I called you that the first time we met, when I saved your life. Since that day you have more than made up for it, you have even returned the favor. But that’s neither here nor there.
We’ve been travelling together for a little under a week now and I guess somehow we gained each other’s trust without really knowing what we were doing—or who we were travelling with.
You call me a Leecher…that’s not who I am.
…and I see now—now that I’ve stolen your journal and read it. I know it may seem a breach of privacy but I swear it wasn’t meant to be an attempt to hurt you. I just needed to know, and I guess I’ve found it—I see that you’re human, too.
You have to understand that I grew up in the “Leecher” society you say banished you to the dumps. I was taught that you weren’t human. I pictured you deformed and sick and, to my embarrassment now, with a tail. You see I was told and believed that those in the dumps were Rats.
To me, to my kind, you are a Rat.
But you don’t fit the bill. You’re intelligent and kind and thoughtful…and human. Like me.
I’m not a “Leecher”. I don’t eat people, we don’t. It’s not like that. Yes we kill when we feed but do you not? We’ve killed chickens and such on our week together, how can you say what I do is any different?
The feast, you call it, is our day of remembrance. It’s a day we remember and mourn our behavior at our ignorance to our affliction/our hunger. So many people were killed because we had no idea what was happening to our bodies. Why all of a sudden a fit 30 year old, who had never been sick in his life, had taken sick with a hunger no one could understand. And then more people started getting “infected”.
And so they fed on the easiest source they could find, other humans. It was cannibalism, what they did.
There’s a mutation in the human genome, Luce. Humans have adapted to ward off all sickness but at a cost. Our very souls are unstable inside our body. With each breath we lose a part of ourselves and with each intake we gain maybe a fraction of what is lost. At some point, we lose ourselves completely and this is the sickness. Soul Sickness.
We feed off more than just meat and grain. Our bodies need the life force behind the morsel.
The souls of our kind do not sustain us as long as other species. Humans should not feed off humans. But it happens. It is murder.
The sickened that venture into the dump, as you say, are the poor. They cannot afford a life force to feed from and take to cannibalism.
But I am so hungry. My ventilator (which I should admit is stolen) was what was keeping me alive. I wanted to live, Luce. I didn’t want to die. So I chose the lesser of the two evils and stole a vent.
I am poor. I do not have the means to buy a life force. And so when you read this I’ll be gone. I have to be. For your sake and my sanity.
I wish I had known that my family taught me wrong. I wish we had known that we are the same—only different.
