Somber

Chapter 28: The Alpha.

Dedicated to @cheese2016

_________________________________________

Chapter 28: The Alpha.

Louis' POV

_

England, Great Britain

October 30th, 1795

_

The hunger has taken over. There is no bread left in most of the villages all across the country. People are banding together and creating upheaval. Just yesterday, King George was assaulted with stones by an angry mob demanding for bread. The local authorities are enraged. Towns folk have been killed in the governement's desperation to assume some order and control. Rumors are floating around about the Parliament passing new laws next month, to prohibit more than fifty people assembling together and to punish with treason any person who hurts the King in any physical, emotional or psychological extent. Some people are afraid, others are only growing more angry. But aside from that, we are all just hungry.

Those who can hunt, do. But we are not in season and the meat is just not enough for everybody. Hunger does something to people, I have noticed. A person is kind and selfless when the stomach is full. Take away their food source and the person is replaced by a savage who would do anything to satisfy its needs. I have seen it happen on repeated occasions. It is almost as if they are possessed by a cold-blooded monster. I stray away from most of them, keeping to myself as much as I can. I have always worked hard to live a comfortable life. My father taught me to be an honest man.

But even good hardworking people like me struggle when hunger claws away at their humanity. There are times when the pain of my empty stomach becomes unbearable and I double over, my knees hitting the dirt as I clutch my arms around my body, trying to keep it in one piece. It is not the stomach growling and begging for food that makes you lose it. It is the hole that opens up in your gut that drives you over the edge. That is when people get desperate. That is when they do foolish and irrational things.

I was not an exception.

The night of the 30th, at around fifteen minutes after ten, the dreadful pain that I could never get accustomed to, took control over me. Like a mindless animal, I crawled out of my humble home and followed the dirt path towards the thick forest behind my house. It is not that I was not thinking clearly, in reality I was not thinking at all. The hunger was too great.

In my state, I somehow managed to find a wolf, finishing its prey right before my own blue eyes. His fur coat was white, as the snow that came with winter. His eyes were a grey as the cloudy skies before it rains. I was entranced by its dangerous beauty.

When the wolf's eyes spotted me whilst watching it, he left the bloody rabbit he had just hunted behind and he started moving towards me. I should have been terrified, running off as fast as my two wobbly legs could take me. But I was so painfully hungry. The blood dripping from the side of the animal's mouth only urged me forward to it. That is when I knew that it was more than hunger, it was blood lust. I wanted to taste the wolf's blood in my mouth as I took his life to preserve my own.

My vision was clouded, effects of not having eaten in so long. But it did not stop my advance. When the wolf was just a merely few feet away, I jumped. Of course it also was ready for the confrontation, and I heard more than felt when it sunk his dagger-like teeth on the flesh below my left rib. I cried out in pain, cursing the wolf and everything it stood for. All I wanted was to quiet the hunger. But as the wolf's teeth sunk deeper into my skin and muscle, forcing blood to rush out, the hunger started fading along with my life. In under ten minutes, I had lost both the fight and most of my blood. My vision clouded until everything went still and then dark.