By: Colum Coleman
The town was a town. Like any other. It was a quiet place. Empty and still and silent. Lights glowed in windows and from streetlamps. Doors stood ajar. The wind blew. In some places, televisions played to vacant audiences. Somewhere a faucet overflowed.
The town was a town. A town called Barak Nor. A town, which yesterday had been quietly busy with the hum of ordinary life, was now most very much empty. For the town called Barak Nor was now as dead as very nearly everyone who had lived within it.
A man, barefoot, walked the town. He was shirtless, wearing only a robe and blue jeans. He was covered in blood and…smiling. Most unusually of all – unlike his neighbors, unlike his friends, unlike most everyone he had ever known – he was not dead.
He leaned his head back and exhaled into the flurries that had begun to fall. His feet crunched over the frost covered leaves. It was almost a dance as he walked the streets laughing a deep, barking laugh. It was as human as it was not. And, in a strangely simple way, that was key to all of him.
Fingernails a touch yellow, slightly curved, on fingers that were too long. Fingers which grew out of handstoo large, too ashen, toogrey–even for a man’s. Teeth that were a touch too largeand flatbehind anearly lipless smilesurrounded by sunken cheeks and pockets for eyes like a skulls’.
The whole of him was just…too lean. Too tall. The features of him elongated. Exaggerated. He extended himself and he stood six, seven, eight feet tall. He pulled the robe down. His lungs beat out against the skin of his chest as he breathed. He was too hollowed to be alive.
And yet, most unusually of all, he was not dead. He was not dead. He was a person. He had a name. He had parents and siblings and friends. Yet, for all of this – all these horrid things, he was not dead. He was much, much worse.
He ran a bony finger between his ribs. Felt the icy chill of his heart pulse against it with an exhilarating rhythm. He breathed. He relaxed. He let his hair grow long, fall out, and change color. He would look fully human again soon enough. Be perfectly human, as a matter of course. He always did between hungers. A different person each time. But he was always the same when he hungered.
And how he had hungered here, in Barak Nor. He thought about it as he chewed away at his own lips, admiring the blood-stained streaks ona passing driveway. He had done it all in a day. Well, a day and a night and a half. And now, now he hungered again.
He hungered most in these little boom towns that sprung up into nowhere from out of nowhere. What this one had been for – gold, oil, coal – he did not recall. For he did not care. They were all the same in the end, really. Just food. Food for the hungering. The hungering that could not or would not ever end.
The town now is off the map. Every map. Even the old ones from before the end of its time. For mostpeople, Barak Nor never existed. For them, he does not exist. It’s a useful kind of forgetting. Until winter comes. And the hungering with it.