The Hunger

The Awakening

Michael's head was throbbing with pain when he finally gained consciousness. He didn't know for how many days he was unconscious.

"The game has just begun.. The game has just begun", these words kept on echoing in his mind but he was unable to recognise the voice. His mind was in chaos and it felt like a lucid dream to him.

Michael found himself in a dark room unable to see anything more than a big digital clock at one end of that room with red indication of it to be midnight. He was unable to get up as an unseen force was chaining him to the bed. His panic rose and he was unable to determine his next move. Michael kept on pushing himself and gave considerable effort to get out of bed but everything was in vain. After a while, he started feeling dizzy again. With that, he was again dragged back to the world of nightmares.

He found himself surrounded in vomit and blood when he woke up. The bed was smelling of rotten meat with an exceptional smell of iron complementing it. He was feeling disgusted and the gooey, sticky feeling was unendurable. Just then, he heard something travelling down an invisible pipe in the darkness. He was immediately alarmed by it. The sound was approaching him. Although he tried getting out of the bed, he couldn't.

"What have I done to deserve this?", Michael whispered to himself with a feeling of helplessness.

The unpredictability of the sound of something arriving, made him more terrified. It was getting closer and closer but Michael was unable to do anything about it.

" God! Please help me.", this was the first time Michael ever prayed to any God. Though he was brought up in a protestant family, he was an agnostic. He thought that religion was for those who were weak but it provided hope to the one's who couldn't defend themselves. His viewpoints were discarded by his own family who were immensely religious. But now, Michael was weak, helpless and he needed hope more than anyone.

With these thoughts circling in his mind, contradicting his own ideals, massive amount of rotten food started pouring down on him. He understood that the pipeline was just above his head. The overflow of rotten flesh of animals as well as human corpses started surrounding him rapidly. The rotten smell started reminding him of the world outside "The wall". It brought back the miseries that Michael had to endure in this economic crisis. He thought this job to be a turning point in his life but now it seemed that it was just a delusion. The life he thought, he would lead, seemed like a distant dream. Everything was falling apart as he started getting buried under the heap of flesh. It wasn't long that he started suffocating while the flow remained constant. He started choking. Everything, along with his delusions of an utopian life in the dystopian future started fading and Michael gave up trying. He was descending towards death but he accepted it.

Michael woke up with blaring sound of sirens, all around the room. He thrusted upright in his bed. There was no invisible force tying him to the bed. There was neither any heap of rotten flesh nor any blood on the bed. The digital clock displayed the time to be seven in the morning. Michael was relieved.

"It was just a nightmare.", Michael said to himself. Little did he know that the nightmarish part of this had just begun.