The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

The body behind her screamed and flung her sideways. Small but scrappy, she hit the ground rolling and came up into a crouch. Her bag was scattered all over the ground, her knife lost amid the disarray. Without taking a second glance at the figure nursing its hand in a shadow and swearing up a storm, Reesa leaped to her feet and tore across the parking lot. She was aiming for the lights of a nearby Taco Bell, a place with people who wouldn’t call the cops, a place where most of the staff were just kids working late night summer shifts.

  She didn’t get far. The man caught her by the hair and picked her up. She kicked and kicked at his stomach, trying to get a foot down low enough to send him sprawling, but he was too strong. The arm around her middle was like a metal band, tightening until she couldn’t breathe.

  “Fucking bitch!” he grunted in her ear.

  She leaned forward and brought her head back into his mouth, just to teach him a lesson. He staggered. Stars wheeled in front of her eyes. As he tumbled backward, dazed, she could feel blood on her scalp, trickling down her neck. The arms loosened a bit, and Reesa tried to escape. She sucked in as much air as she could, lifted her arms above her head, and slithered down. He was clutching, but she was wriggling lower with each step he took. When she’d gotten low enough, she brought her heel back into his crotch.

  He squeaked and she kicked again. Finally, his arms let go. Thrown forward, she hit the pavement knees first. She staggered up, her legs bloody, her pants torn, and limped toward the restaurant. Every sound he made behind her spurned her on. He rolled around and called her names, but she kept limping, taking short little breaths the whole way. By the time she reached her destination, she was so full of adrenalin that she didn’t feel the door as she collided with it. She fell through into the short hallway and went straight for the bathroom. It wasn’t until the lock clicked in her hand that she felt safe.

  She stumbled backward and onto the toilet, shaking so hard that it rattled. The sobs snuck out while she was fighting to breathe and kept coming even after she’d gotten her lungs back. She put her head between her knees and counted her blessings.

  Someone pounded on the door.

  Reesa jumped.

  “Restroom’s for customers only,” a voice said.

  She sat up and pushed her hair behind her ears. “How you know if I’m gonna buy something? Stop being the toilet police.”

  There was a hiss from outside, but heavy footfalls led away from the door.

  Looking at herself in the mirror, she could see her injuries. When he’d grabbed her, he’d done it hard. There was a red mark across her mouth that was going to be a black mark by the morning. Her lip was bloody, as was the back of her head where his two front teeth had sliced through. She took a wet paper towel and washed the gravel from her knees, then used the sink to bathe her head. She snuck out completely soaked and more than a little overcautious.

  There was no one sitting at the tables, no one waiting outside in the parking lot. In the distance, she could see her bag and its contents strewn all over the place but no assailant. If she was lucky, she’d hurt him bad enough to make him want to go home. People like that wanted easy pickin’s, not holy terrors.

  She slid out into the night carefully, scanning the terrain. It was a wide open plain of black, and if she was fast and alert, she could make it to the other side. She took off at a dead run and cleared the distance quickly, but as she reached her things, headlights clicked on in the bus park. She looked up and saw several silhouettes stalking around what appeared to be a moving van, forming a circle around her.

  Shoving everything she could find into the bag, she searched frantically for the knife. It had been in the outer pocket, but it was gone.

  “I like this one,” a voice broke into the silence.

  Reesa froze. The voice was familiar, but no, it couldn’t be. Gran was dead.

  “She’s got some fight in her.”

  The shadows closed in tighter. Reesa found the knife inside the larger compartment, tangled in a sock, and blindly swept it around herself. She backed away from the lights, but they came closer.

  “Collect her for me, if you please,” said the voice.

  Then there was the sound. It sliced through the darkness and light like a knife and cut straight into her brain. She tried to cling to the blade, but suddenly her fingers no longer worked. It clattered to the ground, followed by her bag. The figures came closer. Reesa tried to run, tried so hard that the effort would have sent her into the Guinness Book, but it did no good. Her limbs were no longer her own.

  The figures gathered around her, blocking out the light. Their mouths were open, like they were singing at full voice, but all that came out was the noise.

  She blacked out, and the memory itself was pulled low by the turbulence of fear and desperation. There was an undertow of anguish. I was dragged down and swirled over, until a third memory appeared from the abyss.

  She was lying on the ground. No, not on the ground, on a sheet of metal. When her eyes focused, she was looking at the prostrate forms of several other people, some injured, some partially nude, some staring blankly ahead as though dead, but all in large, metal cages. The man with the stick came back into the room, his boots thumping across the polished white floor. She listened as they stopped outside her cage.

  “Next,” he said with a humorless chuckle. He opened the cage door and took hold of Reesa’s hair, pulling her down the walkway. She was too weak to struggle, just let him pull her along until he’d deposited her in a cell of some kind. She stared at the concrete of the floor for a long while, the silence and darkness comforting. Then the door opened again, and she was picked up and made to stand. Her head lolled forward, her eyes drooped.

  Someone took hold of her face and shifted it from side to side, but she couldn’t focus on them.

  There was a sigh. “Well, well, all the pluck right out of her.” The voice continued, speaking to the people holding her as if they were servants. Reesa listened carefully to the tone of it, the inflection, the southern accent.

  It sounded like Gran, but it wasn’t Gran. Gran would never have said or done such things. Gran was dead, she repeated in her mind. She shouted it to herself, so that she could not hear the insulting imposter speak again.

  When the conversation about procedures had finished, Reesa coughed. Her throat was so dry she almost had no voice, but even if she had to whisper it, she was going to say it.

  “Chase the moon,” she said.

  There was silence. The men carrying her tossed her head back on her shoulders.

  “What a surprising development,” the voice said finally. “Throw her in.”

  The hands around her arms tightened and forced her from the room. Her vision was fading in and out, but she clung to the reality around her like she’d clung to the microphone. This was an essential moment she could never afford to release.

  A loud squeaking clang rang around her. The walls sounded close. Suddenly, a hot cloud of a stench, so foul that it might have been from Hell itself, blasted her in the face. She coughed and choked, but there was no time to catch her breath. The men let go of her. She opened her eyes and stared down into a deep, dark hole. Then they pushed her in.

  She fell almost twenty feet but landed on a mound of something wet, soft, and sticky, like a huge bed of mud. The smell was all around her, strangling her, the scent of death and decay, of waste and excrement. She cast her eyes upward to the door, but before she could get her bearings, the hatch slammed shut.

  Gasping for air, she reached out with her hands, searching the darkness. Had they put her here to die, to rot? Was this their final insult—a human compost heap? She dug through the slime, searching for something, anything that would tell her what was happening. Eventually her fingers found something small, smooth, and hard.

  It was a tooth.

  She clutched it in her hand and scrambled to her feet. So this is how it would end. Not in an alley, not in a bed like Gran, or in her front yard like her mother. In a pit full
of dead bodies.

  She set her shoulders and breathed in the disgusting air.

  “There’s no moon,” she whispered to herself.

  A reply came from all around, a low and ominous growl.

  Chapter 10

  Memory Lapse

  I woke slowly, pulling myself with herculean effort, feeling as if the horrible images were trying to draw me back into their pit like some hellish gravity. It was like fighting off anesthesia, but the side effects were fierce existential terror, not dry mouth. My cell phone was screaming—literally, thanks to Jinx—in my ear. Cursing ring tones in general, I washed up on the shore of my own reality, out of the dark, churning sea of Reesa’s terrible tragedy, and tried to dust off my shipwrecked consciousness.

  My fingers did not immediately obey my urge to press the button. “Hello?”

  “Is this Lilith?” said a masculine voice I did not recognize.

  I sat up and drew the bath robe around me almost protectively. “Depends on who wants to know.”

  He cleared his throat with something of a beleaguered grunt. “Sergeant Castor, Berkeley City Police.”

  I tried to laugh off my instant anxiety but sounded false even to myself. “Oh, well, in that case, yes, my name is Lilith. I thought you might be a lawyer for my ex-husband,” I lied.

  He didn’t seem to care. “It’s fine. Look, we have a bit of a situation here and were wondering if you could come down to the station immediately.”

  I slid forward to the edge of the bed and glanced at the clock. It was close to eight. My mind moved so swiftly over the events of the preceding day that I nearly became motion sick. “What? Why? What have I done?”

  “Nothing.” He paused, as if waiting for me to fill in detail, which I did not do. “See, we’ve picked someone up. A bit of an…pardon me…an odd character.” He went quiet, leaving all the rest to subaudition. “Says that we can reach a lady named Lilith at this number and that she…um…takes care of him.”

  With a sigh of relief, I lifted my hand to my forehead. My fingers were shaking. What had Jinx done this time? I mean, I knew I could sometimes be a bit mothering, but for him to get out of trouble by pretending to actually be a minor, I was almost shocked. He was one of the most fiercely independent people I knew. It must have hurt to tell them that I “took care of him.” I almost chuckled, thinking of his ruddy, youthful features pockmarked by silver studs and the expression of absolute shame that would be seated there.

  “What’s he done now?” I said with a harassed sigh.

  “Well, we’re right across from a county facility. There’s a park, you know.”

  I knew the place. It was near the library. “Yeah.”

  “He was sitting in one of the trees.”

  “Oooh-kay.”

  The officer sniffed. “That’s not allowed. He could sue, if he fell.”

  “I see.” I was frantically going through my tiny bag, placed helpfully on the ground by Jinx, looking for a pair of jeans that weren’t covered in gore. In the back of my mind, where there was enough space to care about such stupid things as tree climbing, I wondered what the hell Jinx was doing hidden among branches.

  Probably trying to get a better signal.

  “Some officers approached him and asked him to come down.”

  “As they should have.”

  “He said...uh...that the tree was sick.”

  I halted in mid-paw. “Sick? A tree?” Since when had Jinx taken up horticulture? “How would he know that?”

  “Well, see, there’s the issue, ma’am. It’s nothing to worry about. We get people like this all the time around here, it’s just that it’s policy to treat them cautiously, you see.”

  “I understand,” I said blankly, not really understanding what the hell he was trying to say.

  “He said the tree told him so.”

  This time, I really did freeze. My mind did a double take.

  “The tree told him so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh huh.” It had happened. Jinx had finally gone off the deep end. He was one step away from tongueless internment.

  “Like I said, our guys are used to that sort of thing, so we asked him to come down, said that we’d take care of the tree when we could, you know, to calm him down, and then the officers tried to identify him. He didn’t have I.D. So, you know, they asked his name.”

  He sounded as if he were sipping coffee and the whole thing just a tiny laugh in a life of jokes. I began to get impatient.

  “Right, and?”

  “And well…. Said his name was Amanda.”

  My internal record player was knocked, skipped, and then repeated. It hadn’t been Jinx in the tree. That made so much more sense.

  “You mean Ananda. His name is Ananda.”

  “Oh,” he murmured, sounding almost relieved, as if to suggest he was glad that my friend wasn’t one of those types. “Well, we must have misunderstood him. Our mistake. I’ll just note that down here. Anyway, we were going to treat him as a 5150, Mental Health hold, but we thought we’d try to contact family before we requested a rep to come have a look at him.”

  “Thanks, I’m grateful. He’s harmless. Wouldn’t hurt anyone. I mean he was worried about a tree, yeah?” I pulled on a pair of jeans and grabbed an exercise top. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine, just sitting here, as sweet as pie, chatting with everyone.”

  “I’m sorry he’s caused you trouble.” The shirt went over my head and I was back again, talking a million miles a minute. “He used to live in a monastery, so he has a bit of difficulty when it comes to new places. I’ll be there a-sap. If you need to talk to anyone, we have a contact in the Kansas City Police who knows all about the situation. I can give you his phone number if you need proof or whatever to release him to me.”

  “A monastery, huh? Somehow, I could believe it.” He chuckled. “Naw, he’s fine. Just come on down. If he knows you and all, we’ll let him leave.”

  “Thank you so much!” I shoved my feet into tennis shoes and tried to tie my hair up as I ran around the room digging up the pieces of paper that gave me an identity and a means of interaction with a capitalist society. “I’ll be right there in like fifteen minutes.”

  “We’ll have him here. Take your time.”

  As I pulled out of the lot, my mind still confused between my reality and the horrible black hole of man-eating monsters, I tried to imagine what circumstance had put Ananda in a tree, besides his general disposition. Why hadn’t he gone to meet Arthur after work? Why hadn’t he gotten on his bus or a train? Why hadn’t he called me?

  I spent the entire trip fidgeting and tapping the steering wheel, cursing land-based travel, and wishing that somewhere there was an immortal with a type of understanding that had to do with foregoing gravity, so that I could steal their power. When I finally found the station, it took another ten minutes to find parking, since it seemed that the most environmentally friendly place on earth had decided that I shouldn’t be driving a car and, if I wasn’t, certainly wouldn’t need a parking place. Evidently no one had explained to the green-nazis that there’s no way to run the ten miles I had just traversed with the same speed.

  I flew up to the reception window like some kind of banshee, all wisps of hair and worry. The man inside the bullet-proof glass raised his eyebrows at me and cocked his head to one side.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Sergeant Castor called me to pick up my friend. He was in a tree across the street.”

  “Oh,” the man said with a purposefully serious nod, “that guy. Sure, I’ll buzz you in. We have to check you.”

  “Yeah,” I fired back as the door buzzed. I caught it while it swung and on the other side met another officer wearing rubber gloves. He went through my purse, patted me down, and made me walk through a metal detector before I was allowed to walk down the hall. Inside another buzzable door was a kind of holding area. On a row of plastic chairs, barred together like some kind of ergonomically cur
sed movie theater, Ananda sat patiently between two officers, one of whom he held by the hand in the most intimate of ways.

  “But if you continue to feel that way, then your mind is defeating itself,” he was saying.

  The policeman shook his head, absolutely invested in the conversation and his own turmoil, while his partner sat with a hand on his gun belt, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “I don’t know why I bother. I mean, I must just love to suffer right?”

  “It is a sign that you are alive. All else on earth move with the ebb and flow of nature, save humans. We strive to bend it to our will, build castles wherever there is room, sometimes even on sand, and when they fall we lament. It is strange, but true.” He patted the man’s hand in complete compassion. “So, one might say that the pain of life is unbearable, or one might choose to look upon it in another fashion, see it as a testament that you are indeed alive, human, and fighting the path of things. Depending upon your personality, this is either a blessing or a curse. Some wish to move in harmony, some in discord. There is no harm in either; there is only acceptance of the chosen way and its consequences. Though, given your profession, I am forced to say you are a fighter, and so thinking in this way will be helpful to you.”

  I almost gasped, but when I caught sight of the man’s glazed expression as he finally turned at my approach, I realized Ananda was working his magic, once again. Something of a tiny smile began to twist my mouth.

  “You’re right.” The officer shook his head. “I’m going to call her. I should call her, not just because I want to, but because she needs me to. But if she says, ‘buzz off I hate you,’ then I know to move on, right?”

  “There you are.” Ananda smiled. “Excellent thinking.”

  The man turned and glanced dazedly at me, began to focus, and seemed to jump to his feet as if the seat was on fire. His partner shook his head with a distinct thought of “Rookie,” and gained his feet, almost in annoyance.

  “Are you Lilith?”

  “Yes,” I said, “Lilith Pierce.” I shook the more sober man’s hand. He seemed older and, if not wiser, certainly more skeptical.