Алма Катсу - The Hunger

Another day of darkness transmuted into a landscape of dazzling white: Stanton welcomed the night, if only because he could rest his eyes. Often he felt as if they were bleeding, or as if someone were tickling them with a knife; when Eddy had lost his vision altogether temporarily, he had had to walk with one hand on Stanton’s belt.

Mary collapsed next to him. They huddled together under the same filthy blanket, though it did little good. It seemed he was always wet, always cold, always hungry.

Her face was sunburnt, her nose raw and peeling. She reached into her pocket and brought out a strip of dried beef. “Your dinner.” She always said that, dinner , though it was his only meal of the day. “Eat slowly.”

“How much is left?” It hurt to eat. His stomach recoiled and grasped all at once. His teeth sang with the cold, and the slow decay of too long with too little. “Enough for how many days?”

She shook her head. “Don’t think about it, not now. We’ll find something.”

The sky was darkening fast, but the fire wouldn’t catch; the wood was wet. Eddy took his turn with the flint, then Stanton, and then Jay. Stanton stood back and saw the sun pooling behind the mountains, saw daylight pouring, melting away, and his exhaustion turned to a primal kind of fear.

“Take the ax,” he told Jay. “Get a tree down. Get branches down, get something down.” He went toward the woods at nearly a sprint, despite the clutching pressure of the snow. He had thought an hour ago he could not walk another step, but now he was electric with fear; without fire, they had no chance. They’d freeze in their sleep. And fire seemed to keep the wolves, or whatever was following them, at bay.

The thwack of the ax head rang through the hollow. Slow, though—too slow. Even if Jay could fell a tree they would never split the wood in time. Stanton plunged into the deep shadows of a stand of solemn, stooped evergreens. He ducked beneath the branches to feel for wood dry enough to burn; he found twigs, kindling, nothing they could use for any length of time. He kept going, losing sight of the camp, desperate, half mad—from the snow, the endless climb, the hunger, the pointlessness of a fight they kept fighting.

Beneath a massive pine he found some wood largely protected from the weather by the funnel of branches above them. He collected as much as he could; it would last them an hour, maybe more, long enough for Jay to split some wood from a tree.

He had turned back to camp when, from the corner of his eye, he saw movement. Fast, like a wolf running between the trees.

But they were not wolves.

Another shadow, another dark thing moved fast between the trees.

He dropped the wood in the snow, keeping hold only of a stub of pine. He struck his flint against it. Catch, damn you. Sparks flew harmlessly into the snow. His fingers were clumsy, frozen stiff. He almost dropped the flint but managed to grab it at the last second.

He heard the thing behind him only seconds before it would have jawed his neck.

He turned blindly, swinging the branch like a club. Heard it connect, saw the dark and twisted thing, half man and half beast, fall back between the trees.

A kind of demon. A monster.

There was no other word for it.

Stanton ran—or as close to it as he could in the knee-high snow. Sweat poured down his face, instantly freezing in place, pulling at his cheeks, forcing his mouth into a grimace.

Panic surged through him, mingling with disbelief.

Tamsen had been right.

The sudden clarity moved through him with the sharpness of an icicle—seemed to still his heart and uncloud his thinking all at once. The truth was like that, sometimes. Not like being saved, as his grandfather had once told him, but the opposite: cold and terrible and paralyzing.

Now, his mind raced, his blood flowed too fast in his veins. He strove for breath as he fumbled for his rifle on his back. Where was his rifle?

It had never been a pack of diseased wolves preying on them, attacking the cattle, looming in the tree line. Had it?

It had always been… these things .

No. No. He was coming unhinged. He slowed and looked back at the trees, squinted.

The shadows darted and lunged, morphed into the snowy night.

Where was his rifle?

Then he remembered he had propped it against the trunk of a tree at the edge of the woods. He would have to sprint to reach it. The snow here was over his knees now; the darkness had come.

He threw his weight into each step. Don’t look back, just go. His blood pounded in his ears. Then he heard it: a wet kind of panting, a ragged excitement, as if whatever was pursuing him had to breathe through thick, damp rot.

Closer. Closing in on him.

Whatever had attacked him, whatever he’d seen, it was real. They were real.

I’m sorry. He didn’t know what for—for not believing the tales Tamsen had spread through the party? For not protecting them?

For a life wasted not in sin, not really, but in the strangling belief of sin?

He could see the rifle now, and beyond it a thin trail of smoke, the beginnings of a campfire. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him.

He was only feet from the rifle when the thing sprang. He felt the swipe of something sharp and painful on his calf; it felt as if someone had pressed a red-hot brand to his flesh. Then burning pain in his right calf, too, and he was wallowing in the snow like a baby. He tried to crawl forward on his hands and knees, but something had his legs and was dragging him backward. Another slash to the back of his head, the pain so intense he saw white flashes.

He could not die this way.

Not now.

Not yet.

His fingers grazed the very end of the rifle stock. Slipped. But the thing had him now, had a mouth around his ankle—Stanton gasped in terror as he saw human eyes, a human nose…

Whatever it was, it had been a human once.

And yet it was not human now, this creature. Its teeth weren’t human; Stanton felt them hook deep beneath his skin, down into the muscle, and something wet and terrible probing between them that he knew must be a tongue.

He kicked the thing once, hard, in the face. It didn’t let go, but for a moment he had a little more room and, twisting, he got a hand around the gun.

He rolled again onto his back and brought the rifle to his chest, firing directly at the eyes.

The monster released him. Stanton didn’t wait to see if it was dead. He struggled to his feet, and the pain when he put weight on his right leg blacked his vision. There were more of them, massing in the trees. He fired again, blindly, not sure whether he was aiming at the shadows. He stood there shaking and bleeding into the snow, and saw them regrouping, flowing into a dark fluid mass. He lifted his rifle again when a sudden movement made him turn: One of them had sprung at him from the left, had ambushed him, and before he could aim it was on top of him, driving him backward into the snow and knocking the rifle from his hands.

It smelled like a corpse left too long in the heat. But its fingers were cold, and slimy, and wet—rotten. He choked on the smell. He tried to throw it off but he was pinned and too weak to fight. Its mouth seemed to double, its jaw unhinging like that of a snake. He saw teeth sharpened like iron nails, and too many of them, far too many—a long slick of throat, like a dark tunnel, and that horrible tongue slapping like a blind animal feeling for its prey.

Then an explosion split his forehead in two. The thing recoiled—Stanton tasted vomit—it scuttled backward, half its face hanging like a broken shutter. It moved . It was alive.

There was shouting. Mary was at his side, knees down in the snow, tugging him. Crying and screaming. “Why did you leave us? You know it’s not safe. What were you thinking? Why did you leave?”