I am hungry.
I have always been hungry.
Every day, every hour, my insides cramping and twisting and crying out to be fed. Every minute spent, crawling, squeezing myself through ever-tighter spaces, feeling blindly through the darkness in dread of what I might find beyond. Every instant spent hoping for something, anything, to fill my throbbing stomach.
I am hungry.
Through the darkest places I push myself. Through the cramped, squeezing tunnels, through the steel that scrapes and cuts at my skin, through the bulging rock that crushes and bruises against my flesh as I push through it. Through the great yawning emptiness, colossal vaults looming high above me, creatures drifting up there that would eat me too if they could. Down through suffocating crawlspaces, pressing myself into the space between the unforgiving floorboards and the crushing linoleum above. Waiting, watching, in case something should fall down through the cracks so that I can fill my stomach.
My limbs grow long. They twist and unfurl, they push and pull me through these deepest places. They feel out ahead of me, my fingers hair-thin and lightning-sensitive, and whenever they feel something out of place, something that moves –
Snap. Crunch. Swallow. It does not fill the yawning pit inside of me.
My eyes bulge, staring milky-white from my sockets. They peer at the cracks of light, and I fold myself up to wait patiently for something to fall through. They stare up at the great facades high above me, and the foul things that flap and flutter between their buttresses, too far away for me to catch. They press themselves to gratings and windows, swiveling madly between the moving shapes on the far side, imagining what wonders might be worked in the murk and the buzzing, failing light. They torment me, as they stare through the darkness. They tease me with truths that cannot be, with food I cannot eat.
I despise them. If I could, I would tear them from my sockets, and feel them pop between my teeth.
Roots brush against my face. They hang down from the earth and rotting boards above me, tickling at my cheeks and my scalp and my shoulderblades. Slowly, laboriously, I turn myself over, and begin with frantic, ravenous hunger to dig at them.
Dirt falls, scattering soft and cold and wet across my face. It sprinkles across my eyeballs, and my lids slide shut and open again, dreading what I might miss should I leave them closed. My hands are too slow, too clumsy, and so I pull at the foul-smelling earth with my lips, my teeth, my tongue, spitting it in crude splatters down my cheeks as I try with frantic desparation to winkle one of those roots free.
It is a doomed endeavor. They are too tough, too woody, too thin. I cannot scrape at their bark-hard skin. I cannot snap them off to swallow them whole. I will go hungry, and the thought makes me panic, makes me dig and scrabble and bite. One of them must be edible, one –
There. Beneath my lip. Something moves. Something pulls away.
An instant. A moment of claustrophobic silence, as I try to resist the urge to hawk up the foulness in my lungs. And then I pounce.
With lightning speed and mad ferocity, I paw at the dirt, hands scraping it back and back and back into my waiting maw. It is choking, it is foul, it fills me with its filth, but I do not stop, and I feel something small and warm beneath my finger. It twitches – it wriggles – it tries to pull away – but I will not let it. Vice-tight fingers drag it from the earth and hold it immobile before my frantic, staring eye.
It is a being of soft, patchy black fur, of empty eye sockets and ears sewn shut. It is a being of great burrowing claws, of a flailing sting and an toothless bite, of too many legs that scrabble helplessly at my hand. It is a being of fear, that dwells in darkness so as not to see its shadow, that has cut out its tongue to silence the sound of its own screaming. I can feel its heartbeat now, pumping through it as it wriggles in terror in my grip. It will take but a moment for its own sheer panic to stop its heart.
But I cannot wait a moment.
I feel it scrabbling at my hand as I force it down, down, stuffing it in among the dirt upon my tongue. My teeth crush through skin, through muscle, down and down through bone, and blood spatters from my lips and bursts across my face. I chew, once, twice, again, as claws tear at my palate, as a stinger digs into my esophagus. And then, unable to wait for the sensation, I swallow.
I wait, moment after long moment, for the feeling of fullness to come to me. But it does not. I have fed, but my body is not satisfied. It wants more. It needs more.
It is still hungry.
My skin throbs. It is worn raw from years of crawling, of stuffing myself through places too tight to breathe. Its scraped surface drips blood, and leaves a trail of crimson smears in my wake. I lick at it, sometimes, my desperate stomach overcoming my revulsion. It is cold and coppery, and it burns as it slides down my choking, ragged throat.
It does not sate me.
My lungs are cramped, withering away in the merciless cage of my ribs. They clog with dirt, and when I let myself I cough, spewing gobbets of mud and grease across the ground in front of me. I must slow each breath to stop their wheezing, even in what few spaces exist with enough air to feed them. I do not want to be heard.
I crush myself through endless mountains of metal boxes, piled up and up towards some dark ceiling high away beyond. There is only the tiniest space to move between them, but move I do, extending my long, slow limbs to drag myself up through their depths, losing myself in the cramped vaults of their disarray. My nose is filled with the smell of iron and rust, and though I try my best to move slowly the sharp corners still catch, drawing hungry offerings with each ascent. A thousand long, slow cuts, the boxes eating at me as I would eat them, were my teeth capable of crushing their metal shells.
Below me, I realize, there is an open space. A light pours up between the containers, golden and flickering and traitorous. I flinch from it. It is too much. Too bright.
But I am curious. I am desperate. Perhaps, somewhere beneath, there will be food.
Beneath, my bulging eyes tell me, there is a patch of tiled floor. Beneath there is a desk, shoved crudely up against the boxes, with a flickering lamp and reams of unending paper. Beneath me there are stains, dark and sprawling, pouring out across the boards. Old blood, old bile, from countless living things.
There is a smell of sickness, of death, of coppery blood.
My eyes strain, seeming to fill the crack they stare through as they peer hungrily downwards.
At the desk there sits a being, a being fifty times bigger than myself. He is a creature of teeth, vast and long and razor-sharp, like an ivory cage within his monstrous jaws. He is a creature of rolls of gluttonous fat, of a bloated stomach wherein creatures still struggle and die silhouetted against the lamplight. He is a creature of too-small clothes crammed over his bursting flesh, of endless eyes that stare and stare in search of his next meal. He is greed. He is gluttony.
His nose twitches, contorts. Sniffs.
He is hungry too.
His motions as he stands are ponderous and slow, great limbs creaking beneath his weight like ancient trees. His breathing is deep and mucous-laden, an eternal snarl as he stalks, ears cocked upward, eyes rolling and rolling as they scan the shadows for the slightest sign of movement.
With a ponderous, inevitable weight, he hauls a container aside, nose twitching as he inspects the space behind.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I pull myself away from the light.
I begin to move, silent and deliberate, up and up and away from the sounds of his colossal movements. I can still hear him, shifting his terrible bulk as he moves, a sluggish hunter pursuing his sluggish prey. His footsteps ripple up through the boxes as he moves, lumbering ponderously across the tiled floor, ripping boxes aside as he hunts my blood-tinged scent.
And then, with a terrible ripple of flesh, I feel the boxes shift. Iron screams against rusted iron. An inevitable crack opens in the space behind me.
He is following me.
I stay silent, despite the panic beginning to pulse through my brain. I move with utter slowness, letting the rusty box-edges bite, letting the metal press against my flesh as I gradually stretch each muscle and let it find its place. Each breath takes practiced minutes. Each movement takes dragging hours. Every second, I can hear him there behind me, crushing himself inevitably forward as he burrows through the iron containers and shoves them aside in his wake. It will take him a long time to hunt me down. But it will take me longer still to escape him.
I do not know how many days we spend there, pushing onwards in our interminable chase. I do not know how many days that fear beats in my head like a second heart, throbbing and flooding me with panic. I do not know how many boxes I cross, sliding gently between them or slithering up through some larger gap, every second hearing the endless tectonic crash of boxes being scraped aside, of the inevitable rumbling breath of my pursuer echoing up through the cramped space of his hunting ground. Days of the sound of claws on iron, of flesh shoving itself inevitably forward, ever higher, ever closer through the path he makes. His approach is ceaseless, a single, terrible purpose so large and inescapable that it makes my mind go white with panic.
I will myself to move faster, but there can be no faster, not without wedging myself inescapably in place. Slowly, slowly, my muscles contract, dragging me onwards, ever onwards. I cannot see, but the moment the light floods down across me is the moment I will be revealed to him, and his jaws will be able at last to close around me. His carrion breath drifts up through the metal, his inevitable herald, reminding me always of what will happen if I should slow for even the smallest second.
And then, at last, my fingers close around something else. A metal access-vent, its grating broken away to leave razor-sharp shards that tear into my flesh, its exhalations stinking of distant death, of things forgotten and left to starve and rot. But I do not care. I can fit through the space beyond. And he cannot.
Desperately, I grab at it, using my last burst of energy to haul myself into its mouth. My bones creak at the strain of my sudden movement, and my limbs bump and scrape against the boxes’ metal flanks. I hear the sudden silence as he catches the sound, and then the thunderous burst as he surges forward, but my elbows are already inside, and then my chest, and my knees. I am through, and even as he approaches I am climbing slowly upwards, towards the darkness that waits beyond.
Even as I pull myself out of reach, I can feel the fear being washed away. And there, replacing it as it always has, is that endless, overwhelming hunger.
I do not remember a time before I was hungry. The gnawing, insatiable ache in my stomach has been there always, my constant companion as I press myself alone through this endless, crushing forever. I do not remember being born, but I am certain that it was with me even then, driving me on my impossible quest to satisfy it.
I have been able to eat so little, in all these years of crawling. I need so much more.
I squeeze through a maze of crushing concrete, stretching out in all directions around me, winding and irregular and unpredictable. My fingers feel out through it, my skin sliding across the ice-cold surfaces as they haul me through, guiding me around turn after too-tight turn. My eyes bulge, staring around corner after merciless corner into the darkness, searching for something, anything else. Anything to ease the pain.
My legs snap on those corners. Pressed too tight, bones break, sending now-familiar jolts of cold white agony up into my brain. They dangle useless behind me, unable to move, unable to slide through those rough, pressing corners without breaking again, and again, and again. They join, as they must, the splintering agony of my back, my ribs, my jaw, even my reaching arms, pressed into ever-more-painful configurations as I press myself onwards.
It is too tight here. Too tight to move. Too tight to breathe.
Icy wind drags itself over my skin. The throbbing thunder of fans surrounds me, the only exits from the labyrinth, each one gargantuan and unstoppable. My fingertips bleed where they have mistakenly met their whirring blades, and they leave a slippery trail that seems to lead me onwards, dragging me through the never-ending concrete.
I am hungry. I am so hungry. It burns at my throat, it gnaws at my stomach, it whirls at my head. It has been so long. I must eat. I must eat –
And then my fingers touch something. Something so impossible that it takes me a moment to truly understand. They move, yes, just as food should move. They are warm, and shaking. They twitch slightly, and recoil at my touch.
But they are fingers. Fingers like my own.
I feel them reach out again, brushing against my hands. I do not pull back. I let their scarred surfaces caress my own. I let their cracked nails scratch against my skin.
One of them hesitates, and then wraps its fingers around mine.
I begin to haul myself forward, then, forcing myself onwards despite the pain. My fingers scrabble at the concrete walls, and they scrabble also at the body of the other, warm skin beneath their touch, bones shifting beneath muscle. I feel its hands, too, feeling their way along my arms, crawling closer and closer, dragging it towards me along my emaciated self.
I feel its face beneath my hands – its bulging eyes, its prehensile lips, its bleeding ears, its ruined hair. It is like me. It is as me.
And then I pull myself up, over a corner that digs sharp into my chest, and I find myself face-to-face with another pair of bulging, straining eyes.
Slowly, hesitantly, I crawl upwards, bringing myself alongside its form, and it crawls downwards along mine. Slowly, slowly, we press ourselves in against one another, crossing over slow hours the landscapes of each others’ bodies. Its bones are broken, as mine are. Its flesh is lacerated. Its bowels trail along the ground from a hideous gash in its stomach. But it lives, as I live, and we squeeze together in that agonizing concrete tunnel.
We are not alone.
For a long time, we press there against one another, like beasts resting in each other’s company. I feel its heart beat through its flesh. It feels the surging of the fluids in my stomach. We run our hands over each other’s shattered legs, and lick pathetically at one another’s wounds. For a moment, however brief, the pain seems ever so slightly lessened.
And then, as its salty blood flows across my tongue, I lean forward and dig my teeth into its flesh.
I feel it twitch. I feel it try to fight back. But its legs are shattered, and in that tiny space there is no room to fight. There is nothing it can do to stop me tearing at its skin, ripping off strip after strip of flesh with slow, unstoppable purpose. I am hungry. And it is all there is to eat.
Bright pain in my leg, as it responds in kind. Its teeth shred at my flesh as well, gnawing and tearing and digging into me, and I can no more respond than it can. But slowly, grimly, I haul myself away, digging a greater and greater wound into its starving form. Slowly, I strip back the flesh, and let the blood pulse and splatter out across my face, across the filthy concrete. My jaws lock around its legbone, and with a sudden burst of pressure, snap it clean in two.
I feel it convulse. But I do not care. There is marrow within, good and fresh and warm, and I glut myself upon it.
Again, it tries to bite at me. It tries to shred at my flesh as it had before, to claw at it with its hands. I deny it. I crawl back, slowly pushing myself down the tunnel, biting and ripping at every cut, every gouge, every wound. And then, at last, I feel its trailing intestines beneath my lips.
My teeth latch around them as I begin to pull, hauling at them, unspooling them out of its body. It convulses again, thrashing in pain, and I pull and pull, swallowing length after pallid, ropy length, bloating myself upon its dying flesh.
I do not feel the precise moment when it dies. After a time, it has simply ceased to move, to breathe, to bleed. There is no resistance as my teeth dig into it, and its warm entrails spill out across my body.
I cannot care. My ravening stomach will not allow it.
Bit by bit, even the bones vanish from the bloodstained concrete. I crush them between my teeth, swallowing the splinters whole and letting my ravening hunger break them down. Even when it is gone, I spend weeks where it lay, my tongue scraping at the blood staining the cement, my hands feeling out around me for anything I might have left behind. I must take every last bit of the other. I must now allow the tiniest scrap of food to go to waste.
And yet, when at last I have finished, when my body is filled utterly with its and I can find nothing left of it in the entirety of the corridor, I realize that I have failed. For despite the stretch and bloating of my stomach, despite the exhaustion in my jaws and the burning of my throat, despite the guilt and horror pumping into my mind, my body is not satisfied.
I am still hungry.
Written by StalkerShrike
Content is available under CC BY-SA