(screaming)
(ominous music)
- [Woman] How long had it been?
It was hard to tell since the change had taken place.
(ominous screeching)
Maybe it was still taking place.
I didn't know.
My thoughts were strange, my cravings stranger.
He wasn't exactly prince Charming, 33.
I know that wasn't his name, but it was the only
defining name I could give him from the torn badge
sewn on what looked like a hospital patient's clothes.
33 looked like a science experiment.
Syringes half filled with some sort
of green elixir stood out all over him.
But he never made any attempt to remove them.
His muscles pulsed out of line
like an elephant hand and his eyes were a bloodshot
universe that had seen it all
but still lead you into total darkness.
Half his face was mangled in some horrible way,
almost melted off it seemed.
But none of that mattered, not to me.
I'm sure I'm no prize myself, whoever I might be.
We'd wandered the woods at the bayou for days,
surviving on small swamp creatures.
I wasn't as decent a hunter as him.
My skills were sharpening though.
My senses growing stronger with each passing day.
We don't talk.
I seemed to be losing the ability to speak each day.
I've never heard him say a word but somehow
we both knew what each other was thinking.
We're connected on some deeper level,
We can see each others memories.
We can even feel each others pain.
We had become one.
I don't remember how we met.
I've even forgotten my name.
Everything is so fuzzy when I think back.
Each thought I had one day is gone by the next.
An empty space left to fill.
Only to be filled by hunger, never ending god awful hunger.
But 33 wasn't lead by hunger.
There was more to his journey.
We weren't just wandering the swamp land for food.
No, he had a direction.
I was piecing it together in our shared thoughts.
I would get these flasheds of images.
A place like a hospital or maybe a lab.
A sign I couldn't make out.
Doctors, nurses, the chair.
33 sitting there strapped in against his will
as a doctor shoved the needle in his arm
against his will pushing in some awful liquid.
33 wasn't always like this.
They made him into this.
I could see his arm distort as the muscles
broke through his skin, his face dissolving
like acid had been poured across it.
Screaming, so much screaming as his body morphed
into the monster he is now.
It was torture.
But the doctors didn't expect the results they got
as my companion was able to free one of his arms.
He then reached over and grabbed a handful of the nearby
syringes and shoved them into his shoulder.
I could never quite tell if he did it to kill himself
or to free himself.
For whatever reason, it didn't matter now.
He was able to tear through the straps of the chair
and just as easily tore through the doctors and a nurse.
It was a massacre.
They brought it on themselves.
The things they did to him.
They deserved so much worse.
He tried to leave and they sent men with guns after him.
They hunted my 33.
My poor 33.
Everyday and night these images would haunt our minds.
His memories were like nightmares.
They were so powerful they would wake me in my sleep
and I would have to wake him to stop them.
But he needed to return.
And with each day, we were getting closer.
But until then, food was what was important.
Luckily, it was in front of us.
They were in front of us.
A couple, a man and woman, food.
This is what food is to me now.
I struggled against my urges,
swallowed back every desire in it, every feeling I felt.
They had no idea the danger that surrounded them
in their cozy campfire.
The hunger that laid just in the shadows.
33 sensed my terror at me realizing what I craved most.
What would satisfy this never ending pit in my stomach,
was human flesh, human blood, human bones.
I was disgusted with myself.
I turned around to run away.
My foot stepped on a branch, breaking it into an echo
across the woods and alerting the prey to our location.
Before they could turn their heads in our direction,
33 was on them.
It was a sight to see.
He was swift and brutish all at the same time.
He went for the man first,
always go for the bigger game first.
They're worth wasting the strength on.
I learnt that from my partner.
The man put up a decent struggle.
He tried to hold him back with strength alone.
He told the woman to run
but she was paralyzed with fear.
As the man struggled with my companion,
it seemed he was getting the advantage over him.
33 pulled a free hand away to one of the syringes
in his arm and pressed down the vial fluid
into his shoulder.
What happened next, was simply incredible.
33 had taken ahold of the man's arm
and nearly torn it entirely off in one pull.
(blood gushing violently and man screaming)
It hung off him like a tattered sleave of a knit shirt.
A couple strips of flesh barely hanging on.
The man screamed in a way I have never heard
anything scream before.
But he still had some kick left.
He swung his remaining fist at 33 only to lose his balance
and head straight into the campfire.
(man screaming)
33 was on him.
Rubbing his face into the burning flames.
He took an empty syringe from his shoulder
and slowly stabbed the man through the ear canal.
(blood gushing violently)
He was not quick.
You could count the seconds go by
watching the needle disappear.
His eyes rolling back in his sockets
as it penetrated his brain.
(blood gushing violently)
I was entranced by it all, watching him
scream horrifying pain.
All I could do was lick my lips in anticipation
for the dinner that would be him.
I couldn't believe my thoughts anymore.
What had happened to me?
Before my thoughts could grow, she struck.
I had been so focused on watching the man
being torn apart, I forgot all about the woman.
While my companion cooked the man's face,
she had found an ax and laid it into my partner's back,
nearly taking his entire shoulder with it.
(blood gushing violently)
It's hard to recall exactly what happened next.
I remember 33 moaning in pain
and then feeling for once, my own rage build.
(heart beating quickly)
My heart beating so loud, I felt it would burst.
And before I knew it, I was on her.
(blood gushing violently) I only recall flashes
of us fighting.
Teeth breaking, nails tearing into flesh,
blood everywhere I could see.
I could taste.
I couldn't tell if this was rage, hunger
or all of the above.
Whatever power she used to wield that ax,
she was now putting on me.
(blood gushing violently) I bit into her neck violently,
tearing a piece of flesh away.
I swallowed it whole and the taste of it
filled me with such passion.
Such strength.
I wanted more.
So much more.
I was tired of playing with my food.
I grabbed the woman by her hair.
She bleeded out so nonsense words.
I couldn't understand anymore.
Probably some form of begging.
I found a nearby dead tree with a pointed branch
sticking to the heavens.
I forced her over to it.
She could tell what was coming.
She had the face of someone who knows they're going to die.
She placed her arms in front of her against the log
to hold me back from pushing that branch through her skull.
But I wanted it more.
(blood gushing violently) Centimeter, by centimeter,
I got her to that branch until it finally pierced
the first layer of her eyeball.
And then slowly sunk all the way back to her brain
and out the other side. (blood gushing violently)
It was mouth-watering watching it all
spill out the other end.
The little bits of brain matter
smeared across the skull fragments.
It was euphoric to witness the meal in front of me.
It was all I could do to tear myself away
from my food to make sure my partner was okay.
I ran over to 33 as he laid across
the now dead man in the flames.
I pulled him from the fire.
I finally for once had the strength to lift him.
It had to be the meat I tore from her neck.
I realized what he needed, flesh.
I reached my hands into the burning man's side
and was able to tear a pound of flesh from him,
exposing all the beauty of his insides
to the woods and my eyes.
I fed the meat to my injured companion.
I could feel him and our connection getting better
with each bite.
He was becoming whole again.
He took the flesh and handed some to me.
We shared it.
I took a large bite.
Blood spilled from my stained lips.
He wiped it away, it was oddly sweet.
In the moment of our bliss and my full belly,
I noticed 33 locked onto something
in the flames of the fire,
something that gave him great trouble.
He was staring at a badge on the man's shirt.
It read Bixby National Labs.
I looked to the woman's lifeless body
and saw that she worse the same badge on her shirt.
Suddenly, a violent flash hit me.
I saw the sign I couldn't make out from my partner's memory,
it read the same, Bixby National Labs.
We were getting closer.
33 grew quiet and stopped eating his food.
Out of nowhere, he let out a deafening howl
full of so much sadness.
It filled the woods around us.
I'd never heard such agony in a voice before.
Just as the echo of his howl died, we heard a rustling.
We were being watched.
We went into our hunters modes, on all fours,
eyes locking in on the sound.
I could smell it in the darkness.
It was familiar.
I heard it take off and we were after it.
(footsteps running swiftly) It was agile.
Sprinting quickly between the trees.
But it was not match for us.
As I closed the distance between us,
I lept through the air and tackled our fresh prey
into a nearby marsh.
The water sprayed over me as I took it down,
making the blood from our previous kills
stain the water around us a fresh red.
I flipped the creature beneath me over
and there, staring back at me with dull eyes,
was a small boy, no more than 10 years old.
Just a poor child that had stumbled
on the wrong campfire.
What a sight we must have been.
Fresh blood from our kills still dripping from our lips.
He trembled beneath me in absolute fear.
Seeing the terror build in this child,
almost feeling something for him.
A sort of emotion I once knew but couldn't place anymore.
Whoever I was, whatever I used to be,
it was gone now and with it, my mercy.
I didn't see a child anymore, I saw our next meal.
Nothing was off limits anymore.
I opened my mouth wide before the boy, ready to eat.
But just before I took a taste, I saw my partner.
I saw the blood from his wound pour down his side.
The flesh may have healed him but,
what if I'm not there to protect him next time?
This journey will only prove to be more dangerous as we go.
I couldn't risk losing him.
(boy screaming) I snarled my teeth
and bit down into the child's shoulder.
It was not a fatal wound.
But one of rebirth.
He rolled violently on the ground
as the change came over him.
As I watched the child seize across the damp
floor of the bayou, another flash of memory came to me.
It was a similar image to the small boy
rolling on the ground in front of me.
But it wasn't the child anymore, it was me.
Something had bitten into my like I had the child, but what?
I reached up to touch my neck where the bite was.
My fingers stroked the outline of a protruding scar.
I tried to keep hold of the memory but it left me
as quick as it came.
My thoughts returned to the boy beneath me.
His shaking subsided.
I smiled to 33 in recognition of our new offspring.
In a few moments, he would be entirely ours,
in a few days he would be entirely like us.
And in our journey ahead, this child would be
a security to my companion and me.
This child, would become family.