Let Us Prey

Handwritten page: 5x8in. Found in an overturned post wagon.

Liar. Traitor. You dare leave me behind while I sleep without so much as a goodbye?

You’re the one who taught me how to prepare a skull. Remove the head. Cut out the tongue. Scrape away whatever you can manage with your knife—the fleshy cheeks, the scalp marshy with blood. Take the skinned, slippery thing that remains and boil it. Break down the leftover tissues. Keep the skull wet while you work. Strip it of everything that ever gave its glistening meat life.

I was eager to learn. But you frowned when I was more interested in what was inside the skull. You told me that I took too long “playing” with it. I wasn’t playing. I was marveling at its softness. Savoring the shocking warmth that gave way to something lifeless and cold all too soon. You told me I lacked awareness. That I was slowing you down.

Well. Without you here to hurry me along, I’ve come even further into my own. And I’ve learned something: <i>You’re</i> the weaker animal.

Someday, you’ll learn. But that will only happen when I decide it’s time to teach you.

Handwritten page: 5x8in. Found abandoned beneath Pitching Crematorium.

These monsters are full of miracles. Often times I’ll cut them open and admire what waits inside: lukewarm organs riddled with squirming fly larvae. Leeches that reek of the dead. I squeeze and poke and rip. I find pleasure in knowing that I can take as long as I want without anyone to hurry me along.

But lately, satiation eludes me. I want...more. The first time I instinctually slurped spongey marrow from a freshly cracked pelvis, I was the best kind of full. I am alone now, and all the hungrier in the silence. I must fill the void with more flesh.

If killing monsters makes a person legendary, what does eating them make you? Few would have the stomach or the spine to find out. But I do. How wonderful having nothing to lose and everything to gain. I will find out how insatiable my spirit really is.

Handwritten page: 5x8in. Found abandoned beneath Pitching Crematorium.

I am whole. I revel in the delight of the filled void. Even now the effects of the Meathead I consumed linger. I hear the voices still, and the sounds: A woman screaming through the pain of childbirth, begging someone to help her and her baby. The wet sounds of ripping flesh. Then, last night, I dreamed of the leeches. They were splayed across my bare torso, and as one crawled towards my chest, I knew it would feed on me like a babe, and that I would let it. I wasn’t me, or the screaming woman. I was someone else. Someone who was looking for her.

It’s affected the way I hunt, this undeniable connection. I still kill them with merciless, feral pleasure, doing their softest places in with a sledgehammer, blowing their legs off with dynamite. But a new darkness stirs inside when I see one now. It gives me an edge over the others, makes me better, that hunger, its calling. I was resentful, at first, to have to learn it all myself. But now I am thankful.

I crave more. I close my eyes and picture myself pursuing the monstrosity that should be consumed next, the one ripest with potential, that Spider.

Handwritten page: 5x8in. Found abandoned beneath Pitching Crematorium.

The Spider’s dying cry was sublime, everything I hoped for, a swan song of pain and rage and defeat. I dragged its carcass from the depths of Pitching Crematorium and took it to my camp to prepare.

I had never seen one so up close before, and discovered it was a sick, spectacular fusion of human bodies. I’d assumed the body parts belonged to other hunters, but not all the parts were fully grown. Some were dainty. The Spider’s appendages held sharp, unnatural angles that seemed to be reflected in the pained faces hidden in the folds of flesh beneath. It made my blood bloom ice.

I almost changed my mind, seeing that. What did it mean to eat of this flesh? But I’ve come too far to succumb to things like fear or hesitation.

So I cracked the appendages like some Corrupted crab dinner and devoured the soft shreds of meat within those hardened, hairy shells. Even now as I write, the sour smell turns my stomach in sick, curious anticipation.

What will it do to me? What will I see? Who will I become?

Handwritten page: 5x8in. Found in an overturned post wagon.

If you had been here, it never would have happened.

But no. I do not accept regret. I take it back. I regret my regret, not what I saw. The pit filled with all those people…and me. The flies that covered our disemboweled bodies like grave clothes. The fat crows that were filled with our flesh. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Only existed. What felt like years to my spirit ended up only being one night of unconsciousness from the poisoned Spider meat.

I’ve changed. Maybe others will too, if I allow them to taste of these bodies.

Foolish were we for assuming that the Spider’s webs were made of some type of blasphemous silk, and not the souls of the endless dead. Those webs are alive in their own tragic way. Sewn from the moth-souls, to trap the living and the dead. The next time you tear some down with your bayonet or burn it away with fire, remember that.