An Apple for the Creature

“We’re in an orphanage,” Anne guesses. The class heard the story of Oliver Twist once.

“No. You’re on an army base.”

“Is that what happens to kids whose mom and dad die?” This is Steven now.

“Sometimes.”

Melanie is thinking hard, and putting it together, inside her head, like a puzzle. “How old was I,” she asks, “when my mom died?” Because she must have been very young, if she can’t remember her mother at all.

“It’s not easy to explain,” Miss Mailer says, and they can see from her face that she’s really, really unhappy.

“Was I a baby?” Melanie asks.

“A very tiny baby, Melanie.”

“How tiny?”

“Tiny enough to fall into a hole between two laws.”

It comes out quick and low and almost hard. Miss Mailer changes the subject then, and the children are happy to let her do it because nobody is very enthusiastic about death by this point. But Melanie wants to know one more thing, and she wants it badly enough that she even takes the chance of upsetting Miss Mailer some more. It’s because of her name being Greek, and what the Greeks sometimes used to do to their kids, at least in the ancient times when they were fighting a war against Troy. At the end of the lesson, she waits until Miss Mailer is close to her and she asks her question really quietly.

“Miss Mailer, were our moms and dads going to sacrifice us to the goddess Artemis? Is that why we’re here?”

Miss Mailer looks down at her, and for the longest time she doesn’t answer. Then something completely unexpected and absolutely wonderful happens. Miss Mailer reaches down and she strokes Melanie’s hair. She strokes Melanie’s hair with her hand, like it was just the most natural and normal thing in the world. And lights are dancing behind Melanie’s eyes, and she can’t get her breath, and she can’t speak or hear or think about anything because apart from Sergeant’s people, maybe two or three times and always by accident, nobody has ever touched her before and this is Miss Mailer touching her and it’s almost too nice to be in the world at all.

“Oh, Melanie,” Miss Mailer says. Her voice is only just higher than a whisper.

Melanie doesn’t say anything. She never wants Miss Mailer’s hand to move. She thinks if she could die now, with Miss Mailer’s hand on her hair, and nothing changed ever again, then it would be all right to be dead.

“I—I can’t explain it to you,” Miss Mailer says, sounding really, really unhappy. “There are too many other things I’d have to explain, too, to make sense of it. And—and I’m not strong enough. I’m just not strong enough.”

But she tries anyway, and Melanie understands some of it. Just before the Hungries came, Miss Mailer says, the government passed an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. It was because of something called the Christian Right, and it meant that you were a person even before you were born, and the law had to protect you from the very moment that you popped up inside your mom’s tummy like a seed.

Melanie is full of questions already, but she doesn’t ask them because it will only be a minute or two before Sergeant’s people come for her, and she knows from Miss Mailer’s voice that this is a big, important secret. So then the Hungries came, Miss Mailer said—or rather, people started turning into Hungries. And everything fell to pieces real fast.

It was a virus, Miss Mailer says: a virus that killed you, but then brought you partway back to life; not enough of you to talk, but enough of you to stand up and move around and even run. You turned into a monster that just wanted to bite other people and make them into Hungries, too. That was how the virus propagated itself, Miss Mailer said.

So the virus spread and all the governments fell and it looked like the Hungries were going to eat everyone or make everyone like they were, and that would be the end of the story and the end of everything. But the real people didn’t give up. They moved the government to Los Angeles, with the desert all around them and the ocean at their back, and they cleared the Hungries out of the whole state of California with flamethrowers and daisy cutter bombs and nerve gas and big moving fences that were on trucks controlled by radio signals. Melanie has no idea what these things are, but she nods as if she does and imagines a big war like Greeks fighting Trojans.

And every once in a while, the real people would find a bunch of Hungries who’d fallen down because of the nerve gas and couldn’t get up again, or who were stuck in a hole or locked in a room or something. And maybe one of them might have been about to be a mom, before she got turned into a Hungry. There was a baby already inside her.

The real people were allowed to kill the Hungries because there was a law, Emergency Ordnance 9, that said they could. Anyone could kill a Hungry and it wouldn’t be murder because they weren’t people anymore.