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Prologue
The first meal he ate was a rabbit.
He was not an infant and this was not, technically speaking, his first ever meal. He had eaten countless times before but had never appreciated what a true Godsend food was. He regretted being picky. He regretted any plate he had ever left unfinished. He regretted not thanking his mother, no matter how awful the resulting food might have been, for taking the time to give him such a precious gift.
This was a first meal he could appreciate with his entire soul and body. A meal he had been waiting for… for such a long time it felt like he could not remember what time was. He was unaware of the time, the date or the month. He was drastically unaware of the years which had passed since his last meal- if any had indeed passed. Perhaps he was simply being overdramatic. But it wasn’t hard in a place like this.
Under the circumstances he didn’t care if the rain had changed the animal or not. He could have ripped it open to find the inners leaking with the stench of cancer- of failed organs and seeping festers- and he would’ve still continued to feast. He didn’t care because the uncertainty was also ripped from him at the rapture of being able to eat again at last.
With religious relief he found that his teeth could easily sink into the flesh of the animal’s groin. There was a splatter of blood inside his mouth which made him choke in ecstasy, pulling the rabbit away to spit the blood out. It was a shock, and he regretted it afterwards, panting hard as he clutched the rabbit tightly around the throat.
The rabbit squealed helplessly in his grasp but he would not let it go. He couldn’t. His hand was cramping tightly and indeed was only getting tighter and tighter as time went on. The bone gave a lurch under his fingers and sliced out through the throat of the rabbit.
It gave once last kick as a parting gift and slumped in his grasp. He stared at it before bringing it back to his mouth, biting at it’s groin again and sucking the blood hungrily this time. It flooded his mouth and tasted horrible and desirable all at once. It was strange and dirty. It probably was diseased. But he didn’t care. If he died now he would be happy.
He buried his nose into the rabbit’s chest and took a deep breath, shuddering at the sheer scale of pleasure which shot up his spine. He felt his groin ache and was shamed when he came. That part of his body was a wreck to him now. He didn’t understand how it worked and it was painful. He ignored it for the better part but when it committed crimes like that it was hard to pretend it had disappeared…
He looked around and let out a tight breath, shutting his legs together. He ran his foot over the stain in the fallen leaves, shifting them to cover his shame up. Marking his territory.
He turned back to the rabbit. He didn’t eat the organs or the skin, just the meat that he could reach from the wound he had torn open. However, he did dismember the animal by taking it’s left foot. He held it tightly in his grasp and laughed. His fingers were relaxing already.
The world had changed and so had he – God, he had changed so much – but words and faith could never change. They were the fixed whilst he was the variable. The rabbit’s foot might wither and decay but the belief of luck that it brought him would be alive long after that.
He dropped the corpse of the rabbit and turned around, licking his lips and wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. He felt his teeth ache and his tongue shiver. The first few steps back towards the airport were painful but steadily he grew to ignore the pain from his limp groin, building up his speed until he felt nothing.
The path had an unfamiliar sense of déja-vu. He had walked it countless times in his youth but changes were happening everywhere. It was hard to imagine what he knew was locked somewhere in his memories. The path was overgrown with pathetically wilting plants. They masked the advanced culture that had reigned there before.
Trees as tall as buildings, with thick discoloured roots wrapping around at odd angles, with large heart-shaped leaves, dripping with secretion from their long hairs. The mud was sticky and his feet were slowed only by the sucking sensation. The earth wanted him.
As he pushed through the thicket of ever changing vegetation he scoffed at the notion that the environment had ever been suffering at human hands. It obviously hadn’t been suffering enough. He wished they had done more to kill the earth back when he was younger. Then he might not be in this situation- but rather back in the crib at the house in New Orleans.
His senses remember the smell of lemons and the impression of the cotton sheets, both lying comfortably side by side in his memory. They were nestled like a newborn between memories of his elder brother and memories of the days at the airport.
As he came to the end of the forest there was a spongy covering to the very air, like a spider had formed an invisible web that he must pass through. He shut his eyes tightly and let himself ease through it, running until his feet stopped being sucked down- when he was finally allowed to stand on solid ground. The runway.
He opened his eyes and turned his face to the sky. He physically felt the sensation of his pupils dilating, sucking in the rare view of the sun. The appearance of the tender sphere, far away in the sky, was the starting pistol for this whole hunt- for the rabbit- for food- for life. Since taking shelter in the abandoned complex he had not felt the rays on his face even once before now.
He had only heard the rain. The endless drumming on the roof overhead as he lay in the departure’s lounge, a make-shift blanket tugged around his twisting body. In the day it was easy to ignore the rain- easy to think of other things. It was easy to preoccupy himself with searching the airport, to finally see ‘behind the scenes’.
But the night was a different story. Trying to sleep, the rain kept him awake until the early hours. He would imagine it slowly eating it’s way through the hard roof. In several weaker spots the rain has actually already broken through and started to drip on the floor. He felt the loneliness and the fear of thinking so late into the night… The thought of being the only person hearing this. And not even a person anymore. He was the final victim of the rain if it were ever to break through the roof.
His bare feet came down on the newly forming buds of another endless sea of plants he could not recognise. Their leaves curled up at the sight of sun- as if they couldn’t understand its purpose, hiding away from the intruder to their new world.
His own skin had the opposite response- welcoming the sun and dancing over his muscles to show its gratitude. He felt life fill him up again and it was reassuring to know that the universe had not changed behind that malevolent curtain of clouds which usually dominated the sky. It felt like the eye of the storm. The calm was a break to celebrate his thirst for survival; his first hunt; his rebirth into the changed world.
The sun had spurred his gut into action and now his thirst reminded him that he couldn’t live off the airport’s old, half destroyed vending machines any longer. He had eaten more than half of the old treats when he first found his way to the airport, and each day after that the coils were slowly unwinding to ‘zero’.
The reassurance of the sun, and the lack of rain, had made him consider venturing out into the new world to find more food. He had been unsure about the outing at first. What if he was attacked by something much bigger than himself- and more vicious than anything he had ever learnt of in school; something lurking on the edge of the runway? Speciation was a cruel master now. He didn’t want to know what it had created.
He watched, day after day, the creep of the forest towards the terminals. It seemed as if it all depended on him. Whenever he looked away the wet mouth of the forest seemed to be closer than ever, suddenly looming over him with a hunger almost as strong as his own.
But he had finally convinced himself to go- by the madness, by the rarity of the chance and by the mind-numbing questions that haunted him during the rain at night.
What if he was the only one left? The thought of being completely alone apart from the forest made him ill right down to his bones. The desperation for company was what eventually threw him into the world. Surely he was not alone- the others like him were just scared to venture outside… like he had been.
The sighting of the rabbit was a positive one, but now it was dead. He couldn’t follow it home… Now that he thought back the animal had shown no burns or deformations. It had been dry- typically rabbit-like. It reminded his tired brain painfully of lessons in his very first year of school, crammed into a space on the floor with thirty other students, all straining for a look at another child’s show-and-tell project. They had all laughed when it had peed on the owner, and he wished now that he had savoured it more. He hadn’t had the energy to laugh since.
The rabbit must have come from somewhere with shelter, with people who had fed it plump with excess supplies, and their love. He would never know where that place was now. He had killed the only link to it… he had let his hunger control him.
He had barely recognised it as an animal before he had grabbed it. He wondered where his thirst would lead him. If he actually did meet other survivors (people perhaps searching for this lost, loved pet) would he be able to hold back the starvation?
He was under no impression that he had remained the way he was born. He was one of the creatures now. He was the danger.
As he pushed into the dull security and reassurance of the airport he placed the rabbit’s neatly kept foot onto one of the check-in desks. He looked around the empty seats, the wet patches on the floor from the thin roof-sections, the debris and the melted, distorted windows. He felt the loneliness creep up and with it the hunger returned- to be outside- to be fed- to be accompanied.
He doubted his resistance to all these feelings, but stepped further into the airport to repress them. He fought for his old frame of mind and clung to it that night as the rain returned- reassuring himself of his past.
Please tell me what you think. I have a close bond with this character already.
Bra-Two
Ps- Sweet Revolution Awards.
This is an award that is given only to slash writers here on FictionPress. Nominations are open until August 8, 2009, so please visit the site and submit your nominations. You can submit nominations to a lot of different categories; one of which I'm a judge of- Best Kiss - So send all your kisses in. Link is in my profile.
Pps- This story is slash, obviously, but it also changes into a really weird form of male-but-not-male pregnancy. If this isn’t your thing then I’ll understand but that’s not the main focus of the story- or the pregnancy. The point is acceptance of yourself. I know, cheesey, huh?
