Consumption

by Heather Herrman

  Star pulled the knee—which looked incredibly frail and thin where it poked from the hole in her jeans—away. “I’m fine. Happy as a fucking clam.”

  “Star, I—”

  “Just leave me alone,” she said, and Erma gave up, returning to her place against the wheel well, beside John, the truck bed bouncing beneath her so that she had to crawl.

  John moved a piece of hair from where the wind had blown it, sticking it to his wife’s face. They were almost there. He watched the land slide by around them, empty, the grasses blowing, blowing wild, the sky opening wide and beautiful.

  Empty…Except. There.

  Just over Star’s shoulder, a shape emerged, running alongside the truck. It was small, and looked like a dog.

  “Erma, you see that?” he said, leaning in to her. She nodded.

  Maxie saw it, too, and she ran to that side of the truck, her sides quivering as she barked.

  “Is it another dog?” Erma asked. “John, do you think we should stop for it?”

  He gave her a look, and she laughed, though it was a trembling sound. “No, I guess not.”

  The shape moved up and behind the truck, following it, and then around to their side, staying close enough that it was impossible to get a really good look at it. John spun himself around fully to see it. Maybe it was a sign of good luck, this dog, a guide leading them to an impossible victory. The Romans had war dogs; had, in fact, entire companies composed of them. He positioned himself on his knees and held tightly to the truck’s side, leaning over the edge.

  Running along beside them was a child, no more than six or seven. She wore no clothes, and she ran with a speed that easily matched the truck’s, her brown curls bouncing against her neck.

  John watched as the girl’s head turned up, and to the right, where she met his eyes and grinned. The head did not stop turning, but rotated completely and fully around, staring up at the sky, and then back to the left, and then before Erma could turn around to join him in his gaze, the child was gone, loping ahead so quickly that she outdistanced the truck in her run to the factory. A girl. Not Izzy, but as good as Izzy. A last painful reminder from The Feeder.

  “John?”

  Erma was beside him now, on her knees and peering over the side of the truck. “What was it? Was it a dog? Did you see it?”

  “It was…” He swallowed hard, and before he could answer her a new image came to him. A girl, fallen on the sidewalk. The taste of a little girl’s blood on the inside of his lip as he kissed her wound. The crocodile tears of her as she fell, and those great big eyes begging him to kiss it, kiss it, kiss it away.

  “John?”

  He turned full around and wrapped his arm around Erma. Star, he saw, still had her head buried in the book and was paying them no attention.

  “A dog, yeah.” He cleared his throat. “A sweet-looking thing. Good luck, maybe.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said, and let her head fall against his shoulder. “It’s the only chance we have in this.”

  “What’s that?” He could smell her head, the scent that was not shampoo or hairspray, the scent beyond that. The scent of Erma, a rich, loamy smell of skin and heat.

  “Luck. We’re going to need one hell of a lot of it.”

  When she tried to kiss him, John turned his cheek to her, feeling the iron taste of blood fill his mouth.

  3

  “You know…” said Pill, reaching to switch off the radio.

  Javier had the ax in his hand, and still the old man would not shut up.

  “…whoever you lost, your family, they aren’t completely gone.”

  “No, they’re gone all right. Dead as fucking rats in a toilet,” said Javier. He had to do it. Just do it. Turn and swing.

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Pill. “I never went to college, but I learned a lot in my job. I worked with plants, you know. Plants and flowers and shrubs.”

  “I don’t need a biology lecture, old man,” Javier said. He felt sweat breaking out on his forehead. Why was he waiting, sitting here listening to this old man blab on?

  “Sure. No problem. I was just saying, I used to have a favorite flower.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Humor me,” said Pill. “My favorite flower was the Hemerocallis. The daylily. A real pretty flower, bright yellow and looking delicate and weak. The thing was, I’d plant that flower, tend to it some, and forget about it. Then I’d see the winters through up here, and wouldn’t you know it, the next year, there she’d be again, without me ever having to do anything about it.”

  Javier stared straight ahead at the silver pin of the radio dial. He wanted badly to turn it back on, to cover the sound of his heart, beating in his chest. It was so loud that the old man had to hear it. But no, he only went on. Talking. Talking. Javier kept his eyes on the radio pin. If he could just keep staring at it while he lifted the ax…

  “That flower would push through the earth without me ever planting another seed,” Pill went on. “Not the same flower, you see, but a flower using parts of the old one that looked almost just the same. The new flower always carried a bit of the old flower with it, and they kept on that way. Kept all the past ones alive to the world.”

  Finally, Pill was quiet. Now. Javier began to raise the ax. Slowly. Inch by inch. He’d let the old man get away with that speech, let him have his last lecture. But if he didn’t hurry, they’d be in the factory before he could act. All of them. Including Star. He freed his arm holding the ax from the space between the door and the truck’s bench seat.

  But Pill, apparently, was not done. He began to speak again, and the sound of his voice startled Javier to stillness. “It’s like that with your sister, boy. Your mother, too. There’s a part of them inside you, just waiting to come out.”

  A loud grinding noise came from the truck’s engine as it bucked once, twice.

  “What’s going on?” Hurriedly, Javier lowered the ax back between the seat and the door.

  The truck bucked again and then stopped.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Pill as it shuddered and then died. “She ain’t the most dependable thing. Looks like we’ll be walking from here.”

  “Fine by me,” said Javier. Maybe now would be the perfect chance to get Star out safe, grab the dynamite, and make a run for it. This way he could do it without killing the old man. Not that he still wouldn’t if he had to.

  “Why don’t you get out and tell the others. I’ll gather what we need from in here.”

  “Sure,” said Javier, stepping outside and slamming his door shut, taking a deep breath. He felt his heart slowing, the sweat that had begun to form, unbeknownst to him, went cool on his forehead with the wind. He’d get Star out, take the dynamite, and he’d run. He’d make sure Erma kept Star back with her. Pill couldn’t catch him, and he didn’t think Erma or Professor-man would fight him too much on who got to be the hero.

  Javier walked around to the back of the truck and took hold of Star’s hand, helping her down. There was a streak of dirt on her cheek, a yellowish stain against the summer tan of her skin. Javier reached up and wiped it away with his index finger, conscious as he did so of how rough his finger was against the smooth skin of her cheek. He thought if he pressed too hard, he might break it. She smiled at him, and he saw that the thing she’d been carrying when she got into the truck was the journal. He’d wanted Gabby to read books. He’d wanted her to read all the books in the world.

  Star hit the ground with a thud as she hopped out, and a cloud of dust brushed up at her feet. Like a shot from a needle, Pill’s words followed close after the sound and flowed like medicine into Javier’s head. He let go of Star’s hand and realized he’d been holding it with the same hand that, just seconds ago, had been ready to plant an ax in an old man’s head.

  Just like your sister, boy. There’s a piece of her inside you, waiting to get out.

  He wondered if anything that good could possibly be true.

  4

&
nbsp; Pill adjusted his rearview mirror and watched as Javier helped Star out and then John and Erma descended. He patted the truck’s dash, two solid thumps with his palm. She liked to freeze up sometimes if you put her in second for too long. But despite her glitch she could be relied on to start right back up again when you needed her.

  He’d messed up. Everything that Jessi’d told him to be careful about he’d ignored. If only he’d killed everyone at the Feast, things might still be okay. And the little girl, Izzy…

  He’d promised Jessi he’d kill all of them, even the babies, but when it came down to it, he just wasn’t capable. Even now, now when somehow blessedly and miraculously he’d been given a second chance, he was about to let her down again. Pill reached up and shifted the mirror to make sure everyone was fully out of the truck. They were, even the dog. He looked forward, toward the beet factory, and saw that its front doors were thrown wide open and a light inside was on, emitting a beckoning glare like a lighthouse. They were waiting.

  Pill put his hand on the black knob of the stick shift and pushed his foot down on the clutch, shifting the stick back into first. Outside, there was a commotion.

  “Hey!”

  Pill looked in the rearview mirror and saw a form fleeing in the opposite direction of the factory. It was the girl, Star. She ran as fast as a rabbit over the dry Montana ground, Jessi’s journal clutched tightly under one arm.

  “Let her go!” he heard Javier say to Erma and John. A good kid. Pill’d like to think that he’d be a good man someday. Maybe an overprotective one, especially where the girl was concerned. That might not go over well a few years from now. He’d like to see them alive a few years from now. Maybe he would, after all, see them, looking down with Jessi. He’d never been a religious man, but Pill found it wasn’t so hard to give in to the idea of it when the idea was all you had left.

  Pill watched the others watch the girl run, farther and farther away across the field. Good. It would make this easier, give them something to distract them. The setting sun lit her for a good fifty feet before Pill turned away from the mirror.

  “I’m sorry, Jessi,” Pill whispered. He turned the key over in the ignition, restarted the car, and took off—alone—toward the factory. He had absolutely no intention of turning back for any of them.

  Chapter 24

  1

  She ran fast, and she ran hard. She ran after the red, her feet keeping time against the packed earth beneath her.

  Star had been seeing the flashes of red since they left the house. At first, she thought she was imagining it. It was easy to imagine things, in the back of the pickup truck, with the sunset creating pockets of shadows around them.

  Inside of her, rising flush to the surface like a fish to the dusky film separating the world of water from air, Star felt an unexpected calmness emerge. Maybe it was such with all things in the midst of transformations cut short. She, a girl with her first chance at love, also a girl stuck in the thick mud of grief for the parents she had lost. If she could move from one world to the other, everything that had come before might still keep its weight but at least hang heavy upon her with a purpose, a valuable necklace not to be removed but worn always, a tether to the past.

  Dumb thoughts. Useless. There would be no transformation from confused, grieving girl to wise woman for her. Once, when she was a kid, she’d found a butterfly’s cocoon attached to the side of her friend’s yellow house. She’d plucked it and then, using her child’s dexterous fingers, peeled back the layers of the wrapping, expecting to reveal a beautiful butterfly. Instead, what she found inside was a mash of blood and pus, unformed bits of body floating amidst it all. She hadn’t speeded the unveiling, only killed the insect. The transformation, like her own, was never to be.

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t pass the chance on to Javier. It all came down to the red.

  It did no good trying to ignore it, as she’d tried to ignore John and Erma, the two of them acting like it was no big thing that they had each other left back there in the truck, acting like everything was going to be okay.

  Star knew better.

  A dip in the earth caught her foot, and her ankle rolled painfully to the left. Star flung her arms wildly to the side, stopping herself from falling, but her ankle gave a scream of pain in protest. It didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter. She had to go on. There. Just ahead of her, she saw another flash of red, and then the ground dipped, undulating in a wave of one of its many hills, and the red was gone. Star chased after it, the pain in her ankle blooming into a sharp, insistent throb.

  The answer was in the book, and anyone who looked at it knew that things were going to be a long way from okay.

  Back at Bunny’s house, Pill had sat his wife’s journal down on the chair after reading it to the group and left it there.

  “You want this?” Star asked, picking it up and offering it to him.

  Pill shook his head. “It’s done what it needed to do. That thing’s no friend of mine.”

  So Star kept it. The journal was old, and the soft leather of its cover, a faded brown calfskin, was comforting to touch. All the way here, in the truck, she’d stroked its cover as she flipped through the pages. And that was how she understood the red, understood her one chance at saving Javier.

  Pill had read the story in the journal to them all. He had not, however, shown the others the pictures. They were graphic and the scenes within them perfectly executed. There was no doubt that Jessi had been a good artist—too good, maybe. With each turn of the page, a new horror sprang to life.

  One picture showed the town burning, people with claws reaching out of the flames. One showed an old woman with red eyes and black nails, the old woman from the circus, Star guessed. Others showed monsters in various stages of change, their faces human, but on each of their chests rested a black mark, like an X drawn there by Jessi.

  But it was the last picture in the file that Star kept going back to. It was a picture of a young girl with red hair holding the hand of an older boy. The girl, Star guessed, was Jessi. She didn’t have any reason for this assumption except for what Pill had told her about his wife and…and because she knew that the boy was Jimmy. It was the way that Jessi looked at him in the picture. Around them, flames burst everywhere, and arms and limbs reached from them, the flesh hanging from them, blackened. The boy and girl, however, remained untouched. The fire was closing in around them, and yet…

  The danger seemed to be coming from inside the circle. It came not from the fire but from the boy. Because the girl looked at him not only with love but with terror, and Star could not tell whether the girl was holding his hand or trying to get away.

  And on the fourth night I shot him.

  Almost, she could hear the girl in the picture speaking it. On the fourth night I shot him. And why had Jimmy alone been left out of the caves? Why had he remained when all the other Feeders went below?

  Star thought she knew. He’d been left above for insurance. The Feeder liked to play with humans, but he didn’t just enjoy manipulating their emotions for amusement, he needed that vulnerability. If you loved someone, it made it harder to kill them, didn’t it?

  He’d left Jimmy just in case. He’d left Jimmy because he’d somehow had a bad feeling about Jessi. Bad maybe because she’d been marked by Trees when he spoke his prophecy. Bad because he feared something in her. And so, just in case, he’d left Jimmy outside of everything because he knew Jessi loved him. But Jessi’d surprised him. Surprised herself, too, maybe; the weight of her finger on that trigger, the weight of a future not to be lived. But she’d pulled it. By God, she had.

  There was the red again, rising from a new valley just ahead.

  Star didn’t think that Javier loved her. Not yet, anyway, but there was a connection between them, she knew that. He’d said she reminded him of someone, and Star felt certain that whoever it was, he’d loved her. Star had to put enough distance between herself and Javier that he couldn’t catch her easily.

/>   If he came after her.

  If.

  She ran faster than she’d ever run before. She ran toward the red.

  2

  “You fucker!”

  Javier watched in fury as Pill’s truck bounced across the rough landscape, toward the factory. Then he turned in the opposite direction, behind him, to watch the disappearing figure of Star. What the hell had the girl been thinking?

  Javier shook his head to clear it. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. All he had wanted was to go into the factory and kill what could be killed before he himself died. He could still do that. He gathered himself to run after the truck.

  But that left Star. Star.

  She’d taken off without any thought to what could be out there. Maybe the Feeders were all in the factory, but maybe they weren’t. He’d counted on having Erma and John at least be with her when he left, but now that was ruined. Damn her! Why hadn’t she said something to him? And damn, Pill! If the cabrón had waited, he could have gotten all this settled, gotten Star taken care of, explained what he was doing to Erma and John, told them to look after Star, and then joined the old man. But now…

  Javier looked to John and Erma, holding each other, watching the truck as it trundled off into the distance and toward the factory, its rounded green outline like a determined beetle climbing an anthill. Neither of them were even paying attention to the rapidly diminishing figure of Star.

  Javier looked once more at the disappearing taillights and then behind him toward the darkness and the large shape of the rock beyond which the girl had disappeared.

  Just like your sister.

  “Goddamn you!” he screamed, shaking his fist in Pill’s direction before turning and running after Star.

  3

  Please let him follow. Please let him follow.

  The words beat time to her footsteps as she ran toward the next hill, where the flash of red had disappeared. This hill was larger, not just a dip in the ground but an actual piling of earth. Star knew what she would find when she reached it. Jimmy had been The Feeder’s insurance the last time, and this time it was Mabel. She’d come to the conclusion logically—there was no one else The Feeder could leave behind who would mean anything to the group. Javier’s family was dead, as was Pill’s, and Erma and John had just each other. She, Star, was the only person who had someone left she might care about.