I woke with a hunger like I’d never felt before. Like I’d not eaten for days.
I’d slept really badly in the night and felt particularly freaked out from the intense, fever-like dreams I’d experienced. Viserale and violent, they had involved lavish meals of extravagantly rich food, huge joints of meat that I’d tucked into ravenously, tearing flesh from bone with a fevered intensity. There were sweetmeats and piles of bacon, and huge tomahawk steaks dripping in fat and deep red with bloody rarity.
Not such an odd dream to some of you I would imagine, but deeply disturbing for me because I’d been vegetarian for over 15 years.
The rest of my day went mercifully quickly. I tried to slake my hunger with some toast and coffee before heading out my apartment door into the ratrace of my commute to a boring office job in the city.
Things had changed a lot since the global pandemic that hit 3 years previously. Everyone now wore face coverings, no one talked or met outside anymore. We all just moved from one place to another, from home to covered walkway, to public transport, to place of work, and then the same in reverse. The constant presence of the armed forces causing the general atmosphere of these journeys to feel threatening and promote a sense of paranoia in everyone. Of course the persistent propaganda on display everywhere you look doesn’t help; “Be Vigilant. Be safe.”, “Obey the curfew. Stay Indoors” and the worst of all “Don’t look at the moon”.
That last one has never been satisfactorily explained to me, I mean, why would you not look at the moon for goodness sake? Admittedly It’s a lot harder to do now that we are all, by law, indoors after dark but it’s always going to be still visible out of windows and through skylights. Of course to combat this it’s become mandatory for everyone to cover their windows in a reactive polymer paint that goes opaque when the sun goes down. Conspiracy theories rampant on the internet claim a multitude of explanations for not viewing the moon. Some claim that the vaccines given to combat the viral pandemic causes some form of photophobia, that people become mad when exposed to the lower wavelength of moonlight. Like a Lunacy of old. Others say that some great disaster has befallen our moon and there is a global conspiracy to hide this from the world for fear that it would cause irreparable panic. My favourite is that nanobots in our bloodstream administered via the vaccination program malfunction on exposure to moonlight, turning us all into mindless zombies. As if that’s not what we’ve already become!
For my part I’ve been a good little citizen and kept my head down. Gone to work, home before the curfew, shut and locked all my windows and doors when the sirens sound. The only break in my routine has been a visit, about a month ago, to the local medical centre for a blood test to check on my iron levels. It’s an unfortunate side effect of my vegetarianism, no meat means finding other ways to put iron in my diet, being a celiac also doesn’t help, so I can’t just eat lots of pasta and wholemeal bread. They’ve now got me on a new trial of supplements to try and combat my anaemia. I must admit I am feeling a lot better, well I was until last night’s nocturnal visions of carnivorous pleasure that is.
I eat a large dinner of rice and roasted veg, but despite this still feel hungry. As I clear away the dirty dishes I accidentally cut myself on a knife. Swearing at my stupidity I place my finger in my mouth without thinking, to clean the wound. My brain explodes with sensation and the next thing I know I’m on the floor, and my senses are turned up to 11. I get up and stumble towards the bathroom and too late, realise that I’ve left the skylight in the hallway open a small way. A beam of moonlight hits me full in the face and I almost pass out. The sound of my own heartbeat is drumming a reel in my head. I look down at my own arms and can feel the blood coursing through my veins and arteries. My skin suddenly feels alive, like a static charge is racing over the surface and I watch as each of my hair follicles starts to expand, thick brown hair pushing its way out everywhere I look. Soon my arms are covered in thick dark hair until only my palms are visibly hairless. My fingernails turn to claws and, as I fall forward until I’m on all fours like an animal, they scrape deep rents in the hallway carpet. I feel alive and immensely powerful, stronger than I’ve ever felt. The desire to be outside in the night air comes over me, but not as strongly as the desire to feed, to eat raw flesh and taste another creature’s blood in my mouth. I race for the front door and tear it away from the frame, bounding through it into the night air. I turn and look up. There, above me, is the moon, a bright white sphere hanging in a blanket of stars. I throw my head up and howl at the top of my lungs and am surprised to hear a reply repeated from somewhere in the distance. Another howl reports, then another and another, moving across the night like beacons being lit. I’m not alone out here in the moonlit night and the hunt is just about to begin.
I awake the next day after another fevered night of viscera and blood, my hunger from the previous day finally sated. I doubt i’ll be having any problems with anaemia this month, clearly the pills they gave me are doing their job.
