There it is again, his kindness. It gives me pause. “Do you really feel nothing?” I’m like a broken bloody record today.
“Not nothing. Just not … much.”
“Why are you down here helping Dad with something you don’t know how to do if not because you love him? Why do you spend so much time with Mom when she nags you constantly? Why do me favors?”
Dave glances at Dad and then back at me. His gaze flickers, hiding distant discomfort or maybe confusion. “I don’t know,” he replies. “There are things that drive us besides love.”
“But not to be kind or generous, surely.” I frown. “Unless it’s self-serving, but I don’t believe that. Not about you.”
He shrugs and pats me on the head like a dog, then heads for the door. “I dunno, bro. Maybe it’s habit.”
When Dad and I are alone my old man says, “Give it time.”
I don’t know what he thinks time will change, but I nod anyway.
*
After I’ve unpacked all the new supplies and had Mom check my shoulder and hand, I head for bed but go past the arena like I always do. Inside Josi is already training at the bag, punching it with the lean, coiled strength she’s developed. I watch her train sometimes and marvel at the change in her body, once so weak and now filled with power.
Zach is there with her, holding the bag and discussing something while she punches away. I watch their body language without being able to hear their voices, and I can see the seriousness in the tension of his face. She lands a mighty cross and he stumbles backwards with a groan. Offers her a rueful smile, says something short and then to my astonishment I hear the trickle of her laughter.
I’m ashamed of the hot, bitter jealousy it spikes. I haven’t heard her laugh in six months, that reality like torture for me, and yet she offers it up so easily to this strange son of our enemy.
I love her laugh. Once upon a time I lived off it. If I tried to do that now I’d starve to death.
“Luke?”
I lurch in fear and clutch at my heart. “Jesus!”
“Sorry!” Dodge splutters. “You were a million miles away.”
Josi and Zach have heard us and walk over. She’s sweaty and sexy as hell. I swallow and move my eyes forcibly to our scientist. “What’s up, man?”
Dodge looks between all three of us and then grins. “I made something that will help.”
“With what?”
“Our pest problem.” I sense Josi stiffen beside me as Dodge explains, “I’ve made a gas that will kill them. We just have to evacuate for the day and set off the bombs.”
“Like a bug bomb,” Zach points out sardonically.
“Exactly!” Dodge agrees, oblivious to his tone.
I look at my wife and see a cold fury descend upon her. She doesn’t say a word, just turns and walks back to the bag. She punches it once, twice and then lands a brutally heavy spinning kick; it’s enough to make the seam split, and sand pours all over her feet.
*
October 20th, 2067
Josephine
I’ve hardly moved in days. It isn’t the pain – the pain is nothing. It’s my body filled with lead. It’s sinking to the bottom of the ocean and not being able to swim back up. Not being able to breathe.
I can taste blood in my mouth. They’ve been feeding me raw human meat to keep me alive. Some part of me must still be trying to survive because in a daze I eat it. I eat it and think why not? At this point, why the fuck not. I haven’t washed, so I stink of my own waste again. And my head is filled with endless endless horror.
I thought I knew about monstrosity. I didn’t.
I thought I’d barred the door against the wolves but the wolf was me all along.
Now I want out of this prison of flesh.
*
I manage to sit up and the simple movement makes my head spin. The day is cold but I can’t feel it. I peer bleary-eyed around at my surrounds. Another part of the forest, as unremarkable and beautiful as the last. I can hear the river but the last time I went to drink it didn’t turn out so well. I don’t need water. What I need must be stolen. It’s back in its place on Medusa’s belt.
She’s chewing on a bone and has never looked so feral. I sidle closer; the movement causes all of my crew to look at me. I haven’t moved in days and perhaps they’re relieved they won’t have to keep carrying me.
I gaze at each of them and then Medusa. Her eyes are light brown inside the red. The bone (I think it was someone’s arm, once) pauses in her mouth as she peers back at me.
I make my next move slowly and deliberately, and I give her everything I have left with this unbroken look. Please, the look says. I’m done. And while we hold it I reach for her knife.
She lets me, watching closely. She knows I won’t hurt her: she can smell it.
Astro Boy makes an agitated whining sound. A warning. Someone shuffles nervously. But the others don’t move to stop me, they only watch.
I lift the blade to my wrist and press hard enough to break the skin. A bead of blood blooms and slips down my skin. Two quick incisions along the artery will do it, one on the left and then one on the right while I still have the strength.
I don’t mean to hesitate, but my eyes go up to the white sky through the trees. My whole soul goes up there, such that it is.
I don’t spare Luke a thought. I don’t care about him anymore. I don’t care about a single thing or person left in this ugly world. It’s devoid of anything worth saving, and I am the worst thing of all, the ugliest by far.
Thick, suffocating hatred fills me and I press the knife—
*
Something moves in the sky.
*
A gasp leaves me and the knife falls from my trembling fingers and there are tears of shock filling my eyes because—
Because far above in the empty white flies a bird.
I sink onto my back and watch the glorious beauty of its solitary flight, and I weep for the sudden reminder of the world’s sweetness.
Chapter 20
October 20th, 2067
Josephine
I follow it, ducking between trees and craning my neck to see where it flies. Medusa and the boys run after me but don’t try to stop me – instead they seem curious about my sudden burst of energy. All I know is that I can’t lose sight of the bird.
We plunge into a valley, the floor of which is a long narrow clearing. The bird is circling above, not moving on but watching something below, I think. It swoops lower and I make out the shape of it. Small in body, but with incredibly long wings and a prominent hooked beak. It’s a bird of prey, I have no doubt, but I’m not sure what kind.
The bird lands on a tree branch about twenty meters high. I walk closer, making sure to keep as silent as possible. The Furies are eerily still at the edge of the clearing. So much about them is unknowable and really creepy. I ignore them and keep my eyes trained on the bird.
As I draw near I’m surprised at how close it’s letting me get. From here I can see better. It’s several shades of brown and tan, with a deep chestnut in its wings and flecks of white throughout. The beak is more hooked than I thought, and there’s a ring of yellow around its liquid black eyes.
I think it’s a falcon.
My heart. It’s beating out of my body.
“Where did you come from?” I whisper.
The falcon’s head turns and beholds me. A very long, swollen moment stretches between us.
Without warning it launches into the air.
Don’t leave.
I watch it rise high and angle itself north. It disappears behind the trees and my heart breaks at the thought of never seeing it again.
But if ever I wanted to take meaning from life, if ever I decided to believe in signs, it would be now. It would be in the unbelievable timing of that bird’s appearance in my life.
I turn back to the Furies, those monsters I nearly killed myself to escape, those who have revealed how perfectly I belong with them.
And I smile.
*
The Fury army angles east this afternoon. I walk as fast as I can with the endless throbbing pain in my hand, searching the sky for distraction. It isn’t until late that I see the falcon again, flying above us, circling back and keeping pace with the group.
I laugh aloud in astonishment. I wonder if it has any idea it just saved my life.
*
October 21st, 2067
Josephine
We come upon a village this afternoon. The bird has been following us as we take the winding road through the forest in the direction of the sea. I spot it high above or perched in a branch, always watching. I wonder if it’s looking for food, trying to interpret whether or not we’re to be eaten. It doesn’t seem particularly bothered by our proximity, more curious than anything. An idea has been percolating and I want to see if I can find it something to eat.
As we walk through the center of town, the Furies fan out to search the abandoned buildings for god knows what – stray people, I suppose – and I catch sight of a building farther down that is completely blackened. It’s been burned in a fire. So has the one next to it, and actually the whole rest of the street has been scorched away. An enormous arched building that I assume must have been a church at one point is now blackened char, but still holds curiosity for the Furies, who kick in the crumbling door and enter in a flood.
Something feels wrong about it. There’s a prickling sensation on my arms as I follow them, driven by a powerful curiosity I should know better than to obey.
I walk into what’s left of the sooty church and find a graveyard. There is a sea of blackened, burned bodies and the smell hits so pungently that I gag. They’re not laid out, but scattered and twisted, making me sure they weren’t laid to rest here but burned alive.
Oh god. It was the smell of flesh they were following, and I watch the Furies lunge at the charred remains, apparently not caring that surely most of what they’re eating is ash. They tear and snarl and chew, fighting each other with wild hunger.
I am about to vomit as I stumble back outside and suck in a gasp of clean air. The world spins dizzily around me. There must be more bodies in other buildings because as I walk through the town I can hear the feeding frenzies on both sides.
There’s only one answer for what happened here. The plague hit. But burning the infected did nothing to stop the spread and eventually they were all dead, this entire village, just like this entire cursed country and maybe even the world.
It occurs to me like a blow that I’m alone. For the first time since I was taken I’m not being watched. My feet quicken and I duck into one of the houses that wasn’t burned down. It smells of mold and rot and I’m almost certain there are dead bodies hiding in here somewhere. I go straight to the kitchen in search of food, but I only find tins I can’t open and oats filled with weevils. I devour the oats, heedless of the wriggling creatures I can feel sliding down my throat. In moments like these the hunger is too great to ignore, and I can’t even think about escaping. Not until I’ve fed.
Although, really, where would I go? I can’t go home, not now that I’ve remembered what I am. I doubt I’d even make it that far on my own, without the warmth of other bodies to stave off the cold, without beasts to bring dead flesh for me to eat. There’s survival in numbers, even if those numbers are captors. Each day that passes, however, feels less like I’m a prisoner and more like I belong.
Still, I move around the house hurriedly, looking for anything I might use. Even if I don’t plan to escape, there is something I want more than anything, and I’ll need to be alone to have a shot at it.
I find a backpack upstairs, but as I fill it with warm clothes from the cupboard I catch sight of a body in the next room, a child’s body. My hands stall to stare at it. It isn’t plague ridden and it isn’t old. In fact, it might only be days dead. What does that mean? Are there other people out here somewhere? But why leave a dead child in this house? Why not bury him?
My hands shake as a new idea occurs to me. I was right when I told the kids in the tunnels that I had no line to cross anymore. I just had no idea how right.
I drag the child down the stairs and out the front of the house. It’s easy – he’s so little. I don’t apologize or beg forgiveness. He’s gone. He’s flesh. He’s food. And I need the Furies to trust me.
“Hey!” I shout. “Medusa!”
I’ve been saying her name every day, addressing her with it as much as I can because I want to see if they’re capable of learning cognitive behavioral patterns or language recognition. I know she can speak, I just don’t know if she can learn new words.
Turns out she can. Upon hearing her name Medusa bounds out of a building about a hundred meters down the street, spots me and sprints my way. I feel a moment of fear as she thunders toward me, but after a loud cry she simply lunges onto the child and starts devouring him. Her group of five arrives and she lets them have at it for a few minutes. The sound is always the worst. The crunch and slurp and chew and swallow of it all. The wetness of it, the meat of it.
Medusa growls and they pull back from the mess that was a child.
To me she says, “Feed.”
It makes the hairs on my neck stand on end. She so rarely speaks that it chills me to the core. Steeling myself, I do as I know I have to. I’ve got to be brought into the fold, made one of them in every way. So I kneel and lean my face to the gray flesh of the child’s thigh and I bite. It’s not like the other times, when I’ve been given meat I never saw beforehand. This is actually a corpse that I’m biting into with my too-blunt human teeth. This is real human blood spilling into my mouth and coating my throat. The blood moon envelops me and I flash between all the memories of myself until I’m so disoriented I lose all sense of where and when I am. All I know is that I’m eating as I have done too many times before, and that I am no longer Josephine Luquet, but something much, much less.
*
October 22nd, 2067
Josephine
We’ve set up camp nearby the village to take advantage of the several hundred dead bodies. I spend the time making my way through the wasteland of a village and scavenging. In the houses that haven’t burned down I look for food and supplies. I manage to come up with quite a good haul, plenty of rations, weapons and best of all: clean, warm clothes. I spend this morning looking for something I can use as bait. There’s an old, slightly moldy packet of dried apricots that will do nicely, and I place these under dusty jars propped with the ends of chopsticks. They’re pretty good little traps, if I do say so myself, though it takes ages to get them balanced right.
*
October 25th, 2067
Josephine
For the last three days I’ve sat apart from the group. Close enough to be visible but far enough that it’s quiet and still. I have in my pocket a treasure. One I finally found in the trap I placed in the church, taking its fill like the rest of us scavengers. Now I hold its small, wriggling body in my hand and sit quietly between the great oaks of the forest.
I’m not sure if this will help, but I whistle like I have for the last couple of days. One long bending note. An arching note. I don’t know about animal calls, but I know about the sound of a note, and in this one I put all my sweetness, all my yearning.
I do this for the next hour or so, send this gentle call into the woods.
And eventually it comes, just as it has been doing every day. Curiosity, I’m sure. The sound is an unusual one. It lands on the outstretched branch of an oak, partially hidden behind leaves. I can feel it staring at me.
Out of my stolen coat pocket I produce the mouse. I hold it by the tail and let it squirm visibly.
The falcon’s eyes narrow in on it.
The mouse makes small noises of fear and lurches helplessly.
I think the falcon is female. She has wider wings than I would have thought, but quite a large body, which makes me think she must be a young female. In Will’s book it said tha
t males are about a third smaller than females, and that as youths a falcon’s wings are wider so it can learn flight skills, then taper down to become faster and more agile in high-speed maneuvers. This little girl looks like she’s in the process of growing up. She is fine and delicate, more fragile than anything I’ve ever seen. More precious to me than anything in this world. And I think she’s been following me.
“Here you go, girl,” I murmur.
I give a sharp whistle and throw the mouse to the ground. It scampers out of my sight but the falcon is already moving. She dives with impossible speed, extending her piercing talons. As she ducks out of the dive her wings spread and her talons pluck the mouse from the long grass. A thrill fills me, prickles my skin, electrocutes the tips of my hair. It’s primal and powerful and intimate, somehow, watching her hunt and kill her prey so close to me. She doesn’t fly off with the mouse, as I thought she might, but tears into it on the ground there, pulling pieces free and tossing them back into her throat to swallow.
Something happens to me as I watch her feeding on the mouse I trapped with apricots. Something I’m not prepared for.
The shame of what I’ve done goes numb.
My edges ripple and solidify once more into a new shape, and I feel myself sink into my proper place in this enormous wild savage beautiful world.
The falcon looks at me then, right into my eyes.
And it all becomes so clear, what the Furies are, the reason they took me, and everything I must now do. Hal spoke of taming the animal within. But I think he was wrong. I think we’re meant to let it free.
Chapter 21
March 30th, 2068
Luke
I’ve never seen Josi train so hard. Beyond her usual strength exercises, she’s been focusing on flexibility and agility – she’s preparing herself for something but she hasn’t said a word about what. Not to me, anyway. She talks a whole lot with Zach, the two of them constantly scurrying off to have their private little meetings. It’s really starting to get under my skin.
Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition) Page 26