under the thaw

The chewing. The chewing wouldn’t stop.

It wriggled around Thatcher’s brain, gnashing at the membranes that composed his humanity. He couldn’t feel it, but he knew it was there, could hear it swimming underneath the bone, crawling over the cerebellum, causing his limbs to shake against the icy floor. Its tendrils, which he had watched snap the necks of two researchers just minutes ago, now roamed him, curling around his brainstem, squeezing it, constricting his entire body.

His lungs scraped one another, devoid of air, and things blotted together as all color was ripped from his world. His heartbeat decelerated, thumpthump, thumpthump, thump, thump, thu m p…

And then, the chewing resumed. Teeth against teeth, crunching bone and brain. It slithered off someplace new, rummaging along the grooves of the frontal lobe, nibbling along the temporal, trying to keep its subject alive but not mobile. Breathing, but without control. Thatcher knew these things well—it didn’t want him dead, not yet at least. Just then it had pushed too far, almost killed him. It was curious, but that was careless, and it wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Even his thoughts were turning to gumbo. Every few words, one got snatched from him, gobbled up by the chewing. It dissected them with its fangs and chomped the meaning out of them with its molars. And all he could do was lay there, spasming, in a pool of Logan’s dried, paint-chipped blood. All the good stuff had gushed out his head an hour ago and now the exposed bits of brain-matter were stoning into spackle. He’d been stuck like this, looking the dead man in the one eye he had left, which dangled out of his cracked skull by a strand of stringy, mucus-soaked membrane. The rest of him was gone—lunch in the belly of what chewed away in Thatcher’s head.

Years ago they’d studied away their youth in lecture halls, eschewing teenage debauchery to pen late-night essays that got research labs all over the country eyeing their resumes with a grin. When they got this job, they celebrated by popping their alcoholic cherries. They’d sworn off drinking as something for the stupid, yet they night they danced on tables and didn’t know that, in the morning, they’d fight over who got to cling to the frigid bathroom toilet first. ‘Alaska!’ they’d yelled, clinking shots of whiskey together. ‘Fucking Alaska!’

Thatcher tried turning onto his back. Pointless. His bones were jammed rusted gears.

“Fucking…Alaska…” he groaned.

Putting two words together was like trying to make opposites attract. Thoughts came, bounced off one another, and were gobbled up by the chewing. The chewing that, as he looked at Logan, implanted nasty new thoughts in his weakened brain. Friend, he thought. Food, it told him. Sad, he thought. Hungry, it told him.

He fought; he sent every signal he could to every nerve in his body still under his command and thrashed like a baby throwing a tantrum. Soon, one by one, those signals went dark, chomped out by the gnashing teeth. He tried to scream, praying the intercoms would pick it up and send someone out to at least kill this thing, but the memo never reached his lips. His body, unsure of which voice belonged to its master and which belonged to the intruder, simply froze. Without cohesion of body and mind, the thoughts in one’s head stay exactly that—thoughts. And his were weakened to whimpers.

Thatcher laid there, caught in a purgatorial state between life and death, with nothing to do but listen as his individuality was stripped away with each chewed-up thought.

Chewing. Munching. Gnawing. Piggish snarling, ripping flesh, as it inched around his hippocampus and swam through his cerebrospinal fluid, lapping up his memories. He saw flashes of his youth; sunny summer days far from here, trapped on that dilapidated ranch house in northern Wyoming, gazing at the stars through his telescope, wondering ‘why was I born here, somewhere so boring?’. Then, years later, after sweltering through four years of a high school with no AC, standing on stage, being handed a diploma earned through countless A+’s and swearing that he’d never again succumb to the loneliness of rural life.

Now here, bleeding away in Alaska, hundreds of miles away from civilization.

Hundreds of miles from food.

Delicious food.

An hour ago, his team had gathered in this room, a bunch of blue-eyed babies who whispered and watched as he and Logan wheeled in the charcoal-colored slab of ice. What lurked within was ancient and alive and at the time, that was an amazing proposition. Now, all around him, the warning lights flashed bright, then night, bright, then night, punctuated by a wailing siren that warned the base was under siege. But it wasn’t. The attack was finished—they’d lost.

It kept chewing. Biting. Consuming. And it must have gotten where it wanted. Black-spots were dotting his vision like holes burnt into a photograph and he was losing the past, quick. All the knowledge he’d accumulated across three decades of tireless work was being shredded. It wasn’t long before he couldn’t recall where he was or who he was. It wasn’t long before…

It wriggled its toes. Tapped its fingertips. Took control. Devouring his humanity wasn’t enough—it wanted to devour the world. It wanted him, it wanted them, it wanted everything. It was hungry. Food, it told him. Food, he thought. So, with a heave, it pushed its body off the floor, and in the reflection of the blood pooled below, he saw the nightmare he had become.

But was it truly a nightmare, or was this what he had always been?

His mind was a void of white noise.

 He shouted random phrases into it that had lost all meaning to him but he got nothing back. Nothing except the chewing.

All that was left…was the chewing.

And then, nothing.

THE END