The New Hunger

by Isaac Marion

  What city is this? When did it die? And which of the endless selection of disasters killed it? If print news hadn’t vanished years ago, Nora could find a paper blowing in the street and read the bold headlines declaring the end. Now she’s left to wonder. Was it something quick and clean? Earthquakes, showers of space debris, freak tornados and rising tides? Or was it one of the threats that linger? Radiation. Viruses. People.

  She knows that knowing wouldn’t change anything. Death will introduce itself in its own time, and when she has shaken its hand and heard its offer, she will try her best to bargain with it.

  “Can I go swimming?” Addis pleads.

  “We don’t know what’s in there. It could be dangerous.”

  “It’s the ocean!”

  “Yeah, but not really.”

  They are standing onspa a new coastline. The ocean has grown tired of living on the beach and has moved to the city. Gentle waves lap against telephone poles. Pink and green anemones compete for real estate on parking meters. A barnacled BMW rocks lazily in the shifting tides.

  “Pleeease?” Addis begs.

  “You can wade in it. But only to your knees.”

  Addis whoops and starts pulling off his muddy, shredded Nikes.

  “Keep your shoes on. There’s probably all kinds of nasty stuff in there.”

  “But it’s the ocean!”

  “Shoes on.”

  He surrenders, rolls his jeans over his knees, and sloshes into the waves. Nora watches him long enough to decide he won’t drown or be eaten by urban sharks, then pulls the filter out of her pack and kneels at the water’s edge to fill her jug. She remembers a photo of her grandmother doing the same in some filthy Ethiopian river, and how it always made her glad she was born in America. She smiles darkly.

  It took only eight feet to drown every port in the world. New York is a bayou. New Orleans is a reef. Whatever city this is, it’s lucky to be sitting on a hill—the ocean has claimed only a few blocks. While her brother splashes and squeals, Nora scans the waterline for any trace of actual beach, some little patch of sand on the last remaining high ground. She remembers the feeling of sweaty toes digging into cool mud. She remembers sprinting over the thin after-waves that slid over each other like sheets of glass. When she ran with the waves it looked like she wasn’t moving. When she ran against them it looked like she was flying. She refuses to believe her brother will never know these things. Somewhere, they will find sand.

  When she looks back at him he’s in up to his neck, swimming.

  “Addis Horace Greene!” she hisses. “Out, right now!”

  “Brr!” he squeals as he dog-paddles past the post office, through soggy clusters of letters floating like lily pads. “It’s cold!”

  • • •

  Nora is grateful that it’s summer. The late-July heat is unpleasant but it won’t kill them. They can sleep in doorways or alleyways or in the middle of the street with nothing more than their tattered blanket to keep the dew off. She wonders how long her parents debated their decision. If they might have waited a few months for the weather to warm. She would like to believe in this tiny kindness, but she finds it hard.

  “Do we have anything left to eat?” Addis asks, shivering in his wet jeans. “Even some crumbs?”

  Nora digs through her backpack reflexively, but no miracle has taken place. No fishes or loaves have appeared. It contains the same flashlight, blanket, filter, and bottle it always has, nothing more. Not counting the Oreos, Addis’s last meal was two days ago. Nora can’t remember when hers was.

  She turns in a circle, examining the surrounding city. All the grocery stores are long since gutted. She found their last few morsels in the kitchen of a homeless shelter—five Oreos and half a can of peanuts—but that was an unlikely windfall. Actual restaurants are the lowest of low-hanging fruit and were probably stripped bare on this city’s first day of anarchy. But something on the horizon catches her eye. She bunches her lips into a determined scowl.

  “Come on,” she says, grabbing her brother’s hand.

  They wriggle through a tangle of rebar from a bombed-out McDonalds, climb over a rusty mountain of stacked cars, and there it is, rising in the distant haze: a wansnt hazehite Eiffel Tower with a flying saucer on top.

  “What’s that?” Addis asks.

  “It’s the Space Needle. I guess we’re in Seattle.”

  “What’s the Space Needle?”

  “It’s like…I don’t know. A tourist thing.”

  “What’s that round thing on the top? A space ship?”

  “I think it’s a restaurant.”

  “Can it go into space?”

  “I wish.”

  “But it’s the Space Needle.”

  “Sorry, Addy.”

  He frowns at the ground.

  “But space ships don’t have food. Restaurants do.”

  He raises his eyes, hopeful again. “Can we get up there?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s go see if the power’s still on.”

  • • •

  It’s more eerie to be alone in a city that’s lit up and functioning than one that’s a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards. It flickers and blinks. It buzzes to life.

  When the first signs of the end came—a riot here, a secession there, a few too many wars to shrug off with “boys will be boys”—people started to prepare. Every major business installed generators, and when the oil derricks started pumping mud and the strategic reserves burned up on a doomsday cult’s altar, solar power suddenly didn’t seem so whimsical. Even the brashest believers in America’s invincibility shut their mouths and gazed at the horizon with a wide-eyed oh shit stare. Solar panels appeared everywhere, glittering blue on highrise roofs and suburban lawns, nailed haphazardly onto billboards, blocking out the faces of grinning models like censorship bars.

  By then it was too late for such baby steps, of course. But at least this last desperate effort will provide a few extra years of light for the next generation, before it too flickers out.

  Nora gives her brother’s hand a squeeze as they make their way toward the Space Needle. The sun is setting and the monument’s lights are coming on one by one. The tip of the needle blinks steadily, a beacon for planes that will never leave the ground.

  In a remote stretch of land that has never known human footprints, nature is witnessing a strange sight. A dead thing is moving. Crows circle it uncertainly. Rats sniff the air wafting from it, trying to settle the disagreement between their eyes and noses. But the tall man is unaware of his effect on the surrounding wildlife. He is busy learning how to walk.

  This is a complex procedure, and the man is proud of his progress. His gait is far from graceful, but he has put appreciable distance between himself and the grisly scene of his birth. The black smoke is a far off smudge, and he can no longer smell any trace of the blonde woman’s rotting body.

  Left leg up, forward, down. Body forward, right leg up, right leg forward, left leg back.

  Repeat.

  He knows he should be doing something with his arms as well but hasn’t yet deduced what it could be. Waving? Flapp heing? He raises them straight ahead just to get them out of his way while he concentrates on the ancient art of ambulation. One step at a time.

  A few other things have come back to him. Words for common objects—grass, trees, sky—and a general overview of reality. He knows what a planet is and that he is on one and that its name is Earth. He is not sure what a country is, but he thinks this one is called America. He knows the strip of cloth around his neck is a tie, and that it’s the same color as the blood oozing from the bite on his leg, although that is rapidly darkening. The vacuum in his head is not as painful as it was, but there is another emptiness building in him. A hollow sensation that begins in his belly and creeps up into his mouth, pulling him forward like
a horse’s bit. Where are we going? he asks the emptiness. Are you taking us to people?

  There is no answer.

  As far as the tall man can tell, Earth is a world of grass and trees and water. He feels like it should be more beautiful than it is. The river is a sickly greenish brown. The sky is blue but not pretty. Too pale, almost gray. He remembers a sky that looked different—sitting on the roof under noonday sun, sipping a beer and listening to his father yell—and rivers that were clean—sinking to the bottom and holding his breath, wishing he never had to come up—but the hollowness yanks him out of his reverie. He keeps walking.

  The trees reach closer to the river until there is no more room to skirt around them, so he stops and regards the dark area where there are a lot of them together—forest. A smell of mildew and earthy rot emanates from it, stirring inexplicable terror in him—Hole. Worms. Darkness. Sleep. Vast mouth and endless throat, down, down, down—but he has no choice. He enters the forest.

  Julie watches the backs of her parents’ heads, looming like stone idols in the front seats. No one has spoken in two hours. She watches the trees and empty fields become buildings, gas stations, college campuses. Welcome to Bellingham, an overpass mural declares, or used to declare before some cheery vandal sprayed the B into an H and crossed out ingham.

  A spark of recognition goes off in her head and she lurches toward the front seats. “Hey! This is where Nikki lives!”

  Her father glances at her in the mirror. “Who?”

  “My pen-pal? The mailman’s niece?”

  “The girl who sent you Vicodin.”

  “Yes, Dad, that one. We have to stop!”

  “Bellingham is exed. Nothing there to stop for.”

  “But I got a letter from her like three months ago.”

  “It was exed last month.”

  “She could still be there.”

  “Highly unlikely.”

  “Can we please check?” She tries to catch her father’s eyes. “She’s my friend.”

  He doesn’t answer. She waits, preparing herself to digest yet another wish denied. Then to her surprise, and without comment, her father swerves onto the exit ramp.

  “John?” her mother says with some concern, but he ignores her. They drive into HBellingham.

  • • ">

  The streets are cluttered with abandoned cars and the Tahoe weaves through them delicately like a show horse through barrels. Julie presses her face to the glass, scanning the windows of houses for any sign of movement. Most are boarded over. The ones that aren’t boarded are broken. She sees movement in one, a sluggish shape lurching in the darkness of the living room, but she says nothing.

  “Where does Nikki live?” her father asks in a genial, optimistic tone that draws a cold look from his wife.

  “Downtown,” Julie says quietly. “Holly Street.”

  They turn right on Holly, the thoroughfare Nikki always talked about in her letters. She made it sound like it was Mardi Gras every weekend, she and her college buddies gathering in riotous numbers, linked arm in arm but still stumbling into the street, blocking traffic and laughing, singing, trying to forget the world crumbling around them. Julie had always wanted to see this street. To watch her friend drink and flirt and to learn first-hand how people keep living.

  But Holly Street is paved with corpses. And other, less rotted corpses stagger through the mess like scavenging dogs, picking for scraps on the bones of their friends.

  “What’s the address?” her father queries loudly as the Tahoe runs over a body, his voice not quite masking the crunch.

  Julie can’t speak.

  “Address?” he asks again as he swerves to hit a creature chewing on a little girl’s foot. Its brief grunt of surprise, the thumps and cracks as the big SUV grinds over it…

  “Twelve-Twelve,” she whispers.

  Her mother is silent in the front seat, keeping her eyes carefully hidden from the mirror.

  “Is this it?”

  The Tahoe rolls to a stop, its tires crackling on gravel and glass. Julie rolls down her window and regards the old house. Front porch lined with moldy couches. Beer bottles and cigarette butts, muddy boot marks on the crooked walls…it was probably a ruin before the collapse, but it’s a different kind now. Not the kind created by an excess of life. Not the result of seven young people crammed into a small house, desperate to enjoy themselves before the world they just inherited burns up. The windows are empty holes lined with glass teeth. The front door is wide open and creaking in the breeze, and everything inside is dark.

  “Nikki?” Julie manages to croak, despite the obvious. “Hello?”

  Her father shakes his head and puts the truck in gear. Julie makes no objection as they pull away from the house. She says nothing as they make their way back to I-5.

  “Was that really necessary, John?” her mother mutters.

  “She needs to understand.”

  “Understand what? That all her friends are dead? That the world’s a pile of shit? Christ.”

  His reply is the rev of the truck’s engine as they merge onto the freeway.

  Audrey Grigio twists her head around the seat to look at her daughter. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  Julie doesn’t meet her gaze. She stares out the window as her friend’s city recedes, giving way to pines and cedars, deep valleys and high mountains silhouetted against the browning sun.

  Dear Nikki,

  I can’t believe you’re gonna be roommates with Zack. He’s totally still in love with you! Won’t that be weird? I guess it’s good that you’re all sticking together right now, but ultht now,how do you deal with stuff like that? It’s bad enough sharing a class with a sappy boy but a house? What if he hears you having sex and kills himself? Haha.

  I’m sorry about Toby. It sounds like it’s getting pretty bad over there. Are you gonna stick it out? I hope you’re being careful. It’s really dumb that you’re 21 and don’t know how to shoot yet. Do you really want an 11-year-old teaching you how to take care of yourself? :-)

  So, I have some big news… We’re leaving New York. The whole east coast is falling apart, so we’re gonna head west and see what we find…maybe all the way to Canada! I won’t be able to get your letters on the way but I’ll try and send a few if we go along your uncle’s route. (I think the only reason he’s still delivering is cause he likes me so much, ha!) Dad doesn’t know what the rest of the country is like right now, it might be even worse than here so I’m kinda scared. But if we make it up north, maybe you and me can actually hang out! Try and stay alive till I get there okay?? :-)

  Your friend forever,

  J. B. G

  “What about these?” Addis asks, holding up a pair of pruning shears.

  “Too small.”

  He grabs a power drill. “This?”

  “Nothing electric.”

  He picks up a nail-pull bar and holds it out. Nora considers it. “Nah. You need to be able to pierce a skull without much windup. Something with more focused weight.”

  The fluorescent lights buzz overhead as she and her brother browse the aisles of a hardware store in search of weapons. Their parents took the guns. Nora would like to believe it was for safety, that they didn’t trust her not to shoot herself or Addis by mistake, but no. They’ve seen her shoot a militia sniper out of a seventh-story window, calmly aiming the family Glock in the dim morning light while they were still trying to untangle their blankets. She can find few excuses for her parents, and she wonders what she will tell Addis when he’s old enough to demand real answers.

  “How about this?”

  He hefts a big, oak-handled axe. He bunches his lips into a tough-guy scowl and takes a test swing, making a woosh sound with his mouth. The axe slips out of his hands and crashes into a display of detergent bottles, spewing milky blue Tide all over the floor.

  “It’s the right idea,” Nora giggles, “but maybe something a little more manageable.”

  She pulls two hatchets off the rack and ha
nds one to Addis. He swings it, making the woosh followed by a grisly splat, then grins at Nora. There is a savageness in this grin, a bloodlust that in any other era would have been patiently lectured out of him as he grew up. It scares Nora a little, but she says nothing. This is not any other era. This is now.

  “These’ll have to do,” she says. “Now let’s go find some food.”

  • • •

  The Space Needle’s lobby has been completely ransacked over the months or years, however long it’s been since this particular city surrendered to the march of regress. All the t-shirts and hats are gone. All the mugs, sunglasses, and “Space Noodles” pasta. heNone of the looters took an interest in the snowglobes, fridge magnets, or souvenir spoons. Even the paperweights—which could potentially be used as bludgeons—are still here.

  The lights in the lobby are broken out, but when Nora pushes the elevator button she hears machinery grinding into motion. Addis looks up at her, wriggling with excitement. Nora pulls her hatchet out of her backpack and waits.

  The doors open with a polite ding. There is nothing inside that wants to kill them.

  “Let me push it!” Addis shouts and begins scanning the rows of buttons.

  “Not the top one, that’s probably the view deck. There. That’s the restaurant.”

  Addis pushes the button. The elevator soars upward, making Nora’s knotted stomach groan in protest.

  “Whoa…” Addis gasps, pressing his face against the window as the city recedes below, spreading out to a hazy horizon of blue islands and waves. The disc at the top of the Space Needle rushes down and envelops them in darkness, then the doors open on the restaurant. Nora steps out and gives Addis a formal bow.

  “Welcome to Sky City, sir. Do you have a reservation?”