Julie watches her mother approach her father, her irritation visible in the stiffness of her stride. She watches them argue, their voices not quite audible through the window. Then she glimpses movement in her periphery and the window shatters. A man’s arm reaches through and pulls the door open. She manages to grab her shotgun out of the ceiling rack just as two hands clamp around her ankles and yank her out of the truck. Her head hits the dirt hard and her vision swims. She sees a man’s face hovering over her—not a man. A boy. Just a few years older than her. Fourteen or fifteen. His beautiful brown eyes are wild with desperation. His black hair is matted and filthy. The knife in his hand is crusted with dried blood.
Julie shoots him in the chest.
The world moves very slowly as she drags herself upright, clinging to the side of the truck. She is distantly aware of her parents shooting the boy’s parents, who were emerging from a van with guns drawn and firing—she even notices the blood oozing from a graze on her father’s thigh. But mostly, she notices the boy dying on the ground in front of her.
“Jesus Christ,” she hears her mother muttering. Her parents are standing next to her now. She doesn’t look at them. She looks at the boy, watches his eyes drop to the side as his breath leaks out of him, a slow hiss like a popped bicycle tire.
The three of them stand in silence for a moment. Then Julie’s father bends down and picks up her gun—she doesn’t remember dropping it. He places it in her hands.
“Are you serious?” Her mother’s eyes are ice picks boring into her father’s. “Are you f**king serious, John?”
“It’s her third kill and we can’t keep hiding this part from her. She needs to face it.”
The boy’s eyes begin to vibrate. Their color drains.
“She’s twelve years old! She doesn’t need to face this yet!”
“This is the world, Audrey. She knows that as well as we do.”
Julie’s mother shakes her head in disbelief. A wet, sloppy breath attempts to inflate the boy’s punctured chest. Fixing her husband with a murderous glare, she steps toward the boy and cocks her pistol—then yelps as the boy’s face vanishes in a spray of blood.
The valley reverberates with thunder. Audrey Grigio stares open-mouthed at her daughter, and at the ghost of smoke creeping out of her daughter’s shotgun.
Julie hops into the truck and snaps the gun into the rack. She fastens her seatbelt and stares ahead with hollow eyes, waiting to leave.
Silently, her parents climb into the front seats. Her father drives into the grassy median to get around the blockade, working his way through the edge of the war zone to reach the residential side streets, which will be slower than the freeway but marginally safer.
“Hey Mom,” Julie says.
“Yes, honey.”
She points at the markings on a destroyed tank, the American flag’s red and blue scorched to gray but the word ARMY still clearly visible. “R.”
Despite everything he’s traded away, the tall man still feels a faint sense of awe as he wanders through the city. These towering structures, this elaborate urban circulatory system…whatever sort of creature he is, he can tell by the shape of the doors and stairs and benches that this was all designed for bodies like his, and this pleases him. He must have some value if something this magnificent was built for him. The wolves have fast legs and sharp teeth but they don’t have cities. He is excited to learn more about what he is—what he’s called and what he’s here for. Surely it’s something wonderful.
The cloud of hands has not wavered since he arrived here, so he doesn’t worry about getting lost. Each smoky tendril stretches off in the same direction, sending faint pulses of sensation back to him. A strange sort of smell that bypasses his nose and saturates his whole body. Floral sweetness spiked with sharp, electrical bitterness, like a lavender bush struck by lightning. But he finds it hard to enjoy this perfume when his body is collapsing from the inside out. Whatever energy drives his muscles is almost gone, and he can feel his cells beginning to shrivel up like raisins. The gentle hill he’s climbing may prove an insurmountable summit.
How much farther? he asks the brute.
The brute ignores him.
Are we almost there?
Nothing.
How about now?
EAT, the brute snaps, then resumes its silence.
The tall man sulks as he staggers up the hill. Finally, the cruel incline levels out into a long, flat boulevard. He instinctively glances at the street sign but finds no information there. The symbols on it blur and spin and fail to register in his brain.
I can’t read.
This thought surprises him, as he is not even sure what reading is. But what surprises him even more is the feeling that comes with it:
Loss.
What did he lose? What did he have? For reasons he can’t explain, his enthusiasm for learning his nature dims.
His foot strikes something and heth=orid stumbles. He falls to the pavement and lands with his face inches from a round thing that looks like a face but has empty holes where eyes and a nose should be. He pulls himself upright and regards the long, spindly object attached to it—a body. The object is a body, brown and dry and withered. There are more like it all over the street. The cloud of hands pokes at them, mumbling something that’s probably eat, then loses interest and floats off into the city without comment. But the man is intrigued. The bodies resemble him in shape, but like the ones by the river there is a fundamental difference that goes beyond the condition of their flesh. It’s the same chasm that separated him from the girl in the woods, but yawning in the opposite direction.