Chapter 39
Once home, Emmett shut himself in the bathroom and administered the drug.
He intended to take one dose, but just as a handful of pretzels begets an empty bag, he found his mind telling lies to justify another.
He took the second with a one-two punch of guilt and relief.
And now that he’d already overdone it, why stop there?
The third hit of serum spread a flurry of hot, tainted needle pricks through his gut.
His heart rate accelerated to an uneven gallop, his skin fluttering in great gelatinous waves.
What the fuck? His fat was not just undulating but expanding.
His shirt stretched tight around his bloating belly.
A button popped and pinged off the mirror.
He was blowing up like a fucking party balloon.
A ragged cry of horror erupted from his mouth.
Then all at once, his body contracted to its former size. The balloon deflating. He collapsed against the bathroom counter and wheezed. Ragged, like something stretched too far, his insides a frayed edge of snapped fibers hanging loose. What had happened? Why had it just stopped?
He pushed himself upright, revealing his stomach. Showing through the lank curtains of his busted shirt, it was livid with reddish-pink stretch marks. A bloody bruise brewed at the injection site like a gathering storm.
He remembered something Halleck had said at their recent check-in: We’ve seen cases of participants doubling up doses, creating a sudden, dramatic imbalance in thyroxine and triiodothyronine, with weight fluctuations to match. Double that in moments of high stress.
It was the EmaC-8. Too much of a good thing.
He’d need to be more careful.
Emmett weighed in first thing the next morning. He’d lost six and a half pounds overnight, a triumph mitigated by a pain so strident and savage he almost didn’t recognize it as hunger.
He grabbed something to eat on the way to work. The satiating effects of the breakfast burrito—an infant-size stomach bomb of eggs, refried beans, ham, cheese, and sour cream—wore off before he got to the office.
Fortunately, someone had brought in donuts. Each time he walked by he pilfered another, managing five over the course of two hours before a coworker joked, “Why don’t you just take the box back to your desk?”
At lunchtime he drove through McDonald’s, ordered double his usual amount, and scarfed it in the car: a large Big Mac meal, two McDoubles, ten-piece Chicken McNuggets, apple pie.
Barely a drop in the abyss of his need. He struggled to focus all day and stopped at Vons on his way home, loading a cart with frozen pizzas, taquitos, Pop-Tarts, cereal: $120 worth of crap that barely dented his superhuman hunger.
No, his Hunger—the big-H kind. He could feel the food worming painfully through his digestive tract, stretching the walls of his stomach until they threatened to tear.
He was, technically, full. But it wasn’t enough. Still he felt compelled to eat—but what?
Maybe it wasn’t food he craved at all—at least, not the kind he could order at the drive-thru. Not the kind of steaks he could get by the pound at the meat counter.
He let himself imagine it, just for a second—the forbidden fruit: the succulent chew of fresh human meat—then thrust it from his mind, frightened by the longing he licked off his lips.
He’d been so good, hadn’t eaten a bite since the night he found Marco Jiménez in his trunk. Of course he hadn’t; he’d been off Obexity most of that time. The Hunger was a product of the drug. Being back on it didn’t mean he could just start killing people again.
But it wasn’t that easy.
From day into night the craving hounded him. Hollowed him. After a few hours his physical hunger returned, twisting his restraint until it thrummed. Was this how he’d felt all those times he’d blacked out? Was this Hunger what had driven him to kill?
How much longer could he hold out?
Was there even any point in trying?
Of course there is, he thought, disgusted with himself.
This wasn’t like scoffing one too many cookies after dinner.
There was only one way to get human meat short of breaking into a morgue or digging bodies out of a cemetery—ideas that unfortunately didn’t appeal at all.
How long might they have been sitting there deteriorating?
How would they taste, tough and dry and cold against his teeth?
True, he had eaten Jiménez cold. But there was something tasty about having hunted the gym bro himself.
Not just for what he’d said at the gym, but for what he represented.
Like his death was a bite out of everyone who’d ever made Emmett feel simultaneously less than and too much.
Jiménez had deserved to be ingested, digested, rendered down to shit.
In his black, corroded stone of a heart, Emmett believed they all did.
It frightened him to think that perhaps more than meat, what he craved was retribution.
You’ve already killed at least one person; what’s one more?
You’re probably going to prison anyway, so why not enjoy your freedom while you can?
Hypothetically, then: Who had hurt him? Who deserved to be punished?
Emmett’s gut boiled with desire at the thought of the name.
But he didn’t even know where Hank was.
Even if he could track him down, was it smart? All these people in his orbit disappearing? After Georgina Hodge and Myra, a missing family member—a man he’d publicly accused of abusing him—could be an unnecessary risk.
A stranger, then.
Within seconds Emmett had Instagram open on his phone. One by one, he unblocked his trolls, trying to glean whether any of them lived locally.
The handle justintime meant nothing to him, but the profile pic associated with the account trigged something in Emmett’s memory. He opened the profile and understood at once.
J, his first-ever Grindr hookup. Full name Justin Matthews. Emmett opened his Grindr chat log and reminded himself of what Justin had written after they ran into each other at the gym:
I thought you looked familiar (sort of)
Fuck, what happened to you?
Good thing you’re at the gym
Saliva practically dribbled down his chin, his Hunger vengeful and razor-toothed.
Then the status indicator changed, showing Justin was active in the app. Located about a mile away.
Emmett had the urge to send a message, try to get him to bite. But would Justin not just dismiss him the moment he saw who was writing?
Safer perhaps to create a new profile, with more recent photos. He’d be unrecognizable. A wry new handle, too: meateater69.
He tapped out a message and hit send, Hunger drowning out his usual nerves. He was focused, lethal, a carnivore on the prowl.
It was only a matter of time before his prey stuck his head above the grass.
A brrrrup! heralded his reply.
Hey handsome. Hope you’re hungry, because my meat is all-you-can-eat