The New Hunger Read Online Free PDF Page B

announces and hops out of the car.
    “Not alone. I’ll go with you.”
    “I’m twelve, Mom.”
    “Rapists don't check ID.” She grabs her Ruger 9mm off the dash and gets out of the truck. Julie rolls her eyes and walks around the back of the station with her mother in tow. She drops her jeans, her mother hikes her dress, and they crouch in the bushes.
    “Remember those wine parties you and Dad used to throw?” Julie says.
    “Sure.”
    “I wish we could have one now. I’m old enough to have a whole glass, right?”
    “I’d say so. Don’t know about your dad though.”
    “I’ll talk him into it.”
    Her mother smiles. “Maybe we can do something when we find the enclave. A housewarming party.”
    Julie watches her urine pool around her work boots. She browses the decades of graffiti scratched and sprayed onto the station’s wall.
    Big Dick Tim wuz here
     
    Tim sux big dick
    God still loves us
    God loves corpses
    NEVER GIVE UP
    STAY HUMAN
    DIE
     
    “I want to get wasted,” Julie mutters.
    Her mother laughs.
    Julie wipes with a leaf and buttons her jeans. A dead thorn branch catches on her mother’s dress and pulls away with her when she stands. Her husband is waiting around the corner and he watches her tug at the branch until it finally rips free, tearing a surprisingly large hole in the bodice.
    “You need some real clothes,” he says. “We’re not out for a picnic.”
    “Fuck off, John,” she says cheerfully and brushes past him.
    “By the time we get to the enclave you’re going to be wearing a bikini.”
    “The better to seduce their leader.”
    She climbs into the truck and sits there waiting. Julie watches her father’s jaw flex for a moment, then she gets in behind her mother. She thinks about wine parties. She thinks about their old house. She thinks about the day she found out her father used to have a band, and how her mother played his album for her and she laughed even though it was good, because how else could she react to the revelation that her father was human?
    She focuses deep into the trees as they drive back to the freeway, searching for wildlife. Birds, deer, something stupid and innocent that she can pretend to be for a while. Surely creatures that simple know how to be happy.

 
    The tall man is in pain.
    The feeling that began in his stomach has now spread throughout his entire body and somehow beyond it. It radiates out from him like a cloud of ghosts, countless hands clutching at the air, reaching out for…something. He wishes he knew what it wanted, but it is a mindless brute. It lashes him onward with unintel Fhlingligible grunts of need.
    In some distant compartment of his mind, he is aware that the forest is beautiful. Despite the darkness and musty tomb smell, there is a silence and softness that he finds comforting. He runs his hands along mossy tree trunks as he passes, enjoying their texture. Like wool, he thinks. Like blankets. Her skin was—
    Something shifts. He can still feel the moss but it has been reduced to information: Soft. Cool. Damp. He no longer understands why he is wasting energy touching a tree, so he drops his hands and walks faster.
    He is in a forest. He is surrounded by trees. He is wearing a tie the color his blood used to be, and slacks the color his blood is now. He is tall and thin but strong for his build—he surprises himself by snapping a branch as thick as his wrist. He carries it for a while like a club, because the forest is dark and he has seen creatures that aren’t like him lurking in the shadows. Things that walk on four legs, covered in soft stuff like moss—fur— wolves. The forest is full of wolves, which he remembers are dangerous, andhe feels afraid. But after a few hours the fear fades; he loses interest in the branch and tosses it aside.
    It is becoming harder for him to maintain interest in anything but the hollowness . He is aware that tools and weapons might help him get what he wants, but what does he want? The