by Hugh Howey
Page 9
It was one or the other. It couldn’t be both. His brain or his flesh, never the two.
Three times in his life Dennis had gotten stoned, and every time it was this choice. He could have his body or his thoughts, but not both at the same time. That little bridge between the hemispheres of his soul got fogged up by the smoke. That bridge had a name. Corpus Christi or some shit. Once it was severed, he had to choose. One or the other. Lie still and think or get the fuck up and lose his mind.
So he didn’t smoke. Was terrified of the shit. And now it was happening again.
Dennis marveled at the similarities of getting stoned and becoming a zombie as his willpower faded and his arm began to sting less and less. He watched, powerless, as his legs kicked. The movement was a relief, but only for a moment. Cornflakes crunched under the heels of his salvaged boots. And when he began to rise, he did it with the grace of a drunk, with limbs jerking out of control, unsure of themselves.
Dennis was a joystick with its wires crossed. He was playing Dead or Alive 3, that fighting game on his XBox, but the man on the screen wasn’t pulling off the moves he was sending it. He felt that video game lean, the attempt to urge the action in one direction through willpower alone, but that never worked. Instead, his body lurched across the aisle toward the nearest scent. The player was out of his control. The game had gone to a cutscene, and Dennis had an awful feeling of how it would turn out.
He watched as his arms slashed through sacks of disheveled coffee, digging for Lisa. Some distant and half-sane shard of his former self knew what he was doing. It was as though he’d been locked away in his own skull, some interloper crowding in beside him, and the confines and proximity meant that feeble thoughts and silent screams from the one could bleed over into the other. A monster had taken up residence in his head, and he could read the foul beast’s mind, know what it was thinking.
Entire shelves of organic and fair trade scattered to the tiles around his feet. Dark roast and decaf. Coffee from countries where Dennis imagined life continued apace, maybe a news story in Portuguese about an outbreak in Manhattan. Or maybe the entire world was overrun, who the fuck knew?
He heard Lisa calling for him. She was excited, had finally found some special ingredient to this secret meal she’d been promising for weeks. If they ever found a decent store, she’d said, one that hadn’t been stripped bare, one dangerous enough on the outside to be rewarding enough within, she’d make him something special.
Well, we made it, Dennis wanted to say, to shout through the shelves. The old part of him wanted to, at least. The new part grunted with hunger and frustration—it had a different meal in mind. This was the part that made him writhe between the tight shelves, forcing his body past rows of coffee. An inhuman gurgle dribbled past his lips, a verbal drool.
Lisa was reaching for something, telling him to come over. Dennis’s arms found her arm. The touch was electric—skin meeting skin on a first date, the feel of one’s own deadened limb in the morning as numbness wore away into tingles. Dennis’s fear for Lisa melted in a flare of endorphins. His worry disintegrated at this discovery, this touch of meat, of real food among pre-packaged and processed shit.
Lisa shrieked. Dennis was on his belly like a snake, lurching side to side, sending more cans to their dented fates as he tunneled from aisle eighteen to aisle seventeen.
His girlfriend’s screams grew louder and more panicked. It reminded him of all the times he’d hid behind a door before leaping out. Reminded him of the insane pranks of the past week, the humor only boys found funny, the madness wrought of dark survival and fading adrenaline. He would pinch Lisa’s calf with the claw of a hand when she wasn’t looking, making her think she’d been bit. He’d watch Matt do the same or similar to Sarah, the boys laughing with tears in their eyes while trembling hands slapped at their shoulders, girlfriends calling them assholes, thinking for a moment that the end had come for them.
He didn’t know why they did it, why there was this compulsion to strike terror in the hearts of those they loved. More cans scattered as Lisa fought his grip. She was yelling at him now. Her fear had flipped to anger. This was how it worked. Frightened for a moment until she realized it was him, and then just pissed. She tried to pull away, but Dennis wasn’t playing this time. He held her arm with a starving grasp, his brain dripping sick thoughts and remnants of guilt.
Why did he ever scare her for fun? He tried to make caveman sense of it. For Dennis, every human drive had to make caveman sense. Where had it come from, this universal oddity? Why did humans do the shit they did? Where did it originate?
Lisa smacked his head as he emerged through the shelves. She begged him to let go. Dennis made zombie noises, grunts and groans of lungs compressed by metal shelving, the air just leaking past his vocal cords. Why did they do it? Did they scare their women as some sort of training? Was it to teach them to never trust any man, even their own? Or was the fear some subconscious attempt to cow them, keep their women feeling helpless and reliant on the protective brawn they provided, like the mafia feigning worry for some shopkeeper who had only them to fear.
Dennis didn’t know.
He didn’t know why they did it any more than he knew why he was doing it for real this time.
Urges.
Caveman shit.
Like eating raw meat. Dennis had never eaten raw meat before, not even sushi. This was his last pre-monster thought as he wrestled his girlfriend’s arm to his lips, jaws parting, teeth bared, the anger in her shouts sliding to full-on panic.
She shrieked piercing wails, and Lisa knew. She had to know as he bit down on her forearm, a patch of skin he used to kiss, that creamy white with a single mar of a mole that she insisted was a freckle. When his tongue hit her flesh, there was a familiar taste, the salt from weeks of running and not bathing, the hot skin like a day on the beach, the same flavors that tinted their lovemaking. His girlfriend tasted the exact same on the surface.
It was the unfamiliar that lay beneath.
Dennis felt an eruption in his brain like an orgasm. Better. Better than an orgasm. This was what he was wired for. His teeth came together, and Lisa’s arm jerked. Desperation. There was desperation in both of them. Panic and starvation were at odds with each other. The desire to eat and to not be eaten. Dennis thought of make-up sex they’d had once, the rough sex. He thought of that first time, when she’d said she didn’t want to, but he had convinced her. They were both drunk. He was too far along to turn back. Both naked and willing to do so much, but then him wanted more. More than she did. The drive in him to eat was like that drive to fuck. He would’ve insisted it was something containable until he’d actually felt it, until he’d gone that far. That far, and you were going all the way. He couldn’t stop. Too weak.
Dennis also thought, as he bit down, that teeth were meant for this, just not his. He never would’ve guessed that they could rip flesh. Not his teeth. Maybe those of another monster but not his. The flesh of Lisa’s arm gave way, his jaw clenching on the softness, and then her skin stopped moving, became tight, could stretch no more, and with a pop, with a sudden orgasmic burst of power, his bottom teeth met his top teeth, a chunk of her arm in his mouth, him chewing.
There wasn’t a product on the supermarket shelves as delicious as this. Lisa’s safety receded from his mind. What he was doing faded; what he had become made the rest of him cower in fear. Lisa gurgled in pain and staggered backwards, and Dennis latched onto her like a rabid dog. He slid forward, cans bouncing, and emerged from the shelves a different thing than what had entered. He and Lisa were on the ground, rolling around like they used to wrestle, Dennis pulling his way up her body even as he chewed this first glorious taste and swallowed it down.
He wanted her neck. She was yelling for him to stop, begging. The sample in his mouth drove him forward, craving more. This was why he shied away from anything he knew he’d like. One try, and it was over
for him. There was nothing for Dennis in moderation.
Lisa cried out for help. She prayed to a god he knew she didn’t believe in. Panting for air, yelling for Matt and Sarah, Dennis felt just a hint of guilt. The old him was still in there, sad that shit had gone bad like this. He remembered, even drunk that one night, knowing that he was doing something wrong, that he should stop. But he had driven forward until screams and moans couldn’t be told apart, until cries and gasps were the same, until he could convince himself that she was enjoying it too, that she would forgive him, that they would never talk about it, try not to think about it, forget that she had ever begged him to stop.
That was the old him in there, feeling sorry. The rest of him wanted a second hit of this new drug. The rest of him wanted Lisa to shut the fuck up. And as he pulled himself up her chest, he found a way to do both, to get a taste and to silence her. And it amazed him, again, that teeth were meant for this. It was some caveman shit, he thought, as his jaw opened a gushing and hissing hole in his girlfriend’s throat. It was some caveman shit as her cries for help were silenced, as her body fell into reluctant submission, he on top of her, getting his way.
21 • Chiang Xian
Chiang was in the back of the meat shop, cornering a rat in her slow and clumsy steps, when the strangers broke in. It was the fifth day of her terrible hunger, the countless day of her imprisonment, and the third time she’d chased after the same rat. It cowered under the old radiator in the back room while someone shattered the glass door at the front of the shop.
Chiang could smell the tiny animal under there. The last two times she’d seen this morsel of brown meat scurry across the floor, her starving body and senseless mind had charged directly after the thing. She had been forced to watch, mad with hunger, as it disappeared into its home behind the cupboard.
This time, Chiang had a better idea. And somehow, her body listened. Like an exhausted arm and trembling brush finally obeying her concentration and producing the perfect stroke, if she thought hard enough on a thing, a direction, her feet seemed to shuffle according to her will. But just barely. And it wasn’t easy.
I can do this, she told herself. It was no different than stretching her tiny hands around the neck of a violin. It was just like origami, biting her lip and making sure the edges of the paper lined up just right, to within a hair, that with the drag of a fingernail the folds were crisp and sharp, her miniature paper cranes nearly as good as her mother’s. Chiang felt she had studied all her life for this, to corner this one little rat.
She banged into the radiator, and the frightened animal shot off toward her father’s back office. Good, good. Chiang shuffled after. Her limbs were too slow to catch the thing by hand. That was true even before she’d lost the fingers on one hand. But there were swifter limbs in her father’s office. And so she lurched sideways, frightening the little guy through the open door before following after.
Following after. Chiang thought about an old worry of hers as the rat scrambled beneath her father’s cluttered desk. She had this feeling, this nagging sensation even back when her parents were still alive, that her thoughts followed after the things she did. They were the echoes of her actions, not the causes of them.
There was something Confucius had once said: The superior man acts before he speaks. She didn’t think Confucius meant it the way she read it, though. Her fear, as she had struggled to be the perfect girl her parents desired, was that there wasn’t any control at all. All men act first and speak after. She felt it herself. She would do a thing and then take credit or make excuses. In truth, she did the thing because she was born to. Because, in that moment, how could she not?
She banged into the desk, just like she had the radiator. On purpose, she thought. She hoped. Almost there. Swifter arms than hers. She could smell the fear leaking out of the rat and figured it was doing much the same as she. Reacting and then feeling something. Some mix of chemicals. Happiness or sadness, fear or desire, these chemicals causing limbs to move toward or away from the good or bad.
Chiang tried to scare the rat from the bad to the worse. She nudged the desk again. The last project her father had been working on—ledgers full of meticulous script, purchase orders for half a dozen vendors—was spread out across the surface just the way he had left it so many days ago. There was an agitated squeak by the wall, the scratch of tiny claws, and then the clack and slam of a metallic arm and the snapping of a tiny neck as a trap long picked clean did its swift work.
Chiang fell to the floor and lumbered beneath the desk. The darkness was no concern; she could smell the crushed flesh like a piece of cracked ginger. Her hands groped for the trap and found it. She pulled the contraption out, the animal’s tiny arms still twitching with something that resembled life.
Fists smaller than any intricate crane her mother had ever made unfolded into pink and perfect palms. Chiang only studied them a moment before bringing the trap to her lips. She bit the rat in the belly, still warm and heaving, and her mouth was filled with the hot and sticky scraps picked over and digested by the foul beast, this little survivor. The trap itself was something to chew around. The rest was for her. She peeled slivers of flesh off its body and chewed through bones like chopsticks while someone rummaged noisily in the meat shop.
Chiang stopped chewing and listened. Beyond the moist steam rising from the rat’s insides, there was another smell cutting through. Living meat. Something not rancid and spoiled. She could smell them like spices, at least a few of them out there, the odor getting stronger.
Voices.
A whispered hush. The sound of canned goods being scraped off of shelves. There were people in her parents’ shop, scrounging for food. Chiang dropped what remained of the rat and shuffled toward the door. She was still hungry. So very hungry. And her limbs seemed to move of their own accord, her mind making excuses, telling herself a story of reasons, as she went along like a puppet.
