I looked down at the rat, at Jeeds, and remembered something.

  Years ago I had been talking to my aunt’s father, Gary. My aunt had a different father than my dad, but my father always considered Gary his real father. He wasn’t a very good father or stepfather.

  He wasn’t a good anything really.

  He was better at the grandfather thing when I was a little kid. This was back when he was a truck driver. He had taken me out on delivery a few times, and had been pretty fun to be around.

  He was extremely problematic later in life, and he terrorized me when I had become a teenager. He had called me Candy Ass and his Little Bitch Boy because I had been a bit of a goth kid with long hair. He was obsessed with ‘manliness’, and never let anyone around him forget it.

  Something changed when I became an adult, and he stopped treating me like shit. By then I had lost all respect for him. It likely had to do with the fact I was basically twice his size, and little to do with him maturing at all.

  The only thing that kept me from hating him fully and viewing him with contempt is knowing he had been through some pretty traumatic shit in Vietnam.

  It put me at odds with the guy, but at the end of the day he chose to terrorize those around him rather than seek help because, ‘men handle their own shit’.

  So, you know, fuck him.

  But I digress.

  One year Trisha and I had been visiting my aunt. Gary was still living in a small camper on their property so he joined us for dinner. Afterwards, we were all sitting around a fire he had made, talking.

  Well, most of us were talking, he was just staring at the fire with that thousand-yard stare he had.

  He rarely talked about his time in Vietnam, but all of us (except for Trisha) had heard him having his crazy night terrors. There were more than a few times he had come out of the camper shooting his gun wildly. They kept taking the gun from him, and he kept getting a new one somehow.

  It was a miracle no one had been shot or killed by the lunatic. Thank god they lived in rural Tennessee where that stuff wasn’t totally out of the ordinary.

  That night the fire must have sparked something in him, or maybe it was the way we were sitting around talking quietly. I have no idea. He was acting stranger than usual, and looking back I wondered if it was because he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

  Maybe it was the treatment, or maybe it was knowing he was on his way out Whatever it was, he seemed somewhat softer than I had remembered him.

  Maybe not softer, exactly, but different. Either way he looked absolutely terrible, and I knew displaying weakness was a major trigger for him.

  That softness was nowhere to be found that night.

  We were sitting around the fire for almost an hour when he suddenly started talking. We weren’t being particularly quiet but the sound of him shut all of us up nonetheless. Probably because he rarely spoke at all let alone in a group like that.

  I don’t know if he had been drinking or not, but his voice was monotone and hoarse. It was almost like a recording of him was playing over his moving lips.

  “Survival looks different for everybody,” he began.

  Had one of us been talking about surviving something? Had that been the catalyst?

  “You got some people that are lucky to survive the day because they are too stupid to know how the world works. You got others that survive some sort of tragic event and you would never know it. And some that will do anything to survive. Even that looks different for some people. The ‘anything’ part I mean.”

  “Daddy, you ain’t gotta get into this,” my aunt had said, her thick Tennessee accent making the plea still sound sweet.

  She must have had some idea of what was coming. I guessed this wasn’t the first time this stuff had poured out of him.

  “Sometimes I look at people and I ask myself if they have what it takes to really survive,” he continued without a hitch.

  I wasn’t sure but it felt like I caught him shoot me aglance, but the fire might have been playing tricks.

  “If they could make it through half of what me and my squad made it through. But then I wonder if there is even a point to it. Why survive if it’s just nothing but shit after.”

  I felt my aunt tense up a bit at this. One of the things Gary was terrible at was realizing he wasn’t the only person on the planet, and that he could say some really mean shit.

  My aunt had done nothing but care for and love the man since he came into her care but he continued to act as if she didn’t exist or that the care meant nothing.

  She was one of the kindest people I knew, and I wanted so badly to reach over and slap the shit out of the old man. But what good would that do? He droned on, and for some reason we let him.

  “I was stuck with my squad behind enemy lines when I learned what survival really meant. We had been stuck in a fox hole for what felt like days covered in all manner of the jungle to block our scent and hide our bodies.

  “One guy was convinced if he covered himself in shit then it would make the guards give us a wide berth. Somehow it seemed to work but the rest of us weren’t quite ready for that level of commitment.

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  “Survival looks different,” he paused long enough to clear air out his nose.

  “It wasn’t long after that the hunger started to get to us. My buddy Steve, who wasn’t all but 20 years old – not that I was much older – was getting this crazy look in his eyes as the hours passed. See, we weren’t just hunkered down waiting for troops to pass.

  “The enemy had made a camp right on top of us, and they were patrolling regularly so we couldn’t make a run for it even if we wanted to. They would have cut us down in no time. After a while, though, even that sounded like a better idea than starving to death.

  “When you spend enough time stuck in the muck with a handful of people waiting for the slightest thing to give you away, you start to act a little strange. Especially when that enemy would love nothing but to torture you to death.

  “One of our squadmates had to scoot in behind Steve and hold his hand over the boy’s mouth. He was starting to quietly laugh like a lunatic. He wouldn’t stop. Thankfully the rain had started up, and it was loud enough no one seemed to notice.

  “When Steve finally went quiet I wasn’t sure if it was because Johnny had knocked him out or the boy had finally gotten some sense in him.

  “I wasn’t sure how long we were there before the hunger made its way to me. I seemed to be able to go longer than the others with things like that, but everyone has a limit. I was ready to bite my own hands apart just for something to chew on.

  “I had something else come my way before I got that desperate. A little rodent came sniffing around my face looking for food of its own. It started poking around, taking little sniffs at me before trying to take a little nibble. Then another.”

  At this point we are all just staring at the guy, mortified at what we are hearing. I was pretty sure we all knew where this was going, but it was a car accident we couldn’t turn away from.

  He had stopped blinking, stopped moving anything except his lips. A part of me was yelling to stop the old man from saying more but I was too curious, too stuck in his trauma to move a muscle.

  Another part of me needed to know that he had gone through something bad enough to make him the terrible person he had become.

  “I tried to blow air at it, to get it to leave me alone at first. But then I felt some of its warmth despite how small it was. Or maybe it was my imagination that had me feel like that was real.

  “Anyways, it took an actual bite out of my cheek and I got so mad. Without thinking I bit down on the little fucker. At first I was just trying to kill it to keep it from getting at my face. Then I was biting for different reasons. I was just so hungry.”

  “Jesus dad, that’s enough,” my aunt finally said. He seemed to snap out of it, and looked around at us - one at a time. If you had asked me back then I couldn’t have told you what that look meant, only that it made me feel hollow.

  If you asked me now, sitting in that chair, I would say I understood what was behind that look. He hadn’t said anything more as he got up from the fire, and wandered off into his camper.

  We all just sat there staring at the flames, stuck in our own thoughts about what the hell had just happened. Someone, probably me, cracked some sort of joke and we all seemed to relax somewhat.

  I shook myself from the memory, and realized I had been staring at the rat, not blinking. Something was numb inside me as I continued to stare at the thing.

  Whatever they had implanted inside me must be the cause for this feeling of hunger I had. Starving or not there wasn’t anything natural about what I was experiencing.

  Without really thinking about it, I got up from the chair. I pulled the rat sticker back out as I moved towards the rat in the corner. For the first time in a while my brain had gone silent as I knelt down next to the creature and started cutting.

  A few things happened while I started hacking up the rat fink.

  First, a series of tooltips came up as I started cutting. At first I ignored them. After a moment of failing to cut the tougher than expected skin of the creature I took a look at them. The first was the loot tooltip I had seen before but there was another one almost tucked behind it.

  This one was similar to the one I got when I had used the gauze earlier:

  Lootable corpse

  Field dress this corpse Y/N

  I mentally clicked on the ‘Y’ and a tooltip with a graphic popped up like it had with the gauze. This showed a simple drawing of someone making a sawing motion with one hand and a pulling motion with the other.

  I remembered that I had to actually make the motion or nothing would happen. Copying the movement I brought the knife back and forth against the flesh of the creature’s thigh. My other hand held some of the skin pulled back while I sawed.

  Some sounds played from some unknown place that I think were supposed to mimic actually field dressing an animal. It was a wet, scraping sound with something like tearing paper or cardboard.

  Wherever the sounds came from, they didn’t originate from the rat. This went on for a few seconds until I got a different notification:

  Field dressing failed. Your tool is not suitable for field dressing.

  “Fuck!” I threw the knife down, frustration boiling over.

  Why the hell hadn’t it told me I didn’t have the right tool to begin with? I didn’t have time for this! I grabbed the rat’s leg with one hand and with the other grabbed the haunch of the creature.

  With a grunt of pure rage I wasn’t sure I had ever felt before, I tried to pull the two apart. The skin around the leg tore, and I could see tendons ripping free as my hands slipped off. I hadn’t torn the leg fully free of the rat and this frustrated me even more.

  Growling like some kind of animal, I stood up and put my still bare feet on the corpse.

  With both hands I gripped the leg and with a yell, I yanked with everything I had in me. The leg broke free suddenly, sending me back and away from the corpse. I lost my footing in the sludge that used to be its head, and with a low grunt I fell, hard, onto the stone floor – directly on the corpse of the other rat.

  I scrambled up and away from the corpse, the bloody leg still in my hand. My body was as sore as my ego, but I was otherwise unharmed by the fall.

  Now I had blood and other bits all over my body and in my hair. I could smell the weird earthy, rotten smell of the rats all over my skin. If I looked like a crazed psychopath before I could only imagine how I looked now.

  Achievement Unlocked!

  Unarmed!

  You ripped the limb off a creature with your bare hands! That was not only savage but also extremely concerning after everything you put these rat creatures through.

  There was probably a better way to go about all of this but given the fact you are deeply HANGRY it’s understandable.

  (Bronze reward)

  I slammed the leg, still covered in fur and skin, onto the table next to me. The hangry status must still be in effect because I was so full of rage I could barely think at all. I pulled the rat sticker back out and examined it.

  The knife was pretty dull and while I had never field dressed anything I bet I needed a sharper one. Thankfully I had at least sharpened knives before.

  I just wasn’t sure there was enough of an edge on this thing to sharpen it. Regardless, I was going to have to try and get some sort of edge on this thing.

  There was no way I could just keep ripping these things apart like that. My stamina was already almost tanked, and it didn’t look like it was filling back up very fast. My satiation must play a role in how my stamina worked, which made sense. It still pissed me off, but at least it made sense.

  I looked around for some sort of surface to sharpen the knife on and saw the plaque on the wall. There was a tooltip that popped up, and for some reason this completely caught my attention. The writing on the tooltip was just a little too far to see clearly.

  Through the sea of anger and hunger and confusion I was derailed by the plaque, the bowl, and the misshapen bust that sat above it.