Near the Bone by Christina Henry (ebook reader color screen txt) 📗

But there was also an entire wall of shelves filled with packaged food—canned soups, pasta, sauce, bags of chips, cans of soda, candy bars, crackers, cookies, wrapped pastries. There were gaps in the items that made it clear William had been eating some of these things.

“He had all of this in here? And he never told me?” Mattie could hear the astonishment in her voice.

And he never shared it with you, never brought you anything that might remind you of home or of the real world, but he kept it all for himself and had it in secret because he wasn’t going to do without his comforts. That was your lot, not his.

“Just looking at all of this is making me hungry,” C.P. said. “Let’s just grab armfuls and bring it inside, okay?”

“Wait,” Mattie said, before C.P. started grabbing everything in sight. She didn’t think there was any point in removing a lot of food when they were leaving as soon as possible. “Let’s just take what we need for now, for breakfast.”

“But Twinkies,” C.P. said, pointing to a box of the cakes. “What about coffee cakes? Coffee cakes are basically a breakfast food.”

Mattie couldn’t remember what a coffee cake tasted like. She stared at the blue-and-white box, at the picture of the cake with crumb topping. She suddenly longed to know what it was, how the texture of the cake would feel on her tongue.

“Okay,” she said. “The coffee cakes.”

She collected a full carton of eggs—I’m going to eat as many eggs as I want, William’s not here to stop me, she thought with a savage satisfaction—and a package of bacon and a loaf of bread. She noticed a small bin in the corner and found that it was filled with food wrappers. She realized then how careful William was to never let her see the packaging from the eggs or bacon or bread. He always carried everything inside in a basket or wrapped in a towel, so that she would never think about the modern world he’d dragged her from.

She turned away from the bin to find C.P. balancing a huge load of packages.

“I thought we were only taking coffee cakes,” she said.

“Just in case we get stuck in the cabin. For whatever reason,” he said. “I do want to get out of here as soon as possible. But there might be a siege, or whatever.”

“A siege?”

“Yeah, you know. The monster might come back. Or that guy. We didn’t see his body.”

That was true. Mattie had forgotten she was looking for evidence of William. The sight of Griffin hanging from the tree pushed it out of her mind.

Is William still alive? If he is, why hasn’t he come back here for me? Maybe the creature took him away to the cave.

She wished very much that this was so, that the monster was tearing William’s organs out one by one and that he was screaming the whole time, screaming the way he used to make her scream in pain and misery.

Mattie led the way out of the storehouse and C.P. followed. “Make sure the door is pulled tight, otherwise bears can get in there.”

“You don’t think a bear is hanging around with that giant thing on the loose, do you?”

Mattie thought about it. It was true that she and William had noticed fewer animals about in the last month or so. She’d assumed, once she knew about the creature, that it was eating all the available meat. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps some animals had just moved on, ceding their territory to the new monster in their midst.

“Maybe,” Mattie said. “You never know with bears. But it’s true that I haven’t seen much evidence of bear activity around, and neither has William. He does all the hunting, so he should know.”

Mattie checked the fire and started preparing breakfast as she always did. It was so much a part of her that she did everything automatically.

“What can I do to help?” C.P. asked.

She was slicing the bread when he said this, and the question shocked her so much that she nearly sliced one of her fingers.

“Help?”

“Yeah, you know, I could set the table or toast the bread or whatever.”

He wanted to help. William never helped. Kitchen work was for women. It was the responsibility of women to prepare the food that men had hunted.

But he didn’t hunt all of it, did he? He went to the supermarket and bought it and carried it home and forced you to feel grateful.

“I can toast the bread on a fork,” he said. “I’m really good at that. I do it around the campfire all the time.”

Mattie never made toast. William didn’t like it.

“Yes, that sounds like a good idea,” she said. “Just leave me enough room to cook the bacon, please.”

Soon they were sitting down to breakfast and again the cabin felt cozy and safe, filled with the smells of food and the wood burning in the fire. Mattie reflected that she’d never felt this way with William, even with the same fire burning and the same food on the table.

C.P. shoveled food into his mouth with abandon. “God, I’m so hungry. I shouldn’t be this hungry, not with Griffin gone and Jen in the state she’s in and who knows what waiting for us outside. But I am. I’m starving.”

Mattie watched him dip his toast into his egg yolk. She’d never done that before. She copied him and took a bite and discovered she liked it.

I feel like a baby animal, learning the world anew, she thought. William took so much from me.

“So what are we going to do?” C.P. said. “We left the packs somewhere. I don’t know what I was thinking, doing that. I don’t even know how we’ll find them again but we need that stuff, because we’re going to have to spend at least one night outside. Jen can’t walk, obviously, and we’re going to have to fix up some way to drag her.