Devils Unto Dust(75)

58.


I’m falling. I think I’ve always been falling, because I don’t remember what came before this. I don’t remember my name. I sink down through the sand and dust, through layers of forgotten bone and stippled rock, through hidden water and damp earth, until I come to rest in soft darkness. The pain is gone, or maybe it’s my body that’s gone, but I’m grateful for the respite. The darkness isn’t bad, it isn’t empty, it isn’t anything. It’s the absence of what came before. Except—I can hear voices. I frown, and I’m surprised to find I still have lips. I listen, but the voices are muffled, like they’re very far away. They shouldn’t be here. I strain to hear them, twisting what might be my head one way and another.

“Liar,” a voice screams in my ear, and I jolt upright, reeling in the darkness that doesn’t feel soft anymore. It’s sharp, and freezing, and I can’t tell where my body, if this is still my body, ends and the cold air starts.

I don’t belong here, in the cold, in the dark. I am blinding sun and dust, hot metal and chapped skin. This is not my home, so I start to climb. I scramble up what feels like dirt, my nails digging into crumbling earth and chipped stones.

The darkness doesn’t want me to leave. If I stay, it promises, everything will be cold and nothing will hurt. All I have to do is let go. It would be so easy, and I have nothing left. Nothing but the small bits of my body that still count as me. Stay, the darkness says. Stay down. Stay quiet.

But I’ve been pushed down my whole life. And it’s never stopped me before.

I scream and sand pours into my mouth, into my lungs. I choke and sputter, but there, at the corner of my eye, I can see light. I shove my hands into the dirt and dig, grit grinding between my teeth. Something is burning. The acrid smell fills my nose and mouth, and when I breathe I realize the smell is coming from inside me. My skin feels hot and stretched too tight, like diamondback skin pinned in the sun, and the blood is boiling in my veins. I keep climbing, even as my skin bubbles and blisters. I cry out as the blisters pop and wetness oozes over my hands, but I couldn’t stop now even if I wanted to; I don’t know how to back down from a fight.

Tears stream down my cheeks and blood runs down my arms, and still I climb. I dig through sharp, jagged rocks that tear my fingernails and sand that sticks to my blood and stings. And when I think I’ll climb forever, I hear a deafening noise, and light, hot light, pours into my eyes until all I see is white.

“Oh my god,” says a voice that I know. “She’s still alive.”





PART FIVE:


THE


START


Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living.

—T. S. Eliot





59.


I’m hungry. It’s the first thought I form, when I can think again. I’m so hungry that it hurts, that it’s all I can think about. My stomach feels hollow and twisted, sucked up against my other organs.

“You’re all right.” A hand presses down on my shoulder and it feels like a knife slicing into muscle.

Light stings my eyes and I shut them, and suddenly I’m in Silver, I think I’m in Silver. I’m standing in the ruin of someone’s home. Half the roof has caved in, and the house sags to one side. Rubble crunches under my feet, rocks mixed with chalk from the whitewash, broken boards and shards of glass. My ruined hands feel along the wood, searching for something, anything to eat, to fill up the vast emptiness that’s yawning inside me. I hear a noise, a faint scrape against the sand, and I spin around. My eyes land on a man standing alone in the wreckage, and then my vision goes red.

“Breathe, Willie.”

I start to run, and my body moves roughly, like it’s new and unused. My feet come down hard and jar my teeth with every step. The man starts to run too, away from me, and it makes me angry. I’m so hungry and he’s making me chase him, and I’ll make him pay for it. I want to tear the flesh from his arms, let the hot blood fill my mouth and taste what he’s like on the inside. It’s easy to run him down, he’s weak and he’s faltering and I’m right behind him. I smell the sweat on his skin and the acid fear beneath it and when I jump on him he screams and the blood is pumping hard in his neck and when I bite it pours out like a faucet.

It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted, warm and soft and pure; it fills me up and makes me whole. I bury my face in his neck and eat, eat until the emptiness goes away. I finally pull back, breathing hard, and I lock eyes on the face of the man. A boy, really, and one whose face I know as well as my own. I swallow my mouthful and I scream in a voice I don’t recognize. Then I lean back in, knowing full well I’m eating my brother, but he tastes so good I can’t stop.

I wake up heaving, my stomach in convulsions, and I choke up something wet on my chin. I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming, everything is black and harsh and damp.

“Don’t try to move.”

A darker shadow moves across the sky, the outline of a person. I can’t make out the features, but I know Sam’s voice. Why is he here? He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be near me. I try to speak, but my mouth doesn’t remember how to open properly.