The knell of the forbidden elders' hunger resonated in John's lugubrious thoughts. He knew its eerie call like the intimate touch of a dreamscape harlot. The unyielding yearning had been nailed to his soul from the moment he had been unceremoniously yanked into this decimated bitter world.

   His weary eyes fixated upon his freshly deceased father. Three days slumber within the arms of death had drained most of the vitality from Drey's flesh. Most of it now pooled, in bruised violet ponds, at the tips of his fingers and toes. The fragrant black atmosphere of decay choked the miserable one room hovel.

   After whisking his mother off to the Shadowlands, the pestilence had returned three months later to claim his sister. Now, barely six months after the death of his sister, the ravenous virus had satiated itself once more and John had to wonder why he had yet to succumb to its lethal charms.

   John's wandering ruminations returned to the incessant longing in his gut. He felt the saliva welling in his mouth as he stared at his father's partially exposed arm. He struggled with the salacious craving to once again consume the flesh of his own kind. An obscene practice exiled from society, along with its followers, many millennia ago.

   Expulsion of these primeval practices of eating one's own kind had been administered by the deified Riah. He was a prophet from ancient lore who had seized control of a once thriving civilization and slowly brought it to utter ruin through his teachings. Yet the "good people" who still followed him in these days of desolation would never dare to even whisper such blasphemy.

   The "good people", with their blind faith and sheep-like existences, had come to murder the very world that nurtured them into being. Riah's contrived dogma had led them to overpopulation as well as other blatant exploitations of their surroundings. In the prime of their destructive phase, long before John had joined the parade of misery, death had visited swiftly. She had snipped off the productive lives of billions with one clean stroke of her scythe. When her culling of the masses had reached completion, an estimated mere three million were all that remained.

   Yet the frigid sweep of her harvest of lives had left the elders, who resided along the borders of most crumbling towns and cities, untouched. The elders, who since epochs long forgotten, had consumed the flesh of their own people. In fact, it was an honor among them to be the sacrifice that supplied sustenance for their ostracized sect.

   John's thought's traveled down the lonely narrow path that led his memories back to the afternoon on which his sister, Illiya, had perished. He had been foraging in the bleak garden, behind their decrepit shanty, for whatever meager vegetables he could find. Like a fly hovering on the cusp of winter, Illiya had shambled sluggishly out of the cloth covered archway that served as a door to the shack.

   "I smell it," she had wheezed painstakingly. "I smell the hunger in you. Does father know? He has always suspected." She had smiled weakly with demented glee as he had begun to fidget with the rusty garden spade.

   "The plague makes you say such nonsense!" he had replied in defense and had averted his eyes from her gaze that had become dull and slimy with sickness.

   "Kill me John," she had begged tugging with her wasted hands on his tattered sweater. "Kill me and we both reap a small gift. I receive death and you receive meat. I know you long for it!"

   She had quarreled with him and coddled him for most of that afternoon as she sought to validate the argument for her necessary demise. She'd exposed the swelling abscesses on her waist that had been encrusted with the putrid blood of disease.

   "I'm going to die soon anyway!" she had finally screamed as she had grown increasingly frustrated with John's refusals. "And what do you care if you poison yourself with my flesh? You want to die and leave this misery as much as I do. Satisfy your curiosity John!"

   Eventually he had given in to her hysterical coaxing. He'd told her to lie on the ground and she had implored him to make it quick with minimal suffering. He'd used the new rake his father had proudly procured just a month prior. She had closed her eyes as he had raised the rake high and, with as much force as his emaciated body could muster, he'd embedded the prongs in her tiny throat. Her body had emitted an insignificant spasm before the stillness of stone had come to nest in her dead muscles.

   He had eaten only a small piece of her arm when his father had returned from his monthly trip to collect rations at the town center. When Drey had discovered John in the backyard avidly chewing on a tiny scrap of his sister's flesh, a mask of silent fear had woven itself around his usually apathetic composure.

   He had spoken not a word to his son as he had calmly, but firmly, pushed him away from Illiya's corpse. He had carefully scooped her off the cold arid ground and had carried her to the ghost of a deteriorated willow tree under which he had quickly buried her remains.

   No words were spoken between father and son from that day forward. Drey died in silence six months after his first born daughter. The plague had slowly eaten away at him as well, although his suffering had been veiled by soundless pride and the newfound distrust of his son.

   As the curtain of dawn drew its warm orange sheathe across the horizon, John noticed the glass sitting on the crumbling window sill, near his father's rotting body, was no longer filled with the typical murky water. Instead, the water had somehow purified itself and was completely pristine. As he continued to stare the water began to swirl softly in the glass, creating a tiny mesmerizing whirlpool.

   "Beautiful when it's clear, isn't it?" the spectral voice came from behind him wrapping its eerie tendrils around his spine and causing him to chase away a violent shiver. Terrified by what he prayed was a mirage of his demented state, he spun around to face his visitor.

   Illiya stood near the tattered entrance to the shanty with a strange naked male who possessed an androgynous visage. Their skin shimmered with ever changing metallic rainbows of color. John swore, as he stared at their shimmering bodies, he saw faces appear momentarily in their swirling gem-like flesh. Faces that screamed, smiled, and winked at him sinisterly.

   "You thought you were the only one with the hunger," Illiya scoffed as she and the man moved closer to John. "Did you think the elders would come and save you one day?"

   "How are you here?" John whispered through tears that housed his trepidation in their tiny droplets.

   "You injected me with your longing when you fed on me," she explained disdain dripping from her voice like the acid from a viper's tongue. "It kept me alive and I started to hear the voices. I was strong John, stronger then you've ever been. I answered the voices and they came for me. Now that I am one of them, I can have whatever I want."

   John stumbled backwards and began to chatter incoherently as he felt a vice like grip close around his hand. A storm of numbing shock struck his heart as he looked down to see his father rising from his chair.

   "Don't fight this son," his father's skin began to take on a myriad of hues as he rose from the splintered wooden chair he had died in. "Come with us to the table."

   "No!" John squirmed feebly as his sister and the man joined his father in restraining him. His vigor to fight waned easily under their preternatural strength.

   "It will hurt tremendously," Illiya giggled wickedly as they heaved John on top of the rickety sliver laden table.

   "But it will be worth it," his mother assured him as she entered the shack carrying four black scourges and a peculiar silver box. "Think of the nourishment you will give to us."

   His mother handed the silver box to Illiya and from it she produced a handful of thick iron spikes. She handed one spike to each of the standing occupants of the room and they proceeded to cluster around the immobilized John.

   Scalding agony the likes of which he had never experienced sliced its way through his hands and feet as he was fastened to the table with the spikes. He screamed and the four hovering about him smiled at one another in unison.

   "Ahhh, John," his mother sighed as she passed around the scourges. "Your torture will make the meat so much sweeter."

   "Why?" John bellowed as the whips sank their angry thongs into his flesh. "Why are you doing this to me?"

   "Survival of the fittest," his sister breathed into his ear just before she tore it free from his skull with her teeth. "You were the weakest. The weakest become the elders' prey."

   "Remember, John," the man who entered with Illiya finally spoke in his guttural hollow voice. "This is an honor."

   As the elder leaned over to feast upon John's bloody arm, a caul of unconscious respite cradled their young victim's brain and led him to the borders of the blessed reaper.