The bat. Chiang lumbered to intercept the man. The woman writhed and groaned on the floor like she was having bad dreams. There was a third shape moving in the dimness of the shop. More screaming.
Chiang felt afraid of these people. Maybe they had brought food to her, their untainted flesh. Maybe they had brought escape by shattering what she could not. But they had also brought a lasting death with them, the desire to end her. The man reached the counter and grabbed the bat. Chiang could smell his intentions, his rage and fear. She hurried through the spilled cans, her teeth clacking anxiously on the empty air, arms out in front of her as he reared the bat to the side.
It was a can of asparagus. One of Chiang’s senseless feet slipped on the can, shooting her legs out from underneath her, and the stained bat whistled through the air above her head. With a ferocious crack, the bat met the old cash register with its brass buttons and little tombstone prices. Chiang flailed to right herself. Inhuman screams came from the large man. His knees were wobbling like Chiang’s. The smell of rage on him grew to a stench. There were sobs behind her from a third person, a shadow. The bat screamed through the air again as Chiang stumbled toward her feet.
The blow grazed the side of her head and came down on her shoulder. Something snapped. Chiang felt her shoulder twist out of place. She kept moving forward. The man was holding half a bat, the splintered ends trembling in his fist. He tried to move backwards, slipped on a can of onions, and Chiang was on him, pulling herself with one good arm and another flashing in pain, the man’s hands scrambling to keep her off, until she reached his neck.
Countless days of hunger disappeared in a gushing instant. Blood jetted into her mouth as she tore open the man’s neck. It tasted just as her desperate cravings had led her to expect. Warm and vital. Like the sashimi her father would cut and feed her while she worked.
The man’s voice left his lips and emerged from his neck, gurgles and bubbles flooding around Chiang’s mouth. There was more here than she could eat in a week. She lapped hungrily at the gushing fountain, which gave of itself in throbbing spurts. The two powerful hands scrambling at her face seemed to fade. They pawed listlessly now as Chiang’s limbs found new purpose and strength.
A loud crack filled her ears, her head bobbing forward, the delayed sense that someone had struck her. Chiang rolled off the bleeding man to find a young boy standing over her, a white boy, maybe her age. He held the broken end of a bat in his trembling hands.
Chiang lunged forward. She watched as her arms tangled around the boy’s legs, his eyes opening in horror. The boy brought the short piece of wood back down on her head, mimicking his father. It bounced off her head and out of his hands. He shrieked as Chiang wrapped herself around his knees and toppled him. She pulled herself up his frail body, hands grabbing fistfuls of his rumpled and smelly clothes, blood spilling out of her mouth and down her chin, mouthfuls of blood from the neck of the boy’s father.
This boy’s father, Chiang thought. A boy. She pulled herself toward his more youthful neck while his hands beat uselessly against her cheeks. She thought of Shen, the cute boy with the jet black hair who sat across from her at school. Chiang wondered suddenly if he had made it home that day. Was he out there, breaking into stores with his parents, killing animals like her with baseball bats?
The white boy screamed and begged. He was pleading with her. Sobbing. As if she had any choice.
Chiang opened her mouth. The boy’s hands were on her face, covering her eyes, trying to push her away. He felt so thin. Like bones. Like a disappointing catch her father might curse as he cleaned for the salvageable scraps.
“No!” the boy screamed. His mother had fallen still. Chiang thought of all the flesh in the room. Weeks and weeks worth of flesh. The taste of the father was powerful on her lips.
She bent her head toward the boy’s screaming throat and fought through his pushing and shoving arms, and she hated herself for this. It wasn’t what she wanted, killing this boy who reminded her of Shen. But try as she might, Chiang couldn’t do anything else. Even though she wanted to pull away, her head continued to bend toward his neck. She could add her own silent pleas to his, and yet her body moved to sate its hunger.
And Chiang was afraid. Not of these people, no longer, but of herself.
She wailed inside her own head. She yanked with her mind like a person inside one of those jackets from the movies, with the long arms strapped around the back, the crazy people. She bucked and jerked with her mind, tugging and pulling her head away, even as clacking teeth drew closer.
The boy was sobbing, crying, begging, digging his fingers at her eyes.
Chiang thought of the hours she had wrestled with a paintbrush, the long days with her tiny hands wrapped around the infuriating neck of her violin, practicing, practicing, perfecting. Concentrate, her mother would say. Try harder, her father would say.
Chiang concentrated. She tried harder than she’d ever tried concentrating on anything. The setting sun bounced through the streets and cast shadows across the spilled cans and the scene of violence. There was a symbol for life painted out there, but it read stranger from the inside. Chiang’s lips brushed against the boy’s throbbing neck. His poor arms were too weak. His mother stirred; Chiang could hear the lady’s groans.
And then some handhold was reached. Like the thrill of her fingers finally bending into place and a sonorous and rewarding cry spilling from her violin—or the graceful arc of ink left from the supple perfection of her spinning wrist—there was this moment of complete control, this eyeblink of a mind taking over a body and bending raw impulse to graceful will.
Chiang’s mouth brushed against the boy’s neck, but she did not bite him there. She pulled away. Really pulled away. In charge for a slender moment.
When his hands came back to her face, pushing her, Chiang turned to the side and bit his finger. She crunched through to the bone and then bit down even harder. Her teeth went through the knuckle, the pop of something solid in her mouth, something to chew on as she fell away from the boy, a fleshy coating and a hard candy center.
The mother was stirring, holding her wounded side, coming to. The boy gasped and peered wide-eyed at his hand, clutching the spurting wound where his finger once stood. He would survive. Chiang knew very well that he would survive. She scrambled across the floor after the woman, still hungry, knowing what she needed to do. She glanced down at her hands as they brushed canned goods aside, at her missing fingers, the black char of her infected wound wrapping up her arm like a twisted tattoo, and Chiang was happy.
Look at what these people had brought her, she thought, as she turned the woman’s groans into screams. Food and a way out. Flesh and blood. But more than that, as she bit the woman beneath the ear—
Company.
A friend.
Chiang ate and ate while the frightened boy beat her weakly and pathetically with what remained of his father’s bat. She ate and smiled while his tormented screams filled her parents’ shop. He was frightened, now, just as she had been. But that would change, Chiang thought to herself.
Everything does.
22 • Dennis Newland
Lisa’s face was a mess. Her chest had stopped heaving—the foamy bubbles of blood no longer gathering at the holes in her neck—and Dennis couldn’t tell if there was enough of her left to come back or not. He’d seen others so eaten up that they didn’t turn, just stayed dead.