Vigil

by Saunders, Craig

  But her hands clasped in front of her breast, clicking beads and her head bowed. This I understood. Supplication to a God who lived among the stars.

  Why pray over me? Was I dead? All this time, was I dead?

  In my panic I tried to move my arms…and they moved. At last! The joy in this moment was overwhelming. My eyes misted red under the sheet and I understood that this was not my vision fading in death but my tears of joy for my life.

  But it would move no further. This sheet was tight around me, covering me from head to toe.

  I had to tear it. I had to tear free. They thought I was dead but I was not. I was not! But I could move. I could move.

  I turned my hand against the sheet and felt for a seam. I found it and began to rip and the woman with the beads who was saying the prayer began to scream as I rose from under the shroud and sat up.

  She screamed and it hurt my ears so much. Footsteps came at a run. Not far to come, it was a small house.

  She screamed and shivered and pointed, all the while shouting, over and over again, until a man burst through a thin hide covering the doorway. He was carrying an axe.

  ‘Devil! Devil!’ she cried, but in her language I didn’t understand.

  The axe swung at my head but now my arms could move. I took the axe from the peasant man’s hand easily and planted it in his chest. I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted my hands free.

  The candle fell against the cloth that bound me so I pulled myself free and stood for the first time on shaking legs. Flames licked higher as I wobbled toward the woman, hands held out in what I hoped was a gesture of peace. I did not want to hurt her, even though her screaming and her words were hurting my ears, just as the brightness of the flames was hurting my eyes. I wasn’t angry or sad or happy, but I was in pain. It was the pain that came from within.

  I wanted to tell the woman I meant no harm. I took her head in my hands to hold her still and quiet her but instead I bit off her nose as she was screaming.

  For some reason I felt the need to explain. I thought of all the words I knew. The first word I had learned since birth didn’t seem appropriate. It was not pain.

  Instead, I said, ‘Hungry.’

  Words became speech. I mumbled. I was still chewing. I liked the way the word sounded, even so.

  *

  Chapter Four

  Romania

  Base of the Carpathian Mountains

  The small hut burned behind me as I stepped out into the evening air. My legs shook with the effort and I walked unsteadily away from the chattering flames and the brightness. The fire took hold of the straw of the roof and ash floated in the night sky. The moon was high and the fire was bright. It hurt my eyes. I could see everything so clearly but I had to screw my eyes up to keep some of the light out.

  I was in a small clearing in deep woods. The hut, house, abode, dwelling, cottage was the only structure I could see…I wasn’t sure which. There seemed to be too many words for places where people lived. There was a small stream trickling through the woods, a sliver of silver in the undergrowth. Its banks were high with weeds and plants I had no names for. I walked toward the river and pushed aside the weeds. They made me itch but it was nothing compared to the pain I had been born into. Kneeling in the muddy bank and watching a shimmering, shifting reflection of myself in the water I could almost believe I was alone in the world. The fire behind me crackled. The warmth reached my back and as I took the water in my cupped hands I felt icy cold and fiery warmth from both sides. It was a pleasant feeling.

  I washed the blood off and stood for a moment, listening to the sharp crack of the timbers burning, the crashing as the weak walls of the house caught fire, then the roof, falling in. I picked each sound out with my ears because it was too bright to watch, even though I wanted to. The sounds were delicious, as was the smell, wafting on a mild breeze, of roasting meat. But roasted meat tasted of ash. This, a memory surfacing. Some part of me knew that there was much I had forgotten. I shrugged. The taste of flesh was still in my mouth and my belly was full, and that was enough for now. I smacked my lips and licked around my teeth, hoping to find some small morsel stuck in a gap.

  But, no. My meal was over. Any meat left was burning in the house, inedible now. Thinking of it was making the hunger come back. Thinking how there was nothing to eat. No people. The hunger wasn’t as strong now, but it was there, gnawing away at my thoughts, making me sway.

  I shook my head to clear it. I didn’t work so I walked into the stream and dunked my head into the chilly flow and emerged, gasping, but wide awake and better, clearer. With my hands I rung the water from my long hair and shivered a little in the sudden cold. I should go to the fire to dry off, but being closer to the fire would hurt my eyes. There was enough light to see by. There was nothing for me here. I needed to find more meat. I was hungry.

  I walked for three days following my meal. My legs were weak, at first, even though my arms were strong. Both legs were bent and there was pain as I walked. When I caught a fox that was snarling and protecting its cubs (vixen, the word was vixen) my legs felt better. I ate the fox after it bit me, but not because it bit me. It was just hungry like me. The fur was disgusting, but I discovered I could tear the fur clear to reveal the meat underneath. There wasn’t much meat on it, but it was sating my hunger. I ate while the cubs mewled and yipped, nipping at my shins and thighs as I sat. It sort of tickled, even though they were playing rough and drawing little dots of blood with their sharp teeth.

  I ate them, too, but there wasn’t much point. There was hardly any meat on them, and when I’d eaten them they didn’t tickle me anymore. It made me sad, but I understood now that to eat was to take away the pain. When I eventually stood, wiping fur and blood and flesh from my face, my legs were stronger, straighter. The pain from my legs and the hunger, too, were gone.

  The hunger soon came back, though.

  I couldn’t catch anything else to eat. The hunger, it seemed, never left. I couldn’t satisfy it. This I came to understand as I walked and tried to catch the dancing animals that ran through the forest. I climbed the trees and tried to catch the birds that flitted on the air, but they were too swift. I found a nest and cracked open the eggs within, but the meat was runny and it wasn’t really meat. It made me sick, so I didn’t eat anymore eggs.

  Those first few days I learned much. I learned there were things that made me sick. My hunger told me what I could eat, but I couldn’t catch anything that moved. Moving things tasted much better than other things, even if I could sense life in them. I could sense, or perhaps hear, things that grew in the earth. There were trees, and there was grass. There were tubers under the ground, and things hanging from some trees that I could hear, growing. But they had no beat. I needed the beat. The things that went thump thump thump inside tasted the best.

  I didn’t know what that thump was. I could hear it within myself, steady and comforting. But I couldn’t eat myself. I knew that would hurt me, and if I ate myself there would be nothing left to eat with. And I wanted to eat. It was all I wanted to do.

  So I walked, the daylight burning my eyes so badly I had to walk with my eyes shut and my hands over them to cut out the light. It drove spikes into my brain and made me shiver and cry out sometimes. When clouds passed the sun there was some relief, but night time was the best. Then it was cold, but there was nothing to fear in the night time. The woods were quieter then. The sound of things growing was quieter, and after three days I realised I could hear the thump thump thump of a living thing, a quiet thing, but it was sleeping.

  I crept closer to it. I made very little sound. But it seemed the sleeping thing had good hearing too. I heard a rustle and something small dashed past me. I leapt for it but I was too slow. I heard the beat, faster and faster, but more distant. I chased it for a while, but when it went into a tree I couldn’t catch it. I tried to tear the tree down, but I could not. I was not strong enough.

  Not then.

  So I walked duri
ng the night and hid under bushes I tore from the earth during the day. The moon had gone and the night time was my time. I came alive when the sun went away. I felt stronger and there was no pain in my head. I could see better in the dark. I could hear more, too, because the background noise did not confuse me.

  I picked out the sound of something large crashing toward me. I waited for it. Food! And coming to me!

  I was excited, and happy, yes, happy, when eventually it crashed through the undergrowth and roared at me. It was immense, dark as night itself. It had claws and teeth and it smashed me to the ground with one of its huge claws. I wanted to eat it, but I passed out from the pain and entered the sleep that was not sleep.

  When I woke up my arm was at a strange angle, one that was not natural to it. I pushed it back into place and held it there for the rest of the day. When it stayed where I put it, a new word came to me. Bear.

  Plenty to eat, but too big. It could hurt me. It could put me to sleep.

  I avoided bears from then on.

  I got better at hunting. Some things could hurt me, but I found the small things, the things that tickled. I caught them when they were asleep. I was quiet, now. I could creep up on the little things and they did not hear me until I had them in my grasp.

  But they weren’t enough. I was still hungry. Hungry all the time. Sometimes I cried, and my eyes misted over with that red film and the red dripped down my face. The only time the hunger had truly gone away was when I had eaten the woman. I wished I had eaten more. Perhaps then I wouldn’t be so hungry now. I was ravenous. My stomach began to rumble and growl. I woke a few sleeping creatures by mistake, not with my feet or my breath or the steady beat of my heart, but with my stomach grumbling in the stillness of the night.

  So those nights I went hungry.

  I walked in a kind of state of non-being, wandering, alone. I passed from happy to sad often in those first few days, but I did not know the meaning of lonely. In a way, I was fascinated. There was so much to learn and so many words in my head. The words in my head tumbled out and sometimes I spoke them aloud, just to hear them and taste them running over my tongue.

  ‘Whisper,’ I said. And, ‘rustle’, ‘earthen’, ‘flying’, to describe things I thought of as things, then I moved on to words to describe things I thought of as thoughts, such as ‘interesting’, ‘horrible’, ‘monotonous’. Sometimes I would speak words that described things I was doing, like ‘walking’, ‘breathing’, ‘speaking’.

  Mostly I walked and my hunger kept me awake all the time, whispering and complaining and grumbling and moaning.

  The ground began to slope steadily upwards. In the distance I could see mountains which seemed to cover the horizon, immense beyond my limited understanding, even though the view was broken into morsels I could take without going insane as I saw each glimpse through gaps in the trees. They were breathtaking, immense. I could hear a steady rumbling. It was the mountain’s hunger. It was the belly of the mountain, trying to eat the sky.

  One week passed. My hunger was like that of the mountain.

  That was when I found the path. Path: something people made, to go to one place from another.

  People, I remembered, tasted the best.

  *

  Chapter Five

  Panaci

  Carpathian Mountains

  It was a small village. There were only a handful of houses. People had banded together and made something solid and real. People need to be together. I needed to be with people. But I was not people. I was something else. I understood this as I watched them from the undergrowth. They bustled, busy in the day to day tasks that people had to do so that they could live. They tended crops, they spoke to each other in that strange harsh language that was so unlike my own, yet somehow familiar at times. The meaning floated before me, so close I could almost reach out and pluck it from the air like a falling leaf.

  I sat on my haunches in the bushes, a long way back from the people, just watching. They wore clothes spun from some dull cloth, with the occasional hint of colour in a sash or a headscarf. The adults went about their work, the children ran and played. A mother fed a child from a pendulous breast as she walked and I could smell the baby, hear its heart tripping within its chest. The beating heart of the mother was calm, the baby’s heart like a mouse in flight. I could hear the sucking sounds of the feeding baby, the slashing of hoes in the earth, the creak of the buildings in the wind, and underneath it all the heavy yawning of the mountains stretching from the earth.

  The pain became too much to bear after a short time. I shut my eyes against the sunlight. Part of me understood even then that this life was not for me. The hunger burned but it would wait until nightfall. That was when I came alive. I was just a pale shadow during the day. Night time was the only time a shadow felt truly at home.

  I curled up on myself and pulled a leafy plant over me and listened to the people, their growling language and their little footsteps on the hard packed earth. I waited and hungered, but night was a long time in coming. Part of me wanted to run out and feed, feed until my belly stood out and my jaws ached from chewing. The part of me that was slow to wake spoke softly to my hunger and bade it wait. Night was a time for feeding. When I could see and hear and run and the moon was shy.

  I did not sleep. I lay huddled like that child at his mother’s breast, cradled in my hunger, but I had no mother to feed me. I had been born full grown and had never known a mother’s teat. But I needed flesh, not milk. Soft, wet flesh.

  Dusk came all too slowly. It always does when the hunger is upon me. By that time my hunger had teeth of its own, gnawing and tearing at my belly.

  The sun sank and I imagined I could hear the night’s blissful sigh as it rose out of the east from behind the mountains where it had been hiding. It rose fast until there was nothing but the lights people need to keep back the night. Were they afraid of the night itself, or the things within it that they did not understand?

  I could wait no longer. I ran toward the village. The night, warm around me, held me in its arms. It gave me strength. I ran silent in that warm embrace, faster than I had ever run before.

  I followed my ears to a house at the edge of the village. I had heard the mother come and go there. I knew her voice and I knew the babe’s wailing. I followed those sounds. I crashed through the door. She looked up, surprise and shock on her face and then she was screaming and the baby was screaming. Perhaps it was because of my nakedness. The people here all wore clothes. Whatever the reason for the screaming, it hurt my ears and I was hungry so I pulled the woman’s head to one side and took a bite from her neck. Her blood gushed from the wound and sprayed across the room. I put my head to the wound and lapped like a dog, gulping and slurping in my hunger. I was making small satisfied noises in my throat as I drank. This was better than meat. It sated the hunger. There was no chewing. It quenched my hunger, my thirst, and my desire.

  The blood dried to a trickle soon enough and she slumped back in her chair but I caught the baby.

  There were noises coming from the village, now. Shouting and footfalls, running toward the place where the baby’s screaming would not have brought them but the mother’s scream had.

  I didn’t know if I would be hungry enough to eat all of them, but the baby looked delicious. I sank my teeth into its fat leg and drank deeply.

  The door burst aside and a man was screaming at me. He grabbed me around the throat. It made me angry. I was eating and he was in my way. I pulled free, lashed out and tore part of his face off. Then another man took my arm so I tore his arm from the socket but that made me drop the baby and there were so many people in the room now. They were crowding around me, pulling me away from my meal, so I bit anyone I could. I sank my teeth into arms and shoulders and necks and faces, eating and eating, growing stronger all the time.

  Their shouts hurt my ears but I was so hungry now that I barely noticed the pain. I clawed and bit until they held me down and held me around the throat and
by the arms and legs so that I could not move.

  I screamed then, in hatred and in hunger, wanting to feed and not being able to, being held tight and my vision blackening, but really it was turning red as I cried.

  They dragged me away from the bodies, holding me tight.

  I was like the bear to them. I wasn’t a part of their world. They were my food. I should have controlled the hunger, but it ruled me then. It was more powerful than I was. I was thrashing and bucking in their grip and even through my dimming vision I could see their veins standing out and sweat dripping from their foreheads and their muscles, these dirty, grubby people, straining to hold a bear.

  I was their bear. The hunger was mine.

  I understood much then about my nature.

  But as usual, moments of revelation come too late to make a difference. Through the haze that had become my sight I saw a man approach with an axe. My neck was freed but still I was held tightly on the dirt. There was hatred in the eyes of the man with the axe. I did not understand why. I was only hungry, and people were food. The mouse and the fox and the rabbits, were they angry? Were the cows and sheep in the fields angry?

  I did not think so.

  The axe rose and fell.

  It bit deep into my head. Pain blossomed. Bone drove into my brain, pushed by the sinking blade. For a second I thought I saw a bright corona of light and it didn’t hurt my eyes, but that was all I saw. Then thoughts and sights and smell, the things that made me what I was, stopped.

  To my knowledge, that was the first time I had died.

  *

  Chapter Six

  Paris

  Year 0026

  Post Apocalypse

  Tom Fallon crouched in the shell of a burned out building looking out over the city. Smoke no longer curled above the sky line. The city was a necropolis, abandoned by the living these past years. Even in the early days, when it had been ground zero for the plague that cured mankind of all disease and sickness but one, the living had fled to the countryside to escape the cured.