Page 65 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Thirty-Nine

W hat are we going to do?”

It is night once more, darkness closing in around the walls of the garden, and Olea and I have made the trek to sit amongst the grasses and stinging nettles of our fountain. The air has grown cold, though we don’t feel it as normal people do.

Neither of us slept after Petaccia’s visit last night, and we spent the day today doing anything but talking.

I’m still sore from our vigorous lovemaking, which I know isn’t a good sign, but I’d rather have the pain than the lack of pleasure.

We can’t go more than a few hours without food or wine or sex: almost as if our bodies are trying to plug the gaps where hunger, where satisfaction, lie.

“I know it seems like an obvious question,” I go on. “But what the fuck do we do?”

“If you want me to say that we can’t just ignore it and go on as we are, then…

” Olea shrugs, popping a cherry in her mouth.

She holds the punnet between the two of us reverently, like a cradle; it is some of the last fresh non-garden food we have until the doctor brings more.

“Well, then you’re right,” she says. She tries to smirk but the gesture is tired and sad.

“We need the antidote.” I take a cherry and place it on my tongue. The skin is tough, the innards tart and watery. I chew around the pit and then swallow that whole too. I hate eating; it only makes me hungrier. “I have the exact ingredients we used last time.”

“With the exception of the human blood.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Well. We don’t know that it won’t work with your blood again,” Olea suggests hopefully. “There’s nothing to say we’re not human.”

I point at the blood, my blood, which still stains the fountain. We’ve had one small round of rain showers since I did that, but it wasn’t enough to remove the evidence. Just seeing it makes me want to do it again, rip my teeth into that hare too, taste the pulse of its blood—

“Thora.” Olea smacks my leg hard enough to make it sting.

“Thanks,” I murmur gruffly. “Why is it you don’t struggle like I do? Sometimes all I can think about is… it’s darkness. I don’t like it.” But, oh, I do.

Olea rests her chin in her hand, a ghost in white.

“I don’t know,” she says genuinely. “It’s not like I was a sex-crazed maniac before I met you.

” Even now, after the intimate places we have taken our bodies, she curls slightly inwards at the mention of sex.

It’s not embarrassment, I don’t think, so much as the need to protect herself.

She doesn’t want to admit how much she needs it—like me.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I joke. “You did a pretty good job of seducing me.”

“Says you with your filthy pornography collection.” This would be a low blow from anybody but her. I know she doesn’t mean it harshly and I let out my first genuine guffaw in days.

“I believe the scholars call it erotic fiction,” I correct. She gives a gentle huff of laughter of her own. “Did you…” I trail off, but it seems silly to avoid the subject now. “Did you and Clara ever…?”

Olea starts to bristle, but I see the same realisation in her face as she softens. “No. She was—magnetic, though. I wanted to. Before her I never thought—that is…” She rubs her nose awkwardly. “Sorry.”

“I won’t be angry,” I say, realising as I say it that it’s true. “No more secrets.”

“She was the first time I’d ever felt seen ,” Olea goes on carefully. “She was lonely, like me. She didn’t talk about it much, but I could tell. She never had anywhere else to rush off to, not like the other scholars who used to walk past—back when your building was used for accommodations.

“Florencia stopped that, of course. But Clara found me anyway. She told me once that she used to come and sit for hours on the grass outside the wall before she met me. Only… she didn’t ever get too close. She always used to smoke this little… these tiny little cigari—cigare…”

“Cigarillos?”

“Yes. She sat and smoked and read and smoked some more. And one day she was still there when I came to do my rounds.”

“And you spoke to her, just like you did with me.”

“I did.” Olea inclines her head thoughtfully.

“It was different, though, Thora. I’m not just saying that—it was.

At first she was kind and patient, but it didn’t take long for that to slip.

After a while she was brash and sharp and, well, sort of mean.

She told horrible tales about the ladies who lived near her, made snide comments about their husbands and children too; she told me stories about her hometown and how much she hated it here.

At first I thought she was funny and charming, and I was so tired of being alone . ”

“It didn’t last?”

“It wasn’t long before I started to see through the facade, no.

By the time I realised she never truly cared for me, I’d already decided I loved her, though, and it felt too late.

I thought maybe if I let her into the garden, if I could touch her, it would be different, like when we first met.

Maybe we’d get some of that magic back. So I invited her in. ”

“And instead she robbed you.”

Olea nods. “Let’s call it a mistake. I’m… I still feel awful about it, though. She didn’t deserve—what I did. I never meant for it to be punishment. I was just trying to protect myself—and the garden. I was sure, even then, that Florencia’s cure would come.”

“You did love her, though,” I say gently.

“Maybe I did. It was puppy love. It’s not like it is with you—and I’m not talking about now, all the… the blood and the sex.”

“I know. It’s like the antidote has reduced us to our basest needs. It isn’t who we were before.”

“The garden had already stripped away many of my defences.” Olea glances behind me, to where she can no doubt see the stinging tree in the distance. “What does it mean for the cure, though, if it’s breaking down again in our blood?”

Always the cure. Everything leads back to the damned antidote.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “We can try a batch with our blood, but it congeals so fast I can’t see how it’ll be any good as a mixture. We’d have to water it down a degree to even get it to mix.”

“We need human blood,” Olea says, repeating Petaccia’s phrase. “You said we could leave the garden if we wanted to. Get through the gate. I’ve always been too afraid… Please promise me you won’t go without me.”

“It doesn’t matter about leaving the garden,” I say. Olea eats another cherry and offers me the punnet, but I shake my head. I’m queasy and dizzy, my stomach all in knots. “I’m not sure where we’d find it anyway. Petaccia keeps only animal specimens in the lab.”

“Promise me you won’t go without me anyway,” she urges. “Please?”

“Olea—”

“No.” She is firm in this. “Please promise me.”

“Fine,” I say, shrugging. “I’m not so sure I can manage the gate any more anyway.”

“No. I suppose not. It’s like recovering after a long sickness, isn’t it? Only we’re not getting any better.”

That’s exactly what it’s like. I had the flu once as a small child and I recall those aching days afterwards, hot and cold and feverish, starving and thirsty though it hurt to eat and drink.

And the delirium… My father never treated me the same after that.

It makes me wonder what I said during those hours. What I did.

“We can’t let her do this,” Olea says. I only half hear her, stuck in my thoughts. “My whole life she was the only constant I knew, aside from the plants. And I still don’t understand how she could just… leave me to die. For all our talk of monsters—”

“That’s it!” I cut her off, then grasp her hands in apology, startling her. “Sorry, sorry. But.”

“But?”

“Petaccia,” I breathe. “She’ll have to come back to the garden with supplies soon. We can make sure we’re awake, that she can’t sneak past us. We’ll find a way to get her blood.”

Olea grips my hands right back, so tight it hurts, smearing cherry juice over my thumbs.

“You can do it, can’t you?” I ask. “Even though she’s…”

“Yes. And then we make the cure for both of us.”

For the first time in days our minds are occupied—not with food and sex but with plotting. We work out how much food we have left, make a calendar based on the last drop, or the best we can remember it, and attempt to cover all our bases.

If Petaccia comes between dawn and dusk she will likely bring the food into the cellar, though we can’t assume that to be the case.

If she comes overnight, the likelihood of us being awake will be much higher, but she’s more likely to abandon the supplies by the gate as she’s done for Olea before rather than demanding we help given the new revelations about her hidden knowledge.

She’d be a fool to assume we won’t be working against her.

We plan to use strips of sacking and some of Olea’s craft tools—knitting needles and crochet hooks amongst them—to create tiny alarms for the perimeter, hoping the jangle might alert us as we take it in turns to keep watch.

It isn’t much of a plan, but given our limited resources it’s the best we can do.

Neither of us is particularly confident we’ll be able to take Petaccia in a fight if it comes to it, and though Olea suggests she might be able to concoct some type of sedative from the garden easily enough, we’re not convinced we’d be able to get her to consume such a thing.

Still, it’s better to have something of a bad plan than no plan at all.

We quickly lose ourselves in security, taking turns keeping watch near the gate.

Our couplings are urgent, quiet, and brief.

Neither of us suggests taking a break from them and for this I’m grateful—without Olea, the smell of her tangled in my hair, on my hands, I’d go mad.

We wait. The days stretch, and with them the last of the fresh supplies.

We run out of milk and meat first, then fresh vegetables and fruit.

Then we start to run low on staples: potatoes, pasta, wheat, and oats.

The hunger is another form of madness, gnawing, desperate.

We return to fucking louder and more often between explosive, repetitive arguments, burning through our frustration every way we can, almost hoping Petaccia disturbs us in such a state.

Then it becomes harder to do even that. We are exhausted, unable to sleep, eat, or drink anything but water from the well.

It takes another week—five, now, since our initial exposure to the antidote—for me to realise: Petaccia isn’t coming back.