SWNOVELS Chapter Hunger Pangs
“Hunger, true hunger, isn’t just a physical thing. It’s mental as well. True, starving hunger claws at your belly even as it eats at your mind until all you can think of it its end. A man will do strange and terrible things to halt its burn”
-Midshipman Torvals Brunson, survivor of the United European Space Force ship Valkyrien after 180 days adrift due to FTL failure.
The darkness that was the tunnels wormed its way throughout the area, hundreds of miles of tunnels, shafts and boreholes. Once they had been filled with activity as miners dug for the heavy metals that made Ares so rare, but with their departure the tunnels lay abandoned for the most part. Unending darkness where only Rats, lichen, and psuedoscorpions lived and moved.
Hunger, stomach-knotting hunger, filled Andrews’ world, not the pain of his wounds or the red tinged warning lights filtering through the remaining fragments of his helmet HUD. No, for some reason his stomach was demanding food, the need for it ate through his mind in an unending barrage.
He’d already consumed all the supplies that had survived the collapse and he was still starving. He lumbered forwards, every footfall ringing on footfalls clomping on the rock floor, and the occasional creak of metal rubbing by metal as his damaged suit struggled to function. In the back of his mind he knew he should try and do some repairs, but his thoughts were hazy. Sweat beaded his brow and his eyes were bloodshot through the jagged view of his visor. He felt burning hot and freezing cold at the same time.
“Must be coming down with something,“ he mumbled as he walked, “should probably see a doctor.” He looked around for one before he realized the oddness of the thought and burst into laughter, an unhinged chortle that echoed up and down the darkened tunnel around him. He could hear a faint voice through his helmet Com’s, but couldn’t seem to focus on the works.
“Warning, multiple breaches detected. Foreign organism detected in wearer. Seek medical attention...” he ignored the repeating message and kept moving forwards in a daze, the growing pain in his stomach growing to a sharp burn. He trudged onward through the darkness, only the flickering light from one badly damaged light on his chest plate to see by. He barely noticed the darkness; images and shapes flickered in his mind, fragments of conversations, and shifting shadows in the darkness.
He muttered and cursed as he walked, breaking off into broken laughter or sobbing gently as something burrowed through his mind, a gift from the creature’s bites. It had travelled through his blood and pushed its way across the blood-brain barrier. Now it was spreading, pumping out a cocktail of DNA fragments and transcription factors to change its new host. Unaware, Andrews lost fragments of his childhood memories and tastes of his past as the invader consumed his neurons to make something new. His muttering degraded, words slurring and warping as his mind was rewritten, saliva started to drip from his mouth as his body demanded protein and fuel for the changes it was undergoing.
Suddenly Andrews stopped and sniffed the air, picking up the smell of burning meat. He started to lumber forwards, the all-consuming hunger demanding to be sated. Flickering lights appeared ahead, urging him to greater speed, his damaged armour and tortured body ignored as he surged onward. Finally, he moved out into a larger room, a small part of his brain recognizing it as the old rail tunnel. The floor was strewn with debris, fallen rock and metal from the ceiling scattered all around the buckled track, but all he saw were the bodies of the workers.
Their flesh scented the air, smelling of charred pork, and he stumbled over to crouch by one, the man’s back burnt and crushed. Heedlessly he reached down and pulled, almost tearing the corpse’s arm completely off as he raised it to his lips before freezing as part of him screamed in revulsion. He was frozen, crouched with the meat so tantalizingly close to his mouth as the part of him that was still human struggled with the alien impulses racing through his mind. Tears poured down his face and garbled words spilled from his lips, but in the end the hunger was too much. With a wet crunch he sank his teeth into the charred limb, tearing the flesh off and, swallowing it in a huge bite, as he groaned in pleasure.