Hungry

by H. A. Swain

  “That what you have has been built on the backs of others.”

  I feel fire rising in my cheeks as I admit, “I didn’t know that before I met you.”

  “But you’re willing to listen. And you think about what you hear.”

  “My mother would say I didn’t know how good I had it.”

  “That’s just a different way of saying you didn’t know how bad it was for everybody else,” Basil tells me. Then he steps forward and wraps me in an embrace. I slide my arms around his waist and settle against his chest inside the warmth of his hug.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” I whisper. All of my hesitation about going with him has vanished. “All my life everyone has claimed humans are more interconnected than ever, but I’ve always felt left out.” I squeeze him tighter. “Until now.”

  “I feel the same way,” he says, and then for the second time beneath this same night sky, we kiss.

  * * *

  It takes almost an hour of creeping through the sparsely lit back alleys of this Outer Loop neighborhood and peering inside garages until Basil finds what he’s looking for in a rickety old shed behind a ramshackle house. When he finds it, he waves me inside and smiles broadly. “Jackpot!” he whispers, whisking away a black tarp.

  “What is it?” I ask, staring at the strange two-wheeled vehicle in the dim light of the moon.

  “A motorbike,” he explains as he roots around in the dark corners of the shed.

  “From a bike-cart to this! We’re moving up in the world,” I say, which makes him snicker.

  He brings over a metal container with a long spout and hands me a thin little wire to hold while he unscrews a cap on the back end of the bike.

  “What’s that?”

  “Biofuel.”

  “And this?” I hold up the wire.

  “A wire.”

  “Thanks, genius.”

  “You’re the one who asked.”

  “I meant, what are we going to do with it?” I watch him for a few seconds, then it hits me. “Wait, are we stealing this?”

  Basil looks up while the fuel glugs into the tank. “You’ve never stolen anything before, have you?”

  I shift, uncomfortably. “Only from One World,” I say, which makes him laugh.

  “Like what?” He screws the cap back on the tank and puts the canister where he found it.

  “Stupid stuff. I hack into their system so they can’t track me or charge me when I play games or chat.”

  He stops what he’s doing and stares at me for a moment. “You can do that?”

  “When your dad is the one who designs Gizmos, you learn some things that might come in handy,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head and I can see that he’s smiling. “That is so subversive.”

  “Guess you’re not the only criminal, huh?”

  “You’re only a criminal if you get caught.” He smirks and points to the bike. “Shall we?”

  I hesitate. “I don’t know. Stealing from One World is one thing, but what if somebody comes out here tomorrow who needs to get to work?”

  Basil sucks in his cheeks. “I don’t think this person is going to work, Thalia.”

  “How do you know?”

  He points to a table in the back of the shed, where I can just make out rows of glass bottles and beakers, burners and tubes.

  “What is it?”

  “Drug lab,” he says. “Just another local entrepreneur.”

  I gasp. “How’d you know that?”

  Basil raises an eyebrow at me.

  “Oh right, your mom,” I say quietly, then I eye the bike. “What if we get caught?”

  Basil steps away from the bike. “I guess we could walk all night.”

  My knees go wobbly at the thought.

  “Or…” He slings one leg over the seat.

  While I’m hemming and hawing, a light flicks on in the house in front of the shed.

  I scurry toward Basil. “What should we do?”

  He reaches down into the bowels of the bike and yanks free some thin cables, then he breaks a flimsy casing that holds them together. “Give me that wire!” he says.

  I fumble the little wire toward his hands, but when I hear voices, I flinch and drop it on the ground.

  “Find it!” Basil whispers harshly. “Quick.”

  I drop to my knees, whisking my shaking hands over the dirty floor. “Oh no, oh no,” I chant, straining my eyes to find that little sliver. A door creaks open somewhere.

  “Hurry,” he hisses.

  The wire pokes the side of my hand. I grab it and shove it toward Basil, who bends it into the shape of a U then shoves each end inside two tiny ports of the connector. “Get on!” he says, as he pushes a switch and the bike roars to life. I scramble to throw my leg over the seat and cling to him as we go screaming backward, spitting dirt and rocks from beneath the tires.

  The back door of the house flies open. A tall woman runs down the steps, yelling and waving her arms.

  Basil jams the bike forward and cuts the front wheel hard to the right, which sends me flying sideways. My butt careens off the seat as I claw at Basil’s jacket to regain my balance, my legs flying out to either side. He cuts hard the other way, which pops me upright again. Then we go forward, straight toward the woman who’s running at us full force, red in the face and screeching.

  “Watch out!” I scream, terrified we’ll hit her.

  Basil swerves, but she catches hold of the handlebar, knocking us off balance and her to the ground. We teeter left then right, Basil grunts as he tries to regain control, but the bike tips, spilling us in the dirt. I look over my shoulder to see the woman hauling herself up and sprinting toward us again. I jump up, grab the handlebars, and yank the idling bike upright.

  “Come on, come on!” I scream at Basil.

  He half crawls, half runs toward me. Behind us, another person bursts out of the house. He stands on the top step and raises something long and skinny to his shoulder. For a moment I’m bewildered and feel like I’ve been transported inside a virtual game, until I realize that what he’s holding isn’t a virtual gun. It’s real.

  I know then that I can’t wait for Basil to drive this thing so I throw my leg over the seat and scream, “Get on!” over the sound of the first shot. As soon as I feel Basil’s weight behind me and his arms around my waist, I pull back on the right handle as I’d seen him do. The engine revs and the bike flies forward, sending us both backward, but we hold on tight. More shots echo off the houses. Basil gasps and grunts in pain. Although I have no idea what I’m doing, I keep the handle back as far as it will go. We veer wildly from side to side, but I don’t lose control. I hunch forward, keeping my eyes on the road and my legs wrapped tight around the seat, driving as fast as I can, to put as much distance between us and them as possible.

  When we’re around a corner and on the interior road, I yell, “Are you alright? Did they hit you? Are you bleeding?”

  He slumps against my back and pants into my ear. “Just keep going,” he says. “Get us out of here.”

  * * *

  Within ten minutes of twisting and turning through alleyways and dirt yards, we’re back on a crumbling, dusty road heading toward the tollgates with nobody behind us. Every once in a while, we pass the remains of decrepit strip malls and old hotels looming in the moonlight like memories lurking in the shadows of my grandparents’ minds. The landscape here is so burned out and bald that it looks like the playing field for Pesky Petey before the virtual effects kick in. In the distance, beyond the toll wall, I see the highways circling the city Loops like tiny twinkling strings of gemstones. I keep blinking, half expecting this world to light up with virtual trees and grass and flowers, but the other part of my brain is slowly coming to terms with the fact that this is the reality behind every facade One World has created.

  Once I believe we’re safe, I gather my courage and slow down to check on Basil. “Hey,” I call. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “He g
ot my arm,” he tells me through gritted teeth.

  “Are you bleeding badly?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  I cruise to the side of the road and kill the motor. “We have to take a look,” I tell him.

  “It’s fine,” he says as I slide off the seat. “We should just keep going.”

  I shake my head and come around to his right side where his arm hangs limp. “You’ve been shot, Basil,” I tell him because I think he might be in shock and not realize the seriousness of the situation. In the dim light, I gently press my fingers against a warm, sticky splotch on the back of his coat sleeve. Basil moans and slumps forward a bit as if he’s going to be sick.

  I crouch beside him and lay my hand on the back of his head. “We have to stop the bleeding,” I tell him.

  When I was little, I loved to play a game with Papa Peter. It was always the same. We were doctors in a war with few supplies. I’m sure it was my childish way of making sense of the stories I overheard. Sometimes we’d rip up old bedsheets and dress each other’s wounds. He usually ended up looking like a mummy by the time I was done with him. Now I try to remember how he did it when he tended to my imaginary injuries. “First we need to make a bandage,” I say, looking around for something to use. “Then we’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “No doctor,” he says.

  I choose not to argue with him even though he’s wrong. “Are you wearing a T-shirt under there?”

  He nods.

  “I’m going to need it.” I take a deep breath and grab the cuff of his jacket. “I’m going to take this off you slowly. It might hurt, but you’ll be okay. Why don’t you talk to me while I do this?” This is a trick Papa Peter used on me when it was time for my inocs. He’d get me so caught up in telling him a story that I’d forget all about the injections, which I hated. “Have you ever been hurt before?” I ask as I slowly thread his arms out of the coat.

  “One time, when I was six or seven,” he says in a calm, almost monotone voice.

  “What happened?” I ask in an effort to keep him talking.

  “I was running through an abandoned hotel.” He gasps as the jacket peels away from his wound.

  “And?” I ask and crane my head around to get a better look at the back of his arm. It’s too dark to make out anything but mangled skin.

  He takes a breath. “I wasn’t supposed to be in there, of course, but what kid can resist jumping on all those beds or throwing old TVs inside an empty pool?”

  “We need to take off the long-sleeve shirt, too.” I move around to the front and begin undoing the buttons, which makes me blush furiously. As Yaz says, this is a lot of interpersonal touching. I breathe deeply to keep my hands steady and focus on the task, rather than thinking about being so close to Basil’s body. “What happened next?”

  Basil seems to relax just a bit as he digs back into his memory. “I was tearing down a hallway, and my foot went right through a rotten floorboard,” he tells me. “Whump! Down I went. One minute I was zooming around, the next, my leg had been swallowed up.”

  I lean forward to shimmy the green shirt over his shoulders and down his arms. Heat rises off his skin. He winces. “Sorry,” I say.

  “It’s okay,” he tells me and turns his face away.

  “Now…” I stand back and try to figure out how to get the T-shirt off without killing him. “I wish I had some scissors,” I mumble.

  “Here.” Basil uses his good arm to reach inside his pants pocket and remove a small compact red utensil.

  “What is this?” I turn it over in my hand.

  “Swiss Army knife.”

  I open up different blades, some kind of screwdriver and several pointy things. “This is amazing!” Then I get to the tiny scissors. “Whoa! So cool.” I pull his shirt away from his body and slowly cut a straight line up from his belly to his neck. “So what happened to your leg?”

  “I had a big gash all the way up my shin.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was with my brother.…”

  “Wait. What?” I stop cutting. “You have a brother?”

  “He was older. His name was Arol.”

  “Was?” I ask. Basil doesn’t answer so I refocus on slicing his shirt open. His newly pale skin faintly glimmers. I can see that he is lean and muscular and gorgeous in the hazy light, like something from a dream that disappears the moment you wake. With my eyes, I trace a path of hair that marches from his belly button into the waistband of his pants. Then I notice just above his right hip bone a smudge of ink. I lean closer and squint until I can see a sprouted seed and the word Remember tattooed on his skin. I reach out to touch it and feel the warmth of his skin beneath my fingers. I have so many questions, but I realize that now is not the time to ask. Instead, I stand up and carefully slip the shirt over his arms.

  “So, um,” I ask, my voice a little shaky as I try to stay on track. “When you hurt your leg, what did the doctor do?”

  Basil half laughs. “There were no doctors where we lived. This was before the free clinic came to town. And my parents didn’t have the money to pay someone in the Inner Loop, let alone get me through the tolls.”

  “Didn’t your family have insurance?”

  Basil frowns at me. “Uh, no.”

  “Wow,” I say, unable to hide my surprise. “My grandfather used to go to the Outer Loop to treat people without insurance.” I cut the T-shirt into long, wide strips that I lay over my shoulder. “It infuriated my grandmother that he’d work for nothing. She’d call him a socialist, which made him laugh and say, ‘I’ve been called worse.’”

  “Why did he stop?”

  I shake my head because I don’t know the answer. “I guess he got too old.”

  “He sounds like a good person,” Basil says.

  I stop cutting and stare at Basil sitting shirtless on the bike. “He is,” I tell him. “He would like you.”

  Basil looks down, uncertain or embarrassed. I can’t tell.

  “I’m going to have to touch your arm now.” I step closer and gather up my confidence. “It might hurt, but you’re going to be okay.” I place one hand firmly on his shoulder and hold him steady in my gaze.

  “Okay,” he says quietly. “I’m ready.”

  “Actually, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” I tell him and it’s true. “I think the bullet just grazed your skin. Good thing you had on that jacket. It took most of the hit.” I quickly wrap the strips of fabric from his elbow up to his shoulder, keeping it tight enough to stop the bleeding but not too tight that it will cut off his circulation. “Want me to sing to you?” I ask. “That’s what Papa Peter used to do while he’d give me the inocs.” I try to remember the song. “‘Don’t worry about a thing.…’” I sing, but I can’t quite recall the words. I hum, but I can’t get the melody right. “Something about three little birds.”

  “Never heard it,” he says and breathes deep.

  I step away and check out my handiwork. It’s not half bad. Papa Peter might even be proud. “This should slow the bleeding until we get you to a doctor.”

  Basil pulls away and winces in pain. “Thalia, I can’t go to a doctor! One bit of genetic material, and we’ll immediately get picked up by security agents.”

  “We’ll go to my grandfather,” I tell him. “He’ll help us.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t so bad.”

  “I just meant, you’re not going to bleed to death, but you’re going to need more than a dirty shirt wrapped around it to heal properly.” I help him back into his long-sleeve shirt and jacket. He tucks his mangled arm against his body and sighs with relief.

  “What happened with your leg?” I ask.

  “A neighbor stitched me up.”

  “Stitched?”

  “Needle and thread.”

  I grimace and look down at his legs. “And you were okay?”

  With his good arm he lifts the cuff of his pants. “Good as new.” In the dusky light, I can bare
ly make out the jagged white scar snaking up his leg, but still it makes me flinch. “I didn’t need a doctor when that happened.” He pulls his pant leg down. “So I won’t need one now.”

  “No. You couldn’t see one. That’s different.” I climb onto the bike in front of him and kick-start the bike like he did earlier. “Now let’s get to the tollgate so we can find my grandfather,” I say and pull onto the road again.

  * * *

  Just as the sun begins to come up rosy through the dust that hangs thick in the air out here, we reach a tollgate. Across the road a small cement building sits on an island of fractured concrete beneath a brightly blinking sign that reads, BIOFUEL AND KUDZARS. The haze makes everything appear ethereal, as if we are dreaming the pink-tinged, fuzzy-edged structures. With his good arm, Basil reaches in his pants pocket and pulls out the little device he handed the driver last night.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “A transponder I built.” He points it at the scanner above the tollgate, but nothing happens. “Move closer,” he says. I shuffle the bike forward, and he points the device again, but the light remains red and the gate firmly closed. “That’s weird.” He shakes the device and tries a third time.

  I look over my shoulder at him. “Is your account low on money?”

  He gives me one of his sideways smirks, and I realize what a dumb question I just asked. I reach for the machine and study it. “How’s it work?”

  “First I made a radio-frequency ID device so I could borrow account info off some Gizmos.”

  “Borrow?” I ask. “Like how we borrowed this motorbike?”

  “Something like that,” he says with a little grin. “Then I uploaded all the account info.” He turns the device over, looking for the source of the malfunction, but finds nothing. “Not all of the accounts could be empty at the same time. Maybe it got damaged when I fell off the bike. I’ll have to take it apart later and figure out what happened.” He looks over his shoulder at the biofuel and kudzar place. “We can probably get a black-market toll pass in there.”

  “Is that what a kudzar is? A black-market pass?”

  He chuckles. “No. A kudzar is a thing you smoke. It’s made of dried kudzu leaves and it gives you a buzz.”