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Is that all love is?
Is that all it ever was?
I hope not.
I really hope not.
A Christmas Feast
The First Winter After First Night
(Thirteen and a half years before Rot & Ruin)
1
The living moved like ghosts through the fog.
The dead waited in the swirling mist.
There were screams in the air. A few shouts and gunshots.
And the moans.
Always the moans.
Long, and low, and plaintive. Uttered by mouths that hung slack, rising from chests that drew breath only to moan—never again to breathe. The moans spoke of a hunger so old, so deep, so endless that nothing, not even the red gluttony of a screaming feast, could satisfy it.
The hunger existed.
Like they existed.
Without purpose and without end.
The mists were as thick as milk, white, featureless, hiding everything until far too late. Figures moved through the fog.
And the dead waited for them.
2
The man and the boy heard those moans and huddled together, biting the rags they wore as scarves to keep from screaming.
They were beyond tired. Beyond weary.
Both of them were thin as scarecrows. Barely enough meat on them to allow their bodies to shiver. Clothing was torn, patched with duct tape and rope.
Most of the time the man carried the boy. Sometimes—like now—he was too weak, too starved to manage it. The boy stumbled behind him, clutching his hand, too weary to cry. That was when they moved the slowest. That was when they were the most vulnerable.
The boy, Mason, was six. A lean phantom of the chubby child he’d been when they’d run away in August. It was only four months, but weight had fallen from them like leaves from an autumn tree. There were dead things out there that had more flesh on their bones.
The man—Mason’s older brother, Dan—stuffed the boy’s clothes with wadded-up pieces of old newspaper. It helped some, trapping little bits of warmth.
Dan wore three sets of long johns, and he still looked skinny.
“I’m hungry . . . ,” said Mason. Not for the first time. Or the hundredth.
“I know,” said Dan.
“I’m tired!”
