An insight begins to bubble in his head.
Dead.
The bodies are dead and the girl is…alive.
He tilts his head and frowns. Then what am I?
A pulse ripples through the cloud of hands. It has found something.
Eat? the man prompts.
No answer. The brute is silent, pensive, as if studying a puzzle. What could possibly hold the attention of that drooling monomaniac? The man increases his pace, stepping over heap after rotted heap.
• • •
The sun is nearly set, bathing the bodies in a warm orange glow that makes them look slightly less inert. He can almost imagine them standing up and dusting themselves off, groaning and chasing after him, but he knows that’s absurd. He knows what dead means now. It means gone forever. Lost. Irretrievable.
He sees a familiar shape ahead and feels a rush of happiness when he realizes what it is. A person. Not a body, not an object in the street waiting to become dirt—an actual person, like him. A man, to be specific, even taller than the tall man and also big, a bearded, bald giant in a white t-shirt. He is just standing alone in the street, his eyes on the pavement, swaying slightly.
The tall man approaches the big man with quick, clumsy strides, tripping over corpses, bumping into cars, making no attempt at stealth, but the big man doesn’t look up. His face is almost entirely blank, with just a faint trace of…an emotion…something bad maybe, but never mind; the tall man is too excited to focus on decoding emotional cues right now. He stops in front of the man and stands there, both of them swaying, but the big man still doesn’t look up.
A trembling spasm begins to form in the back of the tall man’s throat. He is going to speak.
He is going to say “hi” to someone.
“Hhh…” he says, managing only this glottal, hebraic hiss.
The big man does not react.
“Hhh…hhh…hi.” He feels profoundly satisfied. He has just greeted another person.
The big man’s eyes slide up to meet his, and the tall man begins to notice things. The big man’s eyes are an unnatural silvery grey. The same grey that stared up at him as he kicked the corpse by the river over and over, filled with some desperate rage that seems utterly foreign to him now. The big man’s skin is also grey, the same grey as the tall man’s. And there is a gaping wound in his barrel-like belly, visible through the bloody hole in his shirt.
An insight:
The big man is dead.
And yet…
The brute st">T>
something there. A sort of anti-scent, a negative. He is not alive like the girl in the woods, but not dead like the bodies in the street. He is…
He’s like you.
The tall man looks at his hands, his arms, the black blood oozing from his calf.
This is what you are.
A moan emanates from the big man’s throat, and the tall man suddenly recognizes the emotion on his face. It’s the feeling of understanding a terrible truth. Of learning something that changes everything.
A piercing screech sounds from the doorway of a nearby building, and another creature emerges onto the steps above them. A female corpse, nearly as rotten as the ones in the street, her hair hanging in mangy clumps, her naked body shriveled and sagging, full of holes and tears and exposed bones.
This is what you will be.
The woman is holding something. It is an arm. A scrawny thing, black tattoos of dice and dragons and dollar bills barely visible on its brown skin, blood still trickling from its red stump. With another triumphant screech, the woman throws the arm down the stairs. It bounces and twists and lands in front of the big man, who stares at it a moment, then snatches it up and bites into its bicep.
This is what you do.
The tall man is hungry. He is so hungry. The sight of the arm has sent the brute into a frenzy, and the hollowness is so strong it is tearing him apart. The woman disappears back into the building and the tall man follows her.
The building is a coffee shop. A quaint, cozy little place lined with books, ancient bagels moldering in the pastry case, a few laptops left unattended and still not stolen. The tall man sees all this by the light of a tiny campfire in the middle of the room. A few smashed table legs stacked on a pile of crumpled book pages, burning hot and bright.
Next to the fire are two bodies. A man and a woman, one brown, one pink, one missing an arm, the other missing everything.
The tall man’s mind has ceased to function. All his senses have been absorbed by the hunger. All he can see is the cloud of hands flailing in his face. All he can smell or taste or even feel is the scent. The perfume.
Life.
And all he can hear is the brute screaming at him to take it.
THIS, it bellows over and over as its myriad fingers jab at the two bodies. THIS THIS THIS.
While the rotten woman gnaws on a thigh, the tall man kneels beside the head. Glazed eyes stare up at him, a mouth frozen open in surprise, as if gasping, What happened? How did I get here? How could I have known that my choices mattered?
The tall man sees his hands reaching out and picking up the dead man’s remaining arm. He feels the brute prying his mouth open and shoving his head down. He feels himself chewing. And yes, he feels relief, a warm river of energy washing over his dried-up cells and reconstituting them, pooling in his chest and inflating him like a sad, sagging party balloon. But he feels no pleasure. He wishes he could feel nothing at all. He wishes he could trade everything for information, the dullest, numbest information feelings can buy, but the trading floor is closed. He bangs on the door as he satiates himself with hiasure. this person’s dwindling life, but the only answer is the thin, cold voice of his own thoughts.