Алма Катсу - The Hunger

They were just around the bend in the lake. So close by. She could holler and they would hear. In a moment, her girls would be in her arms again.

“So you—you’ve kept away the awful… things ,” she said cautiously. “How?”

“Fires,” he said. “I was just about to start up tonight’s.”

She nodded slowly, and began to stand. “I ought to be seeing the girls, then.”

She tried to slip past him, pushing back out into the brisk cold, where moonlight now hit the snow and sent up a faint blue glow from every surface.

She was about to use the last of her energy to dash the few hundred yards toward the other huts, when something—she couldn’t say what, but it was a kind of knowing, deep in her bones—made her turn around again.

Keseberg was still standing there, watching her. She looked at his face, really looked at him in the moonlight. There was that leering quality that had always unnerved her but something else in his expression, too, that she couldn’t quite name. She might have said it was loneliness. That was when she understood what was bothering her: He didn’t look hungry. He didn’t look as if he’d lost weight, as if he’d suffered much at all.

Then she glanced down again at the ax. Its blade was covered in blood.

“I—I…” She backed away.

But his voice came out calmly across the cold air. “Tamsen, wait.”

She turned and tried to run, pushed through a low scrub of trees, but then tripped on something and fell to her knees. It was a large, heavy stick strewn in the snow.

No. A human bone.

She gasped and began to cry—hot tears that immediately froze to her cheeks in the cold.

She had seen too much. Had come too far.

“It’s not what you think,” Keseberg said, a note of warning ringing out in his voice.

She looked around her. She had stumbled not far from a pile of what she thought had been snow, but now saw was something else entirely. It was a pile of corpses, all frozen, swollen, and blue.

At the base of the pile lay a thin woman, mangled, her body in an unnatural position. Dead, like the others. There was a deep gash in her forehead but she wasn’t bleeding.

Tamsen forced herself to look at the body. It was Elizabeth Graves, hideous with death, her eyes staring sightlessly at the sky.

The world wobbled underneath her. She willed herself not to faint. Suddenly, Keseberg was kneeling beside her.

He put an arm around her.

“Get away!” she cried out, trying to shove him back.

“Tamsen, Tamsen,” he began.

“No!” she shouted, crawling now across the snow.

He was so close, and he smelled disgusting, like he was exuding some foul stink through his pores. He grabbed her ankle and she fell to her stomach in the snow.

“I ain’t proud of it, you know,” he said then. His voice was strange, oddly high, and rich with emotion. “But it’s the only way, y’see.”

She tried to kick at him, to wriggle away.

“I’m not going to hurt you, you little bitch. Just like I didn’t hurt the others,” Keseberg said. “Tamsen, just listen to me.” He yanked her, hard.

She was shaking, crying silently, and the skin on her cheeks felt stiff from the frost collecting there.

“Bryant was right about this disease. I should know. It’s in me, like a curse, y’see. But not like those things out there in the night. Not like them.”

“Let me go,” she said hoarsely, trying once again to pull her leg from his grasp.

“Not until you hear me out,” he said. “I did it—I did that —” His gaze fell on Mrs. Graves’s face. “I cut them up, hoarded them, the dead. I had to. We’re out of food, Tamsen. There’s nothing left. They’re all going to die. They would have already if it weren’t for me. I saved ’em all, y’see, Mrs. Donner. It’s because a’ me your daughters are still alive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They wouldn’t do it on their own,” he said grittily. “They’d never agree to it. It’s unnatural. It ain’t right. But it’s the only way to live. They gotta eat something. We all do. They just don’t want to have to know where it’s from. They keep to the inside, so they don’t have to see it. Don’t have to believe it.” His eyes glittered, as though he was thrilled with the arrangement, and his own heroism.

She knew what he was saying. She wished she didn’t understand what he meant, that she didn’t have to imagine the truth of it.

He was feeding the dead to the living. Human flesh. And they didn’t know.

“My daughters. And Elitha, and Leanne…”

“They’re all alive, like I said. Though Elitha’s sick. She might be the next to go.” His eyes moved toward the pile of bodies again, and she realized with another wave of disgust and horror that he was already imagining cutting up Elitha’s body, feasting on it, feeding it to the others. She was dizzy with it; her stomach clenched in pain.

“I been keeping the creatures at bay,” he explained then. “Leaving bits and pieces for ’em. Just enough so they won’t come sniffing around too close to camp. I got it all measured and meted out.” She recalled with sudden clarity how, even just out of Illinois, the other men had already begun to warn against playing cards with Keseberg. He didn’t just cheat, they said—he memorized every hand that was played.

“I know we can make it a month,” he went on, “though we still got at least six or eight weeks before the passes clear enough to haul the remainder of us out. We’ll have to lose at least one more.”

He let go of her and rolled up his sleeve. Even in the darkness, she could see oozing red wounds, claw scratches, bruises, bite marks.

“Whatever them creatures got, it don’t harm me. They can’t infect me. I’m safe. That’s why it’s up to me. It’s only up to me.”

She had stopped crying.

She had started to listen, with an eerie sort of calm, to what he was saying.

“Maybe it takes one demon to keep the others away.” He paused. His eyes glistened with tears now. “Lucifer had been an angel first. I always remembered that.”

HE’D FIRST TASTED HUMAN FLESH back in Illinois, learned from an uncle who later disappeared while prospecting out west. He’d developed a taste for it. A hunger for it, really, though he’d kept the lust in check, was repelled by it even as the desire bloomed. He found that the taste of human blood never satiated him, but made the need for it even stronger.

Tamsen swam up to his words through a kind of fog. Had he knocked her out? Had she fallen and hit her head? Or had her consciousness slipped away for a time? It didn’t matter. She was back at the cabin now, without remembering how she got there. Her rifle was gone. No doubt he had taken it. She was sitting in the snow and listing like a broken doll, and Lewis Keseberg crouched next to her, watching her closely as though he was worried about her health.

“I thought you were like me for a while,” he said. “I heard about you back in Springfield. How you lured Doc Williams into your bed, them other fellas, too. I said, there’s a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go after it.”

“I’m nothing like you,” she said. Her mouth was full of the taste of iron.

“You’re more like me than you think. We take what we want, you and I. We do what we have to do.” He smiled at her, but he was wrong. No one knew that the thing she had wanted for so long that the wanting had cleaved her in two had made her unable to love, almost unable to feel.

No one knew who had first held her heart, and never let it go.

Not even Jory.

For how could she tell her own brother that it had always been him?