I was lost, asleep, caught in a nightmare, until Professor Andrews rescued me. His treatment was new, radical and no-one else had thought of it, let alone tried it. I was the first successful guinea pig - all the others had 'died' or remained unchanged but I was saved. The current was too strong, too weak or the condition of the others was too far gone. After the series of shocks, I started to remember who I was, who I'd been before and then I was slowly able to communicate this to others. "My name is Charles Ward," I said, stumblingly.
"I used to live in Acacia Avenue, Fulham. I was married with two children, until the illness took me. My family - God no! Were my first victims (I would have cried, had it been physically possible but my condition stopped me).
"It's alright old man. Steady on. It's perfectly understandable. The horrors of your previous life," said the professor.
He was the only one who treated me with kindness. The others in the establishment called me a monster and didn't trust me.
"Once one of them, always one of them," they intoned behind my back.
"You just can't trust them - I wouldn't turn my back on him for a second."
I was still a monster, a misfit to them and would revert to type, given half a chance. Maybe they were right - how could I tell? I could be fine one minute and slide back into bad habits in an instant - who knows? Even the professor can't be sure, which is why I'm monitored so thoroughly. The cameras pan me. Eyes follow my every move. If it wasn't for the recovered memories of who I was, I might become paranoid.
My beautiful daughters! My wife! How could I do this horrible thing to them? I was a monster alright. A creature not to be trusted. I was an addict of human flesh and the professor had saved me.
They give me insulin and feed me nutrients, intravenously because they say I cannot digest food normally yet. Apparently all the dead flesh is returning to life and I am becoming 'human' again. They say the return to conscious awareness is the first stage and that they might be winning this war, if they can turn me back to normality. The professor believes that consciousness is what keeps the animal urges under control and stops me - us in fact, from being condemned to a life of mindless cannibalism, eternally. I hope he is right. He further believes (and the evidence seems to suggest it, strongly) that once you've captured the mind and got it in thrall, the body will follow. He says, like criminals and addicts, it's a question of reprogramming the being. I really hope he is right.
The guards wanted their revenge on me - not for my crimes against my own flesh and blood but for those they had lost to 'my kind.' It gave them a sense of closure and of power, to beat the hell out of me. It made little to me as I felt nothing and was broken already, in mind and spirit, and as the professor said the body just followed down the mineshaft of terror.
I am not alone here. The others are chained and locked in cells because they have been known to gnaw off their own hands and pull off their own feet, to try to escape - such is the effect of their deep hunger. They look at me with pleading eyes - like animals that cannot communicate in any other way. I turn my back on them, glad to no longer be one of their number, sad that they are still trapped in this lifestyle and ashamed that I cannot help these lab rats.
Talking of lab rats, the urge is returning in me. It started with surreptitiously swallowed insects, then rodents, birds if I can catch them and once a hedgehog. Oh yes, as they learned to trust me, they let me out into the grounds - at first supervised, then quite freely. By this time Andrews had moved on. I was no longer his favourite 'pet,' just an old project that he let others monitor. I was still fenced in. I still had cameras aimed at me but by this time I was considered mostly harmless. The smell of rotting flash that was me, had subsided with time and the effects of various treatments. On top of that people had become acclimatised to my odour. I was the grenade that hadn't gone off.
Now, like a prisoner of war, I searched for a weak point - the spot where the searchlights or cameras missed and I dug.
I had known I was starting to revert when the Parkinson's like symptoms started to reappear and I found it hard to kick start my body into normal, human motion. I hid the shuffling gait as best as I could, the creeping catatonia but I knew the condition was returning and that there was no point fighting it.
I saw my people wandering in large, distant herds. I heard the sound of gunfire and explosions as the humans culled them. I longed to join them. I wanted to forget the normality I'd been a part of in the past and rejoined here: The bright light effect of coming out of a cinema into daylight, the noise, the smells, the sensitivity of touch and above all 'taste.' I wanted to forget all of these plus the memories of what I'd done to others, who trusted me to be at least 'human.' The wounds of these half remembered crimes against what I was, was just too much to bear. I wanted to slip back into the opulent dark of unknowing. To be without that sharpness of conscience and consciousness, was all I longed for. I wanted to forget, big time and tonight my opportunity came. I scrambled under the wire and got away, joining my brothers and sisters of the flesh. At first they sniffed me, like some new animal but then realised I was still the same underneath. Soon the zombie army marched on, with me in its midst. Sorry professor but I must remain true to my calling as you do yours. You didn't sin against what you were but for me there is no going back and no desire to. Even now the language centre is going and with it my mind.
"Ugh, snarl, grunt."
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