The New Hunger

by Isaac Marion

  “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.”

  “Why don’t we live in a small town then?”

  He looks over at his wife and smiles slightly. “Audrey?”

  “Your dad thinks we should,” she sighs. “What do you think, Julie? Should we move to a place that’s too boring for zombies?”

  “There are worse things than boredom,” her husband counters.

  “I’m not convinced of that.”

  “After what we’ve—”

  He slams on the brakes; Julie’s face smacks into the front seat as the Tahoe screeches to a stop. Stunned, she feels her nose to see if it’s bleeding, then reluctantly follows her parents’ gaze.

  They have just crested a hill, and directly in front of them is a police tire-shredding chain. In front of the chain is a wall of wrecked cars that extends across all eight lanes of the freeway. And beyond the wall, stretching across a wide, green valley of fertile farm fields, ise w If the cha what appears to be a war zone. What was once a shopping district has been reduced to an endless plain of pockmarked asphalt. The gutted, scorched interiors of big box retailers are visible through gaping holes in their walls. The only vehicles in the parking lots are tanks, some with their turrets blown off, some lying on their sides, treads hanging out like entrails; some marked Army, some spray-painted with the logos of various militias. And behind all this, as a perfectly hellish backdrop: the concrete skeletons of buildings engulfed in yellow flames of Fire Church phosphorous, left to burn for days as a warning. A monument. Or whatever their muddled message may be.

  “Why?” Julie asks in a very small voice. There is of course no answer.

  Her father grabs his shotgun and steps out of the truck, slipping into the hyper-alert posture of a soldier on perimeter check. Julie can’t see anything moving down in the valley; it could have been deserted weeks ago and set ablaze more recently by a few passing Churchers for morning devotional. She is hoping it’s as empty as it looks.

  “John,” her mother calls to her father’s back. “Let’s just go around. We can take the back roads till I-5 clears up.”

  He doesn’t answer. Julie can see in the set of his jaw and the animal blankness in his eyes that he didn’t even hear her. He’s in procedure mode. He will scout the area and ascertain possible threats before making any further decisions.

  “John!”

  He climbs into the bed of a pickup and pulls out his scope, begins scanning the smoldering valley below. Julie’s mother sighs and grabs her gun. “Stay here,” she tells Julie, locking the doors as she climbs out.

  Julie watches her mother approach her father, her irritation visible in the stiffness of her stride. She watches them argue, their voices not quite audible through the window. Then she glimpses movement in her periphery and the window shatters. A man’s arm reaches through and pulls the door open. She manages to grab her shotgun out of the ceiling rack just as two hands clamp around her ankles and yank her out of the truck. Her head hits the dirt hard and her vision swims. She sees a man’s face hovering over her—not a man. A boy. Just a few years older than her. Fourteen or fifteen. His beautiful brown eyes are wild with desperation. His black hair is matted and filthy. The knife in his hand is crusted with dried blood.

  Julie shoots him in the chest.

  The world moves very slowly as she drags herself upright, clinging to the side of the truck. She is distantly aware of her parents shooting the boy’s parents, who were emerging from a van with guns drawn and firing—she even notices the blood oozing from a graze on her father’s thigh. But mostly, she notices the boy dying on the ground in front of her.

  “Jesus Christ,” she hears her mother muttering. Her parents are standing next to her now. She doesn’t look at them. She looks at the boy, watches his eyes drop to the side as his breath leaks out of him, a slow hiss like a popped bicycle tire.

  The three of them stand in silence for a moment. Then Julie’s father bends down and picks up her gun—she doesn’t remember dropping it. He places it in her hands.

  “Are you serious?” Her mother’s eyes are ice picks boring into her father’s. “Are you fucking serious, John?”

  “It’s her third kill and we can’t keep hiding this part from her. She needs to face it.”

  The boy’s eyes begin to vibrate. Their color drains.

  “She’s twelve years old! She doesn’t need to face this yet!”

  “This is the world, Audrey. She knows that as well as we do.”

  Julie’s mother shakes her head in disbelief. A wet, sloppy breath attempts to inflate the boy’s punctured chest. Fixing her husband with a murderous glare, she steps toward the boy and cocks her pistol—then yelps as the boy’s face vanishes in a spray of blood.

  The valley reverberates with thunder. Audrey Grigio stares open-mouthed at her daughter, and at the ghost of smoke creeping out of her daughter’s shotgun.

  Julie hops into the truck and snaps the gun into the rack. She fastens her seatbelt and stares ahead with hollow eyes, waiting to leave.

  Silently, her parents climb into the front seats. Her father drives into the grassy median to get around the blockade, working his way through the edge of the war zone to reach the residential side streets, which will be slower than the freeway but marginally safer.

  “Hey Mom,” Julie says.

  “Yes, honey.”

  She points at the markings on a destroyed tank, the American flag’s red and blue scorched to gray but the word ARMY still clearly visible. “R.”

  Despite everything he’s traded away, the tall man still feels
a faint sense of awe as he wanders through the city. These towering structures, this elaborate urban circulatory system…whatever sort of creature he is, he can tell by the shape of the doors and stairs and benches that this was all designed for bodies like his, and this pleases him. He must have some value if something this magnificent was built for him. The wolves have fast legs and sharp teeth but they don’t have cities. He is excited to learn more about what he is—what he’s called and what he’s here for. Surely it’s something wonderful.

  The cloud of hands has not wavered since he arrived here, so he doesn’t worry about getting lost. Each smoky tendril stretches off in the same direction, sending faint pulses of sensation back to him. A strange sort of smell that bypasses his nose and saturates his whole body. Floral sweetness spiked with sharp, electrical bitterness, like a lavender bush struck by lightning. But he finds it hard to enjoy this perfume when his body is collapsing from the inside out. Whatever energy drives his muscles is almost gone, and he can feel his cells beginning to shrivel up like raisins. The gentle hill he’s climbing may prove an insurmountable summit.

  How much farther? he asks the brute.

  The brute ignores him.

  Are we almost there?

  Nothing.

  How about now?

  EAT, the brute snaps, then resumes its silence.

  The tall man sulks as he staggers up the hill. Finally, the cruel incline levels out into a long, flat boulevard. He instinctively glances at the street sign but finds no information there. The symbols on it blur and spin and fail to register in his brain.

  I can’t read.

  This thought surprises him, as he is not even sure what reading is. But what surprises him even more is the feeling that comes with it:

  Loss.

  What did he lose? What did he have? For reasons he can’t explain, his enthusiasm for learning his nature dims.

  His foot strikes something and heth=orid stumbles. He falls to the pavement and lands with his face inches from a round thing that looks like a face but has empty holes where eyes and a nose should be. He pulls himself upright and regards the long, spindly object attached to it—a body. The object is a body, brown and dry and withered. There are more like it all over the street. The cloud of hands pokes at them, mumbling something that’s probably eat, then loses interest and floats off into the city without comment. But the man is intrigued. The bodies resemble him in shape, but like the ones by the river there is a fundamental difference that goes beyond the condition of their flesh. It’s the same chasm that separated him from the girl in the woods, but yawning in the opposite direction.

  An insight begins to bubble in his head.

  Dead.

  The bodies are dead and the girl is…alive.

  He tilts his head and frowns. Then what am I?

  A pulse ripples through the cloud of hands. It has found something.

  Eat? the man prompts.

  No answer. The brute is silent, pensive, as if studying a puzzle. What could possibly hold the attention of that drooling monomaniac? The man increases his pace, stepping over heap after rotted heap.

  • • •

  The sun is nearly set, bathing the bodies in a warm orange glow that makes them look slightly less inert. He can almost imagine them standing up and dusting themselves off, groaning and chasing after him, but he knows that’s absurd. He knows what dead means now. It means gone forever. Lost. Irretrievable.

  He sees a familiar shape ahead and feels a rush of happiness when he realizes what it is. A person. Not a body, not an object in the street waiting to become dirt—an actual person, like him. A man, to be specific, even taller than the tall man and also big, a bearded, bald giant in a white t-shirt. He is just standing alone in the street, his eyes on the pavement, swaying slightly.

  The tall man approaches the big man with quick, clumsy strides, tripping over corpses, bumping into cars, making no attempt at stealth, but the big man doesn’t look up. His face is almost entirely blank, with just a faint trace of…an emotion…something bad maybe, but never mind; the tall man is too excited to focus on decoding emotional cues right now. He stops in front of the man and stands there, both of them swaying, but the big man still doesn’t look up.

  A trembling spasm begins to form in the back of the tall man’s throat. He is going to speak.

  He is going to say “hi” to someone.

  “Hhh…” he says, managing only this glottal, hebraic hiss.

  The big man does not react.

  “Hhh…hhh…hi.” He feels profoundly satisfied. He has just greeted another person.

  The big man’s eyes slide up to meet his, and the tall man begins to notice things. The big man’s eyes are an unnatural silvery grey. The same grey that stared up at him as he kicked the corpse by the river over and over, filled with some desperate rage that seems utterly foreign to him now. The big man’s skin is also grey, the same grey as the tall man’s. And there is a gaping wound in his barrel-like belly, visible through the bloody hole in his shirt.

  An insight:

  The big man is dead.

  And yet…

  The brute st">T>

  something there. A sort of anti-scent, a negative. He is not alive like the girl in the woods, but not dead like the bodies in the street. He is…

  He’s like you.

  The tall man looks at his hands, his arms, the black blood oozing from his calf.

  This is what you are.

  A moan emanates from the big man’s throat, and the tall man suddenly recognizes the emotion on his face. It’s the feeling of understanding a terrible truth. Of learning something that changes everything.

  A piercing screech sounds from the doorway of a nearby building, and another creature emerges onto the steps above them. A female corpse, nearly as rotten as the ones in the street, her hair hanging in mangy clumps, her naked body shriveled and sagging, full of holes and tears and exposed bones.

  This is what you will be.

  The woman is holding something. It is an arm. A scrawny thing, black tattoos of dice and dragons and dollar bills barely visible on its brown skin, blood still trickling from its red stump. With another triumphant screech, the woman throws the arm down the stairs. It bounces and twists and lands in front of the big man, who stares at it a moment, then snatches it up and bites into its bicep.

  This is what you do.

  The tall man is hungry. He is so hungry. The sight of the arm has sent the brute into a frenzy, and the hollowness is so strong it is tearing him apart. The woman disappears back into the building and the tall man follows her.

  The building is a coffee shop. A quaint, cozy little place lined with books, ancient bagels moldering in the pastry case, a few laptops left unattended and still not stolen. The tall man sees all this by the light of a tiny campfire in the middle of the room. A few smashed table legs stacked on a pile of crumpled book pages, burning hot and bright.

  Next to the fire are two bodies. A man and a woman, one brown, one pink, one missing an arm, the other missing everything.

  The tall man’s mind has ceased to function. All his senses have been absorbed by the hunger. All he can see is the cloud of hands flailing in his face. All he can smell or taste or even feel is the scent. The perfume.

  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.”