Hunger is a strange animal with many names, and I’ve been hungry a lot in my life. Hungry for things I could touch and things I couldn’t, for things I could name and words my tongue had been robbed of.
And I really, really used to hate my brown eyes.
Boring, basic, shit-colored eyes, with nothing exciting or romantic about them—nothing at all like green eyes. I hungered for green eyes, even going as far as buying cheap, probably toxic colored contacts from a stand at the mall, only to have a sobbing fit on the bathroom floor when I realized my natural eye color was too dark to be hidden under the film.
It was my brother, Kai, who helped me feel better. He lifted me off the ground and turned me to the mirror, pointing to my reflection staring back at us, and said, “Those eyes are our ancestor’s eyes. They’re always watching you. Are you going to make them proud, EJ?”
And then, years later, Kai brings a boy with the most beautiful green eyes to the Pow Wow. His name is Isaac.
My parents let me skip school on Friday to make the six-hour drive from our home outside Detroit to the Upper Peninsula for the four-day-long celebration. A year ago, they never would’ve agreed to that. But a year ago, I was sixteen and confused, angry for reasons I couldn’t put into words, and when they looked at me, they didn’t know who they were looking at—a problem I’d had myself for a long time.
Kai helped. He’d moved out three years earlier, fresh out of high school, and started his journey toward reconnection, making friends with seed traders and building relationships with folks out on the rez, and—in his own words—discovering the parts of himself that’d been stolen by colonization. He saw my suffering and our parents’ confusion, and he handed me the words to finally talk about the things I was feeling. Words like two-spirit and ancestral trauma.
It turned out I was angry because I was playing a game whose rules had never been designed for me to win.
Our parents still don’t really get it. Our mom calls herself white because white people think she is, because she passes in their spaces—even though her grandfather spent his childhood at a boarding school in Oklahoma and his adulthood beating the religion they gave him into her own mother. Our dad’s parents grew up together on a rez in Florida but moved to Chicago before he was born, and he spent his formative years hearing how they’d gotten themselves out of there to give him a better life.
They don’t understand Kai’s and my drive to reconnect. They don’t see how they, too, have been stolen by a kind of violence. But still, they’d do anything to make sure I don’t go back to who I used to be. That’s as much as I can ask for.
Drums and bells mingle with the sounds of elders chanting and babies laughing and the sobs of those in between, and I find myself thinking, not for the first time this weekend, that I never want to leave.
I spent Friday night catching up with Kai and the friends I’ve made on my trips up here over the past year. Eating fry bread, and salmon and deer jerky, fresh berries, and roasted hominy. Curling up in front of a bonfire and listening to men play music, watching women bead at a nearby table and little kids stomp barefoot in the lake, and dozing in and out with my head on Kai’s shoulder.
And on Saturday morning, his new friend Isaac joined us.
Apparently, they met a few months ago, in a hunting club they both belong to. Hunting, like fishing and farming, tends to attract people on polar ends of the spectrum. One look at Isaac, with his eyes like new money, his blond ex-military haircut, and the Patagonia jacket fitted over his broad shoulders, and I worried he was at the wrong end. I think other people at the Pow Wow worried the same. I noticed the looks he got, the narrowed-eyed suspicion of elders that followed wherever he went. If either Isaac or Kai noticed, they didn’t let on.
Maybe they were just letting me come to my own conclusion. And later that night, I did. I had been too critical. As far as I can tell, Isaac is a good guy. We spent the day getting to know each other—talking, and eating, and dancing. He grew up here, and he cares about this land and the people who come from it. That’s what got him into hunting in the first place. And he seems to love Kai. If none of the rest was important, the latter would be all it took to convince me.
Now the celebratory mood of yesterday and this afternoon has largely faded. A few leaders in the community have come out to speak about MMIWC (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children) in our area. All night, we’ve heard awful stories about human trafficking and abuse and state violence, stories of women and children and queer people being lured away from their communities and never seen again. This isn’t ancestral trauma but ongoing danger.
The feeling I’ve been clinging so tightly to, that thread of community and comfort I’ve never felt so strongly anywhere else, has shifted. It’s just as strong, maybe even stronger, but there’s pain threaded throughout it that demands to be acknowledged. To ignore the pain would be to dishonor the community.
Isaac is still attracting stares. When speakers talk about white men targeting Indigenous communities, people glance in his direction. It’s not like he’s the only white guy at the Pow Wow, but he’s the only one who looks like he’d be just as at home at the Republican National Convention as he seems to be here.
But Isaac doesn’t shrink under the scrutiny. He doesn’t seem to feel guilty or uncomfortable, and that says a lot, doesn’t it? He has one hand on my brother’s shoulder, leaning to whisper in his ear. I wonder—and not for the first time—if they’re friends and. Kai is nebulously queer, I know, and even if he introduced Isaac as a friend, the vibe between them is clearly intimate. It’s not like I’m hunting for clues, but I can’t help noticing the small touches, the lingering glances, the closeness that should be okay in a totally heterosexual male friendship—but isn’t, really, at least not most of the time.
Maybe Isaac feels me staring, because he tilts his head, catching my eye. He nods, an acknowledgment of something more than just the shared glance, and I offer him a half-sad small smile in return. Mourning music thrums in the air all around us.
“EJ,” Kai groans on Sunday evening, slamming the trunk of my car closed after helping pack it up. He turns to me, big brown eyes sad and soft. “Do you really have to go tonight? It’s just one more day.”
“Mom and Dad already let me skip Friday,” I remind him.
“Yeah, so what’s so different about missing Monday?” He raises his thick eyebrows, his expression indignant when I chuckle at him.
I have to laugh it off. If I don’t, I might actually start listening. It would be enormously shitty of me to take advantage of my parents’ fragile new trust to spend another night at the Pow Wow.
Even if I really want to.
“Let them be,” Isaac chides, stepping up from behind him and putting a hand on Kai’s shoulder. The glow of my taillights makes his eyes look more yellow than green. “There’ll be other trips.”
Kai groans, waggling a finger at me. “You better come up this summer—spend a whole week with us. No, a month!”
“I’d love that.” I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.
“Me, too.” Isaac grins.
Us, I think. Definitely gotta ask my brother about that later. I guess it shouldn’t matter what he and Isaac are to each other—but I’m nosy.
Kai sweeps me off my feet, and I bury my face in his neck, my own arms curling around his waist to lace my fingers at his back. I want to remember everything, everything about this weekend and this moment and the feeling of being present and whole and connected to something so much bigger than myself. I never want to go back. I try to remind myself that going home right now is not the same as backsliding; I can take this weekend with me.
When he sets me on my feet again, Kai swipes his hand over his eyes and sniffs. “I’m just—I’m really proud of you, you know? Watching you find yourself here—the way you’ve let your guard down so you can be part of this—just—We’re all just really lucky to know you, kid.”
It makes me want to cry just as badly, but I can’t. I think if I do, I might not stop. I need to get on the road. It’s already going to be well after midnight by the time I get back to our suburb. “I’m driving home, Kai, not going to war.”
“You know what I’m talking about,” he mumbles. Finally, taking a deep breath, he takes a step away from my car and waves his hand at it. “All right. Okay, okay. Get going. Text me when you get there safe.”
“I will.” I swallow past the lump in my throat and wave one last goodbye to Isaac and climb in the driver’s seat.
With that bittersweet ache stronger than ever, I put the Pow Wow behind me, feeling farther and farther from home the closer I get.
I don’t make it all the way there, though.
It’s dark in the middle of nowhere when my car’s low-fuel light blinks to life. No big deal. Light on means at least thirty miles to empty, and empty means another twenty if I’m lucky. It is weird, though. This is the second time since leaving the Pow Wow that the light’s come on, and last time I stopped, I filled up the tank. She’s not a Prius, but my car can handle more than this. But fine. It’s fine.
Only it isn’t. Because I don’t make it fifty miles or even thirty miles. Less than five miles later, the car sputters, chokes, and dies, the steering wheel locking up in my hands as I wrestle her over to the side of the road.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I announce to the car. She does not respond.
I tug my cell out of my pocket. 10:11 P.M. And absolutely no service in Fuckall Nowhere, Michigan. I could truck it down the road on foot, but I don’t remember the last time I saw an exit sign. There could be a gas station half a mile up ahead. There could also be nothing for hours in either direction.
I tap my phone against the palm of my hand, staring out my car windows. I can only see as far as my headlights. A stretch of dirt road, with cornfields on either side. The lights cast shadows on the nearest row of stalks, creating shapes where they don’t exist.
It’s just my mind playing tricks on me, but I swear one of the shadows in the field looks like someone watching me.
“Grow up, EJ,” I chastise myself, ignoring the way my heart tries to climb out my mouth.
I never should’ve left the Pow Wow. But I did. So, what to do now?
Walking for miles isn’t an option. Even if I wanted to, it’s not safe. The stories from the MMIWC ceremony flash in my mind.
No service, so I can’t call for help.
There’s no way I’m making it to school tomorrow. But my parents can’t actually be mad at me for this, right? I mean, I get points for trying, right?
I tug off my sweatshirt before balling it up and shoving it under my head, leaning against my window.
Okay. I’ll hang out here until dawn. Maybe some nice farmer will drive by on their way to work. If not, I’ll feel a lot better about trying to walk for help in the daylight.
There’s nothing watching me from the cornfield. I’m safe.
Totally safe.
I triple-check the car door locks, though. Just in case.
I wake to the sound of pounding on glass and inhuman yellow eyes watching me from outside my window. The scream bubbles up and out of me before my mind even knows to be afraid, my body reacting with an animal’s instinct—trying to crawl to the other side of the car.
“EJ! Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s me. It’s Isaac.”
Isaac?
Halfway over the middle console, I freeze. My heart is still trying to gallop its way out of me and into the field, but I narrow my eyes and twist my head to get another look at the thing outside my window.
It is Isaac. He’s holding a flashlight, and when the glow catches directly into his eyes, they turn that yellow shade I saw right before leaving the Pow Wow. He lowers the light to offer me an awkward wave, and suddenly they’re green again.
I shove myself back into my seat before pushing open the door and stumbling out into the road with him. It’s still black out. The late-night mist has settled over the cornfields, making everything darker than it was when I fell asleep. The only sounds are our breathing, the hum of Isaac’s truck parked behind my car, and about a million different bugs. Goose bumps prick along my bare arms, and I rub my palms over them.
“What are you even doing out here?”
“What am I doing out here?” He huffs, holding out his arms at his sides, as if to demonstrate the complete lack of anything at all. “What happened to you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I’m safe. Just cold and hungry and irritated that I left the Pow Wow for this. “I ran out of gas. I was just gonna wait for morning.”
“To do what? EJ, the nearest gas station’s like … twenty miles from here.” He gives me a pitying look.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think it was gonna be fun.” I frown at him. “Seriously, though. Why are you here?”
“Got an emergency work call and had to take off last minute.” He sighs, reaching over me to push my car door closed. “And you’re lucky I did. There’s some real weirdos out here. But c’mon. I’ll get you where you need to be.”
When he puts a hand on my shoulder and starts steering me toward his truck, my stomach knots, my fingers tightening at my sides as if to reach for something, but I’m not sure what. I remind myself I’m being paranoid and judgmental, just like all the grandmas and aunties giving him the side-eye over the weekend. Kai wouldn’t be friends with someone who couldn’t be trusted. He definitely wouldn’t be more than friends with them, or whatever he and Isaac are to each other. I really should be grateful he showed up.
And still, my stomach doesn’t unclench.
Isaac drives a lifted pickup. By the time I actually make it into the passenger seat, I’m out of breath. He—badly—hides a snicker, cranking up the heat when he sees me shiver again. Shouldn’t have left my sweatshirt in my car. Oh, and—
“Shit. I left my phone.” I grab for the truck handle, but Isaac waves a hand at me, shifting into Drive.
“Don’t worry about it. You’re not gonna be able to use it anyway.”
My heart plummets. I stare at him, my fingers trembling around the plastic lever, an icy chill creeping down my arms that has nothing to do with the temperature.
He raises an eyebrow. “Because there’s no service out here?”
Oh.
Right. Of course, that’s what he meant. Slowly, I let my hand fall away and sink back into the seat. I scold myself for being such a wimp, while Isaac turns the truck around, and we start driving off in the direction we came from.
“How long were you out there by yourself?”
I glance at the digital clock on his display—1:32 A.M. “A few hours.”
“Damn. You hungry?”
Summoned, my stomach unknots from its anxiety enough to give a pitiful snarl. My cheeks heat. “Uh. Yeah.”
He snickers again and motions to the back seat. “Snagged some food for the road before I left. Help yourself. There’s water, too.”
He brought food? From the Pow Wow? Oh, score. Absolutely enormous W.
I twist at the waist to reach into the back, rifling around until I come back with a canteen of water and a bag of popcorn. Only after I’ve taken two swigs of the former and no less than three giant handfuls of the latter do I ask him, “So, what’s the work emergency?”
“Some rare game spotted up this way not too long ago.” Isaac shrugs. “Fresh meat’s easier to catch at night. And less people on the road means faster trips.”
Right. After he left the military, he got into the meat business. He’d mentioned that, I remember now. He sources “avant-garde protein” for rich eccentrics in the Great Lakes. Whatever that means. Nothing about the job sounded interesting, so my brain put the information on a shelf.
“Kai was real sad to see you go,” he continues, changing the subject. “You two really have a beautiful relationship.”
I cup my hand over my mouth to yawn. I’ve always been a night owl. This is far from truly late, where my chaotic sleep schedule is concerned, so I don’t know why I’m exhausted like this. Maybe it’s all the adrenaline of the night finally leaving my system now that I’m safe, leaving my bones heavy. I can barely keep my eyes open. “Yeah. I miss him a lot. But you two—you seem … close.”
Again, I wonder at the real nature of their friendship, but I don’t ask. If I’m wrong and Isaac is a straight white man, I really don’t want to run the risk of him not appreciating the question. Especially not while I’m stuck in a truck with him. More goose bumps flutter to the surface of my skin at the thought.
He seems to know exactly what I’m saying without saying it because the next thing he says is “yeah. I was worried about it, at first. You know, befriending a guy who clearly has a thing for me. But it’s worked out well.”
Blink.
Blink.
Maybe it’s just because I’m so much more tired than I was when I got in this truck, but something about the way he says that makes the hair on the back of my neck spike up. Yeah. Yeah, no. I’m just tired. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I find him pretty repulsive. But if it weren’t for him, I never would have met you.”
I must be hearing him wrong. That’s possible. My head is swimming. I don’t remember ever being this tired in my life. What the hell is wrong with me? I scrub my knuckles into my eyes, fighting to keep my head up. “Um—I’m sorry, what? You find him what?”
When I pull my hands away to look at Isaac’s face again, his head has turned ninety degrees to stare directly at me. He’s speeding down the dirt road, but he’s not looking at anything but me. “We can talk more about it later. We’ll have all the time in the world now.”
“I don’t—what does that—?” In a haze of green and white, we pass the exit sign. In the distance, I can make out a gas station just over the hill, then in our rearview. “Where are you taking me?”
Isaac doesn’t answer. The last thing I see is the blur of his green eyes becoming more and more yellow as my own vision fades entirely, the taste of buttered popcorn and something chemical on my tongue.
I’m freezing. That’s my first thought when I come to.
My second is something along the lines of fuckshitfuckfuckfucknonononono.
I jerk upright, my hands flying to assess my naked skin for injuries.
Naked. Why am I naked?
My body seems fine, other than the lack of clothes. No cuts or bruises or any pain from broken bones. Even my head feels better, my thoughts clearer and sharper. There’s no soreness to indicate that something else might’ve been done to me while I was unconscious and stripped.
The painful spark of relief is short-lived. I’m still here, discarded like a carcass in the middle of this room.
It’s smaller than my childhood bedroom but bigger than a closet. Everything is gray and silver. Gray walls and a gray floor and a silver generator humming at the back and big silver hooks hanging from the ceiling. Gray and silver all morph together into one colorless abyss, lit by only a single white bulb hanging from the center of the room.
I blink at the hooks, the black shadows the light bulb casts on them hitting the gray wall, shadows that look like claws stretching down toward the ground, toward my bare legs. The ceiling is too high for me to reach them on my own, and all I can do is watch as they loom over me.
Hanging hooks. My brain turns it over and pokes at the thought but can’t seem to grip it tightly. What are hooks like these used for?
On the other side of the room from the generator is a door with a massive metal handle shaped like a steering wheel. When the wheel starts to spin, I scramble to my feet, curling one arm protectively over my chest, my other hand dipping down to shield between my thighs.
The door clicks open, and Isaac steps through, pushing a little metal rolling cart—and whistling. Before he can close the door behind himself, I catch a glimpse of what’s beyond, outside this room. It looks like … a house. A normal living room, with log walls and a fireplace. A cabin? Warmth leaks in from the fire, but it’s doused as soon as he slams the door closed again.
“Glad to see you finally woke up, EJ.” He smiles at me. Grins, like we’re in on some kind of joke together. “You scarfed down a lot of that food. More than I thought you would.”
Popcorn. Drugged popcorn? Evil.
“Please don’t do this. Please—Kai loves you. He trusts you.” I know I sound pathetic. The argument isn’t convincing, even to my own ears. “What kind of person would rape their best friend’s little—”
“Rape?” Isaac has the gall to look offended, glancing over at me from where he’s sorting through tools on his metal cart. “I’m not going to rape you. That’s disgusting.”
Maybe it should be comforting. If anything, it only makes me more afraid. If that’s not why he brought me here, what’s his plan? Why the hell am I naked and standing in the middle of what looks like some kind of walk-in freezer?
The hooks hanging from the ceiling.
Fresh meat’s easier to catch at night.
No.
No, there has to be another explanation.
Isaac turns to me, lifting a cleaver from the cart. The sharpened edge glints in the shadowy glow from the single light bulb.
When my back slams against the generator, a rush of cold air frosting my skin, I realize I’ve been backing away from him. I hold my hands up, palms out, no longer granted the luxury of caring to cover myself.
“No, no, please, this can’t—”
“You know, I told you I felt kinda weird about making friends with Kai at first. I didn’t want him getting the wrong idea.” Isaac holds a hand—the one not carrying a giant knife—to his chest. “I’m not homophobic. I’m just not interested in him like that.”
Why is he giving me a speech about not being homophobic while he stalks me across his walk-in freezer, where I’m pretty sure he’s about to butcher me for meat?
“But one day he said something to me that really stuck. Someone asked him how he could claim he was pro-environmentalism when he hunts. Like, those two things are at odds, right? And Kai said his people have been hunting the animals here since the beginning of time. Always taking only what they needed—and never letting a single part go to waste.” Isaac smiles, like he’s reliving the conversation. “And then I knew. He was exactly who I’d been looking for.”
“You—” I shake my head. “No. No, this isn’t—I’m not an animal!”
Isaac shrugs. He closes the space between us, and his free hand curls around my bicep. I stomp at his boots, claw at his fingers, trying to wrench away from him, but he doesn’t budge. He presses me down onto the metal cart, forcing my palm flat against it. It’s so cold in the freezer that it feels warm under my skin.
The cleaver’s blade presses into the back of my wrist.
My stomach climbs its way into the empty cavern of my chest where my heart used to be before it leaped from my throat. The fingers on my free hand dig into the skin of his face, neck, anything I can touch, but I know I can’t stop him.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper, as hot salty tears track over my cheeks.
Isaac’s green eyes meet mine. Behind his head, the single light bulb flickers. “Because I can.”
At the first sight of my own pink flesh and white bone, his blade splitting me open like a holiday ham, I start to scream. I don’t stop until I pass out again.
I wish I’d started reconnecting sooner.
The bloody bandage wrapped around my missing fingers looks almost orange in the weird glow of the overhead light bulb.
Isaac’s eyes look yellow again when he sits down across from me. He sets a platter between us. Smoked meat, like a plate of sausages.
My stomach growls for it. I wish he would kill me.
I know different nations have stories about cannibals. I can feel them on the edge of my mind, frayed ends of a blanket I want to wrap myself in but can’t quite grasp. There are monsters who walk among us. They used to be human until they slaughtered their own and feasted on their bodies. Now they only look human. But they’re cursed to walk among us forever, insatiable for human flesh.
At least, I think that’s the story. Or one of the stories.
“You should eat something.” Isaac picks up a piece of meat from the tray. “There’s no use going hungry. It’ll only make you feel worse.”
If I’d reconnected sooner, I could be sure of the stories. I might even know how to get away from one of the monsters.
I wish I had a real blanket. It’s so cold in here.
“Suit yourself.” He shrugs, and I watch Isaac suck the crispy skin from one my severed finger bones.
When he comes for the rest of my hand, I try to crawl across the floor, as if I might actually escape him. I can’t run. I’m missing my right leg from the knee down.
He lifts me up by my hair. “Do you want to go on the hooks?”
I don’t want to go on the hooks.
There’s a part of me that whispers he won’t do it, though. I think he likes me like this—he likes prowling across the cold room, hunting me like we’re two animals in the wild. It wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying if he could just take what he wanted from a shelf. At that point, I’m no different than a frozen dinner.
Isaac grips my wrist, flattening my palm against the top of his cart. The cleaver whooshes through the frozen air before connecting with the metal under my hand with a sound that makes my teeth tremble, the blade undeterred by bone or flesh. I watch my thumb roll away, too numb to really feel the pain, and try to bite back the humiliating flare of gratitude that at least he didn’t take the whole hand.
But I do wonder, as he starts sewing on a new row of stitches to curb the bleeding—when did he take my leg?
It sits under the light bulb and licks barbecue sauce from my tibia. The yawning emptiness in my gut is louder than the sound of its smacking.
This thing isn’t Isaac at all. I know this, though I don’t know how. It wears his face, but with a wrongness, his skin stitched over its decaying insides, its movements inhuman, its bones twisting his limbs in ways that don’t make sense. It is almost Isaac, almost human, almost close enough to convince me, but something older than me screams a warning in my marrow. This monster sits beneath the yellow light and watches me, blood and drool slicking the sides of its face.
I realize I’m chewing something only when I start to choke. I shove the fingers on my remaining hand down my throat, try to make myself gag, throw up, but I can’t. I force myself to swallow, rolling over onto my hand and knee, sucking in a breath, then releasing one that crystallizes right in front of me.
I’m alone in the freezer. Isaac isn’t here, and neither is any monster. It’s just the meat.
“You know, you were really nice to me the weekend we met. Not everyone was. Some of them treated me like I didn’t belong there. You never did. I really appreciated that.”
Isaac says this as he closes a new line of stitches at my hip. I say nothing. I watch the hooks overhead, the shadows stretching from their sharpened tips, and imagine a benevolent monster reaching out its clawed hand to me. I imagine curling my fist around one of those hooks and using it to crack open Isaac’s chest.
I imagine an alternate reality where Isaac is a fish at the end of my hook and I’m one of those straight boys on a dating app, holding up his bloated corpse for the camera. I can’t tell how delirious this thought actually is.
He doesn’t seem to mind my silence. Maybe he doesn’t notice the blood in my eyes. “Guess it worked out fine. That way no one missed me when I went and fucked with your gas tank.”
There is a part of me, the one warm and fleshy bit that’s survived this freezer, that knows I should feel something about his words. I can’t dig deep enough to reach it.
When loneliness comes, I could swear I hear Kai’s voice in the cabin beyond the freezer.
I lie still, a puddle of mottled flesh and jutting bones, my hair thinning and falling out, my vision gone perpetually blurry from the grayness of this room and a diet of nothing my mind will let me remember. Isaac has taken the fingers from one hand, one leg from the knee down, a sirloin of my thigh, thin strips from my back, and one ear.
One ear? I reach up to touch my fingers against the place where my ear used to be, connecting with a bandage flat against my skull. I remember it on some level, but I have no idea when that happened either.
I wrap my arms around myself again. I listen to Kai’s wails. I wish I were home with him. I’m just glad he isn’t really here with me.
Something is wrong with Isaac.
Obviously.
Something new is wrong with Isaac. He pushes his cart into the freezer, and it jostles beneath the shaking of his hands. He’s always seemed so disturbingly happy, like he’s enjoying my company. He smiles, tells me about his day, compliments me. But today there are new shadows on his face, dark circles brought out from lack of sleep.
I know it isn’t me he’s losing sleep over. From my corner, curled up to frost, I watch him.
“Unfortunately, EJ, I have some bad news.” He sighs, picking up his knives to examine them, his trembling hands uncertain of which one he wants. “Our time together must finally come to an end.”
A pitiful spark of joy. Then a realization sets off the first spark of panic I’ve felt in … I don’t actually know how long I’ve been here.
When Isaac abandons his cart to unlatch two hooks from the ceiling, my throat tightens.
My voice is more of a breath than anything else, as if my words have forgotten how to make themselves heard, when I ask, “Why now?”
Only when he shoots me a startled look do I realize I don’t remember the last time I spoke either.
The surprise passes. Isaac turns the hooks over in his hands. I watch his knuckles whiten as they clench and unclench around the metal. “Your brother won’t leave me alone.” Spittle flies on the last word. “He’s pitiful. And he wants to be here constantly. He’s going to see something he shouldn’t.”
Kai’s voice. It wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me. He was here.
How close was he to the freezer? How many feet were between us, while he laid open his grief about his missing sibling?
He could have seen me. Could have heard me if I’d just screamed.
Stupid. Stupid, foolish, naive, idiot child. I could have saved myself.
No. No, I can still save myself. I can survive this. I can get out.
Just not if Isaac puts me on the hooks. No matter what happens here tonight, I cannot let him get me on those hooks.
He sighs, moving toward me. The warm metal wall presses against my back, a caress against my frozen shoulder blade.
“I wanted us to have more time,” he tells me. I think he means it. I think he’s sad about this. “When you’re gone, I’m actually going to miss you. Isn’t that odd? I’ve never felt like—”
Without a yell or a curse or a warning of any kind, I grab for the hook in his hand. Adrenaline floods my body, wet and slobbery and warm, not cold, not compared to the freezer. Isaac has the audacity to look confused, not even angry—and when I force the jagged end of the hook up and into the underside of his jaw, into the soft tissue of his mouth, into the cavity of his skull … to look betrayed.
He makes an awful choking, gagging, coughing noise, stumbling toward me as I scramble back away. The hook tears through flesh when he does, ripping open his tongue, the vulnerable meat of his brain. He isn’t him anymore—the last pieces of primal instinct left are puppeteering his dying body, and they claw at his lips, wasting the dregs of his energy trying to wrench the metal free. I grip the edge of his cart to keep my one good leg standing, and I don’t let myself look away.
When he hits his knees, he tilts his head back to look up at me. Blood soaks the silver in his mouth. He tries to speak, though no words are formed.
I don’t know why it sounds like a warning.
I can’t open the door, not with only one hand, not with the wheel locked in place. But it doesn’t matter. I’m alive. I killed the monster, and I’m still alive, and I just have to keep myself alive until Kai comes for me. Anytime now, Kai will come for me.
Kai doesn’t come for me.
Sometimes I forget Isaac’s body is in the freezer with me. Other times, I wake up and find I’ve crawled toward him in my sleep, burrowing into his side like a dog that stays at its master’s grave.
Other times still, the monster shakes itself alive and crawls along the edges of the freezer. It stays away from the light. It watches me in shadow. I know it needs a new body.
It knows I’m weak.
I am so hungry.
Kai will come. Even if he doesn’t, someone will find me. I only have to stay alive long enough for them to get here.
Human beings become monsters when they taste their own people’s flesh. It’s a fitting punishment. They’ve abandoned their kind, so they no longer get to be their kind.
But I haven’t abandoned anyone. I didn’t choose this. I wouldn’t be punished for surviving, would I?
Would I?
I wake up curled into Isaac’s side. My face is pressed into his neck. His neck, chewy and tough and bloody, is in my teeth.
This time, I don’t choke, only swallow. The dim light bulb overhead pops and explodes, and the freezer plunges into darkness.
The monster breathes down my neck, its claws trailing my stitched-together spine with something like tenderness. I am too tired and too hungry to try and push it away.
When I hear Kai’s voice the next time, a muffled, too-far-away call for Isaac through the cabin, I don’t hesitate to call for him. I can’t seem to remember how words are formed, can’t make myself say his name, can only scream. It bubbles up and out of me, guttural and loud and wet.
Kai’s voice again, louder, closer.
The sound of metal screeching.
Light plunges into the freezer. My brother’s dark eyes find mine. “EJ? No, I—oh my God, EJ.”
When he gathers me in his arms, his skin is so hot, it hurts. I whine at the pain.
“What happened?” he asks around tears. “How—are you—? Did Isaac do this to you? Where is he? I’ll kill him.”
Too late. I turn my head toward Isaac’s body.
Where did it … go?
The corpse I grew attached to has disappeared, leaving nothing but a smear of dried blood on the gray floor.
I can’t have eaten all of him.
When I don’t answer, Kai lifts me and carries me from the freezer. Like his skin, the warmth of the cabin beyond is too hot. The nails on my remaining hand claw at my tattered skin, aching to be back in the cold.
He sets me down on a too-plush couch. Drags a blanket over me and wraps it around my naked butchered body. The sensation of touch makes me want to scream. The soft fabric feels like a web of nettles. “You’re safe. Everything’s going to be okay now. You’re safe. Oh, EJ, I’m so sorry.”
He pulls out his phone, but his scorching hand never leaves my shoulder.
I’m safe.
I tilt my head away from his face to find my own reflection in the cabin window. Something slithers, unrelenting, inside my belly.
I’m safe.
Unfamiliar eyes stare back at me in the window glass. My vision is still so blurred, I can’t decide if they look brown or yellow.
I’m safe. But I don’t think anyone’s going to be proud of the thing I’ve become. Or what I have to do next.
My stomach growls. I reach for my brother’s hand.