by Paula Guran
And even now, right at the end, I continue to fail her. I fail her yet again.
Quickly I lift the rifle and take aim, then fire a single bullet into the back of her head. There will be no solidarity here, no politic with the dead. The back of her skull comes apart and her blood anoints those she wished to help, bathing them in her desire to share. For even at the moment of her death, Coral just can’t stop giving.
I remain in the house for days afterwards, becoming gradually weaker with hunger. A sense of sorrow trickles slowly into me like water spilled on porous stone. At last there is a semblance of emotion. I miss Coral—her constant presence at my side—even though at the end she hated me.
I stay beneath the bedclothes after the second day, not even going downstairs to use the toilet. The bed begins to smell and the sheets are soaking wet, but I am long past caring. The sun rises and sets, the window lightens and darkens, my mind wanders. I remember green fields and children playing, couples walking hand-in-hand and the promise of a future that was not dead . . .
I lose count of the days, slipping between sleeping and wakefulness as easily as closing my eyes. The room is a mirage and the walls seem to shimmer. When I hear the noise downstairs—a crashing splintering sound—I suspect that it is the dead breaking in to finish me off. At last they have found me. I hope they choke on my gristle and that my bones shatter and stab them in the brain.
Footsteps on the stairs—slow, uneven, stumbling. The door opens . . . the room goes dark.
When I open my eyes again I am no longer alone. There is a man standing by the bed. He is not dead. His hair is brown and clean, and the overalls he wears are freshly washed. I can tell by the overpowering smell of soap that he has been well looked after. I stare at him, waiting for something to happen.
“How do you feel?”
I can barely answer. “Bad.”
“I’m sorry that we couldn’t come sooner. We’ve been watching you for days, weighing up the situation and waiting for the area to clear. To be safe.” His face barely moves as he speaks. There is a name-tag on his chest pocket, but I am too tired to read what it says.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
“I’m part of a collective. We have been hiding out for years, stockpiling supplies. Everything we have is shared equally between the members of the group.” His eyes blink.
“What do you want?”
“We can offer you food and shelter . . . a life, of sorts. All you need to do is work with us, become one of us.” His hands clench at his sides. “Help us to re-build something good.”
“How long have you been watching us?”
“A few days. We had to be sure . . . be safe.”
“Did you see what happened to my wife?”
He pauses before answering. “I’m sorry. I wish we could’ve come earlier, but it wasn’t safe. I’m sorry.”
Sorry. I have never met anyone so sorry in my whole life.
“Not. Safe.” I stare at him, knowing that this has all come much too late to mean anything. “And you have food and shelter?”
“Yes. We have those things, and much more.” He lifts his left hand, which clasps a small sack that I had not noticed before. Cans and bottles rattle and sing as he shakes it at arm’s length, almost teasing me.
My response surprises me almost as much as him.
“I don’t want your . . . fucking . . . charity.” I pull down the bedclothes and use the rifle hidden beneath the stained sheets to shoot him in the head. I smile as the blood sprays and his knees buckle, toppling him to the floor. The sack rolls from his lifeless fingers, spilling its precious contents across the floorboards.
After a long time I finally get out of bed and cross the room. There is food and water and, even better, medicine. It is no longer charity—now that he is unable to offer these things freely, it is simply so much found goods. Now they are mine.
Days later, after the food and the water and the drugs, I am feeling much better. My mind is clear and my body has regained some strength. I still cannot think of a good enough reason to swallow a bullet, so instead I will go looking for the man’s comrades. And when I find them, I will show them what it means to be sorry.
Only then can I rest—when the world truly belongs to the dead.
About the Author
Gary McMahon’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.K. and U.S and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters, Rain Dogs, Different Skins, Pieces of Midnight, Hungry Hearts, and has edited anthology We Fade to Grey. Forthcoming are several reprints in “Best of” anthologies, a story in the mass market anthology The End of the Line, novels Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things from Angry Robot, and The Concrete Grove trilogy from Solaris. His Web site: www.garymcmahon.com.
Story Notes
McMahon’s story brings up the question of just who the monsters are.
Douglas E. Winters once said: “A deft morality play for television, Rod Serling’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” warned of the dangers of seeking the monstrous in skin other than our own. Just as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) signaled the certain sunset of the gothic by critiquing its preoccupation with the external, Serling’s simple scenario, in which everyday people hasten with McCarthyite fervor to condemn each other as monsters, underscored the fragile reign of the creature . . . Now that we have seen the monsters—now that they have arrived on Maple Street—we have learned that certain truth: They are us.”
The Last Supper
Scott Edelman
Walter’s mind was at one time rich with emotions other than hunger, but those feelings had long since fallen away. They’d dropped from his being like the flesh, now absent, which had once kept the wind from whistling through his cheeks.
Gone was happiness. Gone greed. Gone anger and love and joy.
Now there was but hunger, and hunger only.
As Walter, his joints as stiff as his brain, staggered through the deserted streets of what had until recently been one of the most heavily populated cities in the world, that hunger burned through him, becoming his entire reason for being.
Hunger had not been an issue for him at first. During the early weeks of his rebirth, there had been enough food for all. The streets had teemed with meat. The survivors hadn’t all evacuated at once. There were always plenty of the foolish lingering, which meant that he had little competition for the hunt. Those initial weeks of his renewed time on Earth had been about as easy as that of a bear smacking salmon skyward from a boiling river during spawning season.
Those days were gone. Now there was not even a faint whiff of food left to tease him from a distance. The streets were filled with an army of the hungry above, devourers who no longer had objects of desire upon which to fulfill their single purpose. For weeks, or maybe months, or perhaps even years—for his sense of time had been burned away along with most of his sense of self—walking the streets was akin to wandering through a maze of mirrors and seeing reflected back nothing more than duplicates of who he was, of what he had become—a bag of soiled clothing and shredded flesh, animated by a dead, dead soul.
Staggering through a deserted square that lay in the former heart of the city, stumbling by shattered storefronts and overturned buses, he sought out flesh with a hunger grown so strong that it was less a conscious thought than a tropism born out of whatever affliction had brought him and the rest of the human race to this state. His senses, torn and ragged though they were, radiated out in search of fresh meat, as they had every day since he had been reborn.
Nothing.
No scent filled his sunken nose, no sound his remaining ear. Yet he kept surging forward, sweeping the city, borne fruitlessly ahead out of a bloodlust beyond thought. Until this day, when what was left of his tongue began to salivate.
Blood. Somew
here out there was blood. Something with a pulse still radiated life nearby.
Whatever called to him was barely alive itself, and hidden, and quiet, but from its refuge its essence rang like a shout. Drawn by the vibrations of its life force, he turned from the square onto a broad avenue and then onto a narrow side street, knocking aside any barriers blocking the path to his blood—his blood now. He righted an overturned trashcan (but his promised meal was not hidden there), kicked up soot as he walked through the remnants of an ancient bonfire (but no, nothing there, either), and kept moving forward until he arrived at a large black car flipped over on one side against a light pole, its roof split open.
He pushed his way through a carpet of broken glass and peered down into what remained of the driver’s side door. He touched the steering wheel and a charge of energizing bloodlust coursed through him. Though the wheel’s leather skin had long ago been peeled away, he could feel the blood that had blossomed there right after impact, still feel the throbbing of its vanished presence. But he knew, if he could be said to know anything, that ghostly blood could not alone have been the call that he had heard, for after all the carnal scavenging that had occurred, no remnants of the accident could possibly still exist. The tug on his attention had to be more than that. Something was here, waiting for him.
Or hiding from him.
In the back of the tilted car, a rustling came from under shredded remnants of seat stuffing. From beneath the mound of makeshift bedding, confused eyes peered out at him. Walter filled with a surge of lust, and dropped atop the creature. A dog yelped—only a dog, and not a man, a man whose scream would strengthen him—and exploded into frantic wriggling, but there was no way the animal could get away from the steel cage of Walter’s hands. Seeing the nature of his victim’s species, the lust was gone. There was no longer anything appealing about this prey.
But his hunger remained.
The dog whimpered as Walter shifted his fingers to surround its neck and cradle its head in his hands. Its bright eyes pleaded and teased, but Walter had learned that the promise of satiation there was pointless. He slowly tightened his grip anyway, and the animal split in two, its head popping off to drop at his feet. He held the oozing neck up to his lips, and drank.
The blood was warm. The blood was salty.
The blood was useless.
His hunger still raged, his needs unsatisfied. What he required could only be provided by the blood of human, and not animal, intelligence. He let the dog fall, where it was immediately forgotten. There had to be something more still left on the face of the Earth. He moved on, clumsy but determined, his hunger once more an all-consuming creature. It wasn’t that he needed that flesh to live. Its presence in his leaky stomach was never what powered him. The strength of his desire was unrelated to any practical end.
He hungered, and so he needed to hunt. That was what he did. That was what he was.
He returned to endless days and nights spent walking the length and breadth of his island, but his prowling proved useless. Though he sniffed out the useless life of other dogs, and rats, and the last few surviving animals who had somehow not yet starved to death unfed at the zoo, nothing human called to him. The city was empty.
One day, much later, he paused in the harbor, and looked west toward the rest of his country, a nation that he had never seen in life. He listened for the call of something faint and distant, waited as the evidence of his senses washed over him. In an earlier time, he would have closed his eyes to focus, but his eyes no longer had lids to close.
The static of the city’s life, quivering nearby, no longer rose up to distract him. There was no close cacophony muffling him from the rest of the continent, just a few remaining notes vibrating out from points west. He began to walk toward them, pulled by the memory of flesh.
He dragged his creaking body along the shoreline until he came to a bridge, and then he crossed it, picking his way past snapped cables, overturned cars, and rifts through which could be seen the raging river below. He had no map, and needed none, any more than a baby needed a map to her mother’s breast, or a flower needed a map to the sun.
Concrete canyons gave way to ones born of rock, and time passed, light and dark dancing to change places as they had since the beginning of time, though he did not number the days they marked. The count did not matter. What mattered was that the sounds he heard, the stray pulsings in the distance, increased in volume as he moved.
His trek was not an easy one. He was used to concrete jungles, not the forest primeval, and yet that is where he was forced to travel, for life, if it wanted to stay alive, stayed far from highways as well. As he slipped on wet leaves and tumbled over fallen logs, he could feel an occasional beacon of information snuffed out, as another life was silenced, another slab of meat digested. Walter was not the only one on the prowl, and somehow he knew that if he did not hurry, the hunt would soon be over for him forever. As weeks passed, he could hear what had once been a constant chorus diminish into a plaintive solo. As Walter could pick out no other competing chorus, perhaps it was the final solo.
Its pull grew yet stronger, and as the flames of its sensations flickered higher, rubbing his desire raw, he moved even more quickly, stumbling lamely through a hilly forest.
Until one stumble became more than just a stumble. His ankle caught on an exposed root, and he then felt himself falling. He fell against what appeared to be a carpet of leaves, which exploded and scattered when he hit them, allowing him to fall some more.
From the bottom of a well twice his height, he looked up to a small patch of sky, and saw the first face in an eternity that was, amazingly, not like looking in a mirror. The flesh of the man’s face was pink and red, and as he breathed, puffs of steam came from his lips.
Then those lips, surrounded by a beard, moved, and a rough voice, grown unused to forming the sounds of human speech, said wearily, “Hello.”
Walter had not heard another’s voice in a long while, and that last time it had been molded in a scream.
Seeing the man up there, looking smug and seeming to feel himself safe, filled Walter with rage—the first time in ages anything but pure hunger filled him. He slammed his fists wildly against the muddy walls of his hole, unconsciously seeking a handhold that could bring him to the waiting feast above, but there was nothing he could grasp. As he struggled to beat out grips with which to climb, his flesh grew flayed against sharp stones and splintered roots, yet he did not tire. He would have gone on forever like that, a furious engine of need, had not the man above begun dropping further words to him down below. They were not frightened words or angry words or begging words, the only sort that Walter was lately used to hearing, so their tone confused him. He wasn’t sure what kind of words they were, and so he paused in his fury to listen.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the man, his head and shoulders taunting Walter in the slice of sky above. “We have a lot to talk about, you and I. Well . . . actually . . . I have a lot to talk about. All you have to do is listen. Which is good, because I have learned from others of your kind that all you are capable of doing is listening, and barely that.”
The man extended his arm over the hole. He rolled up his left sleeve, and then used his right hand to remove a large knife from a scabbard strapped to one thigh.
“This should help you to listen,” he said.
Walter could understand none of the words. But even he understood what happened next. The blade sliced the flesh of the man’s inner forearm, and bright blood flowed across his skin, spilled into the crook of his elbow, and then dripped in freefall. At the bottom of the pit, Walter tilted his head back like a man celebrating a spring rain, the stiff muscles in his neck creaking from the effort. He caught the short stream of drops on the back of his shredded throat.
“That’s all I can spare you for now,” the man said, pressing gauze against his voluntary wound and rolling his sleeve back down. “But then, you don’t like to hear that, do you?”
&
nbsp; Walter had no idea what he liked or didn’t like to hear. All he knew was the hunger. That brief taste had caused it to surge, multiplying the pain and power of his desire. He roared, flailing wildly at the walls of his prison.
“If you can only shut up,” said the man, “you’ll get more. We need to come to an agreement, and then, only then, there’ll be more. Can you understand that?”
Walter responded by throwing himself against the earthen walls of his narrow prison, but his response gained him nothing. As he battered his fists against the side of the pit, three of his fingers snapped off and dropped to the uneven floor. As he struggled more franticly, those body parts were ground beneath his feet like fat worms.
“This isn’t going to work,” muttered the man above, who began to weep. “I must have gone mad.”
He crumpled back out of Walter’s field of vision. Though he could still sense the brimming bag of meat above, its disappearance from his line of sight lowered Walter’s rage, and he subsided slightly. His hunger still overwhelmed him, but he was no longer overtaken by the mindless urge to flail. He howled without ceasing at the changing clouds above, at the sun, and at the moon, until his captor reappeared, suddenly to him, and sat on the lip of the hole. The man let his feet dangle over the edge. Walter leapt as high as his dusty muscles would let him, and tried to snatch the man’s heels, but he could not reach them. He tried once again, still falling short. The man snorted. Or laughed. Or cried. Walter couldn’t quite tell which.
“You can’t kill me,” the man said, peering down through his knees. “Well, you can, but you shouldn’t. Because once you kill me, it might be all over. Can you understand that? It’s been years since I saw another human being. Do you realize that? I may be it.”
Walter growled in response, and continued to batter against the sides of his prison.