She doesn’t have time to pull out her hatchet. The bullets slow the corpse about as much as paintballs. Its fingertips swipe for her face. She stumbles backward and trips, falls on her butt, kicks hard at the corpse’s ankle and feels it snap like brittle plastic. The corpse topples onto its side and Nora scrambles to her feet, sprints to her brother and stands protectively in front of him while the corpse staggers upright. It takes two steps toward her with its loose, floppy foot dragging against the pavement, then stops, looks down at the broken foot, steps on it with the other, and heaves. Its foot tears off like a stubborn shoe. The corpse advances, stumping forward on its bare tibia like a peg leg.
Nora has seen all she can handle. Without premeditation or planning, she grabs Addis’s wrist and runs back toward downtown Seattle, not because there is shelter or food or ammo there, but because it’s downhill. She manages one final glance toward the motel. The Dead woman is giving slow pursuit, but the man hasn’t moved. He stands where Nora left him, just watching her go.
The tall man has been cheated. Some of the information he bartered for is false. He knows that he is in a North American forest and that there should be things like wolves and bears and deer in it but instead there are strange things that shouldn’t be here or anywhere. Floating eyes and trees that breathe and snakes with silky blue fur. He does not know where to send his complaints. He does not know how he’ll ever get a grasp on this world if it keeps changing.
He has been walking in the dark for six hours. His mind is losing what little rigidity it had, melting into mercury and oozing through the cracks. The brute in his belly is in a panic, screaming at him over and over, and he is growing weary of its ranting.
~ aly anTAKE GET STEAL HAVE FILL
Shut up! he finally snaps. I can’t do it until you tell me what it is! So shut up!
To his surprise, the brute shuts up. The man walks onward, his mind ringing in the sudden silence. And then, in a sour grumble, as if pried out of a pouting child, a specific imperative finally emerges:
Eat.
The man stops walking and slaps a palm over his face. That was it? Eat? He remembers eating. He even remembers some foods. Steak. Sushi. Sashimi… Eating is easy.
Why did you dance around it so long?
The brute is silent.
Still in disbelief, the man begins foraging. He finds a huckleberry bush and pops a handful of the plump red globes in his mouth. He bites down, expecting juicy sweetness—and feels the sensation of biting into a dead moth. The juice tastes like attic dust. The texture is dry and flaky, despite how the berries feel in his hands. He spits them out and stares with horror at the pulpy mess on his shirt.
The brute smirks.
He searches until he finds some wild mushrooms and shoves one in his mouth. Although he can feel its fleshy softness in his fingers, his mouth tells him he’s crunching into a ball of dead wasps. He spits it out with a moan.
The brute laughs.
The cloud of hands mobilizes again, darting deeper into the forest, and a rich new scent pulses back to him through the cloud. Blood. Flesh. He follows it into a small clearing and discovers the source: a young deer hobbling through the underbrush, blood pouring from its claw-raked haunches.
This? he asks the brute, and the response is a mumbled, slightly sarcastic maybe.
The deer’s dark, round eyes regard him with desperation. Part of him recoils from the impulses surging into his hands and teeth, but that part is no longer in charge. He seizes the deer and bites into its neck.
Blood pours down his throat. He rips out big chunks of meat and his mouth plays no tricks on him. The meat tastes like meat. The blood tastes like blood, salty and metallic. But when it hits his stomach, there is no spreading warmth of satiety. He drops the deer and stands up, waiting for it, but when his stomach finally responds, it’s not the answer he expected. A dark rush of wrenching, twisting hunger knifes into him, as if he’s suddenly minutes from starvation.
Eyes bulging, he leans over and vomits.
Wrong! the brute giggles into his ears. Wrong wrong wrong.
He vomits until it feels like his stomach will twist inside out, then stands over the deer gasping and shuddering. What do you want? Tell me!
Eat, the brute purrs, retreating back into the shadows, as if the answers to all questions are contained in this single word.
The cloud of hands drifts toward an opening in the trees, beckoning him with long, curling fingers, and he follows. He squints as he emerges from the graveyard musk of the forest into crisp air and blinding light. He is on a hill overlooking a valley, and there is something amazing in this valley. Towering rectangles of concrete and glass. A tangled web of streets winding through houses and businesses and banks and bars.
City.
andalign="left">All these words return to him at once, conjuring a wild spray of images. People swarming in shopping malls, flashing plastic cards, putting paint on their faces and metal things on their fingers. People sleeping in alleys, sticking bottles in their mouths and metal things in their arms. People naked in beds, kissing. People naked in showers, crying. A man pouring gasoline on a leather couch. A man in a tie screaming into a radio. A blonde woman touching the man’s face, then dying beside a river.
THERE, the brute shouts, interrupting his daydream, and the images fade. GO. TAKE. EAT.
The cloud of hands surges down into the city like a squid on the hunt. With his head bowed, the man goes where he’s led.
“Are we going back to the Space Needle?” Addis asks when the motel has vanished from sight and they have recovered some composure.
“No.”
“Why are we going over this bridge again?”