burst. “Your stomach shrank,” he said. “You have to take it easy until it gets back to a normal size.”
I slept soundly in his arms; I was still dreaming I was in his arms when he woke me with a kiss, and another tattered shirt of meat. This meal was bigger, and I thought about demurely protesting, but the smell, my god, the smell, I couldn’t get a word out, just shoved a bite into my mouth.
It was better than sex, or at least better than what I remembered sex had been like. It seemed like forever- and it was at that minute, rolling a piece of meat over my tongue, that I realized I was going to sleep with Claude. Not at that moment, with the camp busy with morning’s activity, but I knew then it would happen, and it did, the very next night.
I woke up a very different woman. I couldn’t believe I had “cheated” on Harry. I say cheat because I haven’t been with anyone since Harry died, and I don’t think I would have, not under any normal circumstances. But I hadn’t eaten meat since long before Harry’s heart attack, either. Sometimes you do things in extreme circumstances you wouldn’t have thought yourself capable of.
But after little more than a week, the meat ran out. Claude did what he could to ration the pile, but most of us were starving by then. We’d already eaten most of the good meat, and all that was left was some muscle sticking to the ribs. I thought Eugene and Bob were going to get into a fight over that last piece, but at the last minute Eugene left and Rita punched Bob right in the eye for it.
Claude and Tony looked to each other and ran off down the beach, where we’d taken Martin before, and where they’d taken Mary. They brought her back a few minutes later. She was already field-dressed, relieved of her clothes and organs. She looked terrible, and I realized I’d only seen Martin in the hours after his death, and from a distance after that- until I realized it wasn’t that her skin was red and leathery, but that it had been stripped off entirely. She smelled like smoke and beef jerky. They lowered her gently down onto a pile of clothing.
Claude spoke. “We didn’t want to mention it to anyone. I know how much Mary meant to a lot of us here, but she was a practical woman. In the end, I think she would have wanted us all to be healthy and safe, instead of worrying about the disposition of her bones. Tony and I did what we could to preserve her; I know that with Martin we took our chances with every bite we took. Mary’s been smoked, which should have dehydrated her body and gotten rid of most of the bacteria.”
Eugene was in a rage, so angry every time he tried to speak he just sputtered. I think he would have taken a swing at Claude, but Tony stood right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, eying him the whole time. Eugene was passionate, but not that foolish.
For the next two weeks, Eugene refused to eat. There was even a little bit of meat left on Martin’s ribs that Rita tried to give him, but he wouldn’t take it. I felt bad for him; I knew that eating the meat wasn’t something the rest of us did lightly, but for Eugene it became the only cardinal sin.
The hunger made him crazy. He was muttering to himself constantly; more than once I caught him talking to Mary’s bones. Tony and I decided to bury them next to Martin, but he continued to talk to her in hushed tones even after it was done. I was afraid of what he might do, particularly to Claude.
One day he fell in the jungle, hit his head, and since he was alone and hadn’t told anyone where he went, it was several days before we found him. He’d already bled out, though it must have taken a long time, because he was still warm when we found him.
It came at a fortuitous time. Mary’s smoked meat was dry, and while we still had half of it, it was horrible without anything but water to go with it. Rita even hailed Eugene’s corpse as “manna from heaven”- apparently later reconsidering, because for the next several days she was intolerably religious- even though we hadn’t decided yet to eat him.
Originally, I think we’d all liked Eugene, but by the time he died, he’d become so worrying that his death was a relief, and we gorged on his flesh. In one night we ate over a third of his meat. “Which isn’t bad,” Claude said, “since we know how smoking the rest of him would have gone.”
We sat around the fire the next evening, talking about how to proceed. Rita wanted to eat the rest of him that night; Bob seemed to think we should hold off, ration Gene out as long as we could (he hated being called Gene when he was alive, but as a meal it was hard to give him the benefit of the extra syllable). Tony didn’t seem to know what to do.
“Rita’s right,” Claude said. “Unless we smoke Eugene, the meat’s going to go bad. And if we smoke it, then we end up barely eating again. Sure it’ll last longer, but I don’t want anyone else to die because we mismanaged our food supply. One Mary on my conscience is enough.” Invoking Mary cleared the discussion immediately; suddenly Tony knew what we should do- and I told myself that my support came with more thought than Tony’s, though it was hard to separate Claude the authority figure from Claude who held me close at night to know the truth.
So we feasted again that night. The next morning, Claude realized the meat was dangerously close to becoming inedible, and smoked the rest. It took us another week to even finish what was left of Gene, and by then, no one wanted to start in on Mary again.
And then Tony went missing. When Claude heard, his mouth dropped open; he didn’t ask any questions, just walked over the sand ridge to where we kept the bodies. I followed him. Tony had lashed himself to a tree, and used the knife to open up his belly; he was trying to field dress himself. In his shirt pocket was a note: Claude, I know what you’re thinking, and I couldn’t let you do it. We need you too much. So I had to. We needed to eat. Tony
There was no celebration that time.
Rita’s spiritual revival lasted only a little longer than Gene’s meat, and she was back to the snarky bitch who nearly knocked me over at baggage check then barked at me to watch myself. She took a bite of Tony’s cooked thigh, then set it down, unable to take another. “Selfish fucker,” she said, and stomped off to where she slept.
I felt bad for Bob. I’d seen the way he looked at Rita; he wanted to chase after her, and comfort her, but she wanted nothing to do with him, so he kept eating, even though his heart was clearly not in it. Or maybe I was just feeling guilty that I had Claude and they were alone.
Eventually, we ran out of Tony, too. We’d gotten better about parceling it out, and Bob and Claude figured out how to partially smoke it, while leaving it tender enough to finish cooking later, so the last parts of Tony ran out when the last bits of Mary did.
I didn’t like that Bob and Claude were getting close, because it felt like Rita and I were being pushed into a submissive role (even though it started that way because Bob and Claude were the only two who knew enough about cooking meat like that). But I didn’t want our little society to end up a patriarchy, so one day I crashed their late night conversation, with Rita in tow.
I regretted it immediately. “I don’t care about fairness, Claude. It’s the right thing to do. Tony knew it. So do you. We have to eat. And I hope, and I pray, every day, that we’ll be rescued. But I don’t- I can’t stand the thought of not doing anything for the people we have left.” His eyes flashed to Rita, then to the sand.
For a moment Claude didn’t speak, and when he did he was grim. “We can start with one of the legs. I should be able to tie a tourniquet a little above the knee. That way there’ll be enough to anchor a prosthetic to, and if we’re careful, we should be able to keep blood loss to a minimum.”
Rita had some first aid training, so she helped Claude with the “surgery.” I stayed nearby, in case they needed me to fetch them water or anything else. It seemed to take the whole day long. Claude half-cooked Bob’s leg, to make sure the meat stayed fresh and clean. Rita didn’t eat that night; instead she helped Bob back to the rough patch of grass where he slept.
But a rescue didn’t come. And every time, the conversation with Bob was shorter, and he was quicker to anger, and every time the resolution was the same. First Bob g
ave up his left arm, then his right leg, and finally the right arm, until Claude told him, “You’ve given enough, Bob. We can draw straws for who’s next.”
Bob sniffled, and I tried not to let on I knew he was crying. “Screw it. I don’t want to live like this. Jesus. I’ve had an itch on my balls all day that I can’t scratch, I couldn’t do a lifetime of this, not even if the government bought me a cute little candy striper whose sole job was to scratch my balls when I needed it. Just do me one favor, Claude: make it last. No one else should have to go through this.”
I never asked Claude how he did it. I found myself speculating, dragging Bob out into the water (and I found myself laughing at the idea of Bob bobbing), crushing his skull with a rock, the knife. They all seemed too cruel, to take too long. Bob’s decision, like Tony’s, was heroic; I couldn’t think of a suitably heroic (or at least deservedly painless) way to end his life.
We did make it last. We made no arguments about smoking Bob. And we parceled it out, just enough to stay alive. But even being cautious, even waiting until we were so weak we passed out, Bob couldn’t last forever.
We waited. We weren’t eager for any of us to go through what Bob had, until one night Rita called the both