Chapter 1: Part 3, Growling with Hunger

He awoke with a sudden sense of movement about him. Echoes of screams and whispering voices danced on his fluttering eardrums. There was a coating of slime on his face although he couldn't tell whether it was from the floor or from the earlier confrontation with his digestive juices. He could still feel the unknown fisherman testing his lure, each time his stomach would tighten in an attempt to bite back.

He felt as if a good span of time had passed while he had been unconscious, maybe a day or two. The dim light had receded from the X shaped window and had been replaced by an equally irritating purple of an encroaching twilight. His skin was taut against muscles that flexed against each other. Capillaries couldn't get blood to the extremities to wick moisture into the epithelial cells of his flesh. How could capillaries get blood from a heart he had not yet feel beat. A faint aroma of fast food trailed from a pile of discarded trash somewhere in the room. Someone had definitely been here, hidden within the bouquet of McDonalds and Taco Bell there was a trace of cologne and a smell of something more human, sweat.

His existence had not been off to a good start when his stomach caught site of the lure. It took what felt like a giant leap and bit down hard in a twisted pang of hunger. Curling into a fetal position seemed to be the only thing he could due till the fit subsided. The position had not only seemed to quell the hunger pains but it brought a sense of familiarity with it. A common comfort of humanity we all share in utero.

Unfolding his rigid body with a feline flex allowed him the freedom to sit up and gather more of his surroundings. A growl of hunger worked its way through the smell of decay to remind him that the trials and tribulations with his stomach were not yet over. The purple twilight had darkened to a new moon blackness that held no hope visually, yet he found that he could still somewhat see. The ground he sat on and the stone of the walls behind him were a darker black then the pane of glass in the window or the wood of a door that stood opposite him. He changed his viewpoint by moving onto his hands and knees when he was thrown by the fact that he felt like a lopsided table. With arms fully extended he realized that his left arm was at least three quarters of an inch shorter than his right, or was it that his right was longer than his left? A detached growl of hunger reminded him to move slower or test the fisherman's patience.

His ungainly crawl inched the door closer to him when a storm of goose bumps broke out on his shoulders. The skin on the back of his neck tingled as thousands of tiny hairs stood to salute their commander. He turned slowly and came to the realization that he wasn't alone... and that the growls of hunger weren't coming from him...



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Chapter 1: Part 2, Shattered

With this revelation his nausea subsided slightly. Almost as if the realization that the offending funk was emanating from him somehow lessened its intensity. There seemed to be someone fishing out there because it felt as if he had swallowed a lure, every now and then the fisherman would give the line a tug and a sharp cramp would make his stomach flutter. That was fine, the cramping was something he could manage, the lack of control that accompanied the waves of nausea though, that he couldn't deal with.

The motility of his arms seemed to be getting better. His hands clawed the floor as he tried to explore his surroundings. His curiosity overcoming the pain from the innumerable sutures threatening to tear under the tugging muscles. Every muscle felt as if it had its own mind, each one out of place and not knowing how to work as a team. In fact this feeling didn't stop with his muscles, it continued into his mind. His psyche was a shattered mirror strewn across the floor. Each fragment reflecting some idea that demanded action on his body, trying to impress upon his awareness the directive that they were the right one. Trying to cope with it his entire mind reeled with varied interpretations of every sensation. An unknown groan lost within garbled gasps escaped his mouth in some lost dialect only known to devils. His fragile consciousness succumbed to the pain, nausea, and constant strife within his skull until it finally pulled him under the dark and troubled seas of sleep.

Horrifying images found fertile soil in his sub consciousness as dark seeds took root in aborted thoughts. Flashes of severed hands and organs fused together created a backdrop of puzzle flesh. Pieces of some child's puzzle forced together in an attempt to complete the scene and understand the picture. Corners backwards and edges in the center. What was to be a Thomas Kinkade was a jumbled mass of meaningless lines and colors. Creatures not meant to exist but forced to exist clawed at cages with appendages in wrong places. While needles pierced as they did their work dragging along miles of black nylon. They did their best to fill the gaps between mismatches but couldn't cross the great divide when form did not meet function. Utilitarianism at its best you see, get it to work first, all else is secondary. Beings filled with screams of pain unrealized because vocal cords were deemed tertiary.

As the calamitous visions withdrew other layers of sensations became more pronounced. Pins and needles turned to electric pulses of angry nerves as phantom limbs came online. In the distance bones crunched with a deafening scream. A disembodied voice chimed in "He's the first... the archetype. He was based off our success with the canine studies."...



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Chapter 1: Part 1, Litany of Rot

He sat there alone, in the dark, quite unsure of his standings in the world. Even the most inconsequential of us have a sense of who we are, we are defined by our accomplishments and our actions, but not him. No, most definitely, not him. He sat there fingering the stitches and staples that crisscrossed his forearm like rusty train tracks crossing the heartland, segregating corn fields from farm. His whole body itched, it was the type if itch that you can't scratch without causing pain, like the itch of a healing wound.

Time swirled around him like the cold Atlantic fog rolling in off Boston harbor. He felt conscious of it's passing but couldn't grasp how long he'd been there. He had tried to move his legs a few times to get up but he couldn't get the myriad of muscles to coordinate the intricate ballet of balance needed to stand. Instead he spasmed a lurch and struggled a stumble to gain a blurred glance of his surroundings. Each time he hit the floor fireworks of pain flared up and exploded in fantastic colors inside his clenched eyelids, wait, did he even have eyelids to shut because he couldn't remember ever blinking.

With every colorful display receding he felt a little more in control of his senses, as the hangover after the fourth of July abated into a dull headache he became more aware of his surroundings. He could tell that he was naked, not so much see that he was naked, but feel that he was unclothed. His epileptic floor routine earlier clued him in to that, as his skin was covered in the wet slime which seemed to carpet the ground. There was a faint stream of light that trickled in through a small X shaped hole in the wall high above him. It was a dim and faded light that seemed only to exist to frustrate him as he strained to see anything illumined by it.

A putrid sweet smell such as that of spoiled ham strode past his nose every once and a while and threatened to entice the contents of his stomach to follow. Unsure of what he ate last and not wanting to go through the uncofortable process of finding out the hard way he jerked his head to the right. The faint light quivered dizzily, the smell grew worse by a magnitude and a fit of retching racked his body as bile passed his lips and joined the other slime on the floor. The smell of rot never ceased assailing his nostrils, in fact it seemed to have crawled up their and set up a permanent residence, green card and all. He turned his head, this time slower, to the left. It seemed no matter where he located his proboscis the smell of rot followed. The futility of being stuck encased in a dark wet stench was almost overwhelming when he made the discovery that it wasn't his environ which throttled him with rot, the smell of rot... was coming from him.



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