“I can’t believe you just did that, you humongous animal!” Dr. Will Cameron shouted in sobs as he looked up and watched his gigantic colleague, Dr. John Gula, licking human blood off his fingertips. “How could you just…pick up…Dr. Sanders and…eat her?”
“I was hungry,” thirty-foot-high Dr. Gula said, then belched.
“You were hungry?” Cameron said. “That’s all you can say, you cannibalistic monster!”
“It must be one of the bizarre side effects of Aggrandizin, the drug we were going to test on the diseased fish around this island…”
“And you’re still hungry, after all those apes you ate,” Cameron said, looking up at Gula in horror. “Making you grow to that monstrous size.”
“Another…surprising…side effect of the drug,” Gula said, pulling up the tarpaulin he had wrapped around his waist to cover his nakedness. “And you know I had to eat the drugged apes, to stop them from eating us. One of them almost got you.”
“I’d rather we were eaten by the apes then to see this nightmare as it’s unfolding! I keep hoping I’ll wake up from a nightmare, but this…insane…moment seems all too real!”
“I find it as hard to believe as you do, Cameron.”
“We were only supposed to dose marine animals with the Aggrandizin, to speed up their ability to heal wounds and recover from disease, after the exposure to the pollution and toxic chemicals surrounding the island. How did this simple experiment turn into such a nightmare?”
“That baby shark grew in size, and hunger. It bit Sanders, she bumped into me, and I accidentally injected myself with the drug. I already explained that to both of you.”
“How much of the drug did you dose yourself with? Ten times the amount we gave that shark?”
“It must have been at least about ten times the amount we were going to dose the fish with,” Gula said, without a trace of emotion.
“And you ate all those apes!”
“It was either that, or they were going to eat us. We saw how ravenous they got after they, it’s more than safe to assume, broke into the phials of Aggrandizin in the boat, and how they grew like me, each time after they ate something. We saw how insatiable their hunger got, like mine, even to the point of eating what no animal of their species would normally ever eat, including flesh. We saw how they ate most of the plant and animal life here…”
“And you ate the rest, and Dr. Sanders, just now!”
“I couldn’t help myself, Cameron! Try to understand! I’m not any happier about it than you are.”
“You don’t seem to give a shit, John!”
“You don’t know the hunger that Aggrandizin causes!”
“I don’t wanna know!” Cameron bawled. “How could this have happened? How could we have gotten this drug so horribly wrong? This is like something out of a B science fiction movie. How could a mere drug cause someone to grow into a giant, of all things, and to hunger so much, that he’d eat apes, and another human being?”
Speaking of hunger, Gula was looking down at Cameron and licking his lips.
“John, don’t look at me like that,” Cameron said, backing up a few steps, with trembling legs.
“I can’t help it.” Gula was drooling as his eyes explored Cameron’s meaty body.
“John, only I can fit into the boat to go back out and get help for you. There’s no more food for you to eat here.”
“I’ll go fishing by hand in the ocean after I eat you.”
“The massive pollution in the water surrounding this island means that you won’t be able to eat any edible marine life here,” Cameron insisted. “That’s why we chose this island to do our experiments: to dose the sick fish, and hopefully save them from the poisons in the water. You can’t eat the marine life here. You’ll get sick.”
“The drug dose I took should be strong enough to repel any toxins from the dead fish near here.” He licked his lips again at Cameron, who shuddered at the sight.
“The toxic chemicals dumped in the water are so poisonous that even your Aggrandizin dosage, as excessive as it was, surely won’t be strong enough to counteract the toxicity of any dead fish floating around here.”
“You don’t know that for sure. You’re only saying that because you want to believe it. But even if what you say is right, I’ll go further out into the water. I’m getting larger and larger. I could conceivably wade far enough, with my gigantic size, to get past the polluted part.”
“You can’t swim, by your own admission, and the toxic chemicals are already spread out so far into the ocean around here that, even at your size, you won’t be able to wade out far enough to get past the pollution surrounding the island. The ring of pollution is like a thick donut, and this island is like the small hole in the centre, there’s so much donut out there.”
Gula licked his lips and said, “Donut.”
“OK, bad comparison,” Cameron said, shaking spastically at how Gula’s eyes were staring at him, appraising his tastiness. “Look, you need me alive to sail the boat back to the African mainland and get help. Just hang on, be patient, control your hunger, for God’s sake.”
Gula’s hand reached down to pick up Cameron, who dodged the huge fingers and started running away. “You can’t catch me; how can you expect to catch any fish by hand in the ocean?”
“I’ll practice and get better.” He reached for running Cameron and missed again.
“If you eat me,…you’ll have…no food left.” Cameron raced for the leafless trees that Gula and the apes had already fed on. “What will you do…after eating me…eat yourself? You eat, you grow…and only get hungrier. Aaaah!”
Gula grabbed him and picked him up.
“The tarp is slipping off your waist!” Cameron said, hoping to distract Gula and make him let go.
“So what?” Gula said as he brought Cameron up to his face. “Nobody else is here to see me with my cock and balls hanging out.”
“After you eat me, the tarp won’t…be big enough…to cover you! You’ll rip out of it…the way you…ripped out…of your clothes…after eating…those apes!”
“Nobody will be here to see me.”
“Exactly!” Cameron shouted. “Without me, you’ll have…no one to help you! You’ll be trapped…alone…on this island! With no more food!”
Gula opened his mouth wide enough to bite off Cameron’s head. Cameron put his hands on Gula’s upper lip, pushing away to keep from going in his mouth.
“Only I…can help you…find food!” Cameron shouted while kicking at Gula’s chin and swinging away from his mouth. “The water’s…toxicity…will damage…your skin…if you wade out…to find fish. The Aggrandizin…won’t be strong enough…to heal you. If you eat me, you’ll die!”
“Yeah, I probably will.”
“Then, why won’t…you resist…the temptation…to eat me? Unh!”
“I can’t help it,” Gula said, grabbing Cameron’s legs and aiming the feet at his mouth. “It’s in my nature to keep eating. I’m the scorpion, and you’re the frog, like in that old fable.”
He put Cameron’s legs in his mouth, up to his thighs. Cameron was screaming and kicking at Gula’s uvula, and at the roof of his mouth.
“No! John, don’t!”
He felt Gula’s sharp incisors bite through his waist, cutting through his skin and muscles, and cracking the bones. He screamed as he saw the blood spraying everywhere. His now-separated upper half hung loose and shook; his eyes and mouth were wide open in horrific disbelief. He passed out.
Gula was chewing, cracking the bones and sighing with relief that his hunger was being satisfied…for the moment. He felt his body vibrating, as it always did whenever he ate something since his Aggrandizin dosage. He grew by about a foot.
He looked down. Cameron was right. The tarpaulin had fallen from his waist and onto the sand on the beach. A breeze was caressing his balls.
He gulped down Cameron’s masticated bottom half, licked the blood from his lips, and belched out loud.
“Goodbye, Cameron. Sorry about this.”
His mouth was now big enough to stuff in, with the greatest of ease, all of the upper half of Cameron’s body, so he did.
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
Blood splattered all over his face. The bald head of the chubby man looked like that of a giant baby’s having eaten tomato sauce and soaked red all over his cheeks. The white tarpaulin would be his diaper. How appropriate.
Gulp. Burp!
He wiped the blood off his face and licked his hand. To see the day when he would actually find cannibalism to be appetizing…what a shock. His body vibrated again, and he grew another foot or so.
He picked up the tarp and wrapped it around his waist. “You were wrong about one thing, Cameron. It’s still large enough to cover my dick and ass.”
Then, he felt another pang of hunger.
“Oh, shit. What do I do now?”
He walked over to the edge of the shore, where the filthy water washed up pieces of plastic and dead fish. The water was a mix of blue and yellow from all the toxic waste in it.
“Eww,” he groaned at the sight of the dead fish’s unnatural colours. As hungry as I am, he thought, there’s no way in hell that I’m eating any of those.
He looked far out to sea. Cameron was right again: the pollution went so far out that Gula couldn’t see any pure blue water anywhere beyond the filth. Even at his enlarged size, he still couldn’t see far enough.
I wonder if I can see the shark out there, he thought, straining his eyes. I’ll bet it’s gotten really huge by now. If I were to see it, I might consider going out there, trying to swim and risking drowning, then eating it if I caught it…or letting it eat me, even. I can’t imagine wanting to continue living like this. A part of me actually wouldn’t mind drowning or being eaten by the shark.
His stomach was growling.
To think, that shark was a baby, swimming just outside the periphery of the ring of pollution. We caught it in a net, Sarah Sanders held its wiggling body, and I stuck the needle of Aggrandizin in its side. I dosed it with a generous amount. Then it bit her on the arm.
The hunger in his gut was getting painful.
She screamed and jerked her arm. Her elbow nudged my arm, and I stabbed the needle into my left wrist. I accidentally pushed the plunger all the way in and injected a huge dose of the drug into my arm. Neither she nor Cameron noticed what I’d done, they were so busy fussing with the shaking, growing shark and throwing it back into the water, then worrying about treating her bite wound. Cameron said the baby shark had already grown to almost twice its size, just from the one bite.
Another stomach growl.
Back in the water, it caught a fish in its teeth and ate it. It grew some more. We saw it eat a few more fish; now it had grown to about the size of a great white shark…and like at the end of that old Spielberg movie, it attacked our boat.
Another hunger pang.
Cameron got out his binoculars, and after about half a minute of frantically searching for somewhere we could go to save ourselves from the shark, he spotted this island. Getting here would have been the fastest way to get to safety from the shark, which we saw eating more and more fish, and growing and growing, and trying to ram a hole in the side of our boat. We turned on the motor and raced over here. We’d already eaten all of the food on the boat, so I was holding back as best I could…as I am now—oh, this is getting difficult! Anyway, when we got here, I ran over to the trees and wolfed down as many of the leaves as I could stuff into my mouth. Cameron and Sanders were shocked at my behaviour. They left the boat and ran into the woods with me. Some apes must have gotten into our boat, found the phials of Aggrandizin, broke the glass, and drank from it; because soon after, they were growing and eating like the baby shark and me.
His hunger was getting unbearable.
As I, grabbing at leaves and grass to eat, was being chased by Cameron and Sanders, the apes that must have had the drug ran back into the woods with us. They ran around eating leaves and other animals, too. We ended up eating all the leaves off the trees on this tiny island. I was ripping out of my clothes. One of the enlarged, ravenous apes jumped on Cameron; in its new taste for flesh-eating, it would have eaten him, but I grabbed it and ate it. Again, Cameron and Sanders were shocked at my behaviour. I fought off the other attacking apes, and ate them.
Another stomach growl. “Unh!” he grunted.
After having feasted on the rest of the island’s apes, plants and insects, Gula continued in his thoughts, I’d grown so big, I ripped out of my clothes. Sanders gave me the tarpaulin to cover myself with, then…I…ate her. How could I have done that? But…how could I not have…
Oh, the hunger…
He was shaking…gasping and wheezing…
“Aaaaaah!” he screamed, running into the water. It was slimy and disgusting. He grabbed a large shark’s corpse and tried eating it out of desperation. It tasted so awful, he spat it out within a second. He waded out as far as he could go. The…liquid…more like piss than water, had reached his chin. Waves splashed on his face. Then he remembered: “I…can’t…swim.”
He turned around and rushed back, plodding in the water and almost falling into it, till he finally got back onto the land, soaking in caustic filth and sobbing in despair. The Aggrandizin managed to heal his skin reasonably well, but his stomach was growling so much, it was like having a huge second mouth…or many little mouths…in his belly.
“For God’s sake,” he said in gasps and sobs. “We made Aggrandizin…to make animals stronger, more immune…to disease and injury, not to make them…become giant gluttons!” We didn’t see any of these side effects during the lab experiments on the rats, he thought. Granted, we gave them very small doses, unlike with the baby shark (or me, for that matter). We weren’t in charge of feeding them afterwards, and we came out here quickly after what seemed successful experiments. I guess I was too proud to wait and see if there would be any undesirable after-effects. I just saw quick healing, and we all jumped to conclusions. There was an email or two from the people in the lab; we never got around to reading them—maybe the messages were a warning about such after-effects. I don’t know—it’s too late for me now.
He looked down at his arms.
They looked tasty.
He was salivating.
“Come on, John,” he said. “You can’t be serious.”
The growing happens only after eating, he thought as he looked at that meaty flesh. My powers of healing, particularly strong after my large dose, could compensate for the bite wounds, at least to enough of an extent that, if a boat comes by, I can be taken away and saved.
His stomach growled again. He was shaking.
“I can’t take this anymore. It’s crazy, but I have to do it.”
He bit off a huge chunk off of his left forearm. Blood sprayed everywhere.
“Aaaaah!” he screamed in clenched teeth as he began chewing.
The pain was excruciating, but the delicious flesh was satisfying in a way that made him forget the throbbing.
He swallowed. He felt the flesh enter his stomach, filling in the void.
“Aaaaah!” he sighed. Thanks to the Aggrandizin, the pain was subsiding, the blood clotted faster, and he felt every encouragement that the wound would soon just be a crater in his arm. He felt those familiar vibrations, and grew a tiny bit.
He enjoyed a few fleeting minutes of relief from his hunger. The pain in his arm disappeared.
“Wow,” he said. “That was a fast recovery.”
Then he felt another hunger pang.
“And that was fast, too,” he said. “Fuck!” I can’t just keep taking bites out of myself…but what else am I going to eat? My shit when I crap? (Funny thing: I’ve eaten so much, yet I never piss or shit…why is that? Is it another side effect of the Aggrandizin? What kind of bizarre voodoo drug did we synthesize in that lab?) “Am I drugged, or possessed of a devil?”
He looked at his left arm, where the freshly healed crater was. Then he looked at the flesh right next to it, just before his elbow.
Maybe a huge ship will sail by and find me here, he thought. Hope, hope.
Another pang…a sharp, stinging one.
He opened his mouth wide, and his head dove onto that arm.
“Unh!” he grunted as he sank his teeth into that coveted arm-flesh. His teeth dug deep enough to reach the bone, several square inches of which were exposed after his ripping the flesh off, spraying blood all over the place and making him groan muffled whimpers of pain as he chewed.
Again, when the flesh hit his stomach, the more important pain was gone…for the moment.
He trembled, then grew another tiny bit.
With my growing size, I should be more visible to ships, he thought, massaging his throbbing arm as it healed. Then again, I’m not growing as much as I was before. It must be because I’m eating myself instead of eating other living things.
Speaking of eating, he wanted more flesh. He felt like a pregnant woman whose belly was a womb with half a dozen hungry fetuses aching for food.
“I’m getting used to the pain,” he said as he looked at his upper left arm. “If only I could get used to the hunger.”
He bit off the bicep; again, the bite went all the way to the bone. His face was red with blood. He grunted in pain, but indeed, he found it more and more bearable.
His want of flesh continued to grow.
He looked over at his right arm now…and he coveted the flesh he saw.
All I do is want, want, want! he thought. I always want more! I only want more! I can never stop wanting! I’m wanting of flesh on my arms, and I only want to eat more. I have a surplus of want, and a lack of anything to eat other than myself! This is madness!
He bit off a chunk from his right forearm. He was so used to the pain now that he easily ignored it. His body wasn’t growing anymore, though.
The only thing growing now was his hunger. He now felt as though his, so to speak, belly-womb was housing a dozen so-to-speak hungry fetuses instead of half a dozen.
The moments of relief were getting shorter and shorter. Within an hour, he’d ripped off and eaten all of the flesh on his arms. He’d chewed off the flesh on his hands and fingers. All that was left of them were bone and ligaments.
The sharp ends of his finger-bones were useful; he could use them to rip off flesh on parts of his body that he couldn’t reach with his head.
Now that his arm flesh was all gone, he looked down at his legs.
He licked his lips.
Oh, so much meat, he thought.
Without even hesitating anymore, he dug his bony fingers deep into his upper right leg flesh, tore off a huge chunk, right down to the bone, and didn’t seem aware of any pain in his leg as he brought the meat up to his grinning face. He munched on it with manic glee.
No sooner did he gulp it down and feel it hit his thankful stomach, but he felt more hunger pangs.
I’m slowly killing myself, he thought, but I can’t help it. It’s my nature. I’m the scorpion on the scorpion. I’m sitting on my own back, crossing the river and stinging myself.
He tore off a chunk of flesh from his upper left leg and stuffed the bloody mass into his greedy mouth. He chomped on it with a gory grin.
“Mmm!” He swallowed and belched.
Next, he ripped off his left calf and stuffed it in.
I am so high in protein! he thought, then let out a macabre laugh.
He shrank a little.
He ripped off his right calf and ate it. His hunger went on in an unbroken line—no more brief moments of relief, not even for a few seconds. He dug his fingers into the remaining flesh on his legs, tore it all off, and ate it. He shrank some more.
Within another hour, all four of his limbs were just bone and ligaments. His hunger, the only thing growing, was growing far faster than he was shrinking.
He dug his fingers into his cheeks, ripped them off, and ate them. The sight of all of his teeth, in what would have looked like a perpetual grin (were he to have looked at his reflection in the water), made no difference in terms of his facial expression; for if that cheek and lip flesh were to have remained on his face, he’d still have been grinning from ear to ear, his teeth just as fully exposed, he was enjoying his ghoulish meal so much.
The healing effects of the Aggrandizin were still working just enough to keep him alive, but they were abating, fading away little by little. Though his healing was slower, his growing urge to eat overshadowed the pain from the wounds so much that he seemed numb everywhere except in his stomach.
He ripped all the skin off of his face. After eating that, he felt himself shrinking again. He was now just slightly larger than his original size.
He looked out to sea; he saw no ships anywhere.
His stomach was growling, louder and louder, like a thousand voices inside, whining for food.
He felt his energy beginning to wane, too.
With effort, he ripped off the flesh on his chest and ate it. In his skeletal hands, he cupped the blood, as best he could, to stop it from dripping on the sand, then he drank it.
Still, he just got hungrier and hungrier.
He tore the flesh off his neck, all the way around from the front to the back. His neck bone, larynx, and esophagus were showing. He ate the flesh, chewing with lethargic slowness.
He looked down at his chest, where his upper ribcage was showing. Though he’d shrunk all the way back to his original size, his stomach was bloated with all the rest of his eaten body. Instead of being rotund, though, it oddly had a number of bumps on it.
Yet still, his stomach felt as if empty.
He ripped the flesh off of his buttocks and ate it. Then, amazingly, his cock and balls became appetizing, so he tore them off and ate them, his hunger so severe that he gave no thought to how disturbing it would be to lose them. There is no castration anxiety when one is as famished as he was, apparently.
He was sitting in a lake of reddened sand. All that was left of his body were his skull-like face, with his eyeballs showing because he’d ripped off and eaten his eyelids, his exposed skeleton—his ribcage being the only cover of his heart and lungs—and the skin on his back.
He couldn’t bear the sight of his lower body. He’d have shuddered to think what his face must have looked like in the reflection in the water. What have I reduced myself to? he wondered. And the Aggrandizin is still keeping me alive…how?…even though I can feel my life slowly fading away. My energy is draining from me, little by little. The only energy I seem to have in large amounts is in my guts.
He looked out to the polluted sea…still, no ships to be seen anywhere out there.
He looked back down at his bloody, mutilated body, at the protrusions in his belly.
“There is nothing good to see, anywhere,” he said. “And still, I’m hungry.” His bony index fingers stabbed into his eyes. “Unghh!” He pulled them out of their sockets, each pull making a popping sound, then he popped them into his mouth.
He wanted to sob, but he had only blood for tears pouring out of the sockets.
His stomach felt about to burst, it was so stuffed.
Still, he hungered.
He began scratching his back for more flesh to eat, his diminishing strength making those scratches slower and shallower. As he stuffed his bony face with the bloody flesh, he felt the strain on his stomach.
And he was still hungry.
After ripping off all the flesh he could reach on his back and eating it, he tore into his guts, ripped out his pancreas, bits of intestine, and his kidneys. He stuffed the meat in his mouth. It tasted awful, but it gave some relief—not much—to his hunger.
How am I still alive? he wondered. I can feel myself slowly weakening, slowly dying, but I should have already been dead long ago. Was the dose I gave myself really so strong as to sustain me in this extremity?
His hunger pangs continued to grow, even as his energy was fading away.
I don’t wanna live anymore, he thought. That’s for sure. Maybe I can speed up my death. Destroying my vitals should do it. The apes that had the Aggrandizin died soon enough when I ate them; surely I can die soon enough if I keep eating myself, right to the bone. Surely the Aggrandizin won’t keep me going forever.
He dug his hand under and behind his ribcage and tore out a lung. He ate it. Fantastically, he was still conscious and breathing. He tore out and ate the other lung: he still lived. He couldn’t believe it—the drug apparently made breathing unnecessary to live. He ripped out his heart and ate it. The Aggrandizin was, to some extent, counteracting all of these mutilations, though his life was ever so slowly fading away.
Has the drug made me immortal? Am I hallucinating in my fading consciousness? Is that how these impossibilities are possible?
He felt a jiggling of those protrusions in his stomach—not the rumblings of hunger so much as the sensation of what seemed to be small living beings in there.
Am I immortal, or are there immortal beings inside me? Has the drug resurrected and regenerated all the bits of flesh that I’ve digested? Is Aggrandizin making us all immortal, me and those inside me? Or, in my delirium, am I hallucinating their existence?
With his energy level so low now, he couldn’t lift his arms to rip off any more body parts to stuff into his mouth. Yet his hunger kept growing…especially the hunger of whatever had awoken and was growing and fidgeting around inside his belly.
Those things were poking bubbly bumps against his belly, making wavelike movements along the surface of his skin there. After a while of this continued pressure, one of the things poked a hole in his belly, spitting blood out of the opening.
It kept pushing, ripping a larger hole and spraying out more blood. The rest of his body lay still and, finally, he was dead. The thing pushed its way out of the hole, followed by all of the others, one by one, until the bloody belly lay empty on the soaking red sand.
Those things, kept alive by the Aggrandizin that they all shared, were blood-covered blobs, lumpy but basically spherical, with mouths that had serrated, teeth-like protrusions all along the edges. They looked like gruesome, deformed 3-D Pac-men, each about the size of a tennis ball. They rolled out over the sand in a blind search for food, their mouths flapping open and shut without ever tiring, while making grotesque grunting sounds: “Ngah-ngah-ngah-ngah!…” They quickly turned beige as more and more sand grains stuck to the blood on them.
Some rolled out to sea, eating the plastic and dead fish. They would die of food poisoning minutes after their exposure to the impurities in the water. Others rolled into the woods, eating the few remaining blades of grass and leaves on the trees. As they ate, they grew somewhat.
By the time they’d eaten everything alive on the island, they too found their energy waning as their insatiability only strengthened. Instinctively, as they had sensed while hibernating inside Gula’s guts, they knew that eating each other was futile. Each of them about the size of a medicine ball now, they just lay on the ground, rocking from side to side as their mouths faced the sky, as if babies wishing to cry out to their mother for something to eat.
All of them were in the middle of the leafless forest, hidden by the trunks of the trees. Night was falling. They were saving what little energy they had left for any possible food that chance might provide. They didn’t make the slightest sound.
Within an hour, the stars and moon offered the only light. A large, lost boat came ashore, filled with about twenty people—adults, elderly, and children.
“Where are we?” a ten-year-old boy among them said as they began disembarking.
“I don’t know,” his mother said. “It stinks here. Pollution in the water…Do I smell blood?”
Everyone got off the boat after a few minutes. Some of them, those who hadn’t smelled the blood, wandered into the woods.
The eating blobs felt the vibrations from all the footsteps. Their mouths curled up into smiles.
Infinite Ocean 