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1.
The lights cover over him and he—blinks—twitches his awareness somewhere beneath the neck-deep red fury, and a thin tendril of him only sees the syringe crashing down, again and again. He is falling into that blood-thick hunger. Then: gunfire. Then: blankness.
2.
Awareness cudgels back in relentlessly, slow, like an egg cracked down the back of his shirt. Bryan tries and fails to open his eyes, and then tries and fails to open his mouth. Instead about a third of his—mass—comes into contact with a wall. The wall is cold and wet and there are bits of dried blood—human and bird (maybe?)—and his own and there’s a trickle of rust-cold water and a few kinds of moss or something and these riveting cracks and he’s terribly, walloped-in-the-stomach hungry. The front of him feels odd and loose. Most of the rest of him is in contact with the floor, which is similarly cold and damp and there are interesting cracks filled with a muddle of blood and rainwater—old blood—fuck—he tries to make a noise or breathe in and a bunch of smells come at him on all sides, these varying points of sense, this-way-that-way, and it hurts—it hurts—he sinks under, relieved and stupid, and moves.
He comes back up, eventually. His awareness is dull and spread out—there’s only a vague idea of vision occurring, and it’s all—like a spotty heat-map—and his head (???) hurts. His mind hurts. Most of him is still lurchingly hungry. He has eaten more and he is bigger now.
Whatthefuck, slurs a largely irrelevant piece of his mind. I gotta open my eyes, he thinks. I gotta—open—and he forces something, shunting at these alien muscles, and he peels eyes open. The issue is that his vision is occurring both way high up and way low; at least it’s in colours he recognizes. He’s high up and it’s raining. Jesus, he thinks, and tries to look at himself; there’s that dumb curl of disgust, and underneath a distressing blankness. He’s got mostly lots of arms and legs and lashing—tentacles and stuff. What even. Isn’t he supposed to be—brainless—or beyond this?
He moves an arm into vision and it is decidedly not his arm because it has lots more muscle and tattoos that are bubbled and distorted and stuff. His body fails to produce nausea. This is normal.
And then he manages a sound. It comes from his torso—what—a weird low raspy wet sound, from his middle where his primary most useful mouth is.
“Oh, shit,” he says, with about a third of his old face, and then he’s panicking again—cold water fear—shivery, dumb—and underneath it a catchless yaw of rage, for those fucking—those fucking—fear-faced science motherfuckers acting like it wasn’t them, like it wasn’t all their fault—he wasn’t sorry for killing them at all; he was hungry and they deserved it—what the fuck, he killed them—he was hungry—he is hungry—and he sees a spot of living-heat, untouched heat. Far, though—outskirts, edges of the city, and something else will get to it if he doesn’t—but no—
Blank again, the tide of instinct too much to ignore.
3.
When Bryan puddles up something like a mind again, he feels so fucking good. He feels—at least thirty percent full. He feels strong. He’s been resting. Where he is is dark and damp and warm and he’s wedged lots of himself into all kinds of interesting nooks and corners and he has so many vantage points, all the vantage points, so if any easy pickings come by he’ll get ‘em right then and there. Distress is dull and far away. He caught something real big, he's sure.
But what, Bryan wonders, and trudges at the dim mire of the monster’s memory—well, his memory, really—and doesn’t recoil at what he finds—a train, mislaid—crash—and he’d gotten there first, had glutted himself. He’s so much now.
It’s hard to think about how he’s seeing-feeling-tasting-smelling the world. But he is, and he knows it all; he can feel the rumbling web of others-like-him moving about, the fat-glutted beasts, the hungry small things. He is very warm and he is safe—his body, well-fed, is certain he should be happy. This is the closest to happy he should get.
Michelle, he thinks, inanely, and when his mind conjures up her face the rest of him reacts with terrible bloody hunger—no! That’s wrong—empty yanking loss—better—missing her very badly—yeah, that’s it. He had been happy with Michelle. There had been—he’d meant to call her—what the fuck.
He should be dead. He should not be—his head should be dead—but that fucking kid had also talked. Whatever, he’s no scientist. It’s not his problem. But it had been—he’d had the fucking—the cure—a rumbling of distress all through him and the subsequent reaction of several thousand other organisms in recognition of this—they’d pulled him into it all—the fury too much to bear.
To the right of his primary mass a pillar of concrete is shattered and explodes annoying dust everywhere. One of his—ohgod—tentacles—having squeezed it. The ceiling makes threatful noises.
Shut up! he thinks. He beats himself sideways and slinks his tendrils inwards, consolidating his senses. He pants in air. It’s chemical down here, thick and hot. These are things neither bad nor good for him.
He tries to move—well—tries—he just judders around some and causes other pillars to creak at him. Forward! he thinks, but half of him is in a completely different direction and so he ends up stretching in several ways—he has to bully himself into facing sort of one way. It’s oddly reminiscent of being very, very drunk and, like, keeping himself moving in a straight line.
He reaches the air on the surface and he’s thinking about Michelle more, but there’s no one here—still—just empty air and crashed cars and old uninteresting blood—and skating overhead: choppers—and several others-like-him, grotesque and smaller, moving around through the wreckage of the city. I should call her, he’s thinking. I should get that syringe—no—definitely broke—he turns and punts in through a door and into a house.
There are no lights on and he’s having to mostly squeeze down to fit, which makes him feel inexplicably hungrier—like one time when he hadn’t eaten in two and a half days—like being a kid and forgetting to—like being on a job and not eating all fucking day holy shit—like being seventeen and shooting up a foot and nothing being enough—it’s claustrophobic; he can feel the oily ceiling and the unlit light and the furry carpet and the dining table, cluttered, and the windows, and the radiator, and the chairs, and okay there’s the fridge.
Some part of him manages to open the fridge and inside is a bunch of moldy food which he nonetheless eats—very quickly—about as satiating as a piece of stale popcorn, about as interesting. The water isn’t running. There are no lights on, which is okay, because he’s fairly sure he’s not seeing with eyes or anything. Push in; he wanted a phone.
None of the phones are fucking working; no beeps or anything. It’s all dead. All—dead. He moves more; there are bedrooms through here, soft, and paintings in frames on the walls; there’s a bathroom, a cabinet cold on him, back of the house and out, leaving the insides wreckage. He moves; he’s disconsolate and wildly hungry—wildly unhappy, he’s missing her—hungry—missing her—it’s all rendered the same.
4.
In the woods is where there’ll be any food and he’s so fucking hungry Jesus Christ and he misses her he really fucking does. There’s no snow; the ground is damp and there are bits of what he knows to be green. It’s gross. He makes himself quiet and tries not to push into too many trees, and then carefully he sees-knows through far away these people. These people behind some barricade, near their armoured trucks, with their guns—alive, flutter-hearted—he’s so hungry—he could talk to them—maybe they have phones—he’s so hungry—he shouldn’t. He’s dipping back into the red and he has to compromise. He’ll get ’em—better—if he’s aware. This placates the most of him and he keens down in on himself and tries to shove into an approximate human shape—two legs two arms one head two eyes two ears one mouth one nose—it’s so fucking hard—he keeps slipping and stuff—and when he’s small he’s so much denser and the hunger is dense, like the bright point of a star, like a black hole. But he’s roughly speaking approximating human.
“Hello,” he tries, but it comes out liquid and thick in his mouth. With his hand—sort of—he touches his jaw and it’s half out of shape. He knuckles at it. This small his senses are nearly too much, the hunger so fucking bright. But he’s playing it—he goes the long way, sideways, to the unmanned barricade, and he gets through, puts the right frequency next to the readers and fiddles open locks and then he’s—out—through the undergrowth he walks. He’s got clothes, right? No. He fritters some in the right shape, sweatpants and a floppy long-sleeve shirt, and a hat, and shoes, and puts his hands in his pockets—two hands, one on each side, his right and his left, though he recalls for ages he couldn’t tell and when he was really little he had to make Ls with his index and thumb and he does that now, L for left and mirrored for right, and his feet are only two and he feels—inanely—off-balance. And he’s close.
5.
“Hey!” he says, and waves his hand up. “What’s up—d’you have a phone I could use—I got lost and my girlfriend’s been—”
And a great number of guns point at him; the base of him wants to react sensibly, by grabbing and killing them all, but he forces harsh normality. “Woah!”
Hands up, jaw slightly slack, brow furrowed not overmuch eyes normal eyes fucking normal and blue teeth ORDINARY tongue in ONE PIECE and there are SHOES on his feet thank you very much no tendrils no fucking tendrils.
“Is there some kinda—some kinda restricted—”
“Yeah,” says one guy, gruff, and the guns don’t go down.
“Oh, shit,” he says. “I just—I really need to call my girlfriend—I was on this nature thing, I’m fucking flaky, she’s pregnant and I really gotta—”
A lot of muttering is occurring, and the way the guns are pointed at him is way more vague. He remembers shooting; he remembers fear. He trudges closer. He remembers this. “Man, c’mon, she’s been, like, it’s been pretty rocky and she’s definitely worried.”
There are five of them here, all wearing vests and heavily armed and in possession of walkie-talkies that occasionally hiss and stuff and all grim-faced, and one sighs and says, “Christ alive.”
“If you want me to leave, I can just, like, uh, if you point me in the direction of the road or something—”
Some clipped conversations via walkie-talkie occurring under breath, but he hears: guy-near-south-perimeter-looks-disheveled. Yeah but human. Says he’s lost. Know that. Should we just fucking shoot him or what. Civilian casualties already high as fuck no one’s gonna—no, though, says his girlfriend’s expecting a call—pregnant—yeah, I fucking know—some shit—could just send him on his way.
“What happened to your phone?”
“Died,” Bryan says, glum. “I know, I know. I’m a fucking idiot.”
“No kidding,” says another guy.
“Okay—here—call her quick, though, and we’ll point you to a road.”
“Thanks,” Bryan says, keeping it together somehow, and takes the proffered phone, dials her—dials her—rings several times—
“Who the fuck—if this is about the car—-”
“Michelle,” he says, rushy, thick and soft. “Michelle, baby, it’s me—”
A hiss of silence. “Shit.”
“Michelle—”
“Bryan? Jesus—Jesus—what the fuck—where were—what happened—I don’t—”
“I miss you,” he says. “I miss you. Something bad happened. I miss you.” Slick tender in his mouth, teeth too sharp for this shit, making him sound slurred or something. He can’t help it. He spreads a bit of himself very thin on the ground and snakes so slowly near the ankles of the five guards, thin and invisible, sliding up their shoes, these sensible dirt-worn shoes on all of them, standard issue, synthetic, the bare beating of hearts so close.
“You miss me—you miss me? Bryan—do you have any fucking clue how long it’s been—what I thought—”
“I know, I know,” he says, and he can’t help the relief in his voice. “I know. It’s been—”
He swallows and licks his lips with his tongue. He’s not sure it’s the right shape.
“Wha—” guns lift, and he punches through into skin, five places, strikes fast, quickest route through—spine—wet crush sounds—feels fucking good to let himself go a bit, the hot sweet scent of blood, satiation.
“What the fuck is going on on your end,” she says. “I hear so much—”
One is screaming; he jams tentacle down the throat until it splits open and then he begins to—eat—incorporate.
“What the fuck,” she hisses. “Are you in a movie theater? Are you—”
“Watching something on TV,” he says. “That’s all.”
The bodies jerking like fucking electrocuted fish or something; no disgust, no fear, only easy mellow pleasure and rich satisfaction.
“Turn it off—do you even—”
“Baby, listen to me.”
“Bryan.”
“Something—something real bad happened to me.” His jaw makes a wet soft popping sound. He shoves it back with this click. He hears her inhale jerkily. He imagines the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes and he imagines her ribs crushed. “And I’m—baby, I’m sick.”
“Sick,” she says, toneless. “Brian, it’s been four fucking months since I saw you.”
“I’m sick,” he says, thready and wet. “I haven’t been awake much.”
“Oh, Christ,” she says. “Why didn’t—I’m your emergency contact, right? Why didn’t anyone call me? What—”
“I’m contagious,” he says. “I’m sick. I miss you.”
“Jesus,” she says. “You’re just—God—I don’t want excuses, Bryan! Tell me what it was, tell me what it fucking was—I shouldn’t’ve—oh, Jesus.”
The sounds of her nearly crying.
“No,” he says, cracked nearly in half. “No, I didn’t—I didn’t—I never meant to leave you like that. I’m just all kinds of—it was nothing you did. Nothing you did. I’m not lying about being sick and contagious. I am. I really am.”
“Fuck you,” she says.
“The baby,” his mouth says, garbled.
“Are you fucking—on something?”
“Painkillers for the fucking—Jesus, I’m sick—the kind of sick I am really hurts. It makes me kind of messed up. The baby—are you—”
A rattle of wet breath. “I don’t see how it’s—much of your business.”
And then she hangs up, very summarily.
6.
Bryan is fuller but he’s not full, and there’s a seeping pit of hate waking through him; he opens up one truck with a scavenged key and finds racks of guns and such—he remembers the first time—he remembers dumb and witless—he takes some. He takes some. Half in shape he pushes into the car and makes it go; he knows where the other security teams are. He’s still fucking hungry. He has a face that works—he looks in the mirror—ugh, nasty, his eyeballs are all fucked up and half his jaw is flopping and his cheekbones are warped or something—he pushes at his face until it’s—passable—the rest of him a writhe over the floor, over the back of the truck, wall-coating, thorough awareness, and he turns on a walkie-talkie—they’re asking for a response from south perimeter team three—ha-ha-ha—and he knows the logo everywhere, he knows it, he remembers the white room and no one helping him; he remembers Michelle screaming at him; he remembers being in one concrete shape, unresilient and breakable and simple; he remembers pain; he remembers fear; he remembers happiness; he remembers sorrow; he feels them all in distant echoes, subtle flavorings of hunger, and he turns onto the road; he’s heading west—west perimeter team two—the most nervy, he’s sure—he’s hungry. He’s so fucking hungry.