Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 3. As told by Chris.
My name is Chris. I'm a decent mechanic. I like to tinker with things and make things work. I joined this colony as a slave but as soon as the slavers rounded the corner, Donald looked me in the eye, unlocked the manacles and said to me, “You are a free man.” I will forever be grateful.
Donald is rich. You can tell the man was born to wealth. He paid for me like the cost was nothing and then freed me like it meant nothing. The colony's got walls made of silver and I sleep on a silver bed. For breakfast I eat at a silver table and sit on a polished silver chair. They've got the best gadgets and tools here. Anything they can't make, they buy. They always go for quality. They want for nothing here except warmth and food. It seems even some things money can't buy.
Caption: Our 7x7 living room. Silver butcher's table in the bottom left, stove in the top right, silver dining table and chairs in the bottom right. The silver statue was bought early on from a trader. It's not the famous Fernand statue that was talked about earlier – Fernand currently sits in Trumps bedroom. The coloured floors are just our drop points for food and ingredients.I joined them a year after Donald started this colony. Donald had been doing most of the jobs and they say they bought me from the slaver to take over the construction side of things whilst Donald started on the garden. I don't think they knew at the time that they were getting an engineer. I think I've spent more time on inventing things than building things. I've certainly learned a lot over the last year.
I've changed a lot too.
Hunger changes a man. When your stomach acids are dissolving you from the inside out, you can become desperate. No one jokes about it, but I can tell they think I'm a cannibal. I'm not. I just do what needs to be done to survive. Sometimes I think they deliberately don't bring up the topic until we're all starving, waiting for me to be the first to voice it because they know I will. They're all thinking it. I can tell. They leave sentences half finished, look at me sideways when talking, just waiting for me to bring up the word so they can absolve themselves from the guilt of having said the C-word first.
I don't want to be the Cannibal again. The others look at me funny like it's my fault. They put their guilt and shame onto me and I don't like it. We all ate human meat. WE ALL ATE IT. It's not my fault. We ate it, and then we drowned ourselves in alcohol to forget.
So I bring up the topic of cannibalism. Again. I say we have graves full of dead bodies, buried in the ice. They'll still be frozen. We can eat a little, just enough to get by until the traders come. This time, no one looks at me. No one says no. Olga even seems to perk up a little.
I leave with Olga. We head north to the burial grounds. On our way out, we wave to Owl. He's just setting down some steel in our dropzone. He waves back from a distance and continues unloading his steel. Buddha should be around somewhere as well. I think of the two portions of dinner we left them. We had divided the last meal 7 ways and the portions all looked equal, but after finishing our portions, the remaining 2 for Buddha and Owl somehow looked bigger than what we had. Donald had to put it away because nobody was doing anything other than look and salivate over the portions, which wasn't doing us any good.
It's funny. When you're tired and hungry you don't remember things as well as you should. Neither Olga nor I knew where the most recently dead were buried, so we just start digging. We dig and we dig and we dig.
In hindsight, I could have dug more smartly. Instead, I dug the earliest graves – the ones that were a year old, from before I even arrived, hoping to eat the earlier ones and leave the fresher ones for a later emergency. It made sense at the time, but the corpses Olga and I dug out were dessicated. Rotten bones with nothing else. It was disheartening. I felt some of my humanity slip away. Olga wandered off, said she couldn't do it anymore. I tried slapping her to snap her out of her haze but she seemed intent on throwing herself into the wind and screaming. I left her. We needed food. I'd save us by finding food.
I remember thinking about food. I remember digging. A lot of digging.
I have no memory of what happened next. They say they found me collapsed, a day or two later, malnourished, exhausted and dehydrated. I don't remember digging more graves but it turns out I dug them all out in the end. I dug every single grave. Not a single intact corpse in all the graves I dug, apparently. I'd dug it all out, even the empty graves. The skeletons were lying, some in the grave, some outside the grave. It looked like I'd dragged one a hundred yards then dropped it and went back to dig another. I look back now at my handywork – all the rotten corpses, the fragile bones, the empty graves and I wonder... where did the fresh corpse go? There should have been at least one fresh corpse.
The horrifying thought plagues me at night. I dream I'm a wolf with teeth as sharp as knives. I rip the flesh from the bone. The dry juice of frozen blood dribbles out my mouth. Chunks of meat turn to ash in the fire of my mouth and I enjoy it. I wolf it down. And then I see a pair of eyes, sunken and accusing, and I wake up, sweating, my heart pounding and I tell myself, it's just a dream. I dreamt I was a wolf.
But deep down I wonder, before my blackout, did I eat one raw?
