It was cold. So cold that my warm breath instantly froze in the air as it left my mouth. Upon each of my moves the frosty meadows underneath my feet gave a moan. No single bird was to be seen on the horizon. No single track of a deer was to be found on the icy ground. What I could, however, make out were the tracks of other people.
It was nearly impossible stalk soundlessly. Every noise that I would make would reduce my chances for prey.
"Always walk on the outer ball of your foot," my father used to tell me. "Then shift your weight slowly from one side to the other. In winter," he would add, "just imagine your feet to be leaves that are floating on the water."
I thought of his advice that morning. As if I had no weight, I slid across the frozen ground and moved through the thicket. In the first morning light, I discovered the traces of a hare, lonesome and completely frozen where its paws had sunk into the stiff moss. It looked like an imprint in stone. As if it had been millennia ago that a living creature had crossed around here.
I decided to leave the tracks of a long gone prey behind, and moved on to the hidden spots where I had known deer to graze. Even though I didn't make a sound, I went there to no avail. Grey feathers that were frozen over spots of blood were the only things I found.
Someone must have been there before me. Obviously, with more success.
In the sky above, the day pressed through cracks in the twilight and dripped through the branches above my head, when I suddenly felt the stranglehold of hunger. It gained intensity with every step that I made. My bones hurt, whenever I tried to shift my weight, and amidst the silence, I thought to hear every cell in my body cracking open in an attempt to feed my starving body.
I had been there before, in hunger's constrictive grip, but never before had I been hungry enough for it to crush my mind. Or had I, I started wondering. Maybe I just hadn't taken any notice.
Am I insane, I asked myself on my way, while I wandered further and further.
Meanwhile, my eyes kept searching the thicket. For fruits, vegetables, roots, carrion, grass, or nettles. Indigestible weeds, poisonous mushrooms, toxic berries. I would have eaten anything and the higher the sun climbed in the horizon, the less constraints I felt.
My mind slowly slipped away from me, as if it were water that was running through the fingers on my hand. Eventually, my consciousness slipped away with it, and the next thing that remember is a numbness in my tongue as I was gnawing at a frozen pine tree branch, as if it were T-bone of an ox. Then suddenly, a pair of eyes. It was buried underneath debris and weeds, when I frist discovered it.
Those eyes were shining brighter than a round dance of golden light. I was afraid I would go blind, if I were to look into them much longer.
I didn't hear noises, only silence, but silence can be the loudest of all sounds. Something deep within it was urging me to spit the frozen branch on the ground and approach the sheen in the bushes before my. Those eyes could have belonged to anyone. To a madman, to a hunter like me, or to a beast. Or to no one at all. Maybe I was only imagining them. At the moment that this thought crossed my mind, I was closer to insanity than I had ever been. It would take a pair of glowing eyes to rip me from its grip.
Walking over, I stopped to pay attention to my father's words, and ignored his advice. I didn't slide; as if on water, and wasn´t even trying to stay unnoticed. Instread, I dragged my feet, as if they weren't a part of me. Fizzy frost was swirkling up, and branches broke, where they touched the chilling ground.
Once I reached the overgrown ruins, and the eyes that had been staring at me, I sank onto my knees. As if possessed, my icy hands started digging through tiny thorns and sharp debris. I was going to deliberate whoever the glow amidst it belonged to.
The whole time that I spent digging, it stayed silent, apart from the sounds that I caused, moving.In the dead of silence, the grip of hunger around me tightened so rapidly that I could hear the soft crackling of my mind.
My knife was dangling on a rope around my neck, and as it hit the ground every once in a while, it was pounding like a drum, the beat of which was encouraging me to move faster. In the corner of my eye, I noticed it, and all at once I became befallen by a thought that didn't feel like mine at all.
The faster you get him out, the sooner you can eat him.
I had almost completely exposed his head. He was a man who must have been my father's age when immortality had hit us. Still digging, I looked into his face, and it wasn't a person I saw. I only noticed flesh. Warm and healthy meat, wrapped up in feet and feet of skin.
The morning sun was lingering on top of it, as if it were a golden treasure, when a single ray - piercing and sharp - hit the blade of my knife, and it started glowing, all at once. It looked like a magic wand that I grew increasingly willing to use. As if by magnetism, my eyes were drawn to it. After a while, my hands dug slower and finally gave it up. Instead of using them to dig on, I used them to stop the knife from dangling ,and briefly thereafter, I turned it in my trembling fingers.
He is still half burried, he cannot move, I caught myself thinking.
He cannot fight me off if I ram the blade down his throat. When I expose his shoulder bones and shove my fist in between his skin and ribs, he won´t do a thing. Inside the shell, there is meat, tender, red, and mellow meat. Once I have skinned him, I can gnaw it off his bones, like a wolf. I can keep on gnawing on him for the rest of eternity, because he will forever grow it anew.
Salvia gathered in my mouth and dripped from my half-parted lips. With my eyes welded to the shiny knife, I was about to use it, when it suddenly spoke, the pile of meat I had just been about to devour.
Half of his mouth was still burried, and his lips couldn't fully move, but as little as I understood what he was trying to say, just as much it shook me.
The meat was a person. With a voice, with a name, with a story. A real and speaking, breathing, and feeling person. No matter if his cells were going to regrow, eating him wasn't an option. I couldn´t do it.
The tremble of my hands grew stronger and stronger, and my thoughts felt increasingly strange to me, but with the rest of my mental strength, I took the knife off my neck and threw it to the side, before I cleared the rest of his mouth.
That was when his breaking voice started whispering, "I will feed you. Just get me out of here, and I promise that I will!"
It took me forever. Above the bleak looking branches, the sun reached its zenith when I had exposed enough of him, so he could break free from the debris, like a sprouting tree. From the hip down, he shook his visibly weak gone legs free, and I stumbled back from him, so exhausted that I could barely see.
All of a sudden, there he was standing in front of me. Tall and slender, almost saintly, with a golden glow in his green-brown eyes, and reflections of the sun on his pitch black hair. He was an epiphany, perhaps; an angel of light, or who knew, maybe a demon in disguise.
How long had he been buried for?
How hungry was he, and how far would he be willing to go in order to keep his sanity
He could have stabbed me in the ankle with my own hunting knife, stretched me between the trees on my own rope, sliced my stomach open with my own blade and used my own hands to disembowell me, so he could eat my innards.
Yet I am still here, 30 years later, writing this, which is why I suppose he has done neither of these things. Despite it, I don't know what exactly has happened, back then. My corrosive mind could only still store tiny fragments of memory, which is not to say that what happened had no relevance. Perhaps it was more important than anything else in the past decades, even though I don´t remember.
Back then, we had only been in this place fir 40 years. In a simply horrific place, where nobody could die any longer. Where there was nothing left to eat, aside from insects, and where permanently starving people kept on losing their minds.
For the first decade after it had started, we used to be less. Nature could still provide for us back then, until we became too many.
At the very start, people started plundering the supermarkets and filled their basements, their garden sheds, and their garages up to the roof with every sort of food. Some moved into stores and fought off everyone who approached. A bit later, there were no supermarkets left. Most started growing their own vegetables, and some kept livestock. But whatever they had was taken from them by the ruthless, and eventually none of it even mattered anymore. For a while already, we have been so many that nothing and no one can feed us any longer. At least, that is what we thought.
It was what I thought until I met the man in the forest. in the fragments of my memory, he assured me that he could provide for me. Black gaps covered up what happened afterwardsl, the next thing I blinked. The next thing that I perceived consciously again were my freezing hands in my jacket pockets on the way back to my camp. I
t took a while before I realised that the lining of my coat felt strange. When I did, I stopped, fogged with dust and ashes.
With a rustle, my hands pulled a bag out of my pocket. It was transparent, but even though I saw the contents at first glance, I had no idea what I was looking at. My fingers made out a powdery substance. It was yellowish in my eyes, and would have perhaps been white to someone else. When I took a closer look, the gepas in my memory filled with pictures. I had eaten it.
When I wiped over my mouth with the back of my hand, I had it on my fingers.
Was this the reason why I could no longer feel the stranglehold of hunger?
Had a buried man's promise and a yellowish powder in a transparent bag saved me from madness itself?
On the way towards my camp, I kept on wondering what the powder was made of. When I got to my hideaway I had another bit of it. It was neutral in taste, but energizing on the body.
I have been holding on to the sachet ever since. Writing this, I have it on my lap, like something valuable that could be stolen from me.
Could it be what astronautes would eat in space, I wondered on the day I received it. Is it synthetic food, and if it is, where did he even find it?
They had been trying to produce it in masses, when they had first understood that we were eternal, and apart from that, too many. This was way before the rich and wealthy took off to Mars. I used to assume that they had taken it with them and us, the unworthy, they had left right here to keep on dying and resurrecting until we would lose our minds. Only a few had kept up hope that some bit of artificial food had to be left somewhere. I used to doubt it, but maybe I should have had faith.
Maybe transparent sachets could have saved the hungry, but in an escalating anarchy, the thought to go and look for people who could produce them had never crossed my mind. Soon thereafter, transport ways, power lines, and industrial halls had been burning down. Synthetic food couldn´t have made it through all of that. Or could it have, I suddenly wondered on the day of the sachet.
Some had always kept on talking about an underground society that, so they had been assuming, didn't have to hunger.
Is the man I met today one of them? I wondered those 30 years ago.If I will find him, will he have an antidote for the hungry?
I had been looking for him ever since. Literally, everywhere. In ruins, on rooftops, even in the sewers, around me dripping water, stench, and aggressive attacks of other survivalists, who hid from the madness down there. It didn't lead anywhere. There hadn´t been a single trace of him, until I eventually came face to face with him again a month ago. But by then, it was too late.
If it hadn't taken me 30 years to get to him, my unique opportunity wouldn't have gone over my head, like a summer breeze. I could have grasped it. I could have saved them, the people who were most important to me.
Things would be different now if I hadn´t missed my chance, and maybe I wouldn't have to do what I will do in a few days.
So much has happened throughout the years, and all of it together has shaped the inevitable event that no one can prevent any longer. The extinction of humanity.
Let me start where it began.