Hunger by Jackie Morse Kessler

Author:Jackie Morse Kessler [Kessler, Jackie Morse]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780547341248
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2010-10-18T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

They galloped across the skies, the world streaking beneath them in colorful waves that rippled when Lisa glanced down. Or maybe her tears distorted what she saw. It didn't matter. Her problems were far away, a lifetime away. They rode the path of Famine, and for a time, Lisa didn't think of herself. Instead she lost herself to the thrill of the ride—the way her hair whipped back, the feeling of the horse beneath her. On Midnight's back, Lisa was free.

Freedom, of course, came with a price. And that payment came due as they slowed over a mountainous terrain, passing over verdant jungle: dew-kissed emeralds and lush jades; darkling peridots and sunny chartreuses. Everywhere, it seemed, were green fields, a farmer's delight. The vegetation spoke of life and health, and it lightened Lisa's heart.

But then they swooped low, and she saw that the crops were riddled with desiccated stalks and brown husks, tantalizingly green at their tips but rotted at their bases. Entire fields of maize and paddy had been destroyed before they even had a chance to ripen. Ruined before maturity.

Starved.

Lisa swallowed thickly as she peered at the crops. And her mouth twisted in disgust from the gray-brown bodies that undulated within all the green like a river of cancer. Rats—thousands of them; hundreds of thousands. They devoured the living smorgasbord in an almost lazy way—scavengers, even when sated, never ceased in their hunger for more.

Midnight touched down at the outskirts of a dusty village littered with shacks. Fences separated the fields from the washed-out town, and Lisa realized they were trying to keep the rats out of the crops. It was as fruitless as the trees on the mountain; fences and traps couldn't contain such a plague. Looming poles dangled vermin with snapped necks, but where ten rats were caught, thousands more roamed free.

Free, like her. The thought made her cringe in her seat.

On Midnight's back, Lisa toured the land. She took in the desolate huts, the dilapidated structures that listed in the wind. She watched brown-skinned farmers, barefoot and thin, as they tossed rats into debris piles of shredded wood and dead crops. Men with sinewy arms hoisted line after line of dead rodents, but it did little good. Their crops were ruined, sacrificed to the vermin god.

And as the scavengers feasted in the fields, the villagers starved. Lisa saw mothers ignoring their own raking hunger pangs as they fed their emaciated children, babies with their stomachs bloated and their limbs like twigs. She saw fathers toiling to catch rats or to hunt in the neighboring jungles for food. Even the livestock—pigs and cows and chickens—were scrawny from hunger, their ribs all too clear beneath their bodies as the animals rooted in the dirt. In one large hut, dozens of men and women gathered by cook pots, sharing the little food they had: yams and bananas and leaves from the jungles around the village.

And rats, of course. The villagers ate the very creatures that were forcing them closer to mass starvation.

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