Scifi Motherlode Page 11

  But what really amazed me was how little I cared when I finally bit into him. When he slid the tip of his index finger between my teeth, and I nipped off one tender bite and chewed.

  I remember there were tears in my eyes. The flesh was sweet and soft as lobster, and it tasted faintly of drawn butter and paprika.

  He pushed the finger further into my mouth. "Have some more." There was no trace of gloating or sarcasm in his voice, just concern. "I’ve added meds for the fever."

  I nipped at him again, and this time the bite was bigger. It tasted even better than the first, and I closed my eyes as the flavor surged through me.

  "More." Manny pushed the finger deeper.

  I bit down again and pulled more meat from the bone. Again, the latest bite tasted better than the one before.

  "D-does it hurt you?" I swallowed and licked my lips. "When someone...eats you?"

  "Yes," said Manny, and then he pressed another finger toward me. "Now have some more."

  *****

  Two weeks before, on my first day in the Cambio with Guapo, Frogface, and Manny, I couldn’t imagine that the time would come when I would taste a Ration. I honestly thought I’d let myself die first.

  Our quarry seemed to feel the same way. His first target, when he came after us, was not the Ration.

  It happened that first night, after we’d made camp. Thanks to the marker beacons planted long ago by explorers of the Cambio, we’d found a bolsillo sólido--a solid pocket, a rare area of limited geologic change...compared to the rest of the Cambio, anyway.

  We were sitting around the campfire in the bolsillo, winding down. As usual, Frogface was nibbling on a hunk of Manny, and Guapo was trying to get a taste of me.

  If I’d just given Guapo a little love instead of pushing him away, he might still be alive today. Instead, he stomped off to take a whiz...and it turned out to be the kind of whiz you don’t come back from.

  My last words to the man who, as much as he annoyed me, I had never been able not to love for long? "Go flap yourself, flap-face."

  Two hours later, we found him by flashlight, fifty yards from camp. And fifty-five yards. And seventy-five, seventy-eight, eighty-two, and eighty-six yards.

  Guapo had been ripped into little-bitty pieces and scattered all over the landscape. Most of the pieces didn’t have much meat left on them, either.

  "It was the man-eater," Frogface said in a horrified whisper.

  "Ya think so?" Even as I pushed around pieces of Guapo with a stick, recognizing the occasional beauty mark or shred of clothing, I couldn’t believe this was all that was left of him. I couldn’t believe that such a big, forceful presence was gone from the world.

  Most of all, I couldn’t believe that none of us had heard a single sound when such a noisy sonofabitch had been torn apart and devoured.

  *****

  I think Frogface knew he’d be the next to go.

  The morning after Guapo’s death, Frogface begged me to take him back to the Puerco. He was almost in tears when I told him he’d have to walk out himself.

  "I’ll never make it," he said. "If the reflejo doesn’t get me, the Cambio will."

  I slung Guapo’s rifle over my back and nodded in Manny’s direction. "I’m sure your little chew toy will watch your back."

  Frogface brightened. "That’s true." He grinned at Manny. "He’s got a gun."

  That was when the tutti-frutti bastard surprised me. "No can do, Froggy," he said. "Don’t you think Guapo would’ve wanted us to finish our mission?"

  "No," said Frogface, but the look in his eyes told me he knew better. "He’d say the flap with it."

  Smiling like always, Manny walked over and stood beside me. "Somebody has to stop the man-eater, right?"

  Frogface looked back in the direction of the border, then looked at us. Finally, he sighed and shook his head.

  "There oughtta be a fresh trail after last night." He drew a sniffer glove from his belt pouch and pulled the glove onto his hand. "We’ll get a bead on that thing for sure."

  I glanced over at Manny, who was still standing beside me. To his credit, he didn’t say a word...just met my gaze, then broke eye contact.

  I, on the other hand, opened my big mouth. "Kiss my nalgas all you want, you good-for-nothing flap-head." I spit in the gray sand at his feet. "I still got your number."

  Manny just smiled. "Someday," he said, "you’ll have to tell me why you love me so much."

  *****

  Cornucopia pointed a color-swirled finger at my brother, Roto, who sat in the prisoner cage at the front of the courtroom.

  "That’s him," said Cornucopia. "That’s one of the boys who stole me from Señor Gustavo."

  I was eight years old, and Roto was twelve. It was the day after we were caught holding Cornucopia the Ration captive in our shack in Barrio Sucio.

  The day after Miguel and Oswaldo died from eating the Ration’s poisoned flesh.

  The prosecutor waved his cigar toward Roto. "What role, if any, did he play in the group that stole you?"

  "He was the leader." Cornucopia nodded. "He gave the orders."

  "Thank you." The prosecutor ran a hand over his wavy silver hair. "You may step down."

  "In the matter of the province of Pesadilla versus Roto Calderon," said the jury foreman, "we find the accused guilty."

  "Roto Calderon," said the judge. "I sentence you to ten years of hard labor at the Campo Esclavo maximum security facility. Take him away."

  As they led Roto from the courtroom in shackles, I was free to go. Roto had taken all the blame, lied that I’d been trying to stop him...and Cornucopia had backed his story.

  Why she did it, I’ll never know. Did she feel guilty and think she’d ruined my life enough? Or did she think I would suffer more this way?

  Through it all, the sparkly little smile never left her tutti-frutti face. The whole time that she was helping send away the only person I had left in the world now that she’d killed my other brothers, she smiled.

  As her owner bit into her shoulder, and I was turned out, starving, into the street, she smiled.

  *****

  Twenty-four years later, I felt Manny’s hand touch my shoulder, and I didn’t brush it away.

  "That’s enough," he said. "Don’t keep watching."

  But I had to. The man in the video flickering on the wall of the bone-strewn, bone-white cave was Roto. My brother.

  And he was a changed man.

  We had watched it happen, Manny and I. We had followed the trail of poor, dead Frogface’s body parts to the cave, where we had found the video diary. We had switched on the blood-smeared projector and watched the whole horrible story of my brother’s transformation, as urgent and immediate as if it were not recorded but happening live right there in front of us.

  In the early entries, Roto had been bitter but hopeful. Prison had scarred but not broken him. He had come to the Cambio to live among the reflejos and learn their secrets. He had recorded his observations in the video diary and planned to use it as the raw material for a documentary.

  In later entries of the diary, Roto had become more and more excited. His frizzy brown puff of hair had bounced as he talked about how he had been hungry all his life, but feeding the reflejos had changed all that.

  "I was wrong," he had said. "I always thought the most important part of life was to eat...but it’s more important to be eaten."

  Shortly after that, Roto had started singing in a language I’d never heard before. He had stopped wearing clothes and had shaved all the hair from his body. Mysterious wounds had appeared on his flesh. He had started crawling around on all fours and making animal noises.

  Then, there had been one last coherent entry.

  "Must feed others now," Roto had said. "Feed humans, not reflejos. Become like a Ration...but how? I can’t feed others my flesh like a Ration."

  Roto had paced back and forth in the video, mumbling and striking his forehead with the heels of his hands. Then, he had stopp
ed. "Wait!" His eyes had flared with mad inspiration. "I know what to do! Rations kill! I will kill like a Ration."

  The next time we saw him...

  "No more, Lupe." Manny tried to turn me away from the video. "Please."

  But I couldn’t look away.

  Until that moment, I had thought that a man-eating reflejo had killed all those people on Polvo. I had thought that a reflejo had torn apart Guapo and Frogface and captured Roto.

  But a reflejo was not to blame.

  In the video flickering on the cave wall, Roto used a hunting knife to kill a man. Then, he...

  "Don’t look, Lupe," said Manny, tugging on my shoulder.

  Then, Roto fed pieces of the dead man to another man chained to the floor. The man wailed and spit out the human flesh, but Roto forced in more, and the man started to choke.

  "He thinks he’s a Ration." My voice was a whisper.

  "The reflejos did something to him," said Manny. "Or the Cambio changed him. Or both. He lost his mind."

  "No!" The voice of my brother, Roto, echoed in the cave. "I am a Ration!"

  My heart hammered in my chest. Roto’s voice was not coming from the video.

  All of a sudden, he sprang up in front of me, between the projector and the cave wall. "Hermaaana," he said. "You’re just in time for dinner."

  Naked, hairless, and blood-smeared, Roto gaped at me with wild, red eyes. In his left hand, he clutched Frogface’s half-eaten arm; I recognized the sniffer glove that Frogface had been wearing when he’d disappeared.

  "Luuupe." Roto held out Frogface’s arm. "I am a Ration. Let me feed you."

  Video of Roto stuffing more human meat into the choking man’s mouth flickered over his body. He smiled at me with blood-stained teeth.

  Behind me, I heard Manny cock his rifle.

  "Close your eyes, Lupe," he said, and this time I did what he told me.

  And then he pulled the trigger.

  *****

  Here’s the thing about the Cambio: more than the land changes here.

  Sometimes, people cross the border because they want to change. The Cambio is unpredictable, so people have no idea what changes it might bring...but anything would be better than the way things are now, right?

  Only one thing’s for certain: the Cambio will change you. People who walk out might not even be recognizable as the same people who walked in.

  Just look at poor Roto. Would he have become a murderous cannibal freak if he’d stayed out of the Cambio?

  Then there’s Manny and me. What about the changes we’re going through?

  *****

  Once again, Manny offers me the last finger he has left, a right thumb. This time, I take it.

  Not long ago, it would have grown back, but not anymore. I’ll never taste that thumb again, or any part of him that I eat.

  He’s been this way for a month. One day, he just stopped being able to regenerate. I guess the Cambio screwed him.

  The Cambio’s screwed us both another way, too. We’re lost.

  We’ve been wandering through the shifting landscape ever since we left Roto’s cave. Our high tech equipment has been just as useless as our sense of direction.

  And it’s starting to look like we won’t make it out of here alive.

  "Have some more." Manny pushes his fingerless left hand at me. "There’s still meat in the palm and forearm."

  Gently, I touch his arm. I’m so hungry, I could eat everything that’s left...but looking at what’s left makes me sad.

  The tutti-frutti flesh is pitted and gouged from all the bites I’ve taken. Very little skin remains. In places, I can see clear to the bone.

  His right arm is even more damaged. From shoulder to wrist, the meat’s all gone, except what I couldn’t suck from between the bones.

  The rest of him isn’t much better. I’ve been rationing him, trying to make him last, but I’ve been eating him for a month with him not being able to regenerate. Even losing just a little bit every day for that long will make a man disappear.

  "How much longer?" I reach up and stroke his cheek, which is intact. "How much longer can you keep going?"

  Manny shrugs. "I won’t know until I get there. This has never happened to me before."

  "We’ll be all right." As I gaze into his eyes, my heart pounds and my stomach growls at the same time. God help me, even as I try to comfort him, I want to eat what’s left of him. "Maybe you’ll regenerate when we make it out of here."

  "Maybe." How can he keep smiling? He’s literally full of holes, staggering lost through a parched, shifting wasteland, and he still has a smile on his face. "Either way, I want you to promise me something."

  "What?" I trace a swirl of red and yellow as it slowly twists through the sugar-white skin of his forehead. Now that’s he’s half-eaten and can’t regrow, the swirls don’t move and change as much as they once did.

  "No guilt." Manny reaches up to touch my face, then looks at his fingerless stump and changes his mind. "This is what I was born to do. To feed the hungry."

  A tear rolls down my cheek. I make the promise, but I know I won’t keep it.

  Not unless a miracle can keep us both alive.

  *****

  "No guilt," says Manny. A whisper is all he can manage.

  His head is in my lap. His ears and nose are gone. So are bits of his cheeks and chin.

  And still, he is smiling.

  "Hold on," I tell him. "Please, Manny." My back is to the sun, to shield him from its blinding rays.

  He can barely move. I’ve made him last almost two more weeks, but I think I’ve taken one bite too many.

  And we’re still lost in the Cambio. It’s as if this place is a living thing, using its ever-changing terrain to turn us in circles and keep us always from finding our way out.

  My stomach growls.

  "Go ahead," he says. "Dig in."

  I wish I could, because I’m starving...but he’s literally down to bare bones. I’ve left the bare minimum for survival--internal organs, veins and arteries, enough strips of muscle to move--and even that isn’t enough to keep him alive anymore.

  Whatever I eat next will paralyze him...and what I eat after that will kill him.

  "I wish there was something I could do." I stroke his face and try to ignore the signs of my hunger--the heaviness, the aches, the slackness of my muscles.

  He has given everything to me. The least I can do is give him what little I have to offer. What comfort I can muster.

  "Now I know what it’s like," he says.

  "What’s that?"

  "Hunger." Manny nods. "Not being able...to fill the void inside you."

  The ground rumbles, and I ignore it. "Rations don’t feel hunger?"

  "We could...but what we eat...is plentiful." He takes a deep, shaky breath and lets it back out.

  It occurs to me that I’ve never seen a Ration eat. "What is it? What do you eat?"

  "Your breath." Manny’s eyes meet mine. "The microscopic airborne life...you breathe out. The organic molecules. The carbon dioxide and water vapor.

  "I recycle it. I give it back to you...in a form that will sustain you.

  "At least...I used to."

  I never knew. "We feed you?"

  He nods. "And we...feed you...in return."

  I never cared. After Cornucopia...until Manny...I wanted to know as little about Rations as possible. I never knew we were connected.

  I never knew the feeding worked both ways.

  Tears run down my emaciated cheeks and off the tip of my chin. "I wish I could still do it," I say. "I wish I could feed you now."

  Manny coughs. His head twitches in my lap. "Lupe." His voice grows weaker. "I don’t think...I can keep going."

  "Just rest," I tell him. "Rest now, darling."

  I hear a landslide in the distance. I hear the Cambio groan and creak and crack beneath us.

  "You know...what you have to do now," says Manny. "Time...for the feast. El banquete del muerte."

>   I wipe away tears and shake my head. I don’t want to listen.

  "Eat as much of me...as you can hold. Stuff yourself. What’s left...will rot."

  "No." How did I come to love him so much? I don’t understand. How did I get to this place?

  "Do it, Lupe. You need the energy."

  "No!" He’s right, and I hate him for it. I love him and I hate him for what he’s telling me to do.

  "It’s my last request." His smile is fading. The tutti-frutti swirls have stopped moving. "Don’t let me...go to waste."

  That’s when I do it.

  I’m in a daze. I hardly realize that I’m pushing my index finger toward his mouth. Toward his half-eaten lips.

  "Lupe, no." His whisper trails off, and he closes his eyes.

  When the tip of my finger touches his lower lip, I stop. I know what a futile gesture I am making, but I also know it doesn’t matter that I make it. No one will know but him, and he will understand.

  So I push onward.

  My fingertip passes between his lips. I feel the ridges of his teeth scrape the skin.

  I push the finger in past the first knuckle, and then I tell him to eat. "I love you." I want him to live, and I wish with all my heart

  The Cambio jumps. A new geyser hisses to life.

  I wish with all my heart that I could bring him back. At least I want him to know that I would do this for him, I would do it if I could.

  Far away, there is a thunderclap. The bubbling of lava.

  "Please, Manny." I hold his chin with my free hand and push it up, as if that will make him take a bite. His teeth press into the flesh of my finger.

  The ground beneath us trembles and rises. We ride the newborn mesa toward the sky.

  Suddenly, Manny’s teeth clench.

  I start to cry out as he bites into my fingertip...and then I catch myself. "Good, Manny." He bites down with surprising force, and I shut my eyes against the pain. "Take what you need."

  I feel him nip the meat from the bone. This is it, I realize.

  This is how he feels.

  I slide out my finger, the tip ragged and red. I suck away the oozing blood, which tastes strangely sweet, like vanilla.