The hunger had stopped being a sensation and become a condition.
It lived in Henry's stomach and broadcast upward into his skull, a sound like distant thunder that never quite stopped. He had eaten twenty-something hamburgers. His body had registered none of them. The math between intake and satisfaction had simply broken — the more he consumed, the wider the gap became, and the gap was now the only thing he could think about.
He was passing a post office on the corner when the memory surfaced. Something about that building. He'd been here before. Or someone who worked here had — a package, unclaimed. He'd opened it. After that, the hunger had started. The memory lasted about three seconds before the hunger swallowed it whole and moved on.
He left the hamburger stand — twenty-odd wrappers on the pavement behind him, already attracting flies — and ran toward the restaurant.
Jude watched him come through the door.
If there isn't some DC character called the Big Eater that I've never heard of, I've walked into something.
The problem was that his DC knowledge, broad as it was, had significant gaps in the corners — and a Mediterranean man in a suit stress-eating himself into a medical emergency was not a scenario that rang any bells. He filed it as unknown event, monitoring and went back to his fish and chips, which had just arrived and looked approximately as described in guidebooks.
The man — Henry, the food truck operator had called him — dropped into a seat across the restaurant and immediately began ordering with the focused intensity of someone who had stopped treating this as a meal and started treating it as a siege.
"Fish and chips. Steak. Yorkshire pudding. Shepherd's pie." He looked up. "Everything. The whole menu."
Jude ate his fish and watched.
The appetite alone was unusual. The stomach wasn't. Henry had eaten two dozen burgers in ten minutes and his midsection was completely unchanged — no distension, no visible displacement. The food was going somewhere, but it wasn't going into a stomach. It was going somewhere else entirely, and the somewhere else was still hungry.
Then Jude noticed the flies.
Two or three at first — easy to dismiss in a restaurant. But he looked again, and looked more carefully, and the insect presence around Henry was building. Not clustering on spilled food. On Henry. The smell of them was getting stronger.
Flies gather on corpses.
Henry was visibly alive. No obvious decay. No smell that explained it. Jude reached out instinctively, the way he'd learned to reach for plants and small animals to get a read — and got nothing back. The flies weren't responding to him at all. Not even the usual baseline of dim instinct. Just noise. Meaningless buzzing, like interference on a dead channel.
Something is controlling them. Or they're not quite flies.
He was still thinking about this when the waiter materialized beside Henry's table with the expression of a man who had seen many things in this restaurant and was adding this one to the list.
"Will that be — are you satisfied, sir?"
"More." Henry's voice had gone flat and mechanical, the request coming from somewhere below conscious decision-making. "Steak. Fries. Cream cake."
Jude put his fork down.
He watched Henry eat — really watched — and the certainty settled in that whatever was happening here was not a dietary condition. This was a man losing a fight against something that was using his body as a vessel, and the something was winning.
Henry ate everything on his table in ten minutes. He looked up, and his gaze moved to the next table with the same flat, mechanical assessment. Then he got up, walked over, and started taking food off other people's plates.
The table erupted. The restaurant erupted. Henry didn't notice or didn't care — he was stuffing a tablecloth into his mouth with one hand and reaching for a woman's arm with the other, and that was when Jude stood up.
He crossed the room in four strides and took Henry down to the floor, getting his weight on top and his hands on the man's wrists. Henry thrashed with genuine, surprising strength — not trained strength but the kind that came from something biochemical overriding normal human limits, the panic-strength of a drowning man. Jude had to work to hold him. He did, barely.
He checked what he could from this position: pupils, fingernails, teeth, the color and texture of the skin. None of the markers he associated with the dead or undead. No decay. No active necrosis. The Marvel zombie strain, as far as he knew it, showed physical deterioration at the site of infection. This looked completely different.
Not a zombie. Something else.
Then he saw Henry's face.
The fat was gone.
Not gradually — in the space of two minutes, the subcutaneous tissue that had given Henry his rounded, heavy features had simply vanished, as if something beneath the skin had consumed it from the inside. The face that remained was slack and hollow, skin hanging loose from the bone structure beneath it, the hands the same way, the neck the same way. He had gone from overweight to skeletal faster than a body could physically do that on its own terms.
The restaurant was in complete chaos. The manager was somewhere behind Jude shouting about police. A woman was screaming. Somebody's phone was already out.
Henry stopped struggling.
Without food entering his system, the process accelerated. Jude watched the vital signs drop — not with any instrument, just the particular way a body goes from present to absent, the shift in weight and heat and tension. He activated I Didn't Kill Anyone immediately, the skill extending outward, and held it there.
Henry was loaded onto a stretcher when the paramedics arrived. His head rolled to one side.
He was gone.
[SYSTEM WARNING] Skill level insufficient to block lethal force.
Jude stood in the middle of the restaurant, surrounded by overturned chairs and half-eaten plates and a crowd of people who didn't know what they'd just seen, and looked at his hands.
What was that?
Whatever had killed Henry — whatever had opened that package at the post office and taken root in him and eaten him alive from the inside out — was still out there. And it had apparently killed a man through starvation in under twenty minutes, which meant it operated faster than anything he'd encountered in Gotham, and it had beaten a skill he'd invested five hundred thousand asset points into.
Welcome to London, he thought.
Different city. Different rules.
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