Consumption

by Heather Herrman

  Let me stop him and kill him and come to you. I want to HURT him. HURT him, KILL HIM. MINE. Let him be MINE.

  With a wave of his hand, Grady motioned the fat man away from the truck to which Pill was crawling. Oblivious, the old man crawled on.

  John stepped toward him. Pill made it to the truck. He grabbed the now doorless side and tried to pull himself up.

  John looked behind him. Grady stood tall and ugly, his jacket ripped, his face twisted into an unnatural expression—one of greed and hope and triumph that could fit no human face.

  Go on, Grady said. I give you this.

  John reached down and hefted Pill by his pants, yanking the man upward. Beneath his hands he heard something crack. Bone.

  It felt good.

  John lifted his foot and kicked the old man hard in the face. He watched as Pill crumpled onto the seat. On the floor of the driver’s seat, wedged almost unseen, the edge of the six sticks of dynamite peeked out.

  “John,” Pill said. When the old man spoke, John saw that he’d broken most of Pill’s teeth. Blood leaked between their jagged edges.

  “Shut up, old man.”

  John reached into his pants and pulled out Riley’s gun from his pocket, which had ridden beside him, like a familiar friend.

  Yes! the voices screamed around him. Yes! Yes! The Feeders stared at him with eyes that glowed, their mouths agape, pressing against the railing, against the truck, pressing toward him like a mass at an orgy. Do it!

  John brought the gun forward and clicked the lock off. He fitted his finger into the trigger and, oh! How good it felt! Such release to finally and completely kill all of this, to rid himself of this pain and anger, to have power! Finally! Instead of railing helplessly against everything, to always be on the losing end. He didn’t, as just John, know how to shoot a gun. Never had. But he was no longer just John. He was more. Oh, so much more, and he knew all that his brothers and sisters did, all that Grady knew, all that was necessary to know. He knew all.

  Do it! the Feeders coursed. Now! Now! We’re hungry, John. We want to eat!

  John placed the gun against Pill’s temple, looking into the man’s battered face. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but the other looked at John.

  And then it looked beyond him.

  “Jessi,” the old man said, his voice ragged.

  John spun around and saw, standing just outside the truck, a woman dressed in white. Her hair, too, was white, and her eyes were so light as to seem colorless. Yet, she was beautiful.

  John looked at her and beyond her, to the Feeders. They did not see her, he understood. None of them saw her at all, only he and Pill. She reached out to John and placed a hand on the one of his that held the gun. Gently, she brought it away from Pill’s head and pointed it toward the floor.

  And when she touched him, just for an instant, John felt himself returning, felt his mind going from a THEY to an I, and he was John. John, son of Adam Scott. With his empty hand, he reached into his pocket and felt the outline of a piece of paper poking from his wallet. He didn’t have to look at it to know what it was. Jonesy. The picture of dear Jonesy.

  And knowing that, he again knew himself. John, husband of Erma. John, father of the baby that never was but would always and forever be. John.

  On the floor of the car rested the ancient sticks of dynamite, their sides sweaty with nitroglycerin. With a hand no longer trembling but steady as could be, John pointed the gun to the floor and pressed its muzzle against them.

  The creature that was Grady screamed. Even returned to himself, John felt the voice of the thing rip into his mind.

  No! it screamed. No fair. TRICKED!

  The woman in white smiled at him, and John was filled with both an overwhelming sense of love and the unmistakable feeling that he knew this woman, had known her all along…and then he pulled the trigger and everything was a beautiful and blinding white.

  3

  When it saw the man pull the gun, The Feeder knew He might need to leave. Most of his children were in the factory. Most of them. This was a fact and one that it couldn’t change, though it realized that it had been greedy and, if it could admit it to itself, somewhat stupid, putting all its eggs in one basket, as its last premier had liked to say—and they were, quite literally, his eggs. His children, ready to fertilize the world with themselves.

  There was always a premier. A first. Somebody who woke the earth with its blood, and opened a way into it for The Feeder. A skin that housed the beginnings of The Feeder. This time it was Grady Anderson. The man in the truck pulled the trigger on the gun just a little bit tighter, and The Feeder took a last look at its Grady skin. The left arm was split open along the front, bone and bits of The Feeder’s own gray skin poking through. The legs had been stretched to the breaking point, and the left one hung at an odd angle, hardly connected at all to the Grady man’s torso. The back was the worst. Always, those stubs of his wings tried to poke through. They were the hardest to hide, although they would never again grow. With a gesture that was both tender and unusual for it, The Feeder brought the hand of his Grady skin up and kissed it, like a courtier might kiss a king’s hand.

  With that final gesture, the Feeder let himself go. Just before the flash of the explosion, the Feeder reached out, felt beyond the walls of the factory, beyond it all, to the other part of itself. Yes. There it was. Not far. The girl and the man.

  The explosion came, and the Feeder was released, the screams of its children nothing but dead whispers on his back. Through the air He came, and all He needed was a body. A single body that had a part of him in it, and there was the girl, almost…and then…

  The Feeder screamed, and the air turned black with its wrath; the scream shook the skies, and somewhere, up above, The Feeder thought that for the first time in a thousand years, its father was listening.

  The red-haired girl, his child, was dead. The Feeder in its form of nothing, its form that could not exist outside of the earth under its Maker’s curse, not without its wings, not without a body, flew toward the last hope, the names of all its children on its breath, the only kind of prayer it knew.

  First there had been Mamo of the Tired People and then Sweet River and then a long time of nothing, and then White Horse and then Crazy Foot, and then the settlers came and it was good. Yes, Lucy, and yes to the sweet miners with their coal-blackened faces and then Grady and from Grady to them all, to Holly to Thad to Sam to Eve to Betty to Susan to Megan to Tom to Tilly to Bob and on and on He had spread himself, beginning without end—Hallelujah!—until now there was only the one, only Thad left on the top of that rock and it was almost there! Almost there! And then it was tap, tap, tapping at the man’s skull, at its last child, its only child.

  It would not go back. Could not.

  Let me in, it said.

  Let me in.

  In.

  In.

  In!

  LET ME IN!

  4

  Star felt her father push her away as he took the gun, and she knew then that she had made a mistake. The thing across from her was not her father. It grinned, the eyes that had once shown such love for her, now nothing but holes in a face.

  “Daddy?”

  The thing raised the gun, and Star sank farther down to the ground, sitting supine with her arms open, ready for what was to come. The body of her father raised the gun, and pointed it at her head.

  “I’m jush trying to help you feesh better, Shar Bear,” the thing said, and Star saw that her father no longer had his teeth. He gummed his words. “Dish bullesh will put you right, my sweesh. Hush noow.”

  The sun behind her father had fallen so far down that they’d lost most of the light up on the plateau where they stood. All the orange was gone and now everything was shadows of purple. The gun and her father melded against the sky like spikes against a railroad track, punctuations to a great and terrible thing.

  And so this was how she would go. Star closed her eyes and waited for the gun to go off
.

  But then her father spoke again.

  “Anything you ask for. So long as you mean it, Star Bear. Anything.”

  Her father’s voice, and Star opened her eyes, and saw that it was not her father who had spoken, not the father in front of her. But was there something, after all, behind the thing’s eyes? Something of her father left?

  “Dad?”

  Yes! Just there. A change behind the eyes, or maybe she had imagined it? Her father’s body began to tremble. Great rolls like a seizure taking over it, as if something large was entering it, shaking it. The gun trembled in his hand, but the arm stayed straight, the barrel trained on Star. Her father’s face shook with the convulsions, as if he was fighting something, and Star saw her dad’s face twist into a grimace of pain, the lips moving, moving, like worms on a hook, until finally they formed words, two words, and Star knew that these, at least, were her father. If nothing else, these words were her father’s, and they were perfectly clear.

  She held her arm out to him, the black bear dark and shining against her skin.

  “Ask me,” he said.

  Star rose to her feet and found whatever she could find in the thing’s eyes to hold on to. Her father’s body wasn’t just shaking now, the skin itself was moving, bubbling, like a multitude of worms or snakes had forced themselves beneath it and were trying to eat what was underneath. The flesh on her father’s arm split open, and then the skin on his cheek split wide, like great fissures in an earthquake. Star did not wait for more.

  “Kill yourself!” she screamed. “If you love me, kill yourself. Put the goddamned gun to your head and do it! I ask you to. It’s what I want!”

  She thought that her father hadn’t heard her. The wind howled around her, the sky going from purple to black to darker than black, and she felt the gun press against her head and knew that this was how she would die.

  Then the metal was gone, lifted from her temple. Star opened her eyes just in time to see a last burst of light from the dropping globe of the sun below, a finger of it reaching up and out of the grass beneath to tickle the scene in front of her to life. The light wrapped around the gun, its metal shining a bright, hot silver, and her father raised it up and away from her and to his own face, to his mouth, which smiled a single, beautiful, toothless smile that carried beyond his lips to his entire, familiar face, and Star watched as her father slipped the gun between his lips and she did not remove her eyes from his nor did the light remove itself, that solitary sunbeam that both commanded and forgave, but mostly held her there, held her unmoving and unwavering as it lit the metal between her father’s lips. And then the sound. The bullet emerging from the back of her father’s head and taking the sunbeam with it, tearing the world open with its power, and taking, finally, the life of her father up and away, bits of blood flying prettily toward the sky.

  5

  The flesh did not yield.

  At first, The Feeder did not understand. It forced itself through the man’s blood, forced itself into the arm and to the gun to shoot the girl! Shoot the goddamned girl! Had not this body fed upon his might? Was not this body his very own?

  But a heat came forward from the center of the man’s being, like an eye, or a burning coal buried at the bottom of a fire pit. Something of the man was not dead. Something had not fully changed.

  It couldn’t be. The Feeder screamed and pounded through the man’s veins down to the coal, down, down, down to the thing that was familiar and awful to him. Down to the soul.

  No! Not fair! He would put the flame out and take the man before it could do what it was thinking of doing and it shouldn’t be like this! Shouldn’t be! The man was one of the first to turn, one of the very first, and no one could hold out for this long, no one, no one, no one.

  And then the blast.

  And then the pretty pieces of flesh everywhere.

  And then the mouth of the great earth opened beneath him.

  Down The Feeder fell.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  And it was a familiar falling, a familiar feeling as the walls of the earth shut over him, as all the light disappeared and He was left alone again.

  But just before the earth’s crust closed over him, He saw the face of a woman peering in. A white face, and it was smiling, and it knew him, had always known him, and it was the face on which favor shone, and The Feeder swore that someday He would eat that face.

  Bite it right out of existence.

  Chapter 27

  1

  Javier felt the dirt beneath his fingers begin to tremble when he was near the top of the hill. A piece fell away, then another. The whole ground trembled as he pulled himself over the crest of the plateau just in time to see Star fall. The sky turned black and then the earth shook itself as the entire mound fell into pieces beneath them.

  There was nothing Javier could do but fall with it.

  The earth buried him in its warm breast, but Javier did not wait to see if he was hurt before beginning to dig himself out, the cold wetness of the mud coming away easily, until he saw light again. He listened to the muffled beating of his heart as it thudded under his jacket, and pushed himself all the way through.

  He did not know how far he’d fallen, but the earth had cushioned his descent. He saw what was left of the hill in the great white light that lit up the now twilight and star-spattered sky. The factory was on fire.

  Javier found that he could walk, and so he walked, and there, sitting on the mounded earth just a few feet from him, was Star. Javier went to her.

  As he pulled her to him, her body warm and covered in dirt and small wounds that bled, he wondered if it was true, what Pill had said, if there was a piece of his sister in him, beating life into his vessels, ready to emerge again someday.

  He hoped so. They watched the fire, and in the distance, another explosion sounded, as the gas from the great generator blew. Above, the sky spread its inky coolness upon them.

  He held Star to him and shrouded her ears with his hands as more explosions rocked the night. He pressed his hands more tightly against her ears and closed his eyes. Together, they rode out the blasts, tucked into a small ball of life, a ball of existence against the blackness that was erasing the blasphemy behind them. They rocked against each other and did not have strength even to think, nor cry, nor pray. Only to rock, each held against the warm flesh of the other.

  2

  The first explosion knocked Erma to the ground.

  When she could stand, minutes later, the world still spinning about her, she walked toward the flames that rose into the night’s uncaring sky and she could make out the shape of Maxie.

  Erma struggled forward. The dog was dragging something away from the wreckage. Something large.

  Her heart flipped over, and she began to run. Maxie kept tugging at the thing, pulling it between the burning bits of rubbish, and the thing formed, unbelievably, into the shape of a body, and Erma ran faster. Her lungs seized up, and yet still she ran…let it be him, let it be him, let it be him.

  Maxie dragged the body farther until it was beyond the flames and then Erma was upon them, and with shaking hands she touched his broken face and then took his hand as she helped Pill to sit up.

  3

  What Pill remembered after the white was hands. First they were Jessi’s, and she was holding him, somehow, holding him and whispering in his ear. She was crouched over him, like a wall, sheltering him, and they were speaking together through the white, and he reached for her, took her hand, and she was pulling him toward her through the white, and he was coming home to her, coming home…

  …but then he felt the hands slip…

  Not yet, Pill. Not yet. Wait. Watch…

  “Jessi!” And then she was fading, blending into the white, but her hands were the last to go, hands white and unlined and soft as the air into which they melted.

  Then he felt another hand, rougher, on his cheek, and he opened his eyes to the shape of a woman
over him and for a moment he thought it was her, Jessi, and then the blur cleared, and he realized that he had not gone home at all. He’d survived.

  He’d survived and it was horrible.

  He shut his eyes once again, praying for the whiteness to take him, but the white was firmly and forever gone and everything now was black.

  Or not quite. As the blackness took him, he heard the whisper of white in his ear, and knew that it was his to hear again. Someday. And that he would never live another moment without trying to catch its sound.

  Epilogue: The Keepers

  I write this behind the words in Jessi’s journal. I write so that others might have some hope of understanding. Of stopping what may rise again.

  We don’t speak of that last day.

  We don’t speak of the drive back through Cavus. Of the man we shot with his back to us and the mother whose cries we stopped. We don’t speak of our walk into the bloody church, where we dragged each and every one of the bodies to flames kept alive with their fuel. We don’t speak of the black squirrels, their fur shining with good health as they ate the remnants of the feast. Or the lies we told to the reporters about the factory tour everyone was on as part of the Festival. We do not speak of the prayers we said as we knelt over ground covered with the ashes of the dead.

  We don’t speak about much of anything, truth be told. But we listen. And we watch. And we cling together because it is all we can do.

  I look after Pill in his old house. Mostly we drink tea together and play cards and try very hard not to talk of things past. Star left for college this year. I forced her to go; she wanted to stay here with us. But she’s young, and even if she feels her duty as strongly as any of us, she has a life to live, and I will make her live it. She’s only gone up the road forty miles, to the community college, but she’s rented a small apartment and even joined their cross-country team. She says it helps, the running. I suppose we all run from the truth of that night in our own way.