Adrenal Insufficiency

The following micro fiction was written in response to the Mother Combs Campfire Challenge. Write a horror story within 75 - 250 words. You can find all the details here.

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Adrenaline prepares us to fight or run away. Our pupils constrict for better focus. Heart rate increases to get more oxygen to our muscles so we can use them in a pinch. Our hair stands up on edge to make us look bigger, back from a time when that mattered.

What happens, though, before our adrenal glands act? That split second between the horrifying and the adrenaline kicking in?

There was a man who feared being bored more than anything else. He constantly sought perils to make adrenaline. For his latest thrills, he lost himself in a dark forest, barefoot.

He tread tentatively, not knowing what was underfoot. He heard scurrying of unseen animals and fluttering from unseen insects. He knew there were poisonous things here. He would guess at what was near by its escape noises.

That was a rodent. Was that a cicada? There was a swoop, probably a bat? Although something might bite or sting or even kill him, he made a game of it. But he was bored.

Then he heard a rustling in the brush. It broke tree limbs as it hissed toward him. It made gutteral sounds, not prudent warnings, but willful threats. He stopped.

His adrenal glands failed.

Something unseen attacked. He was pummeled violently; his skin was shredded. Teeth tore his face from his skull. He was eaten slowly from body part to body part.

What scared him most was that he had run out of adrenaline. He was bored to death.