Hunger Pains

In a starving world suffocated by mega cities, countless numbers of orphaned youth live on their streets. One of them is rescued and attempts to fix the problem that has plagued him his entire life.

The world was starving. Exactly what caused the problem was a topic of hot debate amongst those who had the power to fix it; countless meetings funded with millions of dollars filled with the brightest minds working in the best facilities they could ask for were held in hopes of shedding some sort of light on its origin.

            Of course, these efforts afforded little comfort to those actually affected by the matter. Deciding whether it was due to mismanagement of the mega city’s already meager food supply or simply overpopulation would not put food on their table. Someone to blame does not a meal make.

            Russell Street knew that first hand. He had, just like so many others, been personally victimized by the problem, his bones metal if hunger was a magnet, skin drawn tight against them as if they were trying to burst out. Because he knew lamenting to be useless he was forced to interpret his struggles as a sign that some higher power had faith in his strength. His torment had been his training.

            The mega city’s streets his dojo. The swish swash of unsatisfied stomach acid the mystic whisperings of an enigmatic sensei. The ugly, bubbled flesh that sat above the rags he had once called pants invaded every memory from his childhood, its impossibly perfect emaciated sphere a constant reminder of the struggle he and all like him had been born into.

            His mindset had not always been this way. Throughout the first few years of his life he had known nothing but despair. His parents had gone away, though he had been hungry all the time, even before they left.

            When he did manage to eat it was never a lot. His food supply was relegated to the scraps of the gang of children he was forced to run with, unwanted gristle from mystery meat, bread turned blue from mold, things of that nature.

            Even if he thought he could have survived on his own he would not have changed his situation, for in the mega city, numbers were power. That is what the children whispered in their alleys, under their neon stars and cardboard blankets. It was as good a lullaby that they would ever get, how they made themselves okay with the nightly scuttling of a billion dirty rat claws against their pavement mattresses and the way the floor of their nightlight skyscrapers ran up and away from those that they protected.

            It was the one of the things they all simply knew to be true, and Russell Street was no exception. Another well-known fact was that bottom feeders had no place in a world full of bottom feeders. Helplessness, while useful for attracting initial help, loses its charm fast, like a date who turns out to be a cousin, which meant that Russell was kicked out of his gang well before he was capable of taking care of himself.

            He had thought he was going to die. Actually, he had been sure of it, and so had accepted his fate long before he fell in the middle of that bustling street. It was not an uncommon scene in the mega city, one of the orphaned and malnourished youth dropping to the ground from sickness, fatigue, or starvation. The adults, the well fed, they never noticed, they had schedules to keep people to see and jobs to do just to ensure that they and their own weren’t the next to fall.

            His eyes fluttered closed, but no more than two seconds passed before fingers smoother than any he had ever felt before wrapped around his exposed shoulder. They were gentle as they turned him over, unlike the gasp that followed. “So young! You poor, poor, thing.”

            Russell, a complete stranger to both caring words and connotations, took this as an insult and weakly threw his fist at her. Mistaking his attack as a plea for help she swept him up in a motherly embrace. His attempts to wiggle from her grip did nothing but worsen his exhaustion.

            “Oh, there there.” Fake rubbed real as her perfect hand combed through his never cut or cleaned hair, a television show breaking the fourth wall merging two different worlds into one. Her other arm still held his body tight to her’s. “I’m going to take care of you.” She choked back a sob. “I’m gonna make sure nothing bad ever happens to you again.”

            A suffocated ring played from somewhere within the human sandwich. She sniffled, dug her cellphone out from one of her pockets and pressed a few buttons. The tune, which once uncovered proved to be an oddly intriguing mixture of harsh and melodious sounds, was replaced by a powerful hum.

            Light shot from the back of the device, forming a screen a few feet from her face with a worried looking man on it. “You said call right away. What’s happened? Who’s that on your shoulder?”

            “I was taking my morning walk when he fell on the street in front of me. I couldn’t have been the only one to see him but everyone still walked right by. We have to help.”

            He took on a severe tone. “You had me call you from work for this? We don’t have to do anything. He’s a street urchin, there’s a millions others just like him. His parents obviously couldn’t provide for him, probably no good lazy junkies, but that isn’t our problem. We don’t need another mouth to feed.”

            Her chest, though fleshy in all the places that called for it, could no longer hide her heartbeat. Russell felt her body temperature rise. “Do not, create problems where there are none Richard. This world has enough as it is.”

            Richard looked down. “I don’t have time for this right now. Do whatever you think is best and we can talk more whenever I get home. Boss is coming, I love you.” The light went out and he was gone.

            From that day forward Russell’s life was forever changed. She took him home, cleaned him up, and adopted him all before her husband got back. The usually arduous process had long ago been streamlined for children of the famine as a way to get at least some of them off of the street.

            The only request he made throughout the whole ordeal was that his last name be Street. He did not want to be like her, but knew he was dead if he refused the help so he forced himself to be satisfied with that token victory. He had lived in the streets, been born in the streets, and in all likelihood conceived in the streets; he did not want to leave. Though it wasn’t a good home, it was still his, and thinking about the future only made him half as sick as the thought of what he was leaving behind.

            Countless hungry eyes were burned into his memory. All of his brothers and sisters, those who lived like he did, left to struggle while he was whisked away to some better life. He knew he didn’t deserve the easy road. He hadn’t even been able to fend for himself and now someone else was going to do it for him? The world he grew up in did not work like that.

            Everything he had thought to be true was thrown into question. Separating miniscule shreds of flesh from scrap with his teeth turned into three regular meal times, hardened skin painted black with the grime of gutters and reality turned childlike, raw, and the feral beast that was his mind turned precise and calculating, if not any less cutthroat.

            The couple that had adopted him, the Cunninghams, were almost picture perfect representatives of the class they hailed from. They operated on what they were told were solid morals, quality citizens, productive members of society that worked and didn’t have time for much else. When they didn’t have their brains wrapped around the latest entertainment or menial task to come their way the organs operated under the influence of a pathetically childlike naiveté that Russell found all too easy to manipulate.

            They wanted to think they were doing good. They needed to be told they were doing good. It was one of the many cruxes of their world, active ears coupled with dead limbs.

            After he entered their life his approval was the only thing that they cared about. Whenever he called they would race to his side, stumbling over one another in competition for nothing more than a smile and a nod, pseudo-affection at its finest. Russell saw no problem with what he was doing. His new life of luxury was more amazing than anything he had ever dared to hope for, and for a while it was all he wanted. The eyes returned after a few months to break his serenity.

            They came in his sleep, when he was awake, at the dinner table and after random buzzwords. Each pair desperate, empty, and in a constant state of back and forth motion searching for their next morsel.

            Voices never waited long to follow. High-pitched squeaks not unlike his own discussing what they were going to do. How cold it was out tonight. Whether the nearest alley housed an unspeakably horrible monster or just threatening shadows.

            Always behind both of those things was the chant. A haunting song made of equal parts despair and strength, once it started playing in his head it never stopped. “Numbers are power” over and over and over.

            He started to get sick. His eating habits regressed to a point worse than what they had been on the streets. The thin layer of fat that had finally started to mask his bones wore away in a matter of days. Of course the Cunninghams noticed, but it mattered little; they were completely under his control, indentured servants sentencing themselves to wait for a love that would never come.

            Only when his stomach growled did everything stop. Could he think again. Be who he was meant to be again. The gurgles and whines of his digestion soothed the ghosts of the family he had left behind.

            Figuring that out told him what he needed to do. Going back and starving wouldn’t help anything, but then again neither would sitting around and stuffing his face. The two worlds he had lived in were connected, yet entirely separate.

            The only bridge he had found between the two was hunger. He could be in the penthouse suite of the tallest skyscraper in the word but if he was hungry his stomach would complain the same as if he was on the ground, as if he were still with all of his brothers and sisters.

            What did the body have to say when it spoke in this primal tongue?  A universal language comes from inside, smashes apart the walls we saw it fit to install in our society, treats everyone the same, yet no one was curious? It could hold solutions to a number of problems. To THE problem.

            As soon as he thought of it he knew it was destined to be his life’s work. Everything had happened the way it had for a reason. He had been born, abandoned, abandoned again, then adopted just so he would have the drive required to reach what his what seemed to be an impossibly far away end goal.

            He immediately threw himself into his education. After a little pressure the Cunninghams enrolled him in the best school they could manage, a full time prep academy deep in the heart of the mega city.

            The disadvantages of him not having a former education did not stand for long. He was reading within a week and was put in the highest level class for his age group once he was able to actually comprehend the placement test. When held in comparison to his past the problems they gave him to solve and the work they assigned were stunningly undemanding.

            He breezed through the forest of each day fast, every assignment completed another gust of wind that rustled the canopies of his peers. Before he had a fair chance to be accepted he was an outcast, shunned both academically and socially. Russell could not have asked for a better situation, after all, he had nothing in common with these people.

            He was all too happy to sit in his dormitory alone and wait. Flick off the lights, burrow deep beneath his covers, slow his breathing as much as he could manage, and wait. For the sounds, the growls, grrs, whines, sloshes, and pops of his stomach. That was the only conversation he’d ever need, it had everything in it, wisdom for the picking and answers by the barrel if he could just manage to understand it.

            His brothers and sisters had always known the power of the sound. He was sure they still did, and though countless floors and 0’s in bank accounts now separated them, he did not want to break the bond for fear of forgetting the significance himself.

            This was the prevailing theme of his academic career. Throughout prep and high school, university and doctorate program he worked hard and alone. He graduated directly into a job with one of the government commissioned programs to solve the hunger, a prestigious position with an even more prestigious salary that any one of his classmates would have killed to get.

            Yet to him, none of that mattered. Money had two uses, material possessions and food, which meant that having more of it did him no good. His long, spindly body required only the barest minimum of sustenance to operate having long ago learned to run on fumes, and he was far too obsessed with his purpose to be distracted by anything else.

            To him the job’s importance lied in what it represented, all his years of struggle and isolation finally paying off, an opportunity to fix the problem that had stuck with him not only him and his family but the generations that preceded them as well.

            Fuel being thrown on a fire that never went out in the first place, his close proximity to his end goal made him work harder than usual. Even among other members of the think tank his dedication and results stood out, but for the first time in his life he was in a position to be rewarded for it.

            Those who called themselves his bosses, those removed from the perennial competition of the normal world, those whose vision wasn’t blinded by fear of starving, recognized they had something special. After only a month he was put in charge of his own lab and staff. For a while he did what they said, ran the experiments they wanted to run, jumped through the hoops they wanted him to jump through, though he knew it would do no good.

            He already had the solution. They all did, right in their guts. Bodies are minds’ oldest companions. One cannot exist without the other because they are constantly working together, a pair of ballet dancers performing the same routine night in and night out. For them, perfect harmony isn’t an option. If one stumbles, forgets the routine or stops working, a person dies. It one created the problem then the other had to have the solution, how would they all be alive otherwise?

            He was laughed at when he proposed his idea. Was told it was a waste of resources, and that the government’s pocketbook was not something to play around with.

            It was only due to his stellar reputation and subsequent risk of it that he was able to eke out the time and funding. He had already been working on the project his entire life, the technical specifications long ago figured out, and now that money wasn’t a problem there was nothing standing in his way.

            In a few months everything was ready. A press conference was set up to reveal his machine, making waves when he said he was to be the first test subject and even more when he said it would solve the hunger.

            That day, with the entire world watching him, Russell Street, a scientist hailing from the slums of a mega city, was going to fix everything.

            He felt the camera zoom in on the small and inconsequential object in his hands. He held the light blue device up for clarity, the lens slowly panning across the words “body translator”.  More eyes were on him now than ever.

            He set it down on the table and unhooked the microphone from the side. He pressed the foam covering against the emaciated lump of flesh, the reminder he had purposely preserved from his childhood.

            Then came the sound, a standard abrupt noise that every human knows well. When it ended he brought the screen where the text would appear close to his eyes and waited greedily.

            A ding came from the device and Russell collapsed onto the ground. Someone far away asked him what it said, why he had fallen, and he replied “I’m hungry.” His stomach growled again.

            

Reviews

[Barry]

I really liked it. It is very different, and it helped me out with the book I'm currently writing(Not the one that I have posted on here). It didn't have any action it, and that's what helped me out the most. I was unsure about not having enough action in my first chapter, but now that I've read this that doesn't matter as much. Good luck with the writing. I will be waiting to read the rest of it.

[David Jae]

This is an interesting concept, but it falls short, in my opinion.

You have a compelling protagonist that I like, but the story feels rushed. If this is a prologue, it should be shorter and more to the point. If this is the story, it should be longer and more in depth, from the protagonists point of view. It has some good points, but lacks a sense of emotion.

I liked the world that you created, though and think that this has potential.

Ganbare