Hunger Bellow -Finn
Ten
“What do we do?”
Her voice, breathless beside me, broke the silence.
For a moment, I couldn’t answer.
I sat, hands braced against cold metal, chest heaving, dragging air into my lungs. Her proximity, her warmth in the cold, was a presence that shouldn’t have existed alongside the hellscape below: a relentless, grinding chorus of clawing and wailing that seemed bottomless.
I forced myself to look down.
Bad idea.
Too many. Too close. A mass of upturned faces below, eyes the color of old fat, all of them locked on the platform with an undimmed, fixed concentration.
No confusion, no wandering, only patient hunger.
Mouths gaped. Hands reached up, found nothing, and reached again.
Whatever controlled their want had narrowed to a single point: us.
I pulled my eyes up and away, toward the dark outline of the building above, toward anything that wasn’t the movement below.
“We go up,” I said, my voice rough but steady. “Get to the roof, wait them out, find another way out—another fire escape, a close building, something.”
The remnants of a plan.
Every part of me understood it wasn’t one.
She nodded anyway. No hesitation, no argument, no demand for a better plan.
“Alright.” The word was for myself more than for her. “Let’s move.”
We climbed.
The ladder groaned and rang under us with every step. My hands slipped on the rungs, slick with rust and sweat. Near the top, I pressed past her to reach the next section—her body and the railing leaving almost no room between us.
The contact lasted less than two seconds.
That same sharp, badly timed draw, the kind I couldn’t logic my way out of.
I held onto the rung for a half-second longer than I needed to.
Then I hauled myself over the roof edge, rolled onto gravel, came immediately to my feet, and swept the area.
Clear.
I crossed to the roof access door first and tested the handle.
Locked.
I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Good,” I said quietly.
Then, after a second: “And not good.”
Locked meant nothing could come through from the inside. It also meant we had one less way down.
I moved the perimeter fast. No second fire escape. No close roof I’d risk as a jump. No utilities between buildings, nothing to cross. The access door locked from the other side. The ladder we’d come up on was now raised, with however many of them still circling below.
I stopped and pressed my hand against the back of my neck.
Stuck.
I walked back toward her, the reality of it settling into my shoulders. “We wait,” I said. “They lose focus eventually. Disperse toward sound or movement somewhere else.”
I didn’t finish the thought. What I meant was that our best outcome depended on something else in this city being worth more to them than we were.
Below, the sounds changed—less frantic now, more restless. Circling.
And like us. Waiting on opposite sides of the same problem.
I looked at her.
Her breathing was still elevated, her eyes still wide. I registered both. I noted other things, too—the way the cold brought color to her face, the particular set of her jaw that said she was holding herself together through will rather than calm—and I forced myself to stop.
I’d worked alongside trained people who came apart under less. That was the relevant fact. That was the thing worth noting.
“Stay low and out of sight,” I said, nodding toward the far side of the roof where a cluster of ventilation units sat. “Come on.”
We moved around the stair enclosure, and I stopped.
Wedged against the wall behind the ventilation units sat an old couch—sagging, the fabric sun-bleached and dotted with cigarette burns. A rooftop hideout. Probably teenagers sneaking up to smoke and look at the city, as if they owned some small part of it.
I thought briefly about who they’d been before I told her to help me move it in front of the access door—no way to know if the lock held from the inside, and I wasn’t interested in finding out.
We sat down.
The cushions gave under us with a damp, musty exhale. Libby settled beside me. I let my head tip back against the door, eyes open. But the immediate threat had passed, and the familiar, unwelcome leaching of adrenaline began—my worst liability, a crash that always followed a fight.
I opened my eyes and looked at her.
I quickly sat up, all thoughts of the adrenaline crash forgotten.
Her eyes had gone glassy—fixed on a point past the roof, past the city. I’d seen that before, in people who’d stopped processing the room they were in and started fighting the one they couldn’t escape.
I moved toward her. “Libby. Hey, look at me.”
Nothing. Her gaze held its fixed point somewhere past anything I could name or reach.
Her fingers had dug into her own thighs hard enough that the fabric bunched around them.
A sound was building in her throat—thin and climbing, that would keep going until something stopped it or until it reached the street below and drew more of those things.
My heart gave one hard knock against my ribs and then seemed to stop altogether.
“Libby.” Both hands on her shoulders, firm. “You’re on the roof. Nothing is up here. Breathe.”
Her eyes found mine and slid away. The sound in her throat climbed. Her breathing had gone past fast and into something erratic—jagged gulps with no exhale between them, no recovery, nowhere to go.
I didn’t deliberate. There wasn’t time for it.
I pulled her in and held on. Every tremor ran through me directly. Every stuttered breath vibrated against my chest. I kept my arms steady around all of it.
It got worse before it got better. The shaking intensified, her fingers twisting into my shirt and pulling the fabric taut against my chest, and that sound kept climbing in her throat, sharpening, almost there—
I pulled back just far enough to see her face. Eyes wild. Mouth open. The scream was one breath away from coming loose.
I kissed her.
My mouth came down on hers and swallowed the sound before it slipped past her lips.
One hand locked behind her head, her hair caught between my fingers. The other pressed flat against her lower back, and she came forward into it until the last of the space closed, and I felt the warmth of her through every layer between us. Her breath broke against my mouth.
My rationale was simple intervention. A hard, physical shock to cut through the spiral before it took her somewhere beyond my ability to follow. It was a tactical decision, the kind you make when the alternative is worse. That was the story I told myself in the fraction of a second I had.
Then something changed.
She came back to herself, all at once. Her hands released their grip on my shirt; one slid up to fist in my hair and pulled me down harder, the other pressed against my cheek with a deliberateness that had nothing to do with panic. Certain. Claiming.
Everything else silenced.
There was only her mouth under mine, and the sound she made when I slowed and took it deeper—low and involuntary—and the way her hips shifted, no decision behind it, her body simply done waiting on the rest of her to catch up.
My hand in her hair tightened. She gasped into my mouth and pulled me closer in the same breath, the contradiction of it—the sharp intake followed immediately by more.
I pressed my hand against her lower back, and she arched into it, and the sound that followed was quiet and broken and went straight through every layer of discipline I’d spent years building.
I pulled back.
My forehead dropped to hers, and we stayed there for a moment, mouths close, breathing the same air, her fingers still knotted in my hair and her other hand pressed against my chest. I could feel her pulse, rapid and unsteady, and she could almost certainly feel mine hammering in turn.
I slid my hand beneath the hem of her shirt, slow and deliberate. My fingers spread across the bare skin of her lower back. She drew a sharp breath and pressed closer. I could feel everything—the shape of her, the warmth of her.
“Finn.” My name on her lips, against my lips, broken into two syllables that carried about four different things at once—plea, demand, permission, question—none of them requiring an answer in words.
I kissed her again instead. Slower this time.
My thumb traced upward along her side, and the sound she made passed straight through me.
Her nails dug into my hair. Her hips rocked forward with an involuntary honesty that blurred my vision, and I pressed my mouth to the corner of hers, then along her jaw, then down to the hollow of her throat where her pulse hammered fast and visible beneath the skin.
Her head dropped back. I kissed the full length of her exposed neck and felt her hips drive forward once, hard, against me.
I lifted my head and looked at her.
Her eyes had gone dark with arousal, her lips parted, her breathing still erratic—each breath stopping somewhere short of complete. She looked undone. And her hand was still curved around the back of my neck, still pulling, the pressure quiet and steady.
“Don’t stop.” Both words barely made a sound. And underneath them—underneath the rawness and the trembling that had nothing to do with fear anymore—something unguarded and open that reached into my chest and closed around something vital.
Trust. Complete and unguarded, extended across a rooftop couch at the end of everything, with death still circling thirty feet below and nothing guaranteed past the next breath. She trusted me with her body and her panic and the soft, undefended sounds she made when my hands moved against her skin.
I pressed my forehead to hers and stayed there for a moment with my eyes closed.
Then I kissed her once more—slow and deliberate—and the last of the careful distance I’d been maintaining simply evaporated.
Below us, the dead still circled the base of the building, patient and endless. Above us the sky had deepened to the flat gray of late afternoon, the light going out of it slowly, the city underneath it dark and silent and altered beyond anything either of us had the framework to address yet.
And here, on an old couch on a rooftop at the end of what the world had been, I held on to something I had no right to want.