Waiting in line was not an option. My legs tingled as I stormed into the cafeteria. Everything tingled. My tail, my face, my chest. I was pretty darn sure my saliva was slowly corroding its way through my PPE gown. The bottom half of my mask had crumbled in my hands as I’d ripped it off and stuffed it into my mouth after taking off my visor in the transition area leading out of where I’d exited onto Ward G’s ground floor.

I tried not to think about the rich green stains I’d seen on the inside of my mask as I stuck it into my mouth.

It took all of three seconds for the mask to melt in my mouth like cotton candy. The face mask was a paltry substitute for a meal, but it was sufficient to turn off my internal spit spigot long enough for me to race into the nearest cafeteria. I wasn’t familiar with the particular cafeteria, but that hardly mattered, because as soon as I entered, a minor miracle occurred.

The miracle was vending machines. They had vending machines!

Praise the lucky bowtie!

And they had ramen cups!

Freeze-dried ramen noodles; the staple food of college all across DAISHU’s Hegemony. I swiped my hand over multiple vending machines’ scanners simultaneously. My fingers were woodpecker beaks rat-a-tat-tapping their touch-screens, selecting everything that caught my eye.

It took about sixty seconds for me to seat myself at a table with my modest feast piled up on a plastic tray in front of me and my utensils in hand. I spent those sixty seconds standing off to the side, gorging myself on a bag of extra spicy bu’etl chips as I waited for the microwave to finish my ramen. I hadn’t bothered opening the bag by hand; I’d torn it open with my teeth, swallowing the piece of resected packaging without a care.

I was too focused on eating the chips to care that my mouth felt like it was on fire; it was like gulping down water after a twelve-mile run. Besides, the spice vanished within seconds, leaving only the familiar sickly sweetness. In fact, it was only after I’d sat down, peeled the lid off the ramen cup, swallowed three mini-doughnuts and a slice of banana bread and then gulped down a chaser of peach ice tea that it finally hit me.

Holy Angel.

There was an alimentary canal’s worth of digestive activity playing out on the linings of my mouth, throat, and esophagus. Food dissolved in a matter of seconds, diffusing directly into my flesh. My body drank up the nutrient slurry before it even reached my stomach.

It was orgasmic—and I didn’t use that term lightly.

I probably would have been screaming in abject horror at what I had become—and, what I was still slowly becoming—were I not so utterly desperate to make the hunger go away. It was a scary experience, to say the least. Every bite was a realization of just how deep the hunger went, and just how much of my humanity I’d already lost. And the transformation was still just getting started.

My gustatory pleasures came with a kind of beer-goggles—well, I suppose I should call them wyrm-goggles?

Beer goggles made the unattractive attractive; wyrm goggles made the unappetizing appetizing.

Everything in sight was a potential meal. The feast stretched from horizon to horizon. There was the food I was eating, which—itself—lay in cup-shaped, disk-shaped, and tray-shaped food, the last of which was laminated in thin sheets of food depicting the freshly made sorts of food I could order from the kitchen.

Though I could have also just eaten the kitchen altogether.

My tray lay on a large bit of four-legged food—formerly known as a table. Perhaps it was just me, but I felt like the tabletop would have gone great with a side of lemon, or sour cream and onions, or rubber tires, or Margaret’s expensive vases, drizzled in caramel and sprinkles.

Even the floor was food, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t considering shoveling dirt into my mouth—but only as a last resort.

Plastics and other synthetics had a bread-y taste to them. Minerals and metals were like beef jerky, but fried, or maybe boiled cabbage—so, not exactly preferable, but still very much edible, though strangely… spicy? Metal—like the stool legs from earlier this morning—fizzed and tingled in my mouth, like soda pop or novelty candies. I’d never felt anything like it before.

In this brave new world of food, first prize went to the classics: organic compounds; the starches, fats, sinews, and sugars. Actual, real human food was the most precious luxury. It was gems of ice cream and fudge, of soft pastries still warm and steamy, oven-fresh; sugar drizzled cinnamon rolls, and fruit so sweet and ripe that they burst into texture and juice the instant they touched your lips.

I got all of that from just one cup of pork ramen noodles.

Eventually, though, I was knocked out of my food daze: my console rang.

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I pulled the console out of my PPE pocket, not bothering to wipe the food off my lips.

Unusually, aside from the words West Elpeck Medical Center, the caller ID gave no indication as to who or where the call was coming from.

I answered it, and found myself locking eyes with Dr. Arbond. He was broadcasting live from the quarantined operating theater.

All pleasurable thoughts flew out the back of my head.

“Dr. Howle,” Cassius said, “forgive me for interrupting you, but,” but then he scowled. “Actually, you know what? Screw the forgiveness: I’m freaking the fuck out over here.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s Mrs. Elbock.” The surgeon shook his head. “She’s… she’s eating.”

“…What?”

“Take a look for yourself!”

Dr. Arbond stepped away from the console and rolled the stand it was mounted on up to Merritt.

Holy Angel…

My jaw dropped.

What I saw made me wretch. A bit of sweet slurry spurted up at the back of my throat.

Mrs. Elbock was kneeling on the ground, leaning against the side of the operating table. She was… evolving. Her humanity had blossomed into a macabre sculpture of flesh and bone. Her chest was split open down the middle; it hadn’t stitched itself back together after having been sawed open. Masses of verdant darkness swelled in her chest, above which the bones of her split ribs hung like fangs, flexing up and down with her breaths. The great trunk of her new body was congealing within the core of her old one. The deformed, discolored, shriveled, organs I saw through the gaps in her ribcage were being subsumed into the expanding wyrm flesh. Death would have been almost kind, here; it would have spared her the burden of becoming a living horror. But she wasn’t dead. No: she was hungry.

Merritt was a leech, a piranha; a gnawing hagfish, a rasping lamprey. The hydraulics responsible for raising and lowering the operating table were the teats from which she suckled. Her nibbles and licks eroded the machinery’s plastic casing. Half of the casing had already caved in on itself, and dangled from the rest from a couple points of tenuous attachment. Merritt held the dangling part of the casing in her hands like it was just a giant cracker. She ate it with zeal, devouring it bite by bite. Under her mouth’s ministrations, the plastic took on the consistency of styrenofoam, crumbling into smaller chunks that Merritt swallowed without hesitation, even as she cried in fear and dismay.

Yes, she cried. She wept as she ate. Two trails of tears glistened on her face in twin trails as she looked up from her meal and gaze at Cassius, and then at the bright lights overhead, and then at the console on the nearby stand, and then to me, staring back out at her from the screen.

I’m not sure exactly how long I watched her. It might have been a minute; it might have been more. Not even my hunger was strong enough to peel me away, though my horror nearly was. What I did know, however—what I saw—was that her open thoracic cavity closed as she ate. Or, rather, it filled. Dark green, ooze-slicked wyrm flesh rose like one of the ancient, dew-wetted burial mounds out by the Bay. Slowly, but surely, the expanding cylinder of wyrmflesh was slowly changing the shape and proportions of Mrs. Elbock’s body as it subsumed the surrounding flesh.

She was growing. Thickening. Lengthening. Her torso spurted up almost a foot in height just in the time I spent watching her.

As I watched, I felt the void left by Andalon’s absence even more keenly. Before, when Andalon had been with me, even if she hadn’t materialized right beside me, I could still feel her assistance. It blanketed my perceptions, damping my disgust and visceral horror. Whether it was something Andalon had been consciously doing, or merely a side-effect of her eager personality and the neurological connection between us, I didn’t know. But, as I watched Merritt, I sorely missed it. I had nothing to cushion the feelings of panic and revulsion that sliced into me as I watched Merritt eat. Those feelings were even sharper than what I’d felt when I’d first laid eyes on the dark violet tissue blossoming atop my chest.

At last, I managed to get some words out. I wept as I spoke. “Why… why are you showing this to me?”

When Dr. Arbond answered, his gaze wasn’t trained on me.

“Genneth… she asked us to.”

At times like these, I almost wished I owned a gun. A bullet to the brain might very well put me out of my misery.

What do I tell her?

Though I’d only made a slight dent in my hunger, that, in it of itself, made a world of a difference. I felt less raw. Less jittery. Strangely euphoric, even. The lag was back to being nearly unnoticeable.

Almost.

“From what I’ve… seen,” I took a deep breath, “eating will make you feel better, Merritt. Remember what I said before.” I recited my own words effortlessly: “Your bodies are changing. These changes are driven by your diet. The more you eat, the more you change, and—”

Behind her, I could hear pained coughs from Drs. Nesbitt and Mistwalker.

I tried my best to look Merritt in the eye—and failed. Miserably.

And then she spoke. Her voice was raspy, yet multi-phonic; many tones, sounding at once.

“The others…” she said, “help them, Genneth. Don’t let them get too… hungry.” She shuddered. “Or else…”

I cleared my throat.

Fudge.

I should have realized it sooner!

I ran my hand over my hairnet and bit my lip.

“I’ll go check up on them right away!” I said.

Merritt nodded. And chewed. And chewed.

I turned away.

“And, Genneth…” Cassius said.

“What now?!” I snapped, but then I blanched with shame and shook my head. “No, I’m sorry for yelling. It’s just…”

He nodded shakily. “I know. I know.”

I sighed. “What more can I do for you, Dr. Arbond?”

“I’ve tried calling Dr. Nowston about it, but he’s not replying to calls to his lab, nor to my messages. Tell him to check his messages, and to watch the damn video I sent him.”

“What is it?”

“Two pieces of news, neither of them good. First… there’s this weird pale blue glimmer-glammer that I’ve been seeing in the air. Maybe it’s a malfunction with the machinery, or maybe it’s the infection beginning to affect my eyes, I don’t know.”

“And the second…?”

“Drs. Nesbitt and Mistwalker’s conditions are deteriorating. Rapidly.” Dismay and defeat shot through his face.

“You wanna take a look?”

I heard coughs and moans in the background, as well as something splattering.

“No,” I shivered. “I’ve seen enough for one day.”

“I don’t blame you,” Dr. Arbond said. His hand moved toward the screen to end the call, but then he paused, eyes widening. He stared at his hand.

“Fuck, that’s weird,” he said, slowly twisting his arm.

“Dr. Arbond…?” I asked.

He shivered. “My motherfucking hand is motherfucking dead.”

I lost my appetite after that.