The One We Feed (15 page)

“Restroom’s
for customers only,” a voice said.

She sat up and
pushed her hair behind her ears. “How you know if I’m gonna buy something? Stop
being the toilet police.”

There was a
hiss from outside, but heavy footfalls led away from the door.

Looking at
herself in the mirror, she could see her injuries. When he’d grabbed her, he’d
done it hard. There was a red mark across her mouth that was going to be a
black mark by the morning. Her lip was bloody, as was the back of her head
where his two front teeth had sliced through. She took a wet paper towel and
washed the gravel from her knees, then used the sink to bathe her head. She
snuck out completely soaked and more than a little overcautious.

There was no
one sitting at the tables, no one waiting outside in the parking lot. In the
distance, she could see her bag and its contents strewn all over the place but
no assailant. If she was lucky, she’d hurt him bad enough to make him want to
go home. People like that wanted easy pickin’s, not holy terrors.

She slid out
into the night carefully, scanning the terrain. It was a wide open plain of
black, and if she was fast and alert, she could make it to the other side. She
took off at a dead run and cleared the distance quickly, but as she reached her
things, headlights clicked on in the bus park. She looked up and saw several
silhouettes stalking around what appeared to be a moving van, forming a circle
around her.

Shoving
everything she could find into the bag, she searched frantically for the knife.
It had been in the outer pocket, but it was gone.

“I like this
one,” a voice broke into the silence.

Reesa froze. The
voice was familiar, but no, it couldn’t be. Gran was dead.

“She’s got
some fight in her.”

The shadows
closed in tighter. Reesa found the knife inside the larger compartment, tangled
in a sock, and blindly swept it around herself. She backed away from the
lights, but they came closer.

“Collect her
for me, if you please,” said the voice.

Then there was
the sound. It sliced through the darkness and light like a knife and cut
straight into her brain. She tried to cling to the blade, but suddenly her
fingers no longer worked. It clattered to the ground, followed by her bag. The
figures came closer. Reesa tried to run, tried so hard that the effort would
have sent her into the Guinness Book, but it did no good. Her limbs were no
longer her own.

The figures
gathered around her, blocking out the light. Their mouths were open, like they
were singing at full voice, but all that came out was the noise.

She blacked
out, and the memory itself was pulled low by the turbulence of fear and
desperation. There was an undertow of anguish. I was dragged down and swirled
over, until a third memory appeared from the abyss.

She was lying
on the ground. No, not on the ground, on a sheet of metal. When her eyes
focused, she was looking at the prostrate forms of several other people, some
injured, some partially nude, some staring blankly ahead as though dead, but
all in large, metal cages. The man with the stick came back into the room, his
boots thumping across the polished white floor. She listened as they stopped
outside her cage.

“Next,” he
said with a humorless chuckle. He opened the cage door and took hold of Reesa’s
hair, pulling her down the walkway. She was too weak to struggle, just let him
pull her along until he’d deposited her in a cell of some kind. She stared at
the concrete of the floor for a long while, the silence and darkness
comforting. Then the door opened again, and she was picked up and made to stand.
Her head lolled forward, her eyes drooped.

Someone took
hold of her face and shifted it from side to side, but she couldn’t focus on
them.

There was a
sigh. “Well, well, all the pluck right out of her.” The voice continued,
speaking to the people holding her as if they were servants. Reesa listened
carefully to the tone of it, the inflection, the southern accent.

It sounded
like Gran, but it wasn’t Gran. Gran would never have said or done such things.
Gran
was dead
, she repeated in her mind. She shouted it to herself, so that she
could not hear the insulting imposter speak again.

When the
conversation about procedures had finished, Reesa coughed. Her throat was so
dry she almost had no voice, but even if she had to whisper it, she was going
to say it.

“Chase the
moon,” she said.

There was
silence. The men carrying her tossed her head back on her shoulders.

“What a
surprising development,” the voice said finally. “Throw her in.”

The hands
around her arms tightened and forced her from the room. Her vision was fading
in and out, but she clung to the reality around her like she’d clung to the
microphone. This was an essential moment she could never afford to release.

A loud
squeaking clang rang around her. The walls sounded close. Suddenly, a hot cloud
of a stench, so foul that it might have been from Hell itself, blasted her in
the face. She coughed and choked, but there was no time to catch her breath. The
men let go of her. She opened her eyes and stared down into a deep, dark hole. Then
they pushed her in.

 She fell
almost twenty feet but landed on a mound of something wet, soft, and sticky,
like a huge bed of mud. The smell was all around her, strangling her, the scent
of death and decay, of waste and excrement. She cast her eyes upward to the
door, but before she could get her bearings, the hatch slammed shut.

Gasping for
air, she reached out with her hands, searching the darkness. Had they put her
here to die, to rot? Was this their final insult—a human compost heap? She dug
through the slime, searching for something, anything that would tell her what
was happening. Eventually her fingers found something small, smooth, and hard.

It was a
tooth.

She clutched
it in her hand and scrambled to her feet. So this is how it would end. Not in
an alley, not in a bed like Gran, or in her front yard like her mother. In a
pit full of dead bodies.

She set her
shoulders and breathed in the disgusting air.

“There’s no
moon,” she whispered to herself.

A reply came
from all around, a low and ominous growl.

Chapter
10

Memory Lapse

I woke slowly, pulling myself
with herculean effort, feeling as if the horrible images were trying to draw me
back into their pit like some hellish gravity. It was like fighting off
anesthesia, but the side effects were fierce existential terror, not dry mouth.
My cell phone was screaming—literally, thanks to Jinx—in my ear. Cursing ring
tones in general, I washed up on the shore of my own reality, out of the dark,
churning sea of Reesa’s terrible tragedy, and tried to dust off my shipwrecked
consciousness.

My fingers did
not immediately obey my urge to press the button. “Hello?”

“Is this
Lilith?” said a masculine voice I did not recognize.

I sat up and
drew the bath robe around me almost protectively. “Depends on who wants to
know.”

He cleared his
throat with something of a beleaguered grunt. “Sergeant Castor, Berkeley City
Police.”

I tried to
laugh off my instant anxiety but sounded false even to myself. “Oh, well, in
that case, yes, my name is Lilith. I thought you might be a lawyer for my
ex-husband,” I lied.

He didn’t seem
to care. “It’s fine. Look, we have a bit of a situation here and were wondering
if you could come down to the station immediately.”

I slid forward
to the edge of the bed and glanced at the clock. It was close to eight. My mind
moved so swiftly over the events of the preceding day that I nearly became
motion sick. “What? Why? What have I done?”

“Nothing.” He
paused, as if waiting for me to fill in detail, which I did not do. “See, we’ve
picked someone up. A bit of an…pardon me…an odd character.” He went quiet,
leaving all the rest to subaudition. “Says that we can reach a lady named
Lilith at this number and that she…um…takes care of him.”

With a sigh of
relief, I lifted my hand to my forehead. My fingers were shaking. What had Jinx
done
this
time? I mean, I knew I could sometimes be a bit mothering, but
for him to get out of trouble by pretending to actually
be
a minor, I
was almost shocked. He was one of the most fiercely independent people I knew. It
must have hurt to tell them that I “took care of him.” I almost chuckled,
thinking of his ruddy, youthful features pockmarked by silver studs and the
expression of absolute shame that would be seated there.

“What’s he
done now?” I said with a harassed sigh.

“Well, we’re
right across from a county facility. There’s a park, you know.”

I knew the
place. It was near the library. “Yeah.”

“He was
sitting in one of the trees.”

“Oooh-kay.”

The officer
sniffed. “That’s not allowed. He could sue, if he fell.”

“I see.” I was
frantically going through my tiny bag, placed helpfully on the ground by Jinx,
looking for a pair of jeans that weren’t covered in gore. In the back of my
mind, where there was enough space to care about such stupid things as tree
climbing, I wondered what the hell Jinx was doing hidden among branches.

Probably
trying to get a better signal.

“Some officers
approached him and asked him to come down.”

“As they
should have.” 

“He said...uh...that
the tree was sick.”

I halted in
mid-paw. “Sick? A tree?” Since when had Jinx taken up horticulture? “How would
he know that?”

“Well, see,
there’s the issue, ma’am. It’s nothing to worry about. We get people like this
all the time around here, it’s just that it’s policy to treat them cautiously,
you see.”

“I understand,”
I said blankly, not really understanding what the hell he was trying to say.

“He said the
tree told him so.”

This time, I
really
did
freeze. My mind did a double take.

“The tree told
him so?”

“Yes.”

“Uh huh.” It
had happened. Jinx had finally gone off the deep end. He was one step away from
tongueless internment.

“Like I said,
our guys are used to that sort of thing, so we asked him to come down, said
that we’d take care of the tree when we could, you know, to calm him down, and
then the officers tried to identify him. He didn’t have I.D. So, you know, they
asked his name.”

He sounded as
if he were sipping coffee and the whole thing just a tiny laugh in a life of
jokes. I began to get impatient.

“Right, and?”

“And well…. Said
his name was Amanda.”

My internal
record player was knocked, skipped, and then repeated. It hadn’t been Jinx in
the tree. That made so much more sense.

“You mean
Ananda. His name is Ananda.”

“Oh,” he
murmured, sounding almost relieved, as if to suggest he was glad that my friend
wasn’t one of
those
types. “Well, we must have misunderstood him. Our
mistake. I’ll just note that down here. Anyway, we were going to treat him as a
5150, Mental Health hold, but we thought we’d try to contact family before we
requested a rep to come have a look at him.”

“Thanks, I’m
grateful. He’s harmless. Wouldn’t hurt anyone. I mean he was worried about a
tree, yeah?” I pulled on a pair of jeans and grabbed an exercise top. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,
just sitting here, as sweet as pie, chatting with everyone.”

“I’m sorry he’s
caused you trouble.” The shirt went over my head and I was back again, talking
a million miles a minute. “He used to live in a monastery, so he has a bit of
difficulty when it comes to new places. I’ll be there a-sap. If you need to
talk to anyone, we have a contact in the Kansas City Police who knows all about
the situation. I can give you his phone number if you need proof or whatever to
release him to me.”

“A monastery,
huh? Somehow, I could believe it.” He chuckled. “Naw, he’s fine. Just come on
down. If he knows you and all, we’ll let him leave.”

“Thank you so
much!” I shoved my feet into tennis shoes and tried to tie my hair up as I ran
around the room digging up the pieces of paper that gave me an identity and a
means of interaction with a capitalist society. “I’ll be right there in like
fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll have
him here. Take your time.”

As I pulled
out of the lot, my mind still confused between my reality and the horrible
black hole of man-eating monsters, I tried to imagine what circumstance had put
Ananda in a tree, besides his general disposition. Why hadn’t he gone to meet
Arthur after work? Why hadn’t he gotten on his bus or a train? Why hadn’t he
called me?

I spent the
entire trip fidgeting and tapping the steering wheel, cursing land-based travel,
and wishing that somewhere there was an immortal with a type of understanding
that had to do with foregoing gravity, so that I could steal their power. When
I finally found the station, it took another ten minutes to find parking, since
it seemed that the most environmentally friendly place on earth had decided
that I shouldn’t be driving a car and, if I wasn’t, certainly wouldn’t need a parking
place. Evidently no one had explained to the green-nazis that there’s no way to
run the ten miles I had just traversed with the same speed.

I flew up to
the reception window like some kind of banshee, all wisps of hair and worry. The
man inside the bullet-proof glass raised his eyebrows at me and cocked his head
to one side.

“Can I help
you?”

“Sergeant
Castor called me to pick up my friend. He was in a tree across the street.”

“Oh,” the man
said with a purposefully serious nod, “that guy. Sure, I’ll buzz you in. We
have to check you.”

“Yeah,” I
fired back as the door buzzed. I caught it while it swung and on the other side
met another officer wearing rubber gloves. He went through my purse, patted me
down, and made me walk through a metal detector before I was allowed to walk
down the hall. Inside another buzzable door was a kind of holding area. On a
row of plastic chairs, barred together like some kind of ergonomically cursed
movie theater, Ananda sat patiently between two officers, one of whom he held
by the hand in the most intimate of ways.

“But if you
continue to feel that way, then your mind is defeating itself,” he was saying.

The policeman
shook his head, absolutely invested in the conversation and his own turmoil,
while his partner sat with a hand on his gun belt, as if he couldn’t believe
what he was seeing.

“I don’t know
why I bother. I mean, I must just love to suffer right?”

“It is a sign
that you are alive. All else on earth move with the ebb and flow of nature,
save humans. We strive to bend it to our will, build castles wherever there is
room, sometimes even on sand, and when they fall we lament. It is strange, but
true.” He patted the man’s hand in complete compassion. “So, one might say that
the pain of life is unbearable, or one might choose to look upon it in another
fashion, see it as a testament that you are indeed alive, human, and fighting
the path of things. Depending upon your personality, this is either a blessing
or a curse. Some wish to move in harmony, some in discord. There is no harm in
either; there is only acceptance of the chosen way and its consequences. Though,
given your profession, I am forced to say you are a fighter, and so thinking in
this way will be helpful to you.”

I almost
gasped, but when I caught sight of the man’s glazed expression as he finally
turned at my approach, I realized Ananda was working his magic, once again. Something
of a tiny smile began to twist my mouth.

“You’re right.”
The officer shook his head. “I’m going to call her. I should call her, not just
because I want to, but because she needs me to. But if she says, ‘buzz off I
hate you,’ then I know to move on, right?”

“There you are.”
Ananda smiled. “Excellent thinking.”

The man turned
and glanced dazedly at me, began to focus, and seemed to jump to his feet as if
the seat was on fire. His partner shook his head with a distinct thought of “Rookie,”
and gained his feet, almost in annoyance.

“Are you
Lilith?”

“Yes,” I said,
“Lilith Pierce.” I shook the more sober man’s hand. He seemed older and, if not
wiser, certainly more skeptical.

“I’m the one
who called you.”

“Oh, Sergeant!
Thank you so much! Has he been any trouble?”

“No, as long
as you don’t count giving my partner relationship advice.”

“His advice is
good,” I said with a winning smile to the younger man. “Call her.”

Ananda was
grinning at me in his usual childish way, though there was something almost
worried in his eye. I stepped forward to him and reached out. As if drowning,
he immediately grabbed my hands and swung them back and forth.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, yes. They’ve
been very nice. They even said they’d take care of the tree for me.”

“That’s
wonderful.” I glanced over my shoulder. Castor was observing us, almost as if
he were testing the nature of our friendship. I sat down and pulled Ananda’s
hands into my lap. He turned and met my gaze. “Now, you understand why they had
to ask you to come down out of the tree, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “The
laws of men are strange. They said it was wrong to climb the tree, but the tree
didn’t mind.”

“I know, but
it’s
their
tree.”

His brow
furrowed slightly. “No, it’s its own tree.”

“True, but you
see, they didn’t plant the tree so that it could be a tree. They planted it for
themselves”  

“So that they
would have a tree! With shade, and leaves, and that lovely little voice.”

His frown
deepened and my heart melted. It was strange to think that living in the care
of generations of men who understood his compassion for all things had taken
its toll. With every part of myself, I wished the whole world could see that he
wasn’t the odd one.

“I’m sure that’s
what the tree thinks, but they can’t hear the tree. So to them, the tree serves
a utilitarian purpose. It’s better for them if you don’t climb it.”

He glanced
around as if looking for proof of their apathy on the walls. “The tree serves a
purpose, but it is itself. Should it be ignored, left to them, or allowed to
speak?”

I sighed. “We
can talk about the civil rights of plants later, Ananda. Right now, I need you
to agree that you won’t climb any trees unless you ask for permission. It’s
very important to the
dharma
. You understand?”

I gave him a
knowing look and, with some concern, he nodded. “It has a parasite.”

“I’m sure they’ll
look after it.”

“I would like
them to; it is very weak.”

I brushed my
fingers down his face and caught the older officer’s eye. He dipped his chin.

“Come on,
Love. Let’s go home. Arthur will be back soon.”

Ananda sighed
heavily and stood as though burdened by the sudden understanding that the
outside world was actively rejecting him.