The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

  “Wolf, or bear,” Stanton said. “Maybe whatever’s been following us is diseased.” He pointed to the dark forest surrounding them; eyes followed.

  The part he didn’t understand was how this disease could pass so quickly, how a victim could succumb within hours. It seemed somehow faster in the young, as though the disease fed on the able-bodied and strong. Again, he cursed Edwin Bryant’s absence; his medical training would come in awfully handy right now. But there was nothing to be done for it except make their best guess.

  Stanton paced in front of the group, pointing again to the woods. “If we don’t want whatever’s waiting for us to come back, night after night, trying to pick off the cattle, bringing that disease with them, we’ve got to do something.”

  Patrick Breen, withdrawn deep into his worry, looked up. “What are you saying? We may need those cattle to keep us alive through the winter.”

  Stanton turned back to face the group. “I’m saying we slaughter them. Today. We can store the carcasses in snow. It’ll be easier than trying to guard twenty live head of cattle.” He looked at Breen. “It’s your livestock, Mr. Breen. It’s your decision. If we don’t do this, we stand the chance of losing those cattle one by one to whatever’s out there, and that won’t do any of us any good. What do you say?”

  All eyes were on Breen, the big man looking even bigger wrapped in his heavy coat, a bear pelt hanging from his shoulders. He glanced at his wife, Peggy, her eyes red from crying, and she gave an almost imperceptible nod. “All right then, we’ll do what you say. For the good of the wagon party.”

  Every grown man in the party gathered by the lake, bringing knives and axes and rope. It was hard, tiring work and within an hour the men were drenched in blood: blood up to their elbows. Their hair was matted with it, and they lost the grip on their weapons. A dozen scrawny flayed carcasses hung from the trees, dripping warm blood that melted the snow underneath. Steam rose from the ground and carried a warm, fecund scent.

  They’d have to stack the meat like cordwood in the snow to freeze, close enough for Patrick Breen to keep an eye on it but far away enough so the diseased wolves, if that was what they were, would not be led to their door.

  Stanton helped pack the carcasses in ice and snow. It was a huge quantity of meat. But not enough to see sixty people through an entire winter, if it came to that.

  He prayed it wouldn’t.

  He thought of the narrow mountain pass that he’d ridden through just a few weeks back—it would be just two weeks’ journey in fine weather from the pass to Johnson’s Ranch but one they simply couldn’t risk in these conditions. The land was hidden under deceptively deep drifts of snow. It was clear now they couldn’t even make it to the pass.

  The boys were sent to root through snow for more firewood. Stanton, William Eddy, and Jay Fosdick, husband to Mary’s sister Sarah, set to work skinning. Behind them floated sounds from the lake, the steady chop of metal on bone . . . and men shouting.

  The shouts rose up from the lake, growing louder in pitch.

  A scuffle had broken out. Stanton laid down his knife and joined the swarm of men flowing like ants to the water. He pushed his way through the crowd to see Noah James and Landrum Murphy squaring off. Both were young, under seventeen.

  “What’s going on here?” Stanton said, trying to get between them.

  Noah glowered. “Murphy’s too careless with his knife. He almost cut my hand off.”

  “It’s his own fault,” Landrum Murphy sneered. Landrum was a strapping farm boy with his mother Lavinah’s plain, broad face. “He’s standing around catching flies. This is men’s work we’re doing.” He was playing to the crowd. “If he can’t keep up, Noah should go back to the cabins with the women.”

  It was a low blow. Red-faced, Noah lunged, but Stanton caught him before he could do any harm. Still, Stanton was surprised by the boy’s strength. He could barely keep a grip on him.

  “You shouldn’t be out here anyway. Weren’t you both sick this morning? You should be resting.” Stanton pushed Noah back a step, but the boy wasn’t listening. The murderous look in his eyes gave Stanton a chill.

  But it was Landrum Murphy who charged, bloodied knife drawn. Noah, the quicker of the two, leapt out of his way but then stumbled in the choppy snow. The crowd danced back, too, as Landrum threw himself at Noah and knocked him to his back. In a split second, he drove the knife into Noah’s chest.

  A gasp ran through the circle, and for a second, everyone froze.

  Landrum sat on Noah James’s chest like a cobbler at his bench. Before anyone could pull him away, Landrum brought his knife to Noah’s face—prettier than Landrum’s, almost as pretty as a girl—and sliced off an ear. He held it up for a split second, watching it tremble in his fingers like a freshly caught minnow.

  And then snatched it up with his teeth, grinning.

  Panic. Shouting. Stanton grabbed the boy before he could reach for Noah’s other ear. It took two men plus Stanton to tackle the boy and pin him. Everyone was shouting. Stanton took a boot to the head, a ringing shock he felt in his teeth, but didn’t let go.

  Murder, someone screamed. Murder. Devil.

  He gripped Landrum Murphy in a bear hug. The boy’s chest and shoulders heaved with each breath, his whole body thrumming with excitement. Stanton couldn’t help but notice Landrum was hot to the touch. Burning up.

  “What the hell has gotten into you?” Stanton shouted at him, frightened beyond sense. And Noah lay with a ribbon of blood unspooling from his ruined face, and his chest sticky with blood, as another dust of snow began to fall. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Eliza Williams danced backward, away from Noah. “It’s madness, that’s what it is. After what we’ve been through, we’re all going mad.”

  He had heard of men going mad in the wilderness, driven to talk gibberish and crawl on all fours. He had heard of men lost for months in the snow forgetting their names, forgetting who they were, or that they were men at all.

  But this was something different.

  He thought of the Donners, miles back by now, and they hadn’t caught up. Surely they’d been forced to camp somewhere just as the rest were camped here. What would become of them? It seemed almost a certainty that they would’ve been beset by this same madness. He felt a pang of regret that he was powerless to help them, but he was needed here.

  He then thought suddenly of Halloran—he’d heard how Halloran had played the fiddle like a madman just days before he died. But that had been far enough back down the trail. “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he said shortly, “but maybe madness is part of the sickness, too. Maybe it can catch.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, Charles Stanton watched the layers of snow gathering on the pass and thought of Mary. Pure as snow. He wanted to love her with a clean heart. How all this snow and all this danger seemed to want to erase his past as badly as he did—to blot out everything. But as it did, it began to blot him out, too. To change him. His grandfather would say even this horrible situation was part of God’s plan, but Stanton would be damned if he could see what it was. It made him certain of one thing, however: his love for Mary Graves. She seemed more and more every day like the image of an angel his grandfather used to keep on the wall in their home—perfect, pure, but also untouchable.

  The rest, sleepless, watched each other: The disease, if it was a disease, might work like any other kind of sickness. They watched for sneezing, for coughing, for signs of fever.

  Noah James died before morning.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Donners had been more than a week at Alder Creek, and every day, it snowed. Elitha felt like the whole world had shrunk to the size of the tent, to the sprawling branches of the giant alder tree, to the distance between firepits. The snow melted away near the bonfires they burned every night, at Tamsen’s insistence, but be
yond this circle the landscape was nothing but a thick blanket of white. Snow halfway up most of the trees. Tamsen and Uncle Jacob decided it was too deep for the wagons. They debated how far they might get on snowshoes, if they had any, but all that talk amounted to nothing, since they didn’t.

  They were stuck, among an ever-deepening landscape of snow and ice.

  But there was one good thing about the snow, about their remote high nesting place in the mountains: It seemed the dead had not been able to follow her there. Even they knew to stay away from this cursed place. For the first time in months, her head didn’t echo with disrupted arguments and cussing and nonsensical conversations. Which left room instead to hear the moaning of her father, sick and bundled, still, at the back of their tent, where Tamsen tended to him hour after hour.

  For the first time, she wondered if her father would die. Death had been chasing them a long while, she knew, but it had never gotten this close. Now it was at their heels like a begging dog; the smell of it was in their hair and under their fingernails. It was everywhere, and it was waiting.

  Thinking of this made her miss Thomas, terribly. She missed the way he smiled at her when no one was looking, missed kissing him when they were able to steal a few moments alone. Now they were separated by who knew how many miles and snow so deep you could disappear in it, sink like a stone. No telling when she would see him again—if ever.

  Then there were the things waiting for them in the woods. She knew what they’d seen in the basin was real. She knew whatever those creatures were, they were after them, biding their time.

  The grown-ups did not like to talk about it, but sometimes, at night, when she woke to the sound of Tamsen weeping, or heard the crunch of her uncle’s boots outside the tents, she knew they were out there. Those times she knew, too, that the reason the ghost voices hadn’t followed her was because they were also afraid.

  It was getting so hard to find dry firewood. There was talk of burning the wagons, or trying to take down a tree. They were eyeing the oxen, too, as food got low. There was grass under the snow, but the cattle couldn’t get enough to keep them alive and they would start dying soon. “Either that or those things out there will get them,” Uncle Jacob had said bitterly. That was what he called them—because no one could say for sure what they were. Shadows. Shapes in the darkness. As though their worst inner fears had taken shape and grown limbs, as though the demons that had often visited Elitha’s mind in the form of voices had sprouted into half-living monsters come to haunt them all.

  She had overheard Aunt Betsy whispering to her husband one night: “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?” He had no response.

  That was when the bad thing happened. They were huddled together in the tent one evening, listening, always listening now. They were packed tight, sixteen people in a tent that usually held just one family. All the bodies kept them warm, warm enough to stink of sweat and oils and all the rest that came with a body. The air was thick with expelled breath. Outside, two of the teamsters were on guard with rifles, acting as lookouts and keeping the bonfires fed.

  Then: an unmistakable scrabbling outside the tent. There was no door, only an old cowhide hanging over the opening, so that bitter cold air slipped past its edges and froze whoever was sitting nearest. Something was standing right outside the tent, separated by only a flimsy bit of hide.

  Everyone looked up. Aunt Betsy stopped singing. Fear brought its own kind of cold, freezing the air in Elitha’s lungs. Why hadn’t the men on watch called out?

  They were dead, perhaps. She had a sudden image of the teamsters gutted, and charred creatures with human hands picking at their ribs. They were already steaming out their heartbeats in the snow.

  Uncle Jacob grabbed up his rifle and pulled back the hammer. “Who’s out there?” He got to his feet, crouching to avoid the low ceiling.

  No answer. Then there was the crunch of a foot on snow, then another.

  The cowhide started to lift . . .

  Aunt Betsy screamed as if someone had grabbed her.

  Jacob fired. The flash lit up her uncle’s face, alien and terrible in the glare. The tent filled with gun smoke. Elitha’s baby sister Eliza screamed and the little ones began to cry.

  Outside, someone screamed, too—a high-pitched shriek so unexpected and childish, Uncle Jacob froze. It was Tamsen who pushed the flap aside, to find Virginia Reed—Elitha’s friend, though she hadn’t seen her since their families separated—on her back in the snow, the right arm of her boiled-wool coat dark with blood.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY CARRIED HER INSIDE and Elitha’s father was rousted from his pallet to make way for her.

  “I’ll never be able to explain this to her mother if she dies,” Jacob said, as Tamsen eased off Virginia’s coat. It was a funny thing to say, Elitha thought; did he really think they’d ever see the rest of the wagon train again? The distance between camps might as well have been an ocean. Then again, Virginia had found her way here, somehow, and on her own, it seemed.

  “It looks like the shot just grazed her, thank God,” Tamsen said. “She’ll pull through if it doesn’t get infected.”

  Jacob was still white-faced. “What is she doing here? By herself, in the middle of the night?”

  “Maybe there’s trouble, wherever the rest of them are. I hope to God whatever it is, it didn’t follow her here,” Betsy said, wringing her hands. Jacob was still breathing hard and was pale as a sheet. He was back on his stool with his head in his hands, the rifle out of arm’s reach.

  Elitha sat next to Virginia, willing her to wake up. She considered Virginia her best friend among the girls of the wagon party, and felt terrible; she had forgotten all about her, and had spent little time with her since meeting Thomas. She hadn’t even missed Virginia; all her concern had been for him.

  Now she knew that if Virginia died, it would at least in part be her fault.

  And then they’d never know why she’d really come.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Edwin Bryant recognized the trail to the abandoned prospectors’ camp as soon as he saw it.

  He’d traveled north by northwest from Tiyeli Taba’s village on Tanau Mogop’s horse, which he tied to a tree several yards away. The wind riffled through the branches of the surrounding pines, sounding alive. A shiver ran down his back.

  He built a fire and carried a burning stick into the tumbledown hovel as a torch, knowing it would be as dark as a cave inside the shack. The items he’d found earlier waited for him: the tin cup, book of psalms, coins, bottles. He inspected them for identifying marks, particularly the psalm book. The flyleaf, the most likely place for an inscription, was gone as were the next thirty or forty thin, onionskin pages.

  He got down on his knees and shifted through the trapped dead leaves and pine needles that had fallen through the collapsed roof. He picked carefully through the loamy dirt, setting aside the edible bugs that he found, insects being his main source of food now.

  At the end of an hour, the only thing he’d turned up was a tattered shirt, decayed by long exposure to the elements. He sat back, stretching the fabric between his hands, feeling his spirits sink. Had it been a waste of time to return? What had he expected to find?

  Bryant put the shirt next to the other items and went outside, grateful for fresh air free of the musty taint of the cabin. On his last visit, he’d respectfully piled the bones he’d found outside the cabin, a way to mark the horrors that had taken place here. Staring at the skulls now, Bryant wondered if there had been any survivors. Was there a way to know how many men had been at the camp? He counted five skulls. Yet someone had severed the limbs from the bodies. Had it been one of the prospectors or someone else?

  He pulled the prospecting tools from under the bushes and sorted through them. There were a dozen shovels, though that proved nothing. He imagined it likely that a man who�
�d come all this way to prospect might have brought more than one shovel. Nine pickaxes of varying design. A number of dented tin ore buckets and a half-dozen sieve pans. Bryant inspected the tools one by one, looking for identifying marks. Though the heads of most of the implements were covered with rust, he could make out the manufacturers’ marks: Greenlee, Beatty, Stanley.

  It was then he noticed crudely scratched names on some of the wooden hafts. Probably meant to identify the owner when disagreements broke out. He sorted them by name. Whitely. Gerjets. Appleby. Smith. Stowe. Dunning. Foulkes. Peabody.

  Keseberg.

  Bryant’s gut twisted. He recalled now with decent clarity a fact that had slipped from his mind these past weeks. Lewis Keseberg had mentioned a relative—an uncle—who had gone prospecting out in these very mountains a handful of years ago. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time, though he was sure he did write of it to his fiancée. But now he realized it was too much to be coincidence. Lewis Keseberg’s uncle had been one of these prospectors, and had surely died along with the others. Or had he?

  That night as he sat next to the fire, sucking the wet innards of insects from their shells, Bryant wondered what exactly had happened at this doomed place—how it had all started. Of course, it was still possible there’d been no disease whatsoever, that the prospectors had all been attacked by an external force—but surely there’d been enough of them to defend themselves from such an attack, which meant he was likely right in assuming the threat had come from within.

  No, he felt more sure than ever that there was a disease to blame, the same one he’d seen in Smithboro, and that this sickness, this strange desire for human flesh of which the Indians had spoken—had even associated with their preexisting myth of the na’it—must have started here. Tanau Mogop had told Bryant they’d suspected the Anawai brought it on themselves by associating too freely with the mountain men who trekked through their forests. The Washoe were wary of outsiders, who were known to pass on sickness. They’d said the outbreak of behavior, and the behavior of sacrificing to the na’it had begun around exactly the same time, in what had been a relatively peaceful area. What else could explain it but the introduction of white men carrying the disease? But how?