The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

Few men valued the lives of strangers over profit.

But still, Stanton knew the human mind was susceptible to insidious influence, especially when people were hungry, tired, and afraid.

So he hadn’t told Mary already. One small mercy. And in this world, Stanton thought, that was increasingly the only kind of mercy to be found.

“I don’t believe in monsters,” Stanton said. “Only men who behave like them.”

You can’t have a dog eating human flesh. He’ll develop a taste for it.”

The beauty and frustration of nature, Edwin, is that it is infinite in its variations.

Ounces, grains of sand, seconds falling through an hourglass: Life was all accounting, and at the end of it, the same tab for all.

Hope, Tamsen realized, could be a very dangerous thing, especially when dealt to desperate hands.

Namely, that a disease and its symptoms were not necessarily the same thing. That the disease is something alive but invisible—almost like a spirit, in fact—that then takes hold in the body and causes symptoms, sometimes different symptoms in different people. Sometimes, even, causing no symptoms at all.

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.