The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

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

His eyes burned before he realized he was crying. No one would know. No one would blame him.

Through the smoke, Bryant thought for a moment that perhaps the man was not a man at all, but an animal in decay. There was no sin in eating animals. Why couldn’t he stop crying? Not because he would do it, but because, at the last second, he couldn’t.

He wept because that meant he would die—probably here, in the cave, to become another rotting corpse warming the air with putrescence.

“That’s enough out of you.” Franklin Graves was suddenly at his daughter’s side, the brute giving her a rough jerk to silence her. But Charles Stanton, tall and strong and determined, put an arm on Mary to steady her.

“With respect, Mr. Graves,” Stanton said, “you shouldn’t speak to your daughter like that. She’s talking sense—more sense than anyone else I’ve heard tonight.”

Stanton could feel the disease as it entered him, the shiver of something dark and slick and alien in his veins, so cold that it burned. How long would it take, he wondered, for him to turn? Several days? A week? He would be dead by then, at least, frozen to death or consumed by the monsters when they returned.

“Go,” he said to Mary. “Run. There are more. They’ll be here any minute.”

His mouth began to sting and water. His vision began to glaze and sparkle. Mary’s pale face loomed so close. He wanted so badly to kiss her. But he didn’t trust himself. Who knew what the taste of her lips might do to him? Who knew what the sudden hunger singing in his veins might do to her?

Only now did he close his eyes and imagine Mary’s face. He coaxed it up from the darkness of his mind and held it, let it burn there like a star, his final memory. The gun was small, and fit nicely between his teeth.

The remaining seven members of Forlorn Hope were halfway up the next ridge when they heard the shot ring over the valley. By then, Mary had stopped screaming. She stumbled only once. Then she kept walking, blinking hard against the sudden onslaught of blinding snow.

Mary had lost the knotted thread three days ago; she had left Stanton behind, she had heard a gunshot, and she had simply let the thread fall, and let her thoughts fall with it, her memories and hopes.

She couldn’t stand to hear her own voice, unchanged, carried on the stillness of a world that no longer held Charles Stanton.

“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.

“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.”