Chapter 1

What’s wrong with me? Max thought, stopping for the third time in ten minutes to catch his breath. Something felt heavy in his stomach and chest, dragging him down. His legs felt like they were made of lead, holding him back as he tried to advance. He felt sick almost, his body had stopped producing saliva and his eyes were dry. As he sat down, he felt something squirm in his abdomen.

His instant reaction was to get up and run, to try desperately to run from his body in which something terrible was hiding, but he was too tired to do any more then yelp weakly and scratch desperately at his chest. He pulled his shirt off and tossed it aside, looking down at his abdomen. He noticed he could see a lot more of his ribs then he was accustomed to. In his abdomen, he could see something just...wrong. A large bulge was pressing against his skin, it looked vaguely tube like.

He remembered something in health class about hernias, when part of the intestine pokes out through the fascia, but something told him this was much worse than that.

He lifted a quivering arm and poked at the bulge, watching in horrified fascination as the thing squirmed around, the bulge retreating deeper into his body. That’s not right. Was all he thought, petrified with the thought that something was inside of him, squirming around in him and eating him from the inside.

Something was stabbing his leg from inside his pocket. He heaved his arm up, letting it slip into his pocket and draw out the open knife.

Of course… He thought, his flashlight reflection off the metal with a blinding glare. Max lowered the knife to his skin, finding the area where the bulge was now. Only a bit of the bulge remained, it seemed to have grown in the last few moments, almost a quarter of an inch bigger. Max realized, with fear, that his ribs were more visible now, a strong stink of sweet rot emitting from his mouth and nose every time he inhaled Without thinking, he sunk his knife into his skin, going at an angle so it pushed through the bulge on the other side, yanking up so a proper hole would be made.

He could feel the thing jerk and convulse in him, its long body pushing his organs about as it crashed around. From the newly carved hole in his body spilled not blood, but a thick brown liquid with a terrible stink. No… Max thought, staring down at the growing puddle of brown. “No!” He screamed aloud, watching as the brown muck started to squirm, millions of thin white strands swimming out of it. He started crying, his hands rubbing the muck into his eyes as he pressed them against his face, his lower body becoming soaked in the squirming liquid.

They were in his eyes, his mouth, his nose, he could feel them slipping down into his boxers and squirming in his pubic hair, a few slipping down his urethra. He didn’t struggle, he just continued to cry, knowing it was impossible to fight these things. He would die here, alone, in this damned cave.