The Ones Who Come Back Hungry by Amelinda Bérubé

Author:Amelinda Bérubé [Berube, Amelinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

Sixteen

The smell. God.

In the humming, fluorescent silence of the bus shelter, I toss my coat aside, strip off the borrowed snow pants. The knees are stained and ugly in the merciless light. I stuff them into a trash can, along with my mittens, and shrug my coat back on, shivering.

I’d abandon my coat too if I dared. The faintest whiff still clings to me as I pace back and forth across the pavement, drifting into my face every time I think I’ve escaped it. Like that—dead thing, that monster, is haunting me.

Cole. His name was Cole.

We killed him.

The words seem academic, almost. Irrelevant. The leaky, ragged, shambling mess that emerged from the woods defy them. Audrey was right; he was already dead.

But so is she.

The firelit knife flickers through my thoughts. There’s no euphemism for what Audrey did—what I told her to do. Gutting is probably the kindest possible word; better than disemboweling or vivisecting. And last night, he was still trying to talk to me. What if he was still in there, unable to even scream as we threw him into the fire, as we cut him open? Why didn’t I just let him bite me when he showed up at our door? It has to be worth giving up a little blood to keep someone, anyone, from turning into that. People give blood all the time.

Audrey didn’t want me to. As far as she was concerned, his fate was a foregone conclusion. One she insisted on. You’re the one who knows how to get rid of them. I thought she was protecting me, but the memory of her scalding scorn eats away at that assumption. Maybe what she was protecting was a food source.

I turn my back on the thought. That’s not her. She said herself she was hangry. But maybe that just means it’s more than her body that’s changing. Degenerating.

A chasm of doubt yawns open under my feet. I could fall forever. And at the bottom is the worst of all worlds. The impossible, unimaginable one where I’m the one standing over her with the knife.

It won’t come to that. I won’t let it.

I get on the bus using the back door and haul every window open I can reach. The two other passengers, sitting closer to the front, give me the side-eye, clutching their coats a little closer to ward off the chill. I tip my head back and drink in the cold air, ignoring them.

The bandage on my hand is wet and filthy, the tape starting to peel, and I’m tempted to rip it from my hand, inspect the wound right here, right now, for infection. That purple-black tinge starting to spread. My palm tingles, picking out the places where Audrey’s teeth dug in.

If this is an infection, it’s already got me. Guaranteed.

The thought makes me want to peel my skin right off, scrub every pore with bleach until you could see through it. My heartbeat races in my ears. I read somewhere that blood only takes about a minute to pulse through your whole body.

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