Blue eyes. Blonde hair. A face worn weary by the knowledge it was on a head soon to be removed from its neck and shoulders. Worn beyond death as it found itself beyond the grave once again. The face screamed as it became a squid. The door slammed as it didn’t and couldn’t, lacking eyes or a nose or anything human really, but not for lack of trying. Anya turned around and was not greeting with the familiar sight of a room devoid of life. No, she had entered a world of undercooked calamari. That is to say she entered a room whose every wall and surface was made of pink and red slimy dripping flesh, oozing with the slime of life and decay from exposure to the elements.

  Not to say any of the walls were rotten, it was in fact quite the opposite. Anya’s feet squished and slime tinted pink with blood stuck to her boots. She blinked. There weren’t words to describe the nausea Anya felt at that moment. She began to wretch, but quickly realized there was nothing that could come up. A long ten or twenty seconds passed, and then she coughed, head spinning and dizzy. Hunger took over, and her stomach burned. Is that why it reminded her of calamari?

  She shrugged. At least there wasn’t a tongue or teeth on the floor or walls, just a bunch of esophageal-looking tissue whose every surface rippled with cartilage just beneath. The floor was softer, some kind of almost-muscle tissue, but didn’t seem to be moving or anything. There were still fluorescent lights, but they hung vertically from the twenty or thirty foot ceiling now almost like stalactites. Each bulb was some five feet long and emitted the same cold dead light it always had, lighting the room almost like a surgical theater. But there was no surgeon, and no operation to perform. Only meat. Only delicious, delicious meat.

  Anya shuddered. She really needed a hamburger. Fifty hamburgers. She had said it before, but the whole country would explode if she didn’t eat fifty cheeseburgers with fifty pounds of melted cheese placed on buns deep-fried with six tubs of mayonnaise and half a pound of sugar (each) in the next hour. Anya began to run, her footsteps plapping wetly against the ground and making it hard to move. She began running harder, and began to hear the cartilage beneath the soft tissues crack. The base did not shudder. It did not moan or complain. It simply sustained the damage like a building should and always had.

  Her footsteps slapped the bloody ground in cold fluorescence as she made her way first to the dining hall and then to Central. As much as Anya would love to rendezvous with everyone and see what had transpired since the climactic end of the last loop— as much as she would love to contemplate what had just happened— her head was swimming. The loops reset physical damage, but mental? Nothing was done. And apparently hunger was another thing denied the pleasure of regeneration. She would instead be made to eat. It had been, what, twenty, thirty hours since her last meal? Less? More? She didn’t know. It had been three or four or five or six or seven or more loops, she didn’t know. But she hadn’t eaten anything but a small portion of jerky since before the start, and that was hardly enough. If anything, it had reflamed a hunger that had never subsided, feeding it just enough kindling to make the problem worse.

  Food was the only thing on her mind as the footsteps stumbled and nearly fell in inattention the final few feet from an old-style flesh lock. There was a rusty chain on the door connected to a small polished-steel knife. She panicked, thinking it might have been a dual-release lock, but luckily when she looked to the right there was no second pad of skin to draw sharp red lines upon. Her hands traced the pretty pattern and the door opened with a thud. It had been made of bone carved with some symbol, but she didn’t recognize it and frankly didn’t care.

  She stepped inside and looked over the once-metal furniture. All the benches and tables had been converted to bone. Some of the surfaces were wet with terribly unhygienic slime. Anya ignored all of that and made a bee-line to the back kitchen, recessed behind a long once glass-covered counter and some doors. The glass had turned to some semi-transparent membrane and the door to the back was also bone. She punched it and the door cracked, flying back and giving way.

  Within the holy sanctum that was the back kitchen was a large fryer completely filled with near-boiling grease. Why was it so hot? How was a once-metal container now made of meat not being deep-fried from inside? Who knew! Who cared! There was some line of blood that ran deeper into the base to power the heat and refrigeration, so it wasn’t out of the question for it to have been maintaining the now flesh-based appliances as well as heating and cooling them. She opened the fridge whose interior was bone and whose door was covered in thick muscle. The handle was sticky on her fingers. She reached in and pulled out a brick of meat patties, throwing them directly into the fryer.

  She realized that she had almost opened the freezer by accident, which would have ended a bit differently. That would have been a painful death! Instead, Anya took the time she spent waiting on the burgers to quickly pop all fourteen of her speed pills. They would go down much more smoothly with food, but she wanted them to kick in quickly. The food would be coming momentarily.

  The effect was immediate as it was unfortunate— she keeled over with hunger, a crippling pain in her stomach as her flesh instantly turned white. It was lucky she still had a mouth with teeth and a tongue, unlike the other “greater” necrites— so-called misfortunates unable even to taste their prey.

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  She took out the buns and threw them in the deep-fryer.

  She took out the mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard and threw it in the deep-fryer.

  She took out the lettuce and threw it in the deep-fryer.

  Also the butter, which she spared an agonizing few seconds to mash together with pre-made bread crumbles.

  Anya stood over the fryer that contained about thirty pounds of meat, contemplated, and then threw another box of patties in there for good measure. She watched the grease murmur and cursed her shortsighted hunger— dumping more patties in there would mean the existing food would take longer to cook.

  She waited and waited and waited and ultimately decided to eat whatever was there. Raw meat was safe if you were going to die anyway, after all. She cursed herself for not realizing this sooner, and quickly retrieved the meat and buns and sauce and delicious crispy deep-fried sticks of butter.

  That is to say she scooped out what she could and inserted a pot into the fryer to retrieve the things that had been lost in the delicious grease sauce she fully intended to smother her burgers in— No! That would be stupid. She took another pot and filled it with ice, flung the ice into an empty sink, and repeated the process until she had enough to place the grease pot on top of it. She would *drink* the deep-fried condiments! It was perfect!

  She quickly started making the first burger, but lost her ability to concentrate and started drooling white sauce all over the kitchen so badly she worried it would cause her to trip and land face-first in the fryer herself. That would taste so good………

  She ravenously ate the first stick of fried butter, and the first hamburger patty, and the destroyed green specks of lettuce that kind of dotted a few things here and there. She started crying and chugged the entire pot of barely cooled grease in one go. It burned on the way down, but apparently she was resistant to that now. Five burgers later she noticed the hunger was not going away, so she tentatively swiped a finger through the deep fryer , noticed it was hot but not scalding, then said

  “Fuck it.”

  And stuck her head in. She drank until her lungs burned, not bothering to come up for air. It wasn’t until her vision started to grow spots that she finally came up long enough to gasp, shove five more burgers down her throat, and go back under. It took perhaps five or thirteen minutes for her to drink the fryer dry and eat every burger she had prepared, at which point she began eating raw patties straight from the fridge, which tasted like cardboard or perhaps sawdust. It would be quite difficult, indeed, to taste anything after drinking a sink-full of almost-boiling grease.

  There was a slight iron-tinge to the meat, but that was it. She even ate the lettuce, which made her feel like a cow. It was only when the supersized military industrial fridge was empty that she finally realized the hunger was supernatural and no amount of food could possibly sate it.

  That was obvious in retrospect, maybe after the fourteenth burger? Well, there would be more food for the others in the next loop.

  Anya exited the kitchen with the impression she had spent some thirteen or fourteen minutes eating, but the “necrites” were already there outside the door that had closed behind her. It was no longer accurate to call them that, unfortunately, as their appearance had changed. As before, they did not attack her in her present greater form and its white skin. It was a sign she had been transformed into a thing like them. No, it was inaccurate to say “had been” when she had done this to herself. It was clear the pills had caused this transformation and yet when all their weapons were ineffective what else was to be done?

  But she really fucking wished that she, like the other greater necrites, didn’t have eyes right now. It would seem when the giant shotgun suicide thirteen-fingered abomination had crawled out of the sun it had come with more than just the change of turning the base into meat. In front of her now was yet another thirteen-fingered hand. It had fingernails, but the skin was sloughing off in places, barely holding on. The nails were long and cracked. Where the stump of the hand should have been was what looked like a scorpion’s stinger, perhaps the stump of a neck, which was actually another backwards-facing thirteen-jointed finger. At the head of the stinger-finger-neck was the same head of the abomination that had been born in the sky. Unlike the abomination, this one was worse. Unlike the abomination, this one was not made up of squirming little eyeless tongueless bodies.

  It was a realistic visage of a splayed-open head. The cheekbones pulsed with life, the face torn open fully, blown out like some kind of blooming red flower. In the center was a malformed red stem, a long and inhuman tongue perhaps fifty or a hundred percent longer than it should have been. Thick and throbbing and bouncing with the pulse of life that Anya could hear from within the creature softly pulsing on. Its head splayed open but softly pulsing on. The tip of the tongue was covered in teeth.

  She thought about shooting it, but decided it was best not to antagonize hellish abominations spawned from beyond this plane and instead looked down, away from the suicide victim toward the throbbing floor that, too, pulsed with life. She walked through and under the fingers of the eight-ish foot tall creature but made the mistake of looking up and its underside. It, too, was missing the skin, but this time the tendons and bone were plainly exposed. The fingers twitched and she could see them actuate like some flesh-machine.

  She knew that cars worked like this. She knew that all machinery in this world was powered by flesh. That did not prepare her to see the exposed tendons of a living abomination moving in some kind of hypnotic pattern above her. She looked down and continued forward.

  At least the victims of her gunshots were usually cloaked in body bags.