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Chapter 13 - Lars

I

        It felt like coming out from a nightmare. Shock electrified his nerves. Sweat covered his skin and made his ragged clothing stick to his flesh. Every muscle in his massive frame was tight to the point where they would not obey his brain’s commands. His veins crawled as if ants raced through them – they shifted and pulsed in a tune that did not match his heart’s uncontrolled, uneven, and weak beats.
        His eyes were sticky as he tried to open them. They were consumed with filth and puss. He could smell their sourness, like feet left to long in boots. It took a significant effort to peel his eyelids apart and he expressed his discomfort with whimpered grunts, until they obeyed his demands.
        Panic broiled through his chest, making his heart flutter further out of rhythm. He remembered the monster’s fangs pierce his throat and his blood being sucked from the wound with ravenous greed. It was inhuman. He could feel its hunger, like a physical force, as his consciousness faded into nothingness.
        His eyes adjusted to the dark and the fog cleared from his vision as he blinked away goop and crust on his eyelashes. He was still in the sewers but no longer in the tunnels. The room was square, and he knew it was the sewers central collection point before the waste was funneled to the river and almost every channel led to this place.
        Decaying waste matter assailed his nostrils. Somehow, the reek was not as bad as it should have been, and it was not the only smell that permeated the dark. He recognized the other scents. Only a battled hardened veteran would be more familiar with it. Rotting flesh. It made him hungry. A hunger he had never felt before. It twisted his guts and made him want to exorcise his stomach’s fluids.
        His eyes further adjusted to the black, beyond any ability he thought possible. The room became alight with a twilight grey. It was as if no shadow could block his vision anymore. In fact, he felt he saw better where there were shadows when compared to open space’s general ambience.
        The rats were there, and they could no longer hide beyond his vision’s edge. There were so many, hundreds – maybe thousands. He grinned at them and could see their fast-beating hearts in their chests as if they made echoing waves in the air. They were twisted with something unnatural – something not from this world. He did not care. He wanted them. He wanted to bite into them with his fangs and devour everything without stopping. He wanted to taste their blood and break their bones and pop their organs.
        He wanted to feed!
        He needed to feed!
        Fangs? He thought, which distracted him from the hunger. He felt the long protrusions in his mouth for the first time – they were alive. It was like a limb moving for the first time. Carefully, he ran his tongue along their pointed ends and was surprised his mouth could hold such things comfortably. They were incredibly long and seemed as if they protruded to his chin.
        He found the strength to lift his arm – wishing to touch the fangs with his fingers. He paused. The arm had changed as much as his mouth. It was thinner but was by no means small and it held more power than it had before. Long curved claws extended from each finger’s tip and were as hard as bone. He placed his elbows under him and pushed to look at his body. It was wasted in a way he had never known but similar to his arm was still far from small. His skin was almost translucent and as pale as a corpse. Jet veins looked ready to break from under the thin skin as they crawled along his muscles with their own minds. With their small movements, his heart thundered in his chest and felt ready to quit or explode. He sucked in a deep breath and his nerves calmed, but his heart continued its relentless thunder.
        With the initial shock of his transformation gone, the hunger returned as well – with a renewed fury – making his body writhe and tremble. Lumps rose and fell both quickly and slowly as if something crawled inside him. It was as if his organs were rearranging themselves. His vision blurred.

II

        His awareness faded as the hunger took his mind. With tooth and nail he clawed back his consciousness. His eyes shot open. A roar left his lips, and it gave volume to his defiance. With the silence disturbed, more voices called out their anguish. Something wriggled beneath him and he did not understand how he had not felt it before. It also explained why nothing blocked his vision. With this realization, he fixed his orientation in his mind and the room shifted in angle to match.
        He was not on his back as he originally believed but slumped against a fleshy mound. With muscles that were beyond sore, he turned to face the mound. Eyes – white with decay – stared back at him, like a beached fish rotted by the sun. Somehow it did not disturb him, only made him hungrier. There were others beyond the corpse. Each was ravaged by whatever sickness had befallen him. Their skin was white and the same black veins that throbbed under his skin stretched and webbed beneath theirs. He counted around ten in total but could not be sure and less than half showed any life. Instincts, he did not know he possessed, told him that only a few would make it through the transformation – those who would not, remained still and were meat for the survivors.
        His mouth watered. Saliva rained from his lips like a waterfall. His fangs ached as if the bone they were made from knew his hunger. He could not resist. Every cell in his body flailed with excitement at the prospect. His tongue grew long and extended past his lips to lick the salty, dead, flesh nearest to him. It gave him a thrill that he had never experienced before.
        A great bloody jet projected from his open throat wound as his heartbeat grew stronger. Fresh energy surged through his limps and they bulged until his loose skin grew tight. He rolled to face the fish-eyed corpse, opened wide, and clamped down with a predator’s vigour. His fangs tore through skin, muscle, and bone alike. With a savage twist, he pulled off a chunk and swallowed it whole without a single chew. The stinking meat rolled down his throat stretching his esophagus. It was the best thing he had ever tasted.
        Again, and again, he tore into the corpse. His stomach stretched outwards as it had once done before. There was no stopping. With each bite, he grew more rabid. The decay, the rancid smell, and the rot did not turn him away from swallowing more, and more, and more – all these things only made his meal taste better.
        He wanted it all!
        He never wanted to stop pulling apart the meat with his mouth and swallowing it!
        Even though his stomach grew and looked ready to burst, he continued to take mouthful after mouthful, with each becoming more savage than the last.
        His mind began to haze once more.
        He refused to let go and, with a terrible will, he forced his heart to a calmer pace. Whatever change was twisting him, he would not let it consume him yet. He knew the hunger would overpower him, and there was no stopping it. He was not fighting it for self-preservation. Instinctively, he knew that was a battle he would never win. If truth were told, he wanted to embrace it. He knew he would, but only when he could look at those who had caused him this fate. To see their fear… Oh, how he dreamed to see their fear and taste their meat; that is what kept his mind from being lost to the hunger.
        He pushed away from the half-devoured corpse, turned back to the room, and came face to face with the thing that started this transformation within him. It seemed to smile – a proud parent watching a child achieve a great feat for the first time – and he was not afraid. Somehow, he felt more kinship to the twisted one-armed thing than he had any other. He felt he could understand the thing and the thing understood him.
        “Thank you,” He said with a voice that no longer rang like his own. It sounded as if he was speaking the words for the first time and the accent was wrong.
        It nodded and continued to give its lipless grin as it slinked back into shadow’s that his new vision could not pierce. There was something powerful about the darkness the thing created. Something that defied all senses – as if borne from another world or reality.
        Fresh energy surged through him, but he knew it was only temporary – already his stomach was beginning to deflate as it processed all that he had just devoured. The hunger was returning as if he had eaten hours ago – not seconds. He needed his revenge before the hunger consumed his mind, and the next meal would be that cursed woman’s blood. The Captain was responsible. She had done this to him – her and her cronies. His mind played out violent fantasies about what he would do to them and his mouth began to water once more.
        He pushed from the cold stones and began to walk unsteadily towards the closest passage.

III

        No conscious thoughts directed him. The sewers were a labyrinth. Each tunnel was indistinguishable from the last. He knew the general layout from talk within the drinking halls and rough map in the guard house, but to be in them was a distinct experience compared to drunk talk and a half-remembered drawing. Without his new scenes – without his obsessive hunger – he doubted he would have been able to find his way. It was as if he could smell his desire – his unknowing prey.

        With each passing second, his mind became more lost. No panic entered him, however. His focus matched the hunger’s desires, which allowed an equilibrium to exist. If at any point his desire changed, he would have been lost to the transformation and consumed by the black rushing through his very soul. His revenge guided his hunger, and his hunger guided his revenge.
        He found his way to a ladder – etched into the wall – and his claws bit into the stone as he climbed. With a wave, the grate blocking him from the streets above flew off its hinges into the air. It landed with a clatter a few seconds later but he did not stick around to witness this happen. With a walking corpse’s grace, he stumbled down the alley into the street beyond.
        “Please,” A weak voice said in the distance, “I-I need-”

        A breath escaped his lips, and it was the last he would ever take. It was as if a rabid dog used his voice to growl. Already the hunger was growing tired with the truce and wanted to consume his mind as much as the revenge he sought. Fresh thick and black liquid pulsed from his open throat as his mind fogged. His fangs ached uncomfortably, like overworked joints. He placed his hand against a nearby wall to steady his spinning vision and his claws dug furrows into it without the slightest effort.
        “Lars?”
        He looked up into the open square with almost blind eyes. Only the captain had any focus as black crawled inwards at his sight’s edges. His lips pealed back and, for once, he felt joy.
        “Hello Captain,” He lips curved upwards and willing let the savage hunger take his mind – knowing full well it would enact his vengeance. Lars died happy, with that smile twisting his face. He was finally free from all the pains life had caused him.

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Brett