Enter the Rebirth (Enter the... Book 3)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  My feet plowed through gravel deposits on the side of the tributary as I changed course onto the higher ground of the parking lot. My flapping threads reminded me that I had a mission, and the building looked promising. Surely something so big would contain many things, including something to cover my partially exposed body.

  The front doors of thick, tinted glass were the kind that would slide sideways once they noticed you. The gizmo that made them do that had long ago run out of juice. I hooked my long, sharp fingernails into the seam along the right side and wrenched the door aside. It opened easily, so it wasn't locked, and it stayed ajar after I walked through.

  Cabela's turned out to be a sporting goods superstore. Dust coated the shelves, but the goods looked intact and useful. If the streams outside ever decided to turn into rivers, I could use one of the kayaks hanging against the walls. The clothing department was my main interest, but on the way there I stopped at a case full of hunting knives. They gleamed through the dusty glass. I pulled open the case and examined the blades, some sharp, some serrated, some sharp and serrated, I selected a three-inch folding knife before continuing down the aisle in search of sporty fashions.

  The clothing in Cabela's was the sort you'd buy if you wanted to ski, or fish, or climb rocks. Fortunately, it was full of lycra, and the stretchy fabric still had considerable play to it. I stripped off my shredded old stuff and pulled on a new top, leggings, socks, and even running shoes. Turning in front of the mirror, I showed off the latest mummy fashions.

  “Meow?” something croaked.

  I had left the front door open. The thing from the library must have followed me. I found my new knife and pulled it open.

  “Meow . . .” the throat making the sound seemed more confident now, as if it hadn't practiced in centuries but was getting back into the swing of things. Before I could decide whether to look for it or wait for it to pounce on me, it sauntered into the center of the aisle.

  It was a mummy cat. I could tell, even though all its fur was gone. Its shriveled flesh mirrored my own, but for all that it seemed cheerful. It held its tail high as it walked confidently toward me.

  “Oh.” I put away my knife. Mummy cats were no danger. Animals hadn't developed the hunger for their own kind—only people had done that.

  The cat gazed at me expectantly. Its eyes were still green.

  “Ah.” I could think of nothing more intelligent to say. I couldn't quite recall what cats liked, what they needed.

  And then the answer popped into my head. “Are you hungry?”

  “Mmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooooow,” said the cat, whose voice box was working better every moment.

  “Well.” I looked up the aisle, toward the front of the store. “Let's see what we can find.”

  Up front, near the registers, the racks were still full of protein bars. I opened my knife and slashed several of them open. Then the cat and I sat on the floor and gnawed the petrified food with our needle-sharp teeth. Chewing it was easy but neither of us had any saliva so bits fell out of the sides of our mouths. My companion seemed to enjoy the challenge. But I regarded the bottles of sports water speculatively.

  They had been well-sealed, but some of their contents had evaporated anyway. I popped the top on a bottle of vitamin water and sipped it—or tried to. My lips were still flexible, but my throat didn't work the way it ought to. Still, it seemed to absorb some of the water. After several sips, I could even taste it.

  “Meowffl?” enquired the cat, whose teeth were full of protein bar crumbs. She sniffed at the water, so I offered some to her. She extended a tongue that looked like sandpaper, and I gave her water one drop at a time.

  Between the two of us, we went through four more bottles of water. Her tongue began to look decidedly less sandpapery, and my taste buds woke up. I tried to remember when I had last drunk anything, but it must have happened just after the Hungry Ones started to—

  No. I would rather turn to dust than dredge that stuff up. Kitty and I were happy there on the floor of the empty store, in the empty city, after the end of the world.

  “My name is—” I started to tell her, but then couldn't remember what it was, only that my little sister called me “—Big Sister.”

  Kitty cocked her head attentively.

  “Sheba,” I named her. “Even without your fur, you look regal.”

  She bumped my hand with her mummified head, and I stroked her leathery skin. We sat that way for a time, while I contemplated old protein bars and half-evaporated vitamin water. An appetite was growing in me for something more than storms and books. I wasn't quite sure what it was, or where it would lead me, but I liked it.

  “You know what we should do?” I decided. “We should follow the water.”

  Sheba and I got to our feet. She followed me up the aisle to the backpack section, then back to the registers where I filled the pack full of food bars and bottled water. Together we walked out of the store. I stopped long enough to pull the door shut behind us. We might need to come back later for supplies, and a shut door would preserve them longer. We walked back down to the street and followed the dry stream west. Eventually we would find the part of it that was still wet. I wouldn't think about the Hungry Ones anymore.

  But truly, I didn't need to think about them. I remembered what they were. They ate Little Sister. And then they ate everyone else, even each other.

  Some day, they might eat me.

  * * *

  Everybody had parents, grandparents. Some people even had brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends. This family had a dog. The medium-sized dog was a mummy now, and still waited for them to come home.

  It got to its feet and stood by the gate of the half-intact house as Sheba and I walked up Snowbird Lane. It looked at us inquisitively, but didn't bark or growl. Sheba walked right up and touched noses with it. It gave half a wave of its tail.

  “They're not coming back,” I said. “You can come with us, if you like.”

  The dog sat on his haunches and cocked his head, studying us. Maybe he needed to get used to us. After all, no one had passed in a long time. He had waited so patiently, that was all he knew how to do. But maybe we could get him to see another possibility.

  I wondered what kind of dog he had been. Somehow, even without his fur he managed to look cute. His mummy skin was tough and leathery, just like mine and Sheba's. He had short ears that were perked, as if he were listening to something that moved miles away.

  “I'll call you Radar,” I decided.

  Radar's tail wagged again. It was kind of a creaky wag, but it got the job done.

  “We're following the water,” I told Radar.

  Radar got up and started to walk. We followed him. He led us back out to Route 60, and we walked west on it for a while. Then he turned south into a drive. The gate across the drive said HASSAYAMPA RIVER PRESERVE. I pushed the gate aside, and Radar, Sheba, and I strolled up the lane to the house at the very end. It had a courtyard with a garden, and a VISITOR'S CENTER sign.

  The Visitor's Center was a house that used to belong to the people who had run a general store. Sometime later it became a place where you could learn about the Hassayampa River. It retained many books, fossils, mineral samples, and the bones of local mammals, birds, and reptiles. We loved it. “This is our home,” I said. “From now on.”

  I wouldn't wander the world anymore. Sheba and Radar wouldn't wait for people who weren't coming home. But as the sun started to go down, and we made our beds, something nagged at my memory. I remembered why I left Phoenix, how I got scared and ran out of the library.

  Had I seen something in the street?

  I remembered the library, the silent street, the empty train car with its open door.

  Nothing was there! Why was it nagging at me?

  The library, the street, the empty train car. I had walked to Cabela's and felt like something was following me. Sheba was following me, she was the reason.

  No. The library. The street. The
empty car.

  The empty train car. How did I know it was empty? Because the door was open.

  But when I passed it on the way to the library, that door was closed.

  I walked out into the courtyard and looked into the drive and the road beyond, watching for signs of movement. I saw none.

  At least, not yet.

  * * *

  I had stopped thinking about the past. But it was still there. The world didn't end when people started dying. It ended when we stopped dying.

  I'm pretty sure someone thought immortality improved our species. But I also get the feeling it was an accident. I think only a few people were supposed to live forever, to never grow sick, or old. Somehow, it all got away from them, spreading across the planet before mutating to include other mammals, and then to birds.

  The disaster had just gotten started. We all felt the change in ourselves. We felt the strength that had nothing to do with sustenance. Briefly, we felt joy. But even in those early days, something grew in us, a hunger that could not be satisfied with ordinary food.

  Animals never felt that hunger, only people did. And some of us felt it more than others—a lot more. That appetite created the Hungry Ones. They turned our joy to terror.

  My little sister was a Hungry One. It frightened her. But like all Hungry Ones, when she saw people she wanted to eat them. She wanted the memories inside their brains.

  I felt that dreadful hunger, too. But I had a theory. If you ignored the hunger long enough, eventually it would eat itself and you would be free of it. So Little Sister and I went as far away from people as we could. We starved. We denied the hunger that devoured the world. Slowly, painfully, the hunger burned itself to ashes.

  Only then did we start to look for other survivors. But that turned out to be a mistake.

  * * *

  A mummy cow grazed the grasses next to the Visitor's Center where the Hassayampa, a river that flowed underground for most of its length, ponded at the surface. She had a mummy calf. But neither of them looked all that emaciated. I wondered if it was because they were eating grass and drinking water.

  “I'll call you Mistress Moo,” I told the cow. And when I saw how eagerly the calf chewed the grass, “I’ll call you Munchie.”

  Neither of them mooed, but they did seem to be listening. I decided I needed to plant a garden so we could start eating again. The three of us looked along the banks for a good place to sow seeds. But Mistress Moo and Munchie would nibble anything we planted; we would have to build a fence around it. An old fence still existed around the house, so maybe we could start with that. I inspected the wood, and a mummy bird hopped along one of the railings, watching me with curiosity.

  “Are you eating bugs?” I asked. “You have most of your feathers.”

  The bird chirped. Radar sniffed Munchie. Sheba strolled up to Mistress Moo as if she were hoping to get some milk. The scene reminded me of what had happened so long ago.

  Little Sister and I had gone looking for other people who had fought off the hunger, people who wanted to live normal lives again. We joined a group of them scavenging in a suburb in Denver.

  It had been an optimistic time. We found a lot of supplies and each other. It looked like the end of the world wasn't as final as we had thought. Even with my fuzzy mummy memory, I can see my friends and my little sister going house to house. They gathered stuff we thought we would need, even harvesting wild vegetables growing in the back yards. Little Sister looked so happy.

  All of that ended when a gang of children ran into the yard. There may have been twenty of them. I think the oldest of them may have been eight, but I didn't have more than a second to notice that, because they came at us like a pack of wild dogs. They were carrying hatchets.

  I scooped Little Sister up and ran with all my Undead might. But they were Undead too, and they were consumed with the Hunger we had denied. They stayed right with me, long after a living predator would have broken off the chase. I kept running long after living prey would have surrendered in despair. I heard them grunt with effort as they swung their hatchets at us. The blades grazed me, sometimes biting deep enough to draw what little blood I still had in my body. Little Sister could see them over my shoulder, but she never made a sound, never cried, nor screamed. She just held on.

  I don't know how long they followed me, because I ran for the rest of the day and far into the night. Finally Little Sister said, “You can stop,” and I did.

  Her happiness died that night. We never saw our friends again. But Little Sister didn't have long to miss them.

  “Big Sister, someone is hurt!”

  “Little Sister, don't go in there!”

  “I'm just going to see if someone is hurt . . .”

  Little Sister shouldn't have fallen for that trick. But only a week had passed since our friends had died, and sometimes I wonder if she thought she should be dead too.

  Not that she welcomed the death she got, or the one that gave it to her.

  “Yes,” the Hungry One said, “run Big Sister, by all means. I'll catch up with you later. I'll find you some day . . .”

  That Hungry One had been smart. She had been patient with her trap. If she hadn't been so busy eating Little Sister, I would not have escaped her.

  After that, I stopped trying to eat or drink, I stopped caring about most of the things in the world. I just wandered, avoiding everyone and everything.

  Yet Despite my efforts, I stumbled into the same Hungry One a final time, and again, only the fact that she crouched over another mummy, devouring him inch by inch, saved what remained of my life. As she consumed him, he watched her with fascination, as if he wished he were the one who was eating himself.

  I still wanted to live. Or at least, I didn't want to die the way Little Sister had, the way this new victim would. So I backed away. But the Hungry One spoke to me as if I were her cohort.

  “They'll breed, and we'll eat them,” she said, smugly.

  “Who will?” I asked.

  “The mortals, you silly girl.”

  “There are no more mortals.”

  The Hungry One laughed, showing all of her teeth. “Of course there are. I'm eating one.”

  No, I almost corrected her, you're eating a mummy. But it occurred to me that if I pointed out to her that she liked to eat mummies, it would occur to her that she would like to eat me. So I let it go. And as soon as she looked away from me, I ran.

  Yet I always felt that Hungry One might be on my trail. Years went by; I saw fewer and fewer mummies in the world. I glimpsed Hungry Ones lurking around the edges of things, and I avoided them. But I wondered—if there were so few of us left, could the Hungry Ones sense us from a distance? Could they sense the thoughts in our heads that they so desired to consume, the way a magnet responds to a magnetic field?

  All these years, maybe centuries later, was there one on my trail? Had it been waiting for me in Phoenix? Is that why the door to the train car had been open when I remembered it being shut?

  * * *

  I pulled a loose fence crossbeam out of its post. I carried it back to the Visitor's Center. Radar and Sheba followed me, leaving the cows to their grazing.

  The sky to the southeast was turning black. A storm brewed, pushing a wall of dust in front of it a mile high. We stood and watched it swallow the world as it raged across the desert, straight toward us.

  Sheba hissed. Then Radar growled. I looked around and I saw nothing wrong, but in any case I scooped them up and ran with them into the house, barring the door behind us. Wind clawed at the front door of our house. It wasn't alone. I put my friends down, picked up the crossbeam, and pulled out my knife.

  As the squall broke over us it grew almost as dark as night. The windows rattled with each gust, and dust puffed through cracks between the door and frame. A voice whispered under the wind.

  “Big Sister . . . help me . . .”

  I whittled the end of the crossbeam, working so fast the chips flew on all sides.


  “Help me, Big Sister . . . I'm so scared . . .”

  I regarded the narrowing end of my work, then whittled some more.

  The wind blasted the door. “Let me in . . .” whispered the voice. “Why won't you let me in . . .?”

  I braced the blunt end of the stake on the floor, and angled the other toward the door, at chest level.

  “Let me in,” whined the voice on the other side of the door, no longer trying to sound like Little Sister. “LET ME IN!”

  The door smashed into splinters. The wind raged into our house. Something solid slammed into the sharp end of my stake. It moved so fast, it drove me and the stake across the floor, right into the wall. The Hungry One drove the stake deep into its own heart and right out the other side.

  “What—?” said the Hungry One. “How—?” But the light was already fading from her eyes. Her heart had been torn apart. My own heart broke because she reminded me of Little Sister after all.

  * * *

  Little Sister had been awake and aware while almost every bit of her was eaten. Once her heart was destroyed, she was conscious but no longer able to move. She watched hopelessly while her limbs, her torso, her face, and finally her brain were devoured. Because the Hungry One saved the best for last.

  It was as if Little Sister's spirit had fled from the farthest reaches of her until it was crammed into her brain case, unable to break its bond from the flesh that bound it. When her memories were devoured, so was her spirit.

  This Hungry One had done that to her. And now she sat on my floor with the dust swirling around her. She stared at nothing. If I had not known what happened to Little Sister, I might pity her.

  Her eyes found mine again, and I saw a spark there. “Nothing is all there is,” she said, grimly.

  “Technically,” I replied, “nothing is all there isn't.”

  She glared at me. Then she grinned, showing foul, blood-stained teeth. “Clever girl. I like you.” She kept that grin going long after that last spark left her eyes.