With our new shelter secured, Beth, Jacob, and I met up again. We talked for an hour, and did our best to drink water out of plastic bottles without spilling any. We found a box of cereal, and they took turns dumping Cheerios into their mouths. I declined. I wasn’t hungry. I was still riding heavy on my morning of soul sucking.

We split up again. Beth and my brother broke into one of the neighboring houses and found the keys to the big pickup truck that was parked outside it, and took that off to Home Depot, or wherever. I hopped back in the camry and headed to nearest supermarket I knew of.

I was there for produce, mostly. When my brother told us about what the previous occupants of our new home had in their fridge and freezer, he described the meat with an uncharacteristic amount of revulsion, for a man who loved steak. Given his new form, I could only imagine it was simply because he couldn’t eat it, and maybe his mind had altered a little to let him know as much. I didn’t have the same reaction, though. The cuts of beef tucked in that freezer sounded awesome. So I grabbed a few packs of meat. Ham, chicken, steaks, whatever I felt like, really. I set it on one end of the cart, with all the fresh produce I could get my grubby, buggy hooves on stuffed into plastic bags to keep the two food groups from mixing. I filled the cart to the brim, and only just managed to stuff it all into the car’s trunk.

I took a second trip into the market, with my eyes set on preservatives. That is, salt. I started with the big, economy size buckets, and I prioritized whatever came in containers and probably wouldn’t rot. After the salt, came the spices. Pepper, cinnamon, whatever was readily available and packaged in some variety of metal or plastic. Most of it all went in the back seat of the car.

The third trip, I’m not sure what I was originally looking for, but I wound up with a whole assload of sweets. Now, as a human, there was a damn good reason I was a fatass. I was never good at resisting temptations. Ever. In my middle grade school days, I very nearly sweet toothed myself right into an acquired diabetes-based oblivion. I was bad.

And here I was, pushing around a shopping cart full of edible trash, in one of, arguably, the most stressful times of my life. What do you think I did?

It took more work than I anticipated, but with the application of my sticky hooves and monster dagger fangs, I got that little Reeses pack opened. I clumsily peeled off the wax paper wrapper, and fumbled the whole thing into my mouth. I flipped it around on my tongue a little. I bit it in half. I flipped the pieces around a little more.

“Huh,” I grunted. This wasn’t what I remembered a Reeses peanut butter cup tasting like. Maybe I just never realized how shitty American chocolate was, and the time I’d spend specifically avoiding regular chocolates had changed my tastes. Because I certainly didn’t taste chocolate.

In fact, I didn’t taste anything.

I stopped fumbling with the candy, and wiggled my tongue around a bit. There was definitely something there. I could feel the ridges of the unbroken pieces of the cup. I even felt the squishy, slightly grainy texture of the ‘peanut butter’ on my tongue. If I couldn’t taste the chocolate, I could at least taste the peanut butter. Right?

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to, I guess,” I said to myself, and continued on. Maybe something not riding on decades of brand recognition would taste better. I found my way to the baked goods section, and picked out a cake. Carrot cake, with vanilla frosting. No chocolate.

Like a civilized, armored bug monster, I bit down on the cake’s plastic cover and tore a huge chunk away. With nothing significant standing between me and my sugary prey, I smashed my nose right into it. It was more satisfying than I originally expected, to just send bits of cake flying everywhere. But I wasn’t here to make a mess—I was here eat my troubles away. So I turned my head and took an absolutely monumental bite out of the poor carrot cake.

Soft, with a little spring. The frosting’s grain was satisfactory. There were a few little, hard chunks here and there; probably the cake. All the little air bubbles in the batter were just right. It was everything I expected out of prebaked, storebought carrot cake.

Only, I couldn’t taste it. I knew exactly what this cake should taste like. But all I got was some gross, warm mush in my mouth. I couldn’t even taste my own saliva mixing into it.

I spat the gooey mess onto the floor, and turned my attention to a nearby coffee cake.

No, that was just flavorless mush, too. Another mess in the baked goods aisle, I guess.

Maybe this new body just couldn’t taste sweets? I couldn’t think of any real evolutionary advantages to not being able to recognize and desire pure sugar. I went back to the produce aisle, and picked out a pear. No manners, just take a big bite out of it.

Well, it certainly felt like eating a pear. A bit like an apple, but a little squishier, a little grainier. But, none of the pear flavor I was expecting. Just, juice and mush.

Maybe I could only taste meat? Worth a shot. I doubted I could find anything already cooked that was also warm, but hey, even raw meat had some flavor.

My stupidly sharp teeth tore through the quarter pound steak cutlet like nobody’s business, but no flavor. Maybe only liquids?

The orange juice was pulpy, I knew that much. But it was just fluid. I may as well have been drinking water with some bits of cellulose in it.

Maybe I was just trying the wrong things? There’s no way a living being could live without a sense of taste. That’s just stupid! How could you tell edible foods from poisons? What sort of dumb monster am I? Maybe, compound flavors confuse my senses. Pure chocolate should work. No? Okay, what about straight sugar? No? Cinnamon. No? Strawberry wafers. No? Shitty kids’ cereal. N-no? Well, what about these—

-= = =-

“Pete? You okay?” Something prodded my shoulder. I looked over. Jacob was standing over me, poking me with his hoof. Beth stood a little distance away.

“What?” I asked, dumbly. I looked around to get my bearings. I was still in the super market, but there was crap all over the floor around me and I was lying on my side. The shopping cart that I had been filling with junkfood was overturned and mangled into something barely recognizable, and every single package, bag, and wrapper had been torn to shreds. My whole body was covered in what I could only describe as stuff. Fuck me. “Yeah, yeah, I’m… I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? What happened?”

“I, uh… I just had a bit of a, a moment. It’s nothing you should worry about,” I said, stumbling back to my hooves, before, “Hey, Jake, can I lick you?”

Jake’s face twisted up into some kind of white and orange rorschach as he backed away. Under any normal circumstances, I would’ve bust a nut, but I was still recovering from my meltdown.

“Hey, Pete?” Beth called, the sound of my name stopping me from trying to taste test my own brother, “Are you really sure you’re feeling alright?” I blinked, and looked down at Jake, curled up into a ball at my hooves. My shoulders slumped under the weight of my guilt.

“No…” I mumbled. “Whatever changed us, it, uh, it did… It did something to my brain, too.” I nudged my brother until he gave up his armadillo imitation. “I guess, I’m still, a little scattered. I just... I don’t feel so hot. What time is it?”

“It’s almost eight o’ clock!” Beth shouted at me. Huh? “We were getting really worried—”

“WHAT!?”

I looked toward the front of the supermarket and out the glass building. The sky was orange.

With the sun setting, we decided to call it a day, and put some extra blockading on the front door, since we still hadn’t replaced it. Everybody went upstairs and slept in the master bedroom. Except for me.

I wasn’t tired. Just like I still wasn’t hungry, after a whole day of not eating. I’d been changed, but I didn’t know how. Not at the time.

Unable to sleep, I considered going out at night to do more runs—and hopefully not have another incident. It’d be safer now, only having to deal with maybe a raccoon or a stray animal that’d keep away if I shouted at it. Night would only get more dangerous as the days went on and the animals got more desperate. But, I had no clue how long the grid would stay, and I didn’t know enough about this house to be confident whatever solar power it got was being stored. I imagined it wasn’t.

My research told me that, as I had expected, most of Boston was running off of natural gas power plants. Exactly what kind of natural gas power plant, I wasn’t able to figure out, unfortunately. Which meant I could have anywhere between one and three days, to maybe a little longer, before the pressure faded and the turbines stopped turning. That was assuming nothing went wrong. Really, as a rolling blackout hadn’t knocked out the entire country, within the first hours of sunlight, things weren’t as bad as they could’ve been.

I spent the night on the internet, taking advantage of the servers and the electricity while they were still around. Coal powered plants were already failing—those couldn’t be expected to last more than a day, and I had no clue whether or not any important servers were on coal power. The biggest server farms probably had their own plants.

I was searching for information. Whatever I could find. How to install water catchment systems, how to safely hook photovoltaics to batteries, reminding myself how circuits worked, farming techniques, the lifespan of various fossil fuels, survival tips, anything and everything I thought might be useful. I even printed out directions to other towns and places of interest. What if we decided to go to NYC? Virginia? Cape Cod? What if we wanted to go somewhere in the midwest? California? I built up a list of routes and highway numbers, just in case. I wasn’t prepared for any sort of doomsday scenario when I woke up. But by sunrise of the next day, I was absolutely brimming with ideas. You can do this, I reminded myself. They’re counting on you.

Author's Note

We're finally putting a close to day 1!
Just one last chapter with the search party and it'll officially be the 24th.