Consumption

Kai huddled underneath a tree, clutching her child, Alo, to her chest. The camp around her was on fire. Her family’s home. The whole world.

“Kai!” A voice called. “Come here, quick!” Through the smog emerged Kai’s mother. She yanked Kai upright and dragged her away from the fire. “Walk,” she commanded. Kai sobbed as her mother towed her toward the shore. There, on the beach, the entire island had gathered. People shouted and jostled for space on boats and canoes.

“Give me your hand,” Kai’s mother said. “Hurry. What are you holding? That thing? Idiot girl, throw that away!”

Kai screamed as her mother snatched Alo from her arms. 

“It’s just an oyster!” Kai’s mother shouted. She tossed Alo into the water. Kai watched the ripples, flickering in the reflected lights of the fire, as her mother carried her onto a boat and away.

The only sign you were crossing the line between the BRAIN Laboratory Science Museum and a restricted storage facility was a small plaque, set next to a nondescript metal door, engraved with the following command: Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. Joan had walked past that plaque thousands of times. She’d memorized the words years ago, a fragment of the information required to become a tour guide at such a prestigious center of scientific progress.

Joan scoffed and pulled open the unlocked metal door. She set off down a flight of cramped concrete stairs, her shadows flickering as the fluorescent lights above fizzled. One floor, two floors, five floors. The air grew musty. In the distance, through the walls, the rumbling of giant fans and other machinery grew louder, mixing with the echoes of Joan’s hurried footsteps.

Getting down to the deepest section of the museum’s storage facility was the first step in the worst part of Joan’s job. Faced with persistent custodial staffing issues, the family that owned the place forced tour guides to take a monthly maintenance shift in the Underchamber, as the guides called the facility’s deep-freeze section. Joan paused to catch her breath. Floor 34. Almost.

At 42, the door set into the wall of the staircase glowed green around its edges. It was also unlocked. Joan pulled it open, shadowing her eyes against the green light spilling out from within. The corridor came into focus, narrow and low-roofed, stretching into the distance, lit by glass screens bulging out of the walls at regular intervals. Joan refused to look at the screens as she passed. Behind each one, she knew, lay the brain of someone long-dead, preserved in some kind of cryo-tech icebath. Tour guides were only taught the vaguest outline of the secretive technology.

The brains whispered to her from behind their screens as Joan hurried down the corridor. She glanced at them briefly, looking for anything amiss. Nothing more than a glance. During her first shift down here, Joan had pressed her face up against the glass, squinting against the light. There, somewhere inside, she could see a blurred shape suspended in clear liquid. Joan couldn’t look away. An ominous pressure built in her chest. Her heart palpitated violently. The green light burned her eyes. Now, walking down the claustrophobic corridor, she felt the presence of dozens of people surrounding her — hundreds of people, thousands.

Without warning, everything went dark. Joan froze. In the distance, the rumbling of machinery faded. Seconds stretched to minutes. The silence grew louder. Joan couldn’t see the walls, but felt them pressing in; she reached invisible hands out as if to hold them back. Her breathing became panicky. Then, again without warning, the lights came back on. Background noise returned.

Joan blinked, looked up and down the corridor. A few screens were still dark. One flickered in the distance, further down the corridor. Nope. No way. Joan turned and ran back toward the staircase. Somewhere underneath her, the fans were rumbling again, softer this time. Eventually the staircase door appeared at the end of the corridor. Joan pushed the handle. Nothing. She pushed again, harder, throwing her shoulder against the door. It didn’t budge. 

I awoke face down in the sand. Cool water brushed my feet and the sun beat down on my naked, burned back. Somewhere in the distance, birds called. Gulls, perhaps. Bastard birds. Bastard—

I was alive.

After a while, I managed to lift up my head. My crusted skin cracked as I moved. Ahead, the beach continued for several paces, ending at a wall of vegetation that rose 50 feet into the sky. A great mass of shrubs, trees, and vines towered over the beach. The sand stretched away to either side, curving inward. A small island, then. Beyond the treeline, toward the interior, the gulls called. 

Birds needed to drink. They probably couldn’t drink salt water. I heaved myself to my feet, clenching my jaw at the pain rippling over my skin as sores opened and wept. A few flies buzzed away in annoyance at the movement.

At the shoreline, I paused. The stems and trunks and vines were woven together impossibly tight. It seemed like far too much vegetation so close to the ocean, so far from other land. Behind, out across the beach and the waves, the horizon was completely bare. No land, ship, or cloud marred the perfect line, though it simmered in the hot air.

Nothing to it, I thought. I walked along the beach, examining the greenery to my left for a gap. Eventually, I found a point where a vine had died and shriveled away. It was separated near the bottom. Something had cut through it. Or chewed. 

I pushed aside the dead vine and squeezed through the gap. Stiff leaves and sharp sticks scratched and tugged at my skin, sloughing off strips. After pushing through that layer, though, I stumbled into a clearing. I caught my breath and looked around. Behind me, the wall of vegetation rose up. But it was only one plant thick. Inside, the forest thinned. The ground, free of undergrowth, was covered in a thick layer of leaves. Tracks ran this way and that, weaving around the trunks of old trees, which rose up and formed a canopy above that cast a deep shade. The sun’s absence immediately brought me relief, though the air within the island was hot and humid. Shadows winked and flickered across the floor as the leaves of the canopy, high above, moved in a wind I could see but not feel.

The bird calls were somewhere deeper within the forest. I picked my way through the carpet of leaves, stepping gingerly with raw bare feet. Every so often the ground would be littered with rotting fruit and picked-at pits, dropped from a tree above. At other points, the leaves would hide half-buried piles of bleached bones. Gradually the bird calls grew louder. The track I was following seemed to be important; other tracks kept joining it. It meandered through the forest, winding around trees and taking detours for no apparent reason. At some point, the air had grown thick with mosquitoes. I flinched, then relaxed as the expected itch didn’t come. My arm was covered in mosquitoes, but they weren’t biting. Or couldn’t. How odd.

Suddenly I realized the forest was silent. The crunch of my footsteps seemed almost to echo. Perhaps I'd scared away the gulls. Which could mean — yes, ahead, the trail sloped downward; the leaves thinned and gave way to a small, shallow pool of water. I rushed forward and crashed to my knees at the edge of the pond, plunged my hands in and brought them to my mouth, slurping and licking desperately. Fresh water! I moaned as it washed the salt out of my mouth, trickled down my throat and settled in my stomach. If my eyes weren’t so crusted, I would have cried. 

Over the sound of my slurping and mumbling, I heard leaves rustle. I froze. In front of me, on the other side of the pond, close enough to almost touch, stood a squat, dark, hairy creature. It bared its teeth at me.

What fangs! Yellow, stained, and as long as a finger—no, a forearm—filed down at the edges from gnawing at what? And the beast itself, covered in thick black hair, except for leathery paws with sharp claws and a gruesome whip tail. Naked, and evidently male. I blushed. But not quite naked, because around the beast’s neck was a filthy red cord necklace, wrapped tight and cutting into skin. A silver ornament dangled, glinting in the dappled light.

I let out my breath slowly, mentally willing my heart to soften its thunderous beat. The creature was still regarding me with beady red eyes, its nose twitching as it sniffed the air. I pushed myself up to my knees. The creature projected such a great evil presence it seemed to tower over me.

“Easy now,” I said, raising my hands, palms out. The brutish creature chattered its teeth at me. The sound echoed throughout the clearing, and as I blinked more creatures materialised around me. They rose up from the leaves and surrounded me in a great crowd, bearing and clacking their fangs and hissing and growling and thrashing their tails.

It was almost funny. To have survived the incident on the ship, the storm, the fury of the ocean — to have been saved and guided ashore, but as food for a pack of ravenous beasts. We watched each other, the first creature and I. Waited for the other to make the first move.

Alo, the oyster, had spent the last several decades relaxing on a particularly hospitable section of ocean floor.

Thomas watched the cat through the window of his cramped ship cabin. It was crouched on the deck. In its sights, a gull. Thomas said a small prayer for the cat. It would need it, with all this wind, rocking the ship back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

A few floors deeper, through doors that to Joan’s relief still worked, the corridor opened into a cramped chamber. One side was packed with scientific instruments. On the other side, Joan sat on a plastic chair at a round metal table. In the four other chairs sat three janitors, strangers until they had gathered in the room a few hours ago to discuss what they should do. Two of the janitors were women, both short and round-faced. In the middle, directly facing Joan, was a lanky old man. Jim.

“I think we should check for the Doctor once more,” Jim said in a surprisingly gruff voice. “He might not have been at the door when we checked last.”

Joan shrugged. Her panic had settled into a dull ache, deep in her chest. She told herself the company was working on the problem. Someone had noticed their absence. Was coming to rescue them. She followed Jim out of the room and through the corridor, noticeably darker than before as more screens lost power. They felt their way down flights of stairs in complete darkness. Then, the staircase ended at a final door. Stuck. 

Jim knocked on the door. “Doctor?” He called.

“James?” A muffled voice from behind the door called. 

“Yes!” Jim yelled. “Doctor, are you alright?”

Dr Oded laughed. “I’m unharmed. But the door is locked.”

“Locked?”

“A secret lock system meant to be triggered in an emergency. Something must’ve broken, locking this door.”

“Secret lock system?” Joan asked. “What the—“

“Quiet,” Dr Oded snapped. “You must head up to the central office and manually override the lock.”

Jim paused. “Doctor,” he said, “the door on 42 is locked, too.”

“Ah,” Dr Oded said. He hummed. “Fuck.”

In the world of mosquito testing, long nails and short sleeves are a sign of seniority. Look at my bumpy, bite-ridden forearms, unmarred by scratching. Wonder at my self-control. 

Jeremy’s nails were bitten to the quick and he religiously wore long sleeves. He swiped his card at the reception, lukewarm coffee in hand, arms still itching from last week’s shift. A job is a job, he told himself. He who does not work, shall not eat. 

The mosquitos seemed eager to work today. They erupted in a frenzy as soon as he entered the testing chamber. Long needle mouths strained at the net enclosing them. Not yet, Jeremy thought. He imagined their imminent deaths, revelled in the thought of them becoming terrified as the chamber filled with carbon dioxide after the experiment was over, reminded himself that they would be dissected and decomposed as he went to collect his stipend and complimentary anti-histamine. 

A green light signalled the start of feeding time. Jeremy held his breath and stuck his arm through the net. The mosquitos swarmed. They covered his arm and stabbed downwards at his fragile skin. Jeremy winced — but felt no creeping itch. He frowned. Looked closer. The bugs were stabbing, but their proboscises failed to pierce, bending uselessly to the side. Tiny insect heads bobbed up and down, dancelike. Jeremy’s eyes widened. He relaxed his hand, watching in disbelief. They’d actually done it. Mosquitos that couldn’t pierce human flesh. These bugs would not die, after all. They would be the first of billions. 

And Jeremy was out of a job.

“Why is no one opening the doors?” one of the female janitors said for the thousandth time. The two took turns asking the same few questions over and over again, like children. Joan bit back an insult.

“There must have been an accident,” Jim said, walking into the room. He hefted his backpack onto the table, pulling out a few military rations. “This is all I could find in the storage cupboard,” he said. “One for each of us. We should divide them into smaller portions to make them last.”

“Fuck that,” the other female janitor said. “I’m starving. Give me mine.”

Jim scowled, but remained still as the janitor grabbed one of the packs and walked over to the sink, from which water still flowed.

The creatures, it seemed, were not going to attack me, at least not yet. They simply watched and waited. My mind raced, trying to recall the lessons from that cat trainer I’d briefly employed. “You’re a brutish fellow, aren’t you,” I said to the creature opposite me in a soothing voice. “I mean you no harm.” He twitched his nose agreeably. “We can get along, can’t we,” I said. “I can help you hunt, build you things.” I scooped up some water in my hands and held it out to him. He flinched back, grumbled to himself. “See, I can be useful to you,” I cooed. “What do you eat? The gulls? Their eggs? Listen, I can catch them for you, cook them. I hunted birds as a hobby, you know...” I tailed off as the creature stiffened. “Aha,” I grinned. “You like the sound of that, don’t you?”

The brute needed no more convincing. He ambled over and, rather strangely, kissed my hand. At that, the rest of the pack melted away. How wonderful, I thought, to have God-given intelligence! It was becoming clear to me that I had been singled out for some reason. Here I was, the lone survivor of a dreadful calamity, guided by invisible hands to an undiscovered Eden, populated by strange, docile creatures, who clearly knew humans. Indeed, the band around the first creature’s neck appeared to have some kind of metal ornament attached, with an engraved pattern too rusted to make out. Strange, very strange. For some reason, I suddenly missed my cat dearly. But there was nothing to be done. It had died with the rest, and I’d survived. No doubt this mystery would unfold itself as I established myself on this island…

Alo, the oyster, remained on the ocean floor.

“Doctor?” Jim knocked on the locked door again. “Doctor? Are you still there?”

Dr Oded hadn’t responded in some time. Hours? Days? Joan wasn’t sure. She took a swig of water, trying to trick her aching stomach into fullness. The Doctor hadn’t found any supplies in the corridor. During their last conversation, he’d been rambling, hard to understand, talking about smashing open the screens and self-experimentation.

“Doctor?”

“Jim!” The Doctor’s voice was barely audible. 

“Yes!” Jim cried. “Are you alright?”

“Jim…” the Doctor moaned. “Jim…”

“What is it?” Jim asked. Joan shivered. The Doctor’s tone of voice was unlike any she’d heard from a grown man. It broke, overlapped.

“Jim, open the door. Jim! Don’t! Open the door. Jim…” The Doctor rambled, his voice fading in and out of audibility. Jim stepped back from the wall, horrified. 

Thomas ground his teeth as the men bundled the wonderful cat into a sack, tied the end, and tossed it into the ocean. It looked like the owner, the one with the complicated name, would be next. Who cares so much about some stupid dead bird?

“We should kill the girls,” Jim said, his face dark. Joan gasped. She checked the empty room again, paranoid. “You know I’m right,” Jim said. “They wasted their food. Their greed condemned us.”

Tears flowed down Joan’s face. She wanted to shake her head no. Wanted to.

“Ah, yes,” the Director General of the Biological, Racial, and Anthropological Intellectual Network said in a self-satisfied tone. “One of our most popular exhibits. A truly remarkable didacticism on the corrupting nature of greed.”

The Director General clasped sausage hands over his protruding stomach. He was facing a model, remarkably detailed, of a desert island. I leaned closer. With horror, I realized the refuse scattered on the sand was remains — bones, bleached white and covered in miniscule bite marks. 

“Annihilation,” the Director General said. His baritone voice was loud in the stuffy wooden room. It occurred to me that the stifling heat was appropriate for the subject matter. “As the placards there explain, this island was only recently discovered. Far from any other land, it was desolate and deserted. Rumors of guano brought hardy prospectors, who made a grisly discovery: What was thought, from a distance, to be white gold, was in fact piles of bones, bright white and dry as death. Look closely. Notice these piles. They are mostly birds. And then these piles, here” — a finger, gold ring straining, jabbed awfully close to the fragile model — “are different.”

“What are they?” I asked, curious despite myself.

“A most vexing question,” the Director General continued, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Some native creature? The possibility of discovery drew a new round of prospectors, but these would-be naturalists were equally as disappointed as their feces-farming friends, for the bones belonged to nothing more than the common rat.”

“But how did rats get to this isolated land?”

“As passengers, no doubt. For here,” — the finger jabbed again, at a small collection of larger bones, half-buried in the middle of the sandy island — “lies the real curiosity. Whose bones are these? Some strange beast? Adam himself?”

“Human…”

“Perceptive fellow! Yes, human, without a doubt. There’s evidence of human settlement here, but only the bones of this unlucky fellow remained. Left behind to be eaten alive.”

“By rats.”

“They ate the island whole from the inside out, and their avarice destroyed them. This fragile island, which had survived storms and great fires, succumbed to the humble rat.”

“But who is the person?”

“No idea,” the Director said over his shoulder, already waddling away. “Some hapless native, no doubt. Defeated by rats!”

Alo, the oyster, remained on the sea floor.

Deep in the city’s largest graveyard, down winding, forested paths, all the way in the back, lies a small section of old, moss-covered stones, packed tight together. There are no bodies in the earth. For centuries, when you had nothing to bury, you put a stone back here. These days the section is known as the red light district; one of the premiere locations for teenagers (and/or those with certain proclivities) looking to get it on in a relatively undisturbed public location. According to legend, you should perform certain sex acts by certain gravestones for good luck. Or good sex. I forget. But I will never forget the stone on which I received my very first handjob. Reginald Fiblez-Sotnafter. I made sure to remember the name. He died at sea, I discovered. Does that answer your question?

Joan crouched underneath the pile of lab equipment. She’d burrowed under while Jim was away, attempting to break into one of the broken cryo-chambers. Had the Doctor really managed it? He’d stayed on the other side of the wall for some time, gibbering and shouting, at times sounding almost like himself, at others like an entirely different person, until one time Jim and Joan crept down there to silence, and they hadn’t received a response since. Some buried instinct had screamed at Joan to hide, and now she gripped her knees, suppressing a shiver as she waited for Jim to return from the corridor. The images of the two female janitors, their humanity sliced away by scalpel, divided into chunks and stuffed into plastic bags, were seared in Joan’s mind. She saw their faces in the darkness. Were they whispering to her? Or was that just the brains?

“Joan!” Jim called from the entrance to the chamber. “Joan, the door opened!”

Joan clasped a hand over her mouth. Was he lying? Trying to lure her out?

“Joan, where are you? Dr Oded managed to get one of the chambers open — the meat inside is still good to eat!” Jim’s voice faded as he left the chamber out the other side, heading upward in search of Joan. She waited for a few breaths, then crept out from her hiding spot.

Down a few flights below, the once-locked door lay ajar. Joan pulled it open, heart racing. There, curled on the ground in a pool of dried blood, lay the body of Dr Oded. His hands were ragged, fingernails ripped off; long scratch marks and streaks of blood covered the inside of the door. A sob caught in Joan’s throat. The Doctor’s face was contorted in a dismal expression, teeth bared, streaks of crusted foam still clinging to his lips. 

Joan cried out. From deep inside her subconscious emerged a strange image. An old documentary, dry and dull — what had it covered? — cannibals, ceremonies, the absorption of a deceased spirit, the passage of a mysterious, incurable, inevitably fatal disease. The descent of the condemned into madness, they became rabid beasts. It was as if the brain, having escaped its prison, tried to use the Doctor to escape. The whispering here was almost deafening.

“Joan?” Jim’s voice echoed down from above. “Are you down there? The upper door is still locked. Here, I have some food for you.”

“More egg?” I asked, proffering my hands toward the hairy, brutish beast. He sniffed and looked away. No more egg, then.

I had ingratiated myself with these killer creatures. Through deduction and wit, I had learned over the weeks to interpret what the leader seemed to want. Sometimes I felt as though he truly understood me; other times, as if he’d no idea what I meant.

This island is truly a paradise. The animals squabble over birds and their eggs, but there are trees heavy with fruit and one need only wade into the shallows to find shellfish aplenty. Yes, I could live here a while, I think. And when discovered — what a tale I shall have! How many will know and remember my name!

“More oyster?”

“Let me give you a piece of advice, Joan” Dr Oded suddenly said, still staring at the greenlit computer screen on the wall in front of us. “Focus on life.”

“OK,” Joan responded, still in interview mode. Things were going well, and she really needed him to give her this job. Joan cast her mind back to the textbook for tour guides at BRAIN Laboratories “Do you mean when guests ask us questions about the individuals preserved—”

“Not here,” Dr Oded interrupted. “In life. You’re young. Bright. Do you have dreams?”

“Yes,” Joan said. Was this a test? The old man still wasn’t looking at her. He stared at the screen.

“Do you know who lies behind here?” He asked.

“Evangeline Odell.”

“My aunt, you know.”

Joan nodded. Dr Oded had inherited the facility from his grandfather when the old man died a few decades ago. Hadn’t we gone over this already?

“She’s the reason all this is here,” Dr Oseas continued. “It drove my grandfather mad. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories, even if they aren’t part of the tours. He became very depressed at what he saw as his failure to uncover the secret to actually bringing people back. As people stopped investing, I convinced him to open the museum to keep the lights on. It worked, just about. But he resented it. Hated it, and me for suggesting it, for running it all. He died a lonely, bitter man, his only demand that we bring her back before him. And here I am, trapped here, running a freak show that barely breaks even, watching over an aunt I never knew for fear of disappointing a father who’s dead and never coming back.”

Dr Oded placed his hand on the screen. “I apologize,” he said. “Being in this room is rather painful for me.”

“I’m sorry,” Joan said. Far from the weirdest boss she’d ever had. Though I’d heard some rumors about the storage facility…

“Yes, well. What I was going to say, is that you musn’t worry about the dead. You’ll meet them in due time. Focus on living.”

OK. Maybe not so far from the weirdest.

Ev and I lay on the ground and looked up at the sky. Lights swirled around above like glitter spilled on water. To think, in the past, people could actually see stars. Some of the satellites blinked green. 

The air was thick with biting insects; in that regard, we experienced life like our ancestors. The fighting had ended years ago, but the ground still bore scars. The craters and chasms were filled with dank water, which at night birthed massive clouds of swarming biters, old school, a new terror to a generation raised on laboratory-docile bugs. Ev and I lay on the only hill around, where the wind provided at least a little relief. Far in the distance, almost at the horizon, a tiny light blinked, the signal of a poor runner carrying some message through the fields on an overnight trip. 

“I don’t understand why they only bite me,” I said, swatting at my neck. Ev shrugged. I’d never heard her speak, not since I found her while exploring some long-abandoned underground bunker. Her skin was perfect, smooth and unblemished, seemingly clean despite the mud and dirt and dust around us. She stared up at the sky as bugs swarmed around, never landing on her, always choosing me, biting through skin thick with scars, calluses, oil and grease, pock-marked and bumpy, broken up by weeping sores. Above, a blinking green light flared bright and left a long trail as a satellite fell from orbit. 

One day, after centuries, Alo, the oyster, was eaten. “No! Nooo! Please!” Alo screamed. “Spare me! Let me live! I don’t want to die! I’m too young to die!” So many places to see! Things to do! It wasn’t supposed to end like this! Such wasted potential! Just a little more time!