I bit into the faux meat and felt the ooze of blood seep out like water from a sponge. It was hard to ignore the gamy texture. I had long overcome the gagging reflex that biting into bloody synthetic meats used to induce, but this new, commemorative meat was especially noxious. I breathed in deep, controlled inhales, careful not to let my nostrils flare. I closed my eyes in fake delight, and bit into the chunk of meat one more time.
I felt a prick of pain in my upper gum that almost made me wince. I paused, my teeth still sunk into the meat. Blood collected in the cavity of my mouth. I let it flow out. Down my chin. Into the dripping cup. Took another bite. This time, the pain shot out in a bright flare, radiating around my skull. It took everything to stifle a cry. Teeth still sunk into meat, I kept my eyes closed, as in bliss, willing the gathering tears to dissipate from behind my eyelids.
And it was from behind the black curtain of closed eyes that I first heard the eruption of hissing and neck-snapping. Building in volume, stemming from all four corners of the cafeteria. I waited a few more agonizing seconds until certain my eyes had dried before opening them.
Students were twitching with excitement, saliva now mixing with the blood pouring down their chins. A few were attacking their steaks with renewed fervor, mistakenly believing that the tantalizing aroma stemmed from the meat in hand. Others, the older students, were lifting their noses into the air and sniffing. They were detecting something else altogether.
I bit into the meat again, not fully comprehending what was going on. I was only in second grade, after all. I was only a young boy, a little runt. Again, a jolting stab of pain in my gums. Blood sopped out, collecting in my mouth. But something was different about the blood.
It was warm.
I did not understand. I pushed the overflow of blood out of my mouth, felt the warmth even more keenly on the skin of my chin.
And almost instantly, everyone in the cafeteria stopped eating. Hisses broke out, loud and inquisitive. A few students leapt up on their chairs, their necks snapping instinctively.
I moved my tongue across the upper row of teeth. Starting from the back tooth, moving from tooth to tooth, over the rough crevices, over the pointed tip of the fake fangs I inserted every dusk. My tongue slid over my two front teeth, over the first, then—
Where my other front tooth should have been, there was a gap.
My tooth had fallen out.
I stood up. Half the cafeteria was standing or crouching on their seats now. Even the kitchen staff, on the other end of the cafeteria, stopped working. Only the table of kindergarten students, mistakenly believing the aroma to be from the faux meat, kept on eating, eyes wild, jaws chomping.
I grabbed my dripping cup. Pretended to drink from it, but behind the cover of the chalice, I pressed my lips together, forming a tight seal. I let the blood pour over my chin, down my neck, onto my clothes. To cover over the heper blood as much as possible.
I put the cup down, walked slowly, casually out. When I felt a set of eyes fall on me, I bent over to do my laces, pretending I had all the time in the world and not a single concern. I walked out, one step at a time, sucking at the gap in my teeth, sucking my own blood down my throat, not wanting a single drop to escape my mouth, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing.
I forced myself to walk down the hallway. I willed myself not to cry. I almost lost control over my bladder and that would surely have meant my demise. But I controlled it all. Seven years old, clenching my eyes, my bladder, my face. Refusing fear, refusing emotion to make the faintest dint on my face. My father had taught me well.
My classroom was empty—everyone was at lunch—and after I closed the door behind me, I almost faltered. Almost gave in to the fear and the panic, almost let the tears and blood and urine come seeping out in a deluge of surrender and fear. But I gathered myself and lifted up my deskscreen. Still sucking and swallowing the blood, making sure that none of it dribbled outside my lips, I typed in my father’s e-mail address. My fingers shook as I pressed each key. It was a simple message, a message he’d taught me to use in times of emergency.
A blank e-mail. No message.
It meant only one thing.
I hit SEND then picked up my bag. I exited the classroom, heard the growing commotion in the cafeteria. Shouts and yells. I swallowed and swallowed and hoped it was enough.
My father would be receiving the e-mail now. And I knew no matter what he was doing, no matter how busy he might be in that glass skyscraper, he would drop everything. On the spot. And come for me.
I made myself walk slowly, as if merely strolling outside. I avoided the front gate where traffic was heavy. I walked through the soccer field, the baseball diamond, then onto the street. A few midnight pedestrians turned their heads my way as they strolled past, their noses twitching. But I kept swallowing, and my eyes, brimming with frightened tears, were hidden behind my shades.
Only when I got home, thirty minutes later, only after I locked the door and lowered the shutters, did I fall to my knees, all strength and self-will clipped. I curled around my knees, and hugged my legs for they were my only comfort, and I pretended they were another warm-blooded person giving me solace.
And that is how my father found me fifteen minutes later when he flew into the house, quickly locking the door behind him. He gathered my quivering body into his, drawing me with his thick, muscular arms into his warm fold. And he did not speak as I sobbed into his shirt, dampening the front. He only stroked my hair back, and after a minute told me it was fine, told me I had done well, that he was proud of me, that I was a good boy.
But he had to leave me, a few hours later. After the moon had set and the sun had risen, he opened the front door and went out into the empty, sunlit streets. To my school. It was my tooth. He had to find it. If it were found in some isolated corner of the cafeteria, or next to a table leg, suspicions, still nascent and therefore likely to simply die away as all crazy heper rumors eventually did, would be confirmed. And if that happened, they would quickly put two and two together, and come for me within minutes, within seconds, they would race for me, they would eat and consume me.
But when my father returned hours later, minutes before the arrival of dusk, he came back empty-handed. He could not find my tooth. He was fatigued and his face fought fear, but he told me not to worry. Perhaps I had simply swallowed the tooth, he’d said, and the tooth was safely disposed of inside me.
I started to cry; I thought it was okay, I was home, he’d let me cry earlier. But he reprimanded me. “No more crying now. No more tears,” he said. “You have to leave for school soon, your absence might draw attention.” I managed to stop crying, but could not quell the trembling that quaked through me. I thought he would scold me again, but instead, he took me in his arms and hugged me tightly, as if to absorb the vibrations into his own body. I felt safe in his arms.
“I wish we’d just turn,” I said into his chest.
He stiffened immediately.
I went on. “Why don’t we do that, Daddy? I’m tired of being fake, hiding all the time. Why don’t we just turn? It’d be simple, I could find a way to bring home some of their saliva.” I was suddenly so lost in my own words, I did not register the anger in his face. “All we’d have to do is dab the saliva into a small cut on our skin. And then it will all be over, all this hiding and pretending. We can just become normal, like everyone else. We could do it together, Daddy.”
“No!” he said, and this word was like a shout rammed into my head, the echo of which would never stop resonating. “No.” He cupped my face with his large hands, brought his eyes level with mine. “Never say such a thing. Never think such a thing. Ever again.”
I nodded, more with fear than understanding.
“Never forget who you are, Gene.” His hands pressed tighter against the sides of my face. I don’t think he was aware of the force with which he held me. “You’re perfect the way you are. You are more precious than the sum of all the people out there.” And he spoke more words, promises and oaths and vows to never leave me, and eventually his voice softened, the timbral tone soothing me, coursing through my body until it seemed like his voice melded with the DNA of my molecules. He held me tightly in his arms until I stilled.
My missing tooth was never found. Probably, I’d swallowed it. But for weeks and months and even years afterward, I lived in this constant fear that somewhere out there, in some forgotten hole or crevice or crack, lay my tooth, dull and yellow, about to be discovered. Like my own excruciating existence: discarded and hidden, eventually to be discovered.
And yet. Although I lived in a tiny crack between two worlds, in my father’s arms was a universe of solace that was as high and wide and deep as love itself. And that day in his arms, I made a vow that would fuse so seamlessly into the core of my being that I’d forget ever consciously making it; until a decade later, when, floating on a boat down a river and seeing my name carved into a stone tablet, I would suddenly remember and commit myself anew to this vow: my father was my world and if he ever disappeared, I would search for him to the ends of this fractured earth.
4
NIGHT FALLS. AND with it, the day’s celebratory mood. The land blackens into a gloaming and the river, once smooth as plates of armor, is fraught with an urgent undertow. White splashes kick up against the river’s edge, ephemeral ghosts. Nobody utters the word hunter but the fear it generates is ever present in the tense lines grooved into our foreheads, in eyes that nervously scan the land, in tense backs that will not lie down to sleep this night. Although we have not eaten in days, our bodies have adapted to the lack of nourishment by tapping into inner reserves. But very soon—two days, at most—these reserves will be depleted, and we will start breaking down.
Sissy is sharpening her daggers, eyes fixed on the riverbank. Epap paces back and forth, the Scientist’s journal in hand, occasionally flipping through the pages. When it happens, it is sudden.
“Sissy…” David whispers, eyes saucer-wide.
There are three of them. Sprinting in tight formation, a mile behind us, racing along the bank. They are on all fours, their bodies cheetah-like, legs and arms extending out to the ground, grabbing it, thrusting it under them in a blur with every leap and kick. The lead runner drops off, rejoining the line at the back of the formation. A new lead runner takes its place in the front. I see what they’re doing: drafting off one another in a paceline, all the better to cut down on drag and exploit the lead runner’s slipstream. Running in a paceline will mean improving their net group speed by at least 10 percent—a significant advantage in a journey encompassing hundreds of miles.