Hunger wakes me, but there is nothing but unnatural darkness and nuclear fire painfully moving under my skin.

The pain moves, but I do not. The hunger is there, a wild fire urging me to me move, to eat, but without an destination I burn with it, an itch that cannot be satisfied.

Time flows around me, the light and dark of days and nights pass like memories I don’t care to remember.

Eventually the fog of my sight leaves and I can see something. Flesh!. The hunger drives me to move, but I cannot do more than twitch.

Light and dark come and go, then I begin twitching. Then, eventually, I can suddenly move an arm.

I pull the rotting flesh near me close enough to suckle on as only my lower teeth remain. It is soft and rotten enough I can pull it apart with my hand and force it into my mouth.

The animals eating the flesh don’t seem to mind my stuttering movements.

Once my stomach is full the fire inside moves to my bloated stomach while I rest. The sun streaks across the sky then hides, then rises and streaks across the sky again. Over and over.

When there is space in my stomach the hunger rises. I pull flesh from the rotting piles around me, swallowing until I’m full to bursting.

The insects that land to clean my face sometimes crawl within my mouth and I crunch down on them. When anything larger tries to eat me I kill it swiftly, or it gets away. I do not chase.

Then I rest.

The memories I don’t really recall feature this situation often. This lethargic passing of epocs where I do nothing but eat and shit without moving until the food is gone.

When it rains I turn enough to suck the water from the pooling puddles around me. Aware that my own filth is leaking into it, but not concerned enough to move.

The fire is a slow thing, moving here and there internally. It's rarely ever hot any more, but I still think of it as fire, for it can burn. A dull feeling of warmth somewhere and weakness in the rest of my body.

Over time the world becomes sharper but it doesn’t matter as there is noting to see but the passage of the sun overhead.

Eventually the bodies around me are consumed or rotted away.

When the hunger next rises. I get to my feet. I don’t know why it’s more efficient than crawling but it does use less energy.

I see other bodies, rotting mounds of putrid flesh further down the street on the ground between buildings.

It’s a dead sprint and a slide directly into them as I gorge myself on the filth.

Then a period of rest. Except as the sun sets there is light visible from this new position.

A different type of hunger drives me. There are stairs involved and in my haste I slip and fall.

At the top of the stairs I see a brother standing outside a closed door. His back is to me, and he is not looking my way, even after the noise I made getting here.

He doesn’t matter, not with the hunger upon me.

I can remember moving with the packs, as one of them, and other time hunting them.

In other memories I’m being hunted by them.

I never know if the brothers are hostile until they attack. But when I decide they have to die, they die.

A new craving rises. This one is far weaker than the first two, but when I’ve decided to kill them in the past it has risen. Sometimes it rises first, and I decide to kill because of it. I cannot tell which memory is more common because I can’t control the memories. They wash over me, but I have no control.

My teeth tear into the back of his neck, my hands tight on him as I chew and tear towards the tiny sweetness inside.

It’s as hard as a stone and with hair-like roots extruding from it. To get to it I follow the strands from the back of the neck in. I can’t chew a hole large enough, so I smash the skull and peel it apart to get at the prize.

I swallow and swallow and then then stop.

I wait, staring up at the light streaming though the window above the door. The hunger for power still drives me but the fire inside had moved to my middle to do battle.

The battle inside me is now more important than the other hungers.

I should have chewed and killed it. I forgot, and now it fights me.

Eventually it ends. I won, but at what cost. I’m so tired. I killed inefficiently, wasted too many movements, didn't crunch down on the stone before swallowing. Wasted more resources on a battle that didn't need to happen.

The door is unlocked and the lamp pulls off the wall easily trailing the electric cords like the data port trailed the hair-like strands.

The cheap plasteel of the lamp’s housing pulls apart in my hands.

I smash the innards to expose things.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

My hands burn as they clamp down on the innards but I don’t let go. The pain is what I’m looking for.

I’m on fire again, though this time it’s different. External. Painful in a way that means damage instead of healing. I move my fingers across the innards and the fire changes until it feels more right than wrong. It’s a gut feeling I can’t qualify but I find two places to grip where the pain seems most like what I need.

Inside the fire begins to crystallize, moving though me. It’s not a healing fire, nor doing battle. It spreads across my chest and reaches down each arm to the thumbs I have pressed into the metal contacts. It changes then. The fire becomes warm in a way I haven't felt in a long time. It is a fire of creation and the forge.

I’m squatting when I get the gut feeling I should rest. Everything burns, but my shoulders still droop and my body begins to relax.

Except for my hands, they still cling tightly to the innards of the lamp.

In time a hunger begins to satiate. A hunger I’ve had so long I can’t remember a time without it. It is not the hunger for flesh, but it's twin. The hunger least satiated.

I wait there until there is a war between the hungers. When one over-comes the other I move, seeking reeking piles of flesh, or living creatures consuming the dead until the other hunger takes control and I move back to the room to press my thumbs into the innards of the lamp.

It matters not to me if the blood is black and dried with disease and dehydration, or fresh and flowing with life. When I pass things that hold rain water I drink. It seems I am always thirsty now. Or healed enough to notice the thirst. I’m never driven to find water, only to pause and consume it if I happen upon it.

Sometimes I ignore the warnings and eat too much, throwing up that which I’ve already consumed. I scramble then, with renewed need, to consume what I’ve sicked up as if the animals and insects that scatter before me would instead swam and steal what I’ve lost.

In time I’m no longer driven by gut instinct and need.

Thoughts begin to rise up within me, glacial in both size and speed.

One day, after I eat my fill I carry the flesh that hasn’t rotted into goo back up the stairs to the room where the innards of the lamp wait.

While I feast upon the lighting within the lamp I have the food close, so that when my body hungers I don’t have to leave. I don't recognize it as foresight and planning. There is no conscious thought involved. No evaluation and planning. It just seems like the thing to do.

The planning was something different. A shift at a fundamental level. Something I hadn't done in a long time, being driven only by the most powerful hunger and ignoring almost everything else.

Now I feel the begins of a change. What that means is unknown and unknowable. It isn’t something I dwell upon.

The inner fires continue to burn moving around and eventually I am greeted with floating panels of light when the sun rises. They are easily dismissed, at first with rage-filled swipes and powerful screams, and then later with only the intent to remove them.

I begin to wake from animal reactions to something else. It is a process that takes weeks, months.

I notice things that have never mattered. The color of walls. An image of people in a frame. Glass that allows light to pass through without allowing rain.

I notice the day and night, not as functional differences in how I have to hunt, but as aspects of time passing. It is a strange change. The strangest of all the changes.

I was existing, and then I became the focal point between things that had happened and things that would happen. There was suddenly a defined past. Things that could not change, but that could be learned from. How the darker birds would hop once before taking flight. If I could get close enough to them before the hop, I could lunge and catch a wing.

Future planning required study of the past.

I changed much. I no longer simply wait for one hunger to overcome the other. I plan.

The changes came slowly so that I did not notice any single change being the one that changed me. It started with thinking. With planning.

Before I crouched and waited, then I was planning on how to trap creatures or put myself less at risk while hunting.

Then I found myself with a stapler joining pieces of damaged clothing together so that the thorns outside the town would not tear my skin so easily. The healing fires within could heal the damage but it was a waste.

I couldn’t see the change, but I would have never thought of clothing as armor before, and then suddenly it seemed obvious.

I passed by the scattered guns for months without even acknowledging they were there. Then in the span of three days I went from noticing them to picking one up.

They had been no more interesting to me than rocks for the longest time.

There were memories of being on both ends of the weapons. I collected some, it took time to sort out how to make them work and more time to find the bits that broke and became useless every time they did.

The guns worked better than traps did.

Then one morning, I did not immediately discard the floating screen before my eyes that appeared every morning.

Words had begun to make sense again. The shapes on buildings or doors transforming into information. The screen also had words.

My inner fires flared along my left arm and I scratched at it, the dry scarred skin there peeling away to expose the healthy pink moist skin beneath.

When I first started scabbing up, I’d been compelled to consume the larger flakes of scarred skin and scab, but now I let them fall.

I had the meat from the last deer drying on racks in the next building. It had been a slow twisted thing. Huge with a second partial head and three extra legs growing from it’s lumpy flesh.

I didn’t understand the words that floated before me so I willed them away.

I scrapped the maggots and rot from a large piece of meat with a knife before I began eating. When I was full I drank water from one of the buckets.

That had been the largest change in the last weeks. Now, instead of only storing food, I collected and stored water as well.

I lifted the back of my dress up and tucked it over and behind my belt as I squatted over the roughly hacked hole in the floor.

That too had been a large change. The realization that I was living in my own filth and waste. It had never bothered me before. And then, slowly, it began to.

One of the hatchets had made easy work of the floor, and over time I forced the rest of the filth through the hole into the room below.

Now I squatted over it, so that when I had to discharge my waste it dropped out of my way.

I worked on the spears. The hatchet made points of the sheet metal roofing and time and effort with a heavy stone shaped the metal into spear heads.

I had six already. Most of the guns had broken too much, the small parts that needed to be replaced after they fired were limited and soon used up.

Change, ingenuity, and improvement, I would later learn, were a byproduct of necessity.

I hunted when I needed food, I hauled water from the fountain to the room when the buckets and jars were empty, and I rested, the wires from the lamp-inners slid now into the port near my right hip.

The inner fire had burned there for weeks until one day the skin itched fiercely and I clawed the scabs away. Beneath was a flat metal circle sitting flush with my skin.

My gut knew what to do. Instead of holding the innards I tore them away from the thicker wire coming from the wall.

I pushed the wires into the port until there was a clamping feeling of attachment.

That first time I had rested there for a whole day and when the wires came free they were no longer loose, but had an exterior molding of the same plasteel some of the gun parts were made of.

The new end fit only one way into the hole in my hip, which didn’t bother me at all, at first.

In the beginning I was over joyed to find I could use both hands for other tasks. But it later began to bother me.

If there were only two wires, but only one way for the plug to slide in deep enough to be grabbed, why did it often take me three attempts to find the correct orientation?