Feast

  FEAST

  Book II of The Hunger Series

  By Jeremiah Knight

  The human race hangs by a thread the thickness of a single gene: RC-714. The gene, which unlocks the millennia of genetic traits stored in junk DNA, gives crops the ability to rapidly evolve and thrive in any environment. But RC-714 is passed on when consumed. Any creature—mammal, reptile, fish or insect—that eats the genetically modified crops becomes a slave to the Change. Bodies morph into unrecognizable abominations. Intellect takes a back seat to ravenous hunger. And all the world’s species eat each other toward extinction.

  Racing against this impending outcome, Peter Crane and his family attempt to reach a laboratory in Boston, where a slim hope of saving the human race from extinction exists. But before heading northeast, they must visit the swamps of South Carolina’s Hellhole Bay to find a scientist who can help undo the damage done by ExoGen, the corporation that created and unleashed RC-714. Upon reaching Hellhole, the family is captured by a man named Mason, who not only survived the Change, but managed to keep a small community alive as well—a community that is subject to his every carnal desire and whim.

  Trapped in the clutches of a man whose heart is as twisted as the monsters that roam the Earth, Peter, Ella, Jakob, Anne and Alia, must fight for their freedom from a literal hellhole. Danger lurks behind every door, stalks beneath the swampy waters and descends from the sky. As enemies—both human and ExoGenetic—close in, surviving will be harder than ever, and for some, impossible.

  In 2015, Jeremiah Knight exploded onto the horror/sci-fi scene with his Top 100 bestselling novel: Hunger. Combining the speculative science of Crichton with the twisted scares of King, Feast continues the story that made Hunger the #1 post-apocalyptic novel.

  FEAST

  Book II of The Hunger Series

  Jeremiah Knight

  1

  “Mmm, wow,” Anne said between wet, crunching chews. “Oh, now this...this is good.” She took a second bite of the plump, uncooked corn cob and leaned back against a tree. Juice oozed from the sides of her mouth, as she chomped again and again, moving the food along her lips like a typewriter. She made no effort to wipe her face as she chewed, mouth open, corn sticking to her chin.

  When she spoke again, this time to her mother, the twelve year old girl’s words were garbled by the food. “I mean, I’ve had corn before, but this is amazing. And it’s not even cooked. You guys didn’t just make it grow like crazy, you made it taste better, too.”

  “You left out the part about how that vegetable turns people into monsters,” Jakob said, staring at his younger sister. They’d only met a few weeks ago, but they already bickered, teased and fiercely protected each other like lifelong siblings.

  “Zea mays L. var. rugosa Bonaf,” Ella Masse said, rubbing a hand over her shaved head. She spoke the words whimsically, like recited lines from a play in which she was the star. She watched her daughter take another bite, the juices making clean streaks through the dirt that covered the girl’s chin, and the rest of her exposed skin. The dirt wasn’t out of place. They were all covered in soil. It was camouflage for their white skin and human scents. “Sweet corn. And it’s not a vegetable. It has vegetable features, and fruit, but it’s actually a grain.”

  Ella looked at the corn for a moment, as though lost in thought. Then she stood up and walked away. The world around them, lush with her mankind-destroying creations, was a constant reminder of the biggest blunder in the history of the world. Ella’s blunder, at least, in part.

  “Really big grass,” Jakob said, still watching Anne eat. A bowl of food sat in front of him, composed of foraged leaves, mushrooms, weeds and mosses. All of it grew in the wild and had no ExoGenetic traits, which meant it lacked RC-714, the gene that had turned the rest of the world into monsters by unlocking dormant adaptations going back to the beginning of life on Earth. The gene had also unleashed an unspeakable hunger in all who had consumed it. Those who had eaten the crops unleashed by ExoGen, the biogenetic corporation for whom Ella had developed RC-714, became ravenous predators. Their bodies rapidly adapted to new environments, which included being surrounded by other rapidly adapting predators. Those who adapted faster, killed and ate those who hadn’t. Over a period of two years, the world’s population had eaten itself nearly to extinction, until only apex predators remained. They still hunted each other, and still looked to devour the small pockets of humanity who had not yet consumed ExoGenetic crops. At the moment, that included Jakob.

  Anne was torturing him on purpose, he knew. It was part of her job description as a sister, a role she took seriously. He picked up a mushroom in defiance and forced a smile, as he popped it in his mouth. It tasted earthy and sour, but it wouldn’t make him sick, make him trip or kill him. Still, it was hard to enjoy while he could smell the sweetness oozing from Anne’s corn.

  “Oh my God,” Alia said, eyes closed, nose raised and sniffing. “It smells like a candy bar.”

  “Normal sweet corn has twice the sucrose of field corn and ten times more water-soluble polysaccharide.” Anne took another bite, juices rolling down her chin.

  “Sucrose?” Alia asked. “Polysaca-what?”

  “Sucrose is sugar,” Anne said between bites. “Polysaccharides are a bunch of other things you won’t understand, either, so best to move on.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Alia said, glaring at the younger girl.

  “That has yet to be determined.” Anne took three more bites and smiled at Alia, the gleam in her eye revealing that she hoped the older girl would take the bait. But Alia had quickly learned to not match wits with Anne. She wasn’t just smart, she was also ruthless—a habit picked up while traversing an ExoGen-populated countryside with just her mother. That was, until a few weeks ago, when they had showed up at Peter and Jakob’s doorstep with a horde of monsters following in their wake.

  “ExoGen corn is a super-sweet strain that has seven times the sucrose,” Anne said, staying on topic, oblivious to the brewing teenage tension. She looked away from her food, like she was seeing something not there. “That’s why it tastes good. Why all the crops taste so good. Why people couldn’t stop eating them. Why the Change happened so fast.”

  “But not to you,” Jakob said.

  “That’s great for her.” Alia pushed her bowl of foliage away. “But she could at least try not to rub it in.”

  Uh boy, Jakob thought, here we go.

  He sometimes wondered if Alia remembered her twelve-year-old self. It had only been four years ago, after all. He’d been through seventh and eighth grades, and had learned to avoid unnecessary clashes with his female classmates, especially those who were smarter, or bigger, than him. They might not get violent—though that wasn’t always true with Anne—but they dragged them out. What could be resolved with a few punches between boys might last months or years with the girls. They weren’t fights. They were feuds, and he really hoped that wouldn’t happen between Anne and Alia—his sister and his girlfriend. There weren’t any daytime talk shows left to help them resolve it.

  “First of all,” Anne said, “I can only eat this corn because I was grown, in a lab, from DNA that Mom...” She pointed at Ella. “...stole from Dad.” She motioned to the forest surrounding them, where Peter was on guard. “I’m a genetically engineered freak, who, yeah, can eat corn. But I’ve also got a USB port in the back of my head.” She stabbed a finger at Alia. “Do you have a USB port in the back of your head? No? Too bad for you. It’s sooo fun. If you want, I can drill a hole and shove a—”

  “Keep it down.” The deep, serious voice made them all flinch, but everyone relaxed when Peter stepped into the small clearing where they were enjoying—or trying to enjoy—their foraged lunch.

  “Did you see something?” Alia asked, n
ervous. Of the five of them, she was still the most shell-shocked. They had become adept at avoiding trouble over the past few weeks, but the events that had brought them together and taken her father’s life, had left her in a constant state of nervousness.

  “We’re clear,” Peter said, and then he focused on Anne. “But you are being too loud.”

  Anne said nothing, but took a another bite of corn.

  Jakob picked up a still-full bowl of greenery and handed it to his father. In the past few weeks, his father had gone from looking like a tough-looking Dad to a chiseled warrior. Caked in mud, head shaved and carrying weapons that included a high-powered bow and arrows and a suppressed M4 rifle, Peter looked more like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator now, but a little less bulky and half a foot taller.

  Alia said Jakob looked like his father, and to an extent, he agreed. They had the same facial features, dark eyes and shaved brown hair, but that was where the comparison ended. Seventeen-year-old Jakob lacked his father’s mass. He wasn’t sure if he would ever be as strong as Peter, but he hoped he’d put on some muscle soon, if only to not disappoint Alia before she realized he was scrawny. He wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of masculinity yet. But Alia...she was everything Jakob could have asked for. Kind, funny, and beautiful, with her mother’s tan Arabian skin, dark eyes and black hair. In this post-apocalyptic nightmare world, she was a flower blooming in the desert. Jakob felt more like a misshapen cactus.

  Peter took handfuls of vegetation, shoving them in his mouth and chewing with efficiency. He was done in under a minute, and like Jakob, he was clearly not satiated by the meal. But he wasn’t going to complain about it. Never did. Instead, he’d keep them moving, focused on their destination: George’s Island, off the coast of Boston, where a laboratory had been set up before civilization had come to a screeching halt. Ella claimed she could rework the human genome so that ExoGenetic food wouldn’t transform people into monsters. She couldn’t reset the world, but she could increase their chances of survival and ensure the human race’s continuation.

  If they made it that far.

  Apex predators hunted day and night.

  And ExoGen, whose executives had known what the RC-714 would do to the world, and had prepared for it, were likely still searching for them. Still trying to stop Ella from freeing the human race. They didn’t know why. Only that the corporation had a large, well defended facility in what was once San Francisco, and that they had sent their own private army in search of Ella. And in search of Anne, who held the key to mankind’s future in her head...or rather, in the USB drive in her head.

  Peter tensed. His eyes flicked up. They were surrounded by trees—maple, birch and oak—and they were sitting on a carpet of potato plants. “Finish eating.”

  No one asked why. They just shoved what was left of their food into their mouths and consumed it quickly. Food was sometimes sparse, and they were loath to waste any of it. Unless danger was charging straight for them, jaws agape, they finished all of their meals.

  Jakob had just finished swallowing when he noticed what his father had already picked up on. The canopy above was still thick green with summertime foliage. But that didn’t stop the sun from filtering through the myriad cracks in the armor of thick luminous leaves. Nor did it stop him from detecting the enormous shadow flitting past above them.

  A bird, he thought, holding his breath.

  Birds were among the most dangerous apex predators, mostly because they could spot you from miles away and strike from above, without warning. So he was told. He hadn’t actually seen an ExoGen bird yet. He had seen a few species of normal birds, which fed exclusively on non-ExoGen plants, like hummingbirds, but he’d seen none of the man-eating super-birds of prey said to be circling high in the atmosphere.

  But now...was the shadow so large because it was low in the sky? Or was it just enormous? Experience told him it was the latter, and that it was close because it was hunting them. But they were concealed in the trees. How long would the ExoGen bird wait before giving up?

  Fifty feet away, the canopy exploded downward, as something large pierced through the trees and struck the ground.

  About that long, Jakob thought, getting his first look at an ExoGen bird and quickly wishing he hadn’t—not just because it was a hideous sight, but because it wasn’t alone.

  There were two of them.

  2

  Peter nocked an arrow and took aim before the first massive creature struck the ground. One good shot from the powerful bow could drop most anything alive—before the Change and after it. But when the creature reared up after landing, Peter held his fire. The two creatures were focused on each other.

  And that was a good thing.

  A small voice in Peter’s mind shouted at him to run, to sneak away with the others and never look back. But this was the first time he had ever seen two ExoGen creatures locked in combat. And from the looks of them, they were both top predators, whose recent rapid evolutions had taken them in divergent directions. He crouched with the others, peering out from behind a thick oak trunk, watching the two behemoths tear at each other.

  Peter guessed that the creature on the bottom, which might have once been a crow, was what he’d detected flying above them. Perhaps it had been zeroing in on their scent, despite their best efforts to mask it. Its ten-foot-long wings were covered in black feathers, but the rest of its dark body was cloaked in what looked like long black hair. A line of long spines jutted from its back, flaring up as the bird-like thing snapped at the second creature’s exposed neck. The biting jaws, filled with sharp teeth, fell short, but one bite would be enough. Its long legs, ending at massive, talon-tipped, three-toed feet, kicked and scrambled, but to no avail. It was pinned by its larger adversary.

  The second creature, which had no doubt dived down on the giant crow-thing from above, might have once been a falcon, but Peter had a hard time spotting any features resembling a pre-Change bird. This featherless beast, with an elongated beak, twitching, sinewy muscles and taut brown skin, looked prehistoric. More like a pterodactyl, but with long powerful legs for running and a long tail tipped with a tuft of feathers. A blood-red crest rose up behind its yellow eyes, which were focused on its equally hungry prey.

  The crow-thing gave up trying to bite the larger creature’s neck and opted for a less deadly attack. It twisted its own long neck to the side, clamped its jaws around its enemy’s lower leg and sank those long teeth deep into the flesh.

  The Exodactyl’s eyes just widened, but Peter didn’t think it was from the pain. The creature looked excited, like this was the moment it had been waiting for. With startling speed that made Peter flinch, the creature jabbed its long sharp beak downward. The strike began and ended in less than a second. The crow didn’t even notice the gaping hole in its neck. But it slowed its biting and thrashing, as blood pulsed from its throat.

  When its flailing limbs finally fell still, the victorious creature leaned down close to the bloody hole.

  Peter expected it to start tearing the dead bird apart, rending it with beak and talons, but that was not what happened. A long tube-like tongue extended from the beak’s tip, sliding into the open wound. It then began to twitch, as a slurping sound filled the air.

  It’s drinking blood, using its tubular tongue like a straw.

  Despite having seen combat violent enough to cause a bout of PTSD, not to mention the past few weeks of ExoGenetic horrors, Peter found himself getting queasy. As a former U.S. Marine Critical Skills Operator—part of the most elite fighting force within the Marine Corps—he had been trained to keep his emotions, and his stomach in check.

  But the others...

  A gurgling sound followed by a wet smack made him freeze in place. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a glob of partially chewed, now regurgitated corn kernels laying atop a flattened potato plant stalk. Anne. As tough as she wanted to be, or wanted everyone to think she was, she was still a twelve-year-old girl. And yeah, she had seen some shit that w
ould leave most adults damaged for life, but she still processed trauma like a kid. Sometimes, that meant puking at something gross.

  Without moving his head, Peter swept his gaze back to the Exodactyl. Its body hadn’t shifted position, but the slurping sound had stopped, and its tongue no longer twitched. Peter nearly shouted in surprise when he spotted the baseball-sized yellow eye turned straight toward him.

  Man and beast locked eyes and froze.

  Would it attack with a fresh kill underfoot?

  Did it think of them as prey? As competition?

  Was it even thinking at all?

  No, Peter decided. And it’s not going to let us leave.

  That was one of the defining attributes of ExoGenetic creatures—ravenous hunger. Unceasing. Despite having a meal underfoot, it would hunt them all down, kill and consume them and then return to the mutated crow. Or some variation of that.

  “Everyone get ready to run on my mark,” he whispered. He didn’t expect to hear confirmation or see any nods. They would follow his lead, knowing full well that to stray from the plan, even an evolving plan, would likely lead to a horrible death for one of them, if not all of them.

  “Now,” Peter hissed. “Run.”

  As he heard the others turn and run, he stood up, in clear view, arrow already nocked and drawn back. Their movement freed the large bird-like creature from its predator rigor mortis. It turned to face Peter, leaning toward him. It then opened its beak wide and let out an ear-piercing squawk.

  Peter’s fingers withdrew from the string. It snapped forward, propelling the arrow at three hundred and seventy feet per second, meaning the arrow left his fingers and entered the creature’s open maw before the creature could react to the sound. The Exodactyl’s beak snapped shut, and its head twitched back in surprise. Its wide eyes had an almost humorous ‘what the fuck’ look about them. But the arrow hadn’t lodged in the bird’s throat. Instead, it pierced the layers of flesh and skin, emerging on the far side and striking a tree, twenty-five feet away. It was the one free shot Peter would get, so while the creature was distracted by the confusing pain, he turned tail and chased after the others.