by Travis West
with what little strength she had left, but ultimately found herself being pulled back into the building. The boy dragged her a few feet into the room and she heard the metal door clang shut behind her.
VIII
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
It was a lie. He was a man. He was the danger. He would kill her and mutilate her body and eat it, hopefully in that order. The danger didn’t care about anything but filling their stomachs. That was all that was left of them: a bunch of murderous stomachs to be filled.
“My name is Adam,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him in a gesture of submissiveness. “I just want to help.”
Valerie’s father had told her about the danger since she was old enough to listen. All men were the danger, he’d told her. Men were violent, cruel and dangerous. They were the enemy. This one said he didn’t want to hurt her, but it was a lie, a trick.
“Get away from me,” said Valerie, trying to stand herself up while pulling the small red pocketknife from her back pocket. Getting to her feet, she unfolded the knife and held it out in front of her. Adam, for his part, remained still, continuing to hold his hands out passively.
“Just stay away from us!” cried Valerie, remembering Alice, now stranded on top of the building. If Valerie were killed there would be no one to help Alice get down from the roof. She’d be stranded up there, though at least she would be relatively safe from the danger.
Adam very slowly slipped his rucksack off his back and slid it across the dusty floor towards Valerie. She jumped out of the way as though it might contain some sort of weapon or trap, but as the bag slid to a stop she saw through the opening at the top that it contained a number of small metal cylinders.
“I have food,” said Adam. “I can share it with you and your friend.”
Valerie’s resolve melted. The prospect of food, lots of food, was too much to resist. Even if it meant getting killed, it might be worth it to have one more good meal. As she looked sceptically at the bag, Valerie considered that if this boy had food, it was unlikely he would need to kill her. Her father had told her all men were the danger, but wasn’t he a man? Valerie had always tried not to think about this paradox, never being able to reconcile it in her mind. But if her father had been a good man, wasn’t it possible that this Adam was a good man too? Wasn’t it possible he didn’t want to hurt her? That he truly wanted to help?
“You can have that,” said Adam “All that. I’ve got lots more.”
All her life, Valerie had survived by not taking chances. She was careful, cautious. Always. And now she was considering trusting this boy, who might betray and kill her, and Alice too. But all the time she had spent living in perpetual fear, was that really living? Maybe trusting someone was worth the risk.
“All right,” said Valerie. “We need to help my friend get down from the roof.”
IX
Adam, Valerie and Alice sat on the floor. There was no fire, but the walls of the building protected them reasonably well from the cold. They were in an old gas station; Adam had found a working key to a security room, which made for a relatively safe place to seek shelter.
Adam hadn’t been lying about the food. Once they had gotten Alice down off the roof, he’d brought them to his secret home. On the wall were two long metal shelves sat, and they were both filled with cans of food. Enough to last weeks, maybe months.
Valerie still felt uncomfortable around Adam. She imagined if he was going to hurt them, he would have done it by now, having successfully lured them back to his lair and locked them in with him, but anything was possible with the danger. They were sometimes clever and sometimes random; all she could say about them for certain was that they should always be avoided if you wanted to stay breathing.
Alice slurped pears loudly from a can, the syrup dribbling down her face and onto her clothes. “Don’t eat so fast,” said Valerie. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
Alice nodded acknowledgment of the warning, and then proceeded to consume more of the canned fruit at no slower a pace. Valerie sipped tentatively at juice of her peaches, wanting to savour every bit of the taste she could. She often felt like the only taste she was capable of experiencing was ash, but the can of fruit was extricating that vile taste from her taste buds, dragging her back to the world before, where things had taste and people ate fruit.
“Aren’t you going to have anything?” she asked Adam. He shook his head.
“I ate earlier, before I went out to the mall,” he said. Valerie was instantly suspicious; perhaps there was something wrong with the food. But no, that would be impossible. The cans had been sealed shut, they’d had to use a can opener to get into them.
“Where did you get all this food?” asked Valerie.
“The group I was with… They had a lot.”
Valerie stared at him, waiting for more. They sat in silence for a while, but eventually Adam relented.
“A couple of years ago,” he continued, “we found some cargo containers near a shipyard. We figured they must have fallen off a ship or something, ‘cause they were just sitting there, washed up on the beach.”
“And they were full of food?” asked Alice.
Adam nodded. “Literally tons of it. We made a camp in the area and we’ve been living there ever since.”
“So why aren’t you with them now?” pursued Valerie.
“Can we go there?” interrupted Alice. “To your friends’ camp, where all the food is?”
“No,” replied Adam. “You can never go there. And I can never go back.”
X
Days passed peacefully in the metal office. They went out for a little while each day for fresh air. Adam had an old deck of cards and he taught Alice some games. Valerie read and re-read the same three books that she carried around in her backpack.
Adam never mentioned his former group and would not be persuaded by Valerie to elaborate on his story any further.
The days passed with a quiet, solitude. They spoke little to one another, even Alice. But there was a contentment in their new, mundane existence. It was as safe as any of them had ever felt, and that was enough to keep them going.
But the supply of cans on the wall dwindled. They all knew their sanctuary was only a temporary reprieve from the hardness and the cruelty outside. They ate sparingly, but they felt as though they dined like kings, especially Alice, who had literally been starving for almost her entire life.
They didn’t talk about their diminishing stores. Perhaps it was too painful to consider the fact that they would have to go back out on the road again, so they simply refused to let it occupy their thoughts. But when they reached their final three cans, the subject had to be broached.
“Why can’t we just go and get more from your friends?” begged Alice. “I don’t want to be hungry again.”
“They’ll kill me if they see me again,” said Adam. “They didn’t give me permission to leave, I just stole the food and ran because I couldn’t stand what they were doing anymore.”
“What were they doing?” asked Valerie, happy that the time had finally come to get some answers.
“You know what they were doing. What everyone does.”
“Killing,” said Valerie. “And eating.”
“It was my uncle and two of his friends. They took me in after my parents were killed. My uncle took care of me, but he was a scary man. Ruthless and mean. One night, just before I met you two, they brought home a girl they’d killed. She was younger than Alice. I knew I couldn’t stay with them anymore, so I grabbed what I could and I ran.”
“I don’t understand,” said Alice. “If you had all that food, why would they kill and eat people?”
“Because they liked it.”
XI
“They liked killing people?” Valerie was confused. She had always seen the danger as monsters, murdering people for their own sake, just because they didn’t want to go hungry. But this took their monstrosity to a whole other level. How was something like
this even possible?
Adam continued: “They like the killing. They like the taste of human meat. They’re animals and that’s why I had to run away from them.”
Valerie took that in for a moment.
“When you were with them…” she started.
“No!” cried Adam. “I only ate the canned food from the shipping containers. I refused to eat what they were eating. And I never helped them kill.”
“But you let it happen,” said Valerie. “You let them kill and you just stayed there and lived with them. Isn’t that just as bad?” She didn’t actually think it was, but she was still appalled by Adam’s apparent complacency.
Valerie had done the math, and she knew that in all likelihood the last girl they had killed, the one that finally drove Adam to run away from his uncle, had been Alice’s sister. She kept that fact to herself however, as she wasn’t sure how it would affect either Alice or Adam if they knew.
“I was afraid,” Adam tried to explain. “I was afraid of what they would do to me… and I was afraid of being alone.”
Valerie softened at that. After all, being left alone had always been her greatest fear when she was younger, and then it had been realized. Even after those few short weeks together with Alice and Adam, she couldn’t imagine going back to life on her own.
“Adam,” said Alice, very quietly. “When you were with those people… your uncle and the other men…”
“Yes?” Adam replied.
“Were you… I mean did you…” she paused, trying to form the words in