The Pit: Prologue: The Awakening

This is the prologue of the novellette "The Pit", a work in progress. New installments will be posted once a week (when they're not posted sooner).

Genre: horror, adventure

***

Pain, fading like a fire with no air to feed it. Screaming, screaming, don’t want to fade, don’t want to die.

Don’t have a choice. Can’t fight.

Breath, a last shudder, a last glimpse of sunlight through trees, then-

Dull, numb. Blissful emptiness.

Rest, now. Nothing to feel. No ground beneath, or sky above. Interminable black, and a feeling of soaring through it.

Then-

Slammed back into the body, confused, compressed, blind.

Then-

Hunger.

***

Hunger lifts from the spine and propels it forward, the body, in uncoordinated jerks that make it stumble. The memory returns to the muscle, the jerks smooth into slow, questing movement.

Hunger is the sole drive, coupled with the desire, the need, to propagate the control from flesh to flesh. It can’t otherwise be sustained. It, or what rides with it. The hunger begins as an ache that sharpens into a demand to be recognized. It tears through the abdomen, up to the brain, where electrical impulse fires and commands. The emptiness is all inside, a void, a pit that will suck it down into itself if it is not shored up.

It must find another. One not like itself, one where the blood still pumps hot through the veins to nourish the muscle and warm the skin.

There – scent, like a small, soft beacon. Movement, fast, and the drive to match the speed, bring down the kill. Sharp noises, loud and shrill, but it won’t be distracted, and it can’t stop.

Bringing the other down doesn’t take long. It’s small, but it will shore up the void for now.

Sated, bloated, content.

But something strange begins to happen. With the kill, it becomes aware of the wetness of the blood. The texture of skin and muscle. The weight of the kill in its…hands. It suddenly has names for these things.

It suddenly has a name for itself.

For herself.