Hunger and Something Else

Today is April 31.

That was what the sign said when I found it, hanging crooked from the rusted ceiling of a gas station, its letters half-burned away like the world couldn’t even be bothered to keep time straight any more. I liked it. A date that didn’t exist. A day that shouldn’t have been there.

It felt right for what I had become.

I used to count days. Before the rot got into my blood. Before my heartbeat slowed and thickened, like it had to push through mud just to keep me standing. Now I measured things differently. Hunger cycles. sunsets. The way the wind carried scent across the broken and abused landscape.

The way she smelled.

I knew I shouldn’t have followed her. I understood that in the same instinctive way I knew I could break her bones with one hand if I lost control. The same way I knew others like me would have already torn her apart without a second thought.

I followed anyway.

At first, I kept my distance. I told myself it was caution, that I was waiting, that I was watching for the right moment. She moved carefully, because she understood the world had teeth now. A knife rested at her hip, her pack slung over her shoulders, dirt streaked across her face in a way that didn’t quite hide how soft she must have been before all this.

Before for the rot.

Before things like me.

She didn’t notice me until the third day. I had grown careless. The hunger had begun to pull harder than usual, sharp, insistent, and different than normal. It always worsened when I got closer to her. Not just the need to feed, but something else too. A deeper something. A something that felt far more dangerous.

Ahead of me, she stopped without warning.

“Come out,” she called, voice steady, though I could see the tension in her body. She didn’t turn around to look for me, she just stood there waiting.

I froze in the shadows of a collapsed overpass, every instinct screaming at me to run. Or to do something worse. I knew I should withdraw, to sink into the dark and disappear. Instead, I stepped forward at the same time she finally turned around to face me.

Her knife was in her hand instantly. Clever girl.

Eyes locked onto mine, and I say the exact moment understanding set in. It started with a flinch, then a hitch in her breath, then a tightening of fingers on the hilt of her knife. Even though she had to know it wouldn’t be enough against something like me.

I waited for her to run, but she didn’t. It told me she hadn’t just been lucky to survive this long, she’d been fighting hard with every fiber of her being as deliberately as possible.

“You’ve been following me,” she said. It wasn’t a question. But I nodded anyway.

Her brown eyes narrowed slightly. “Why?”

Because you smelled like something I used to need. Because when I stayed close, the noise in my head quieted just a little. Because even though I felt so much hunger, that something else was always there and I wanted that feeling more. I didn’t say any of that. My voice didn’t work right anymore. It came out rough, broken, as though every word had to be dragged up from somewhere deep in my chest and through vocal cords that had long since atrophied. But, for her, I spoke.

”Don’t…know.”

It was the most honest answer I had. She studied me for a long moment, and I could see her thinking and weighing her options. Every thought, every movement of hers carried calculation, her instincts sharpened by necessity.

Then she did something completely unexpected. Something reckless that changed everything. She lowered her knife and said, “Then don’t just watch me. Help me.”

I blinked, caught off guard.

Her gaze flicked over me, taking in what I was, considering what I could do. “Your kind fight each other right?”

I nodded a second time.

“There’s a settlement eight days from here,” she said. “I won’t make it alone. But if you’re with me, you can act like a meat shield if any other Rotters appear while I flee.”

It had to be a trap. It didn’t make any sense any other way. Humans didn’t trust things like me anymore. Not after everything we had done.

“What…give…exchange,” I asked, the words feeling like glass in my throat as they came out.

Her expression didn’t change.

”Nothing,” she said. “Except not trying to kill you first.”

A pause.

“That’s already more than most people would offer to things like you.”

I felt my lips twitch, as if they were trying to form into a smile. I couldn’t remember the last time I could smile or even wanted to. It wasn’t in humor or disbelief, but something else. This was the moment. The kind that defined the rest of your life in irreparable ways.

I could have taken her then. I should have taken her then. It would have ended the hunger, at least for bit. Silenced the pull she had on me. I should have taken her then walked away full and empty in the only way I had left to exist.

Or—

I could have risked starving, risked losing control when I didn’t expect to, risked remembering what it felt like to be human. If only long enough for it to hurt. I looked at her, really looked this time. At the way she stood her ground despite the fear I smelled and at the fact she asked for help instead of lashing out or running away. At the impossible, dangerous idea that she saw something in me that might still be worth trusting.

My stomach twisted and my chest ached as I made my choice. “Oh…kay.”

The tension in her loosened just slightly, a lowering on her shoulders and a loosening of her limbs. I doubted it was in relief, but it was something close to that.

“Okay,” she echoed. “Do you have a name?”

I shook my head no. I had a name once, but I had long ago forgotten what it was. She sighed a little and returned her knife to its sheath. “Alright, then I’m going to call you Adam, because it feels weird to just refer to you as Rotter seeing as you’re helping me and all.”

We walked together after that. Not closely, at least not at first. But I was never too far away either. For the first time since the world ended, I didn’t measure time by hunger, or sunsets, or the scents blowing across the landscape. I counted it in the sound of her footsteps and in the words she spoke. And there were a lot of words, even though I almost never gave any of my own.

As we moved through the desolate world we both now belonged too, a growing realization settled somewhere deep inside me. Maybe survival didn’t have to mean becoming less. Maybe, somehow, with her…

Maybe I could become something more.