40
The Texaco sign flickered and went dark, along with the lights above the pumps and inside the little gas station office. Elias stood at the edge of the parking lot with his back to the others. He stared into the falling snow on the northbound road and wondered how far ahead his family might be. If they were still his family, given what he’d become.
Behind him, Alfie pumped gas while Root and the others digested. The gauge had been close to empty when the panel truck had rolled into the Texaco lot. A plow had sat idling, a massive yellow dump truck, badly rusted, with a heavy V-blade in the front. Its driver had been inside the gas station’s office with a lanky, mustached man in an oil-stained Texaco shirt. Now the plate glass of the little office had been shattered and the snow accumulating on the pavement had been decorated with splashes of blood here and there. The plow driver and the mustached man had died quickly, bodies broken and torn while they screamed about hell and the devil.
Elias hadn’t been innocent. The hunger had him just as surely as it did Root and the rest of their kin. He’d been so eager that his face was smeared red. Plugs of drying blood filled his nostrils, and he used a fingernail to scrape them out.
He knelt and scooped up two handfuls of snow, trying to use them to clean his face. He felt bloated as a tick, yet somehow also empty.
“Young one.”
Elias wiped bloody snow from his face, but remained on his knees with his back to Root. He could feel the monster’s presence, the way the night and the air flowed around him. The nearer they drew to Shediak, the more it hurt to move. To stand on his own feet. Maggie’s curse made it feel as if his bones were too sharp, blades that cut deep. The pain offered a certain clarity.
“My name is Elias.”
Root laughed softly. “Your name is what I choose to call you.”
Elias rose, turning toward it. In the snow, the blood splashed on Root was the most visible part of it. Its gray flesh should not have blended, but somehow it did. Beyond it, Alfie finished filling the gas tank and screwed the cover back on. The winged Morák—the flyer—crouched on the roof of the panel truck. The other two seemed to glide as they approached Root and Elias. The four-foot monster was called Mathieu. Elias thought his name was French but couldn’t place the accent. The other, Afua, had been wearing tatters when she had first joined them and now was nearly as naked as Root, showing off the pink scars carved as symbols into her dark skin.
“You hesitate,” Root said, eyes narrowed. He tilted his head. A bit of tree bark jutted from the side of his neck, as if it had slowly begun to work itself out of his flesh.
Elias thumbed at his nostrils, trying to scrape away the last crust of the blood that had plugged them. This was what he had become. The monster in him savored the remaining warmth from the blood he’d consumed, and his muscles yearned for more violence. His body ached to find the next kill. There were all kinds of hunger, he had learned. But just when he had thought the last ember of the real Elias had been snuffed out, it had sparked a bit brighter. That voice had gotten a bit louder.
“I don’t know if I can murder my family,” he confessed.
Mathieu laughed. Afua swayed in the snow and slid around to his left, almost as if she were cutting off any escape, should he try to run. Root, however, did not move. Its upper lip curled with revulsion.
“How can you say this?”
Elias thought the question was about loyalty, but then he noted the curiosity in Root’s expression. Mathieu and Afua also seemed puzzled, and he realized the question was more literal. They’d thought it was impossible for him to have such thoughts.
Mathieu trundled toward him, boots kicking up snow. His arms were so long, he was built more like a chimp than a man. Of course he was neither. He grabbed hold of Elias’s hand and felt his wrist for a pulse. Elias could have told him not to bother. Mathieu glanced at Root and shook his head.
“There’s no life in me except what I just swallowed,” Elias said.
“You are not the thing you were,” Afua said. “Once you become this, the shell is only a shell.”
Elias shook his head. “I can’t explain it. But I feel it. I know if I come with you and we catch up to them, hunger will take over and I’ll rip them apart. My brother and sister, and my wife. I’ll rejoice while doing it, and if there’s a speck of my soul left, I’ll be damned to hell for it. When the frenzy wears off, I’ll want to rip out my own heart, use my fingers to claw it out. I’ll probably do it, too. I don’t want to do any of that. They may hate me now, but my family deserve better. I can’t—”
Root struck Elias with the back of its hand. Bone cracked in Elias’s jaw. Clamping its hands on either side of Elias’s skull, Root forced him to his knees. Whatever unnatural strength Elias had, Root was far stronger. Part of Elias’s skull gave way.
“No,” Afua said. “This is not what we do.”
Sneering, Root released him. Elias toppled back into the snow. It fell into his eyes, and when he blinked, he saw the flying one circling overhead. The thing had left the roof of the panel truck, perhaps to get a better look, but now it landed among them and craned its twisted neck.
Root straddled Elias.
“You have no family. You serve your kin. Whatever ghost remains in you, kill it.”
Teeth bared, Root dug a clawed finger into its own chest andripped out a hunk of meat. Elias tried to twist his head aside, but Root forced the bite of flesh into his mouth. It tasted bitter. More followed, caked with blood so black and thick it might have been tar.
Elias felt something worm inside of him, not flesh butpresence. Like poison, it burned in his chest, and then in his veins. Another voice whispered in him now, wordless but there nevertheless. He felt it taking root.
“Rise.”
Root stood and backed away. Elias obeyed its command.
He felt himself so much smaller now, as if he existed in the very back of his own mind, a passenger, an observer, a shrinking ghost who could only haunt the body he’d once owned.
