Walk Among Us, page 16
Because what Duke was discovering with each desperate bite was that his hunger had no bottom, no limit. Roused by his attempt at its fulfillment, it grew, billowing, building, until he became wholly his appetite, a thin veneer of skin over a void as gluttonous as any rich man’s greed.
Duke crammed fruit and chips and flatbread down his throat, choked down ribbons of jerky, inhaled nuts and uncooked noodles, calved butter with his nails and licked the keratin clean. He ate without attention to taste, gorging himself, hoping to capitalize on quantity.
But it only made him hungrier.
Of all the things he’d experienced in the last few days, of all the conversations he’d had, of all the wonder and horror he’d recently witnessed, it was this realization that broke him, this that set his teeth chattering on edge. The hopeless inanity of it, the sheer ridiculous stupidity, uncorked a well of baying hysteria. Duke rocked back and began to laugh in convulsive gasps until his throat lost grip of the tempo and he was left burbling with both hands clasped over his mouth.
His stomach writhed and leaped. Due to his agitation, it wasn’t until vomit, cold and sour, had surged up into his mouth that Duke recognized the physical upset as more than just nerves. He shot then to his feet and staggered to the bathroom, flinging over the toilet bowl, just in time to empty a stinking cascade of waste into the water. He groaned, an elbow propped on the seat, forehead rested on a palm. Potato chip flecks constellated his puke. His head throbbed. Whatever was going on, it stung worse than any hangover he’d endured in his life.
Your limpid system is not working, he reminded himself, and wasn’t certain if he’d inculpated the wrong bodily function and if the revelation, inaccurate as it could possibly be, comforted or terrified him.
Groaning, Duke raised his attention to the joint between the toilet seat and its lid. Behind the wide plastic oval there was a flash of yellow. Another note. He snatched it from where it’d been double-taped to the tank.
Warned you.
The debacle had an auxiliary effect.
He was very, very hungry.
As soon as he became aware of this, the hunger changed shape. He’d been conscious of its presence when he woke. It had been a twinge then, a mild discomfort readily ignored. It had grown slowly in urgency over the next few hours but never in a fashion Duke would have considered significant. Peckish, he would have described himself. Eager to eat.
But now the hunger was something else, red-raw, panting with avarice, a thing alive and furious to have been sidelined for so long. It flensed him, rode him like a god come to roost, fountained through every nerve ending until Duke rattled with his appetite. Duke had wanted things in his life, coveted successes, lusted for women, dreamed and despaired over insurmountable goals. All those desires felt paltry beside this hunger, idle schoolyard fancies beside the solar heat of this singular craving.
Duke stumbled upright again, wholly possessed by his monomaniacal appetite, and raced to the fridge, its doors still open. Inchoate, he descended on the first blood bag he grasped, not pausing to decipher IV tubing or whatever inane label was affixed to it. Instead Duke bit down through the plastic, torquing the container away, molars and motion finally accomplishing what he’d wanted. Blood seeped onto his tongue and—
He choked.
It was wrong, wrong, foul as offal scooped fresh from a corpse, cloying as old honey, an ingot of gore on Duke’s tongue. Was this what he was doomed to? An eternity of subsisting on this utterly wretched diet? He swallowed and swallowed and swallowed, nonetheless, fighting the urge to vomit, no pause between each gulp, the plastic crushed in his fist. When he was done, he leaped for another bag, mutilated it in the same fashion, and drank it all down with a drunk’s shamed abandon. As he lurched from the third bag, however, nausea overrode hunger.
Duke collapsed as his body fought to evict the unwanted substances, fluids gushing from his nose, his mouth, his tear ducts. Halfway through, he stemmed the flow, held on to what was left. Miraculously, the process did not incapacitate him. Duke, after the initial paroxysms, rolled onto his elbows and, using them as ballasts, kicked his way into a crouch. From there he began an agonizing crawl toward the door, a brushstroke of blood left in his wake, his only thought the refuge of a hospital. Common sense wailed for him to stop, that he’d be less than welcome at a medical facility when the personnel learned his heart did not beat and his lungs were vestigial, useful solely for speech.
But the alternative was untenable.
Duke did not know if his body’s insistence on purging itself would go on until he had disgorged his organs, the layers of necrotizing muscles—or not, he had no clue—inside him, the veins, and when there was nothing remaining, the bones themselves. Duke had no plans of finding out. He succeeded, to his own surprise, at wriggling into his coat. Pulling his toque clumsily over his head, the wool closing an eye even as the rest of the material soaked up the blood, Duke took an uncertain stride forward and collapsed, straight into obsidian-clad arms.
“I told you you wouldn’t like it,” thrummed a voice recently familiar, the words pitched low and soothing. “Now close your eyes. We’ll take care of you.”
A short, sweet-faced man opened the door. He held a clipboard in the crook of his elbow, had a stethoscope draped around his neck, and were it not for how young he looked, his calm manner and adherence to stereotype would have been enormously comforting. But as it stood, there was something about being there, quietly scrutinized by someone who couldn’t have been out of medical school for more than a year or so, that left Duke uneasy, and a little self-conscious of how filthy he looked.
“Hey,” said Duke, mopping his lips with the back of a hand. The clinic unsettled him with its white walls and minimal furniture, the latter insectoid in design and entirely in matte burgundy. The spokeswoman—he’d ask her name later, he owed her that much—had led Duke through the necessary procedures, and then did what she could to make him presentable, all without complaint or interest, only the calm briskness of a trauma nurse.
Then she left, her heels still making no sound at all.
“Sorry about the mess,” said Duke.
“Trust me,” the doctor said, “I’ve seen a lot of blood coming out of a lot of orifices.”
Duke laughed despite himself, a broken noise that embarrassed him immediately. “I bet. I didn’t think Reykjavík saw a lot of violence, though.”
The doctor sat himself on the battered stool beside Duke, nodding amiably, a polished tag declaring his name as Orri Helgason. “It doesn’t. But violence isn’t the only thing that causes hemorrhaging. You’d be amazed as to how inventive human beings can be when it comes to accidentally hurting ourselves.”
“I can imagine.” The laugh came easier this time. “I don’t know how you guys do it.”
“Immersion therapy,” said Orri with a wink. “Get bled on enough and you just become used to it. Now, let’s see.”
Duke jackknifed away as the young physician reached for his jaw, earning a pause from the other man, a frown bent into place.
“Mr. Guillo . . .” he said, hand still outstretched.
“I . . . I don’t know if I can let you do that.” Duke tried for a weak chuckle, mouth fluttering at the corners, undecided between a grimace or a snarl, feeble regardless of its intended shape. “What if I’m . . . contagious?”
A mealy cover, but the best he had at the moment.
“You’re just hungry, Mr. Guillo.”
And it was the manner in which the young doctor had said the word hungry, so very softly and so very carefully, that ran ice down Duke’s spine so he froze in position. Orri’s smile held as he winked again at Duke, both hands brought down around the head of his clipboard.
“You’re like me.”
Orri wiggled his fingers on his clipboard. “Not quite. My blood’s too thin, so to speak, for anyone to want to call me family. Your, ah, relatives, in particular, would laugh at the idea. But in more general terms? Yes. Yes, I am. You’re safe here, Mr. Guillo. Ish.”
Something in the pith of Duke’s psyche cracked, splintered under the gentle pressure of that ill-deserved compassion, offered without expectation, kind without reserve. His expression must have divulged his internal rupturing, as Orri’s smile, until then so nonchalant, brittled with concern.
“Really, you’re safe here,” he said again. “This place is meant for our kind. It’s lacking in many ways, but we make do. The forensic facilities are excellent, however. And we have an attached crematorium.”
“Crematorium?”
“Mistakes happen.”
Duke sagged, the unexpected prosaism of his situation, though significantly less distressing than the last few days, was nonetheless as disorienting as everything else he had recently endured. This was not the unlife he’d anticipated, always pendulating between banality and abject alien terror. Nothing as luxurious as mythology had intimated. In some ways, it was worse than the life he had shucked. At least in that one, he had resources. In that one, he had no clue that the monsters under the bed were real.
“I’m going to lose my mind,” he whispered. “I went to this place called 10-11, and—”
“That’s your first mistake. No one should go there. The prices are absurd.”
Another nervous tremble of laughter. “Yeah, I figured. I tried to eat some of the things I bought there. I drank the soda, ate the chips. Threw up. And then I was so hungry. They’d filled the fridge with, uh, wine, if you know what I mean. I drank that. I started throwing up again. I didn’t know our kind had food allergies.”
Orri rapped a cheekbone with a knuckle. “Firstly, you shouldn’t be eating normal food anymore, so to speak. How do I put this? What you and I are, we have rarefied tastes. We prefer our nutrition liquid. Unless you make an effort of will, your body will refuse anything else. You throw up.”
“Figured that out the hard way, doc. No one fucking told me anything. If I knew—”
“But you didn’t. Which means your sire wanted you to find out for yourself.”
“Why?” A pause. “And what about the other stuff? If I’m supposed to be on a liquid diet, why am I throwing that up too?”
The doctor’s good humor elided itself from his face then, and he sighed, fingers pinched around the bridge of his nose. “To answer your first question, I don’t know. I don’t ask, either. The Blue Bloods always have their games, and I make it my business to stay as far away from them as I can.”
“So why are you helping me?”
“Because they told me too.” Orri stood.
“What?”
Again, Duke felt that initial chill, exacerbated now by the pity grooved into his physician’s expression. Orri did not look unsympathetic to Duke’s situation, but he looked as though he’d seen enough real emergencies to not break form for one stranger’s personal ruin.
“I was told to make sure to watch out for you in case you messed up, provide assistance, and then stay out of it.” Orri scratched at the back of his neck with a pen, high forehead rucked with genuine distress. “Sorry.”
“You’re scared of them.”
“Fucking terrified,” said the doctor without inhibition. “As you should be too.”
“Then help me.”
“No.”
“You’re a smart man,” said Duke, possessed by both a sudden wordless fear and the lurid certainty that if he missed this opportunity, if he failed somehow to communicate how exigent his predicament, he would be squandering his one chance at getting, what? Help? An alliance? Camaraderie? Duke was too exhausted to attach the correct words to his want. But he knew it was important. “You know what they say. Together we stand, divided we fall.”
“There are less than four hundred thousand people in Iceland. Of that number, only a handful share our, ah”—Orri made that sound, the singular ah, an exquisitely gentle pluming of air that meant he was rummaging for euphemisms, the exact same way each time—“unique health conditions. Not enough to begin a revolution and definitely not enough to risk things for a stranger.”
“But that’s the fucking thing about revolutions. They all start with one person—”
“No,” said Orri firmly. “They start with one shared idea, and yours is one I will not share. I like what I call a life these days. I’m really sorry, Mr. Guillo. You’re on your own. My only advice is keep your head down. Try not to piss anyone off. And look, if it helps, here’s a freebie to answer the second part of your earlier questions: your, ah, family is even more particular about their libations than anyone else. Each of you eventually develop a taste for only, ah, specific vintage, and no other. I don’t know if anyone’s told you anything, and I’m pretty sure they have not. But you’ll learn precisely what you want. When you do, please refrain from consuming anything else. If you do, it’d be this—”
Orri fluttered a hand at the slaughterhouse floor of Duke’s front.
“—all over again. When that happens, though, don’t come back here. It will pass, and we can’t risk you causing more questions.”
“That it? That’s all the help I’m getting from you? ‘Figure out what you want to eat and never come back’?”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.”
Duke nodded. He knew a lost cause when he saw one.
“Thanks, doc,” he said. “I guess I’ll go home.”
Except he did not.
Instead Duke staggered down again to the main street, head stooped, parka clutched in a blue-veined hand. He had lost a glove in the last assault by the wind and given up, at that point, on parroting human sensibility. Let the locals think he was impaired by drink or drug, that he was inviting hypothermia and frostbite on behalf of an inadvisable vice. He was too tired to care.
The snow built until it gained a luminescence of its own, washed with lights from the shops of Laugavegur: a mottling of halogen gold on solid white, the frilled spar of the city’s largest church a distant shadow. It was pleasant in its inhospitable fashion: starkly, bleakly magnificent, true to every Nordic detective series Duke had watched. But the storm continued to churn, and soon it became ice and the flicker of streetlights.
We’re watching, the note had said.
Duke wondered how closely.
“Seven Nation Army” boomed through a door as it swung open an inch from Duke’s nose, spilling two women in enormous coats, the material fringed with piebald fur. There was the smell of cheap liquor worked into the grain of even cheaper wood: the universal attar of any dive bar, and Duke, starving, badly in need of a win, eased past the women and into the establishment. Lucky for Duke, it was dark enough to camouflage the poor state of his clothing, and too crowded with drunks for anyone to pay attention anyway. The ceilings were low, and the single dance floor teemed with bodies: most young, every one of them effortlessly lithe. Duke wanted a drink so badly, he’d have wrung a dishrag dry for a drop. Not that he could any longer.
But, maybe, this was the place to harvest something better.
The hunger writhed in him, urging him forward, onward, keep going, keep going, a compass erratically realigning to the north of what he needed. He could taste it, almost. That precise—what had Orri said?—libation, yeah, the bestial appetite inside him coveted. Duke couldn’t put a name to it yet, but he knew he was close, close enough.
His elbow grazed the swoop of a woman’s bare spine and he jumped as though singed, pivoting awkwardly in the tight space, a tottering diagonal half step nearly leading him into a collision with a man. But the man caught Duke with a laugh and a hand applied to the divot of his shoulder blade.
“Hey, it’s the American,” said the man with glee, and it took Duke a second to tether the voice to a name.
“Sven,” said Duke. “How ya doing?” He was genuinely glad to see him for a reason he couldn’t yet parse.
“Can’t complain. Alcohol on all the shelves. Pretty girls all around. A new friend found again. Life could be worse, you know?”
A warm smile bled onto Duke’s face, slow in its conception, sudden in its growth. Sven clapped Duke’s arm, his own grin making for a matching set. And despite everything that had happened, optimism kindled in Duke. A few more contacts like Sven, and maybe Duke wouldn’t starve of connection, might have the life he wanted, armed and armored with allies.
Sven leaned in.
“So, you made an impression on Eva,” he murmured into Duke’s ear.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Because of Anouk? Don’t worry about it. She’s all bark, no bite. If Eva really likes you, Anouk’ll let her do what she wants.”
“Even with an American?”
“You can find out yourself,” said Sven, Duke realizing too late what it meant as the other man pushed him lightly. “Go get your girl, brother.”
Momentum and, likely, the commotion that preceded it, made it impossible to withdraw. The woman—Eva, unidentifiable from the back and bereft of her winter gear—had taken notice. Duke gave her a once-over as she turned to study him. She stood several inches taller than Duke, balletic in her elegance, magnificently leonine, with an ice-blond mane and a clinging black dress, blue eyes like a clear summer morning. Every bit Duke’s type. Every bit any man’s type. In the presence of such preferred beauty, Duke, in a previous life at least, would have rolled out the right lines already, coke or compliment, whatever she might have wanted to wheedle. But this version of Duke only mumbled to himself and ducked his head, stupefied by circumstance, more awkward than he could recall ever being.
“Hey,” he managed.
She looked him over, one corner of her mouth crooked up. “Hey yourself. I was just talking about you.”
