Eat or Be Eaten

I remember the good old days, when fewer people suffered. I was one of them. I was blessed to live in bliss, with a beautiful house and a great family. I lost my wife following the attempt at a fourth addition to our family. The two of us and four kids were always her dream, but the fourth one was the death of her. Her pregnancy triggered Leukemia, and they had to abort our baby. It was trying times for all of us, but when her suffering finally stopped, it made the kids and I closer. She passed away peacefully, and though our lives became a bit harder, we were all happy that she was no longer in pain. We called ourselves the Hippos, because the kids were always hungry, there were four of us, and the Hungry Hungry Hippos was our favorite board game to play together. I bought all of them a gold, heart shaped locket. Inside was our last picture as a family, my wife included, and none of the kids ever let it leave their person. Aside from that my life was still blissful. My job was steady, my kids were well behaved and starting to be successful, and the government kept us in the dark on pretty much everything. It kept me stress free for a while I will say, but it was what made me unprepared when the New World started.

It was February 23rd, 2158, when I started to see things change. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and all of the grocery stores were closed. I live in Little Cayman, the smallest of the Cayman Islands, so I was pretty much able to drive to every grocery store on the island within a few hours. We had to eat canned food that night.

On February 26th, 2158, when the announcement was made. The fourth World War had started, because countries were fighting over ownership of farmland. The population was just over 26 Billion at the time, and this was the last time it was documented. Apparently, due to the amount of people buried in the ground, many places had run out of land for its deceased. Bodies were now being dumped in the water, and polluting it even more than it already was. Due to the bodies in the ground, plants were not growing, and animals were not eating as much. Due to the bodies in the Ocean, sea life was literally decaying, and most seafood was inedible. Food was at a premium everywhere, and it was a power struggle to the point where, well, countries were ready to go to war over it. This time though, it was every country for themselves.

On March 19th, 2158, the first Nuclear strike occurred. The United States sent a Nuclear Missile to Australia, and it would only get worse. I watched the News with Liza, my youngest child, and the only one that still lived at home. I assured her that it would be okay, but she seemed rather numb to it already. My oldest child, Daliah, had moved out 4 years prior when she turned 21. She moved to Italy to pursue her dreams as a visual artist, because she considered Italy the “Mecca.” Tyler, my only son, decided to go to college in the United States, California to be exact, to play baseball. He hoped to play professionally one day, but things had to change for that to happen.

On April 2nd, 2158, Tyler called me to tell me that hackers in the United States were hacking cell phones to find people’s locations. They were tracking people down, killing, and eating them. They were eating people for Hell’s sake! He said he would be abandoning his phone soon, and he wanted to come home, and I welcomed it, but that was the last I heard from him. That same day I called Daliah, and asked her how things were going in Italy. She told me that people were eating people there as well! Cannibalism was spreading and I didn’t like it, but there was not much that I could do about it. She told me she would come home if she could find a flight, but that was the last I heard from her as well.

I stopped keeping track of days, because I spent lots of my time searching for food, and tended to stay up for days at a time. Liza asked me if she could leave to stay with her boyfriend, because he had a bunch of canned food and his house was on the beach, away from people. I wanted to tell her yes, it might have been better for her, but I didn’t trust anyone to take care of my little girl besides myself. She ran away eventually, and my life fell apart. I had no contact with any of my children, in a world where nothing was stable.

The television no longer works, and I don’t know if it’s because the cable wires have melted and fallen onto the streets, or because people are no longer working for the news networks. Money no longer has any value, and theft is a common skill. You cannot trade for food, I have tried, and nobody will even tell whether they have food or not. Last night I looked outside my window, and a random woman with grey hair was eating an arm, less than five feet from the carcass of my longtime neighbor. Cannibalism has reached little Cayman, and my mind has been telling me that If I don’t become a part of it, I’ll end up becoming a part of it, nonconsensually. A Cuban man has set up a tent in my front yard. At first I didn’t know if it would be smart to try speaking to him.

This morning I heard the Cuban man kicking down my door. I had no choice but to let myself be known. “I have no food!” I yelled before the door busted open. I showed him my hands to show him that there was nothing in them. He pointed a Machete in my direction, “Where are your weapons?” He asked with a very stern voice. I told him I had none. He slowly lowered his machete before signaling me to come with him. He was a muscular man, with an athletic build, and there were multiple scars on both of his arms. He spoke to me as soon as I stepped off of the porch “I know a place where we can find you some knives. One condition: Anything you kill, we split.” I was taken back before I responded, “I don’t eat people, and I’m not leaving my house permanently.” The man chuckled, and looked at me with a conniving smile. “Not people, animals.” the man said, “And if you want to live, you might wanna consider not staying immobile.”

He was right, and it was about time I started looking to find my kids. I looked back one last time, and saw my son’s first catching mitt. I wanted to take it, but I told myself that leaving meant there would be more memories with him, so I left it.

The man took me on a walk for about 45 minutes, to a house that I had never seen before. I had been around the entire island, this house must have been new. We went around back to a shed, and he pulled a Machete out of it. He handed it to me, and we left that house, but we headed in the opposite direction of my house. “Where are you taking me now?” I asked. “To find food.” he replied, and I followed without any more questions. I had not eaten in days, and until that moment I had not even realized it. He put his arm in front of me to stop my movement, then pointed forward. I looked ahead and saw the grey haired woman that ate my neighbor. She was rummaging through trash and he started to sneak up behind her. I sat back to watch, but before he could reach her, she turned around and grabbed him. As they started to wrestle around I ran their way. I grabbed her off of him, and she jumped on me. I looked at her face, her rotted teeth, her palish grey skin, her grey hair, she looked like a prototypical zombie. She wasn’t dead though, that was until the Cuban man grabbed her by her neck and slammed her into the concrete. I heard her cry out words for the first time “No, please, I can help you!” and those were her last ones. With one hard strike he took the Machete to her neck and cut her head off. He was catching his breath and I asked him, “Have you ever thought about doing what she did… the cannibalism thing?” He smiled. “I knew you’d come around.” he said.

He told me to cut her up while he looked through her backpack. I had no experience preparing a body for eating, so I started off trying to separate the upper body from the lower. I chopped down hard on what I thought to be her waist, but something exploded in the direction of her legs. He shook his head at me then let out a loud sigh. “You can’t cut open the stomach dude, the acid makes everything uneatable.” I looked at him with sorrow. I didn’t know. “Luckily She had some beef in her bag. I can eat beef raw and not get sick.” I was relieved. I walked toward him, with my hand outstretched. He pointed his machete at my face again, stopping my motion. “I can kill you just as quickly as I found you,” he said. “But what about my half?” I asked. He chuckled again, “I said everything that you found. Everything above the stomach on that woman is salvageable, you better figure something out over there.”

I felt it was time. I was conforming to the New World. I was becoming a cannibal, and I was just about to eat a human for the first time. As I crouched down to get ready to cut this woman up, I looked toward her stomach. A gold locket, heart shaped. My heart dropped. I took my shirt off to grab the locket with. I tried my best to open the locket through the cloth of the shirt. It took me a bit, but it popped open. There we were. My family, happy and smiling. I looked at my wife’s smiling eyes. Never did she want us to switch places, she always said that childbirth showed her that she could endure all the pain for the both of us. At this moment, though, I was not sure which of us had suffered more. Tears filled my eyes. One of my hippos was no longer with us. I didn’t even know which one, but the worst part of it was, I could not even tell the other hippos that it happened. I no longer had an appetite.