Nothing. To. Eat.
Hunter stood vacant, hopeless, in the living room. He stared at the backyard and thought about the grass and weeds. Weeds were plants, after all. Animals ate them. They would at least fill his stomach.
Grass and weeds. Boiled. He could do that.
Then he saw the deer.
It was a doe. Hyper alert, with a face that managed to be both cute and stupid. The doe blinked her big black eyes.
A deer. As big as a calf.
Hunter was moving toward the back door before he’d thought through what he was doing or why.
He moved swiftly. He opened the back porch door. The deer, startled, took off in a bounding run. Hunter raised his hands and thought, Burn.
The deer did not fall over dead. Instead, it made a squealing sound Hunter had not known deer could make. The deer kept running, but one leg dragged.
Hunter aimed again and thought, Burn.
The deer stumbled. Its front legs kept motoring, but its hind legs were immobilized. It fell on its face.
Hunter ran to it. He found the deer still alive. Struggling. She looked at him with her big, soft eyes and for a moment he hesitated.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He aimed his hands at her head. In seconds she had stopped thrashing. The dark eyes turned opaque.
She smelled like a steak on the grill.
Hunter burst into tears. He sobbed wildly, out of control. It was like what he’d done to Harry. Poor Harry. And now this poor animal, who was just hungry herself.
He didn’t want to eat the deer. It was crazy. She’d been alive, munching weeds just a minute earlier. Alive. Now dead. And not just dead, but partly cooked.
He told himself he would not eat the deer. But even as he was telling himself he wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t . . . he was finding the biggest knife in the kitchen.
Orsay Pettijohn was no longer hungry for dreams. She was hungry for food.
Since coming to Coates she had eaten barely enough to stay alive. The situation was desperate. Kids were going into the surrounding woods looking for mushrooms, chasing squirrels and birds. One boy had made a trap and managed to catch a raccoon. The raccoon had bitten the boy repeatedly before being beaten to death with a piece of rebar.
A girl named Allison had collected a bowl full of mushrooms. She had reasoned that cooking them would make them safe. She microwaved them till they were rubbery but fragrant.
Orsay had smelled them cooking and had been driven nearly crazy by the smell. One of the boys had attacked Allison, beaten, her and stolen the mushrooms as Allison wept and cursed.
Within a few minutes the boy was vomiting. Then he began raving, crying, shouting at things that weren’t there. He’d fallen silent after a while. No one had entered his room since to see if he was dead or alive.
Some kids had gathered grass and weeds and boiled them. They had not gotten very sick, just a little. But they hadn’t really gotten full, either.
Kids were thin. Their cheeks were hollow. They didn’t look like starvation victims yet, because the serious hunger was only a few days old. But soon, Orsay knew, bellies would bloat and hair would turn red and crisp, and deadly resigned lethargy would set in. She had done a report once on famine, never imagining it would be something she would experience.
More and more kids made dark jokes about cannibalism.
Orsay was less and less sure she wouldn’t go along.
Unless, of course, she herself was the meal.
She was lying in her bungalow, in the woods, out behind the school, watching an old download of a show that seemed to be from another planet. The download came with a commercial for Doritos. The characters ate food all the time. It was impossible to believe that world had ever been real.
Suddenly, Orsay was aware of another person in the room. She didn’t see him or hear him. She smelled him.
He smelled like . . . like fish. Her stomach rumbled and her mouth watered.
“Who’s there?” she demanded, frightened.
Bug appeared slowly. He emerged from the background of Mose’s shabby room.
“What do you want?” Orsay demanded, not really afraid of Bug now that she knew it was him. The smell, the fat, luscious aroma of fish, had her slavering like a hungry dog.
“I need you to do something,” Bug said.
“Did Caine send you?”
Bug hesitated. He glanced aside and for a few seconds faded into the background again. Then he reappeared. His face was twisted into a very un-Bug-like expression of determination. He glanced warily over his shoulder as if fearing that some second version of himself was lurking, listening. “They have fish.”
“I can smell it,” Orsay whimpered.
“I brought some for you,” Bug said.
Orsay felt like she might faint. “Can I have it?”
“First you have to promise you’ll do what I say.”
Orsay knew Bug was a little creep. Who knew what he would want her to do? But she also knew she wasn’t going to resist. There was just about nothing she wouldn’t do for food. Fish would be much, much better than the other type of meat kids were considering.
“What do I have to do?” Orsay asked.
“We have to take a walk. Then you have to do your thing. There’s some, like, creature or whatever. They want you to watch its dreams. See what it wants.”
“The fish,” Orsay whispered urgently. “Do you have it with you?”
Bug drew a Ziploc bag out of the pocket of his hoodie. Inside was white, crumbly, smashed-up fish. Orsay lunged for it, tore the packet open with trembling fingers, and ate it like an animal, sticking her mouth into the bag.