Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

“Fair winds, kid,” Sergeant says.

So Melanie has to spend the night in her chair, still strapped up tight apart from her head and her left arm. And it’s way too uncomfortable to sleep, even if she leans her head sideways, because there’s a big pipe that runs down the wall right there and she can’t get into a position that doesn’t hurt her.

But then, because of the pipe, something else happens. Melanie starts to hear voices, and they seem to be coming right out of the wall. Only they’re not: they’re coming down the pipe, somehow, from another part of the building. Melanie recognizes Sergeant’s voice, but not any of the others.

“Fence went down in Michigan,” Sergeant says. “Twenty-mile stretch, Clayton said. Hungries are pushing west, and probably south, too. How long you think it’ll be before they cut us off?”

“Clayton’s full of shit,” a second voice says, but with an anxious edge. “You think they’d have left us here, if that was gonna happen? They’d have evacuated the base.”

“Fuck if they would!” This is Sergeant again. “They care more about these little plague rats than they do about us. If they’d have done it right, we didn’t even need to be here. All they had to do was to put every last one of the little bastards in a barn and throw one fucking daisy cutter in there. No more worries.”

It gets real quiet for a while after that, like no one can think of anything to say. “I thought they found a cure,” a third voice says, but he’s shouted down by a lot of voices all at the same time. “That’s bullshit.” “Dream on, man!” “Onliest cure for them fuckin’ skull-faces is in this here clip, and I got enough for all.”

“They did, though,” the third voice persists. “They isolated the virus. At that lab in Houston. And then they built something that’ll kill it. Something that’ll fit in a hypo. They call it a phage .”

“Here, you, skull-face.” Sergeant is putting on a funny voice. “I got a cure for you, so why’n’t you come on over here and roll up your sleeve? That’s right. And all you other cannibal motherfuckers, you form an orderly line there.”

There’s a lot of laughter, and a lot of stuff that Melanie can’t hear clearly. The third voice doesn’t speak again.

“I heard they broke through from Mexico and took Los Angeles.” Another new voice. “We ain’t got no government now. It’s just the last few units out in the field, and some camps like this one that kept a perimeter up. That’s why there’s no messages anymore. No one out there to send them.”

Then the second voice comes in again with, “Hell, Dawlish. Brass keep their comms to theirselves, like always. There’s messages. Just ain’t any for you, is all.”

“They’re all dead,” Sergeant says. “They’re all dead except us. And what are we? We’re the fucking nursemaids of the damned. Drink up, guys. Might as well be drunk as sober, when it comes.” Then he laughs, and it’s the same laugh as when he said, “Like we’d ever give you the chance.” A laugh that hates itself and probably everything else, too. Melanie leans her head as far to the other side as it will go, so she can’t hear the voices anymore.

Eddie, she tells herself. Just Eddie Robertson talking. That’s all.

The night is very, very long. Melanie tells herself stories, and sends messages from her right hand to her left hand, then back again, using her sign language, but it’s still long. When Sergeant comes in the morning with his people, she can’t move; she’s got such bad cramps in her neck and her shoulders and her arms, it feels like there’s iron bars inside her.

Sergeant looks at her like he’s forgotten up until then what happened last night. He looks at his people, but they’re looking somewhere else. They don’t say anything as they tie up Melanie’s neck and arm again.

Sergeant does. He says, “How about them fair winds, kid?” But he doesn’t say it like he’s angry, or even like he wants to be mean. He says it and then he looks away, unhappy, sick almost. To Melanie, it seems like he says it because he has to say it; as though being Sergeant means you’ve got to say things like that all the time, whether that’s really what you’re thinking or not. She files that thought next to his name.

One day, Miss Mailer gives Melanie a book. She does it by sliding the book between Melanie’s back and the back of the wheelchair, and tucking it down there out of sight. Melanie isn’t even sure at first that that’s what just happened, but when she looks at Miss Mailer and opens her mouth to ask her, Miss Mailer touches a finger to her closed lips. So Melanie doesn’t say anything.

Once they’re back in their cells, and untied, the children aren’t supposed to stand up and get out of their chairs until Sergeant’s people have left and the door is closed and locked. That night, Melanie makes sure not to move a muscle until she hears the bolt slide home.

Then she reaches behind her and finds the book, its angular shape digging into her back a little. She pulls it out and looks at it.

Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey .

Melanie makes a strangled sound. She can’t help it, even though it might bring Sergeant back into the cell to tell her to shut up. A book! A book of her own! And this book! She runs her hands over the cover, riffles the pages, turns the book in her hands, over and over. She smells the book.

That turns out to be a mistake, because the book smells of Miss Mailer. On top, strongest, the chemical smell from her fingers, as bitter and horrible as always: but underneath, a little, and on the inside pages a lot, the warm and human smell of Miss Mailer herself.

What Melanie feels right then is what Kenny felt, when Sergeant wiped the chemicals off his arm and put it right up close to Kenny’s face, but she only just caught the edge of it, that time, and she didn’t really understand it.

Something opens inside her, like a mouth opening wider and wider and wider and screaming all the time—not from fear, but from need. Melanie thinks she has a word for it now, although it still isn’t anything she’s felt before. Sometimes in stories that she’s heard, people eat and drink, which is something that the children don’t ever do. The people in the stories need to eat, and then when they do eat they feel themselves fill up with something, and it gives them a satisfaction that nothing else can give. She remembers a line from a song that Miss Justineau sang to the children once: You’re my bread, when I’m hungry.

So this is hunger, and it hurts like a needle, like a knife, like a Trojan spear in Melanie’s heart or maybe lower down in her stomach. Her jaws start to churn of their own accord: wetness comes into her mouth. Her head feels light, and the room sort of goes away and then comes back without moving.

The feeling goes on for a long time, until finally Melanie gets used to the smell the way the children in the shower on Sunday get used to the smell of the chemicals. It doesn’t go away, exactly, but it doesn’t torment her in quite the same way: it becomes kind of invisible just because it doesn’t change. The hunger gets less and less, and when it’s gone, all gone, Melanie is still there.

The book is still there, too: Melanie reads it until daybreak, and even when she stumbles over the words or has to guess what they mean, she’s in another world.

It’s a long time after that before Miss Mailer comes again. On Monday there’s a new teacher, except he isn’t a teacher at all: he’s one of Sergeant’s people. He says his name is John, which is stupid, because the teachers are all Miss or Mrs. or Mister something, so the children call him Mr. John, and after the first few times he gives up correcting them.