!” she screams, and drags Addis away from the park, her fingers white-knuckled on his wrist.

 

“Q!”


Where
?”

“Right there. Food next exit…Quiznos.”

“Oh come on!”

“Stick that in your sandwich hole.”

“I hate you, Mom.”

Julie and her mother are playing the Alphabet Game. It is significantly harder without any passing license plates to read. They haven’t seen another car on the road since Idaho, and that one rammed them into the median and disgorged two men who thought they’d found a nice little family to rob. That game of Alphabet ended with Julie and her mother wiping blood off the Tahoe’s beige leather upholstery. She hopes this one will end with her being the first to spot the Seattle Zoo.

As always, she awoke to the hum of the tires and the seatbelt cutting into her neck. Her father gets up at an hour that’s only technically morning and usually has them on the road well before sunrise. She has always wanted to witness his mysterious morning routine but has never managed to wake up for it. She imagines him perusing back-issues of the
New York Times
and sipping a cup of instant coffee while field-stripping the family shotguns.

“How close are we to Seattle?” she asks him.

“Coming up on Burlington, so about two hours more unless the road clears up.”

The freeway has been getting progressively rougher since Bellingham. Huge potholes, scattered debris, and the occasional scorched wreck of a vehicle, either blown up in a crash or set ablaze by the Fire Church. Their speed has been dropping steadily as they weave through the mess.

“What’s the Almanac say about Burlington? Exed, right?”

“Last month’s said there were still a few communes and markets functioning. Small towns last longer than cities sometimes.”

“Why?”

“Not enough resources to attract militias and not enough Living to attract the Dead. If they’re small enough, they get left alone.”

BOOK: The New Hunger
5.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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