The Rule

This place has never pretended to be merciful.

We learned that long ago—before the rivers shrank into memory, before the soil turned to powder, before hunger became the only language we all spoke fluently. Complaints evaporate here, same as everything else. The sun sees to that. It hangs above us like a watchful tyrant, a silent warden that neither sleeps nor softens, pressing its heat against our backs until even our shadows seem to wither.

There is no water. There is no food—at least, none we are allowed to touch.

The children cry.

They have been crying for hours now, their thin voices scraping across the camp like dry wind through brittle grass. At first, the sound stirred something in us—urgency, grief, instinct. Now it has become something worse. Background noise. A rhythm. A reminder of what we are all becoming.

Our stomachs groan, but even that sound is swallowed by theirs. Still, we perform strength. We straighten our backs, tighten our jaws, pretend that we are not unraveling. But beneath the act, every one of us is the same—aching, hollow, desperate for anything that might pass as sustenance. Anything that fits within the rule.

So we drift.

We wander without direction, brushing past one another like ghosts too tired to haunt. Eyes sunken. Movements slow. An entire camp of starving souls suspended in a strange, suffocating limbo—an existence filled with nothing, surrounded by everything we cannot have.

Above us, heavy clouds gather. They promise rain, but deliver none. We look anyway. We always look. Our eyes lift toward that gray ceiling as if hope might condense there, as if it might fall in droplets we could catch on our tongues. But our mouths remain dry, our throats tight. Some of us have taken to swallowing our own spit, as if that small illusion of moisture might stave off the inevitable. It doesn’t.

Beside me, Jasper hasn’t blinked in what feels like hours. He’s watching his neighbor Jordan. Not speaking. Not moving. Just watching. There’s a wetness at the corners of his mouth, a hunger in his gaze that no longer tries to hide itself behind civility. I’ve seen that look before. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t wait long either. I turn away.

“Howdy, boys.” Carter’s voice cuts through the stillness, thin but deliberate. He tips his hat, though the gesture feels heavier than usual—like something final. “Reckon you’ve heard,” he says. “Me and the kinfolk, we’re heading east. Folks say things are different out that way. Different rules. No one starving while food’s sitting right there in front of ‘em.”

A murmur ripples through the group, but it’s Ernie who answers. “Oh, shut the hell up, Carter,” he snaps, his voice sharp with something older than anger—fear, maybe. “This place been this way since before you knew your own name. And we’re still here, ain’t we? If you can’t stomach it, then go on. Take yours and get.”

Carter hesitates. Just for a moment. Then something in him folds. He nods once, lowers his gaze, and slips away without another word. His wife gathers the children close. They don’t cry. Not anymore. They just follow.

I lift my hat as he passes. He doesn’t see me. Or maybe he chooses not to.Before they disappear into the brittle horizon, it happens.

A thunderous crack splits the air as a crate drops from above, slamming into the earth with violent force. Wood shatters and food spills outward in every direction—rolling, bouncing, scattering at our feet.

The smell hits us first. Rich. Immediate. Overwhelming. It fills the lungs, curls around the mind, awakens something primal and merciless inside us.

No one moves. Not a hand. Not a step. Not even a sniff taken too quickly. Hope does not enter this moment. Because hope, here, is dangerous.

The crate vanishes as suddenly as it arrived—snatched back into the unseen heights before anyone dares break the rule. No one does.No one ever does. We follow the rule.

By nightfall, campfires burn and light returns. They flicker weakly against the darkness, casting long, distorted shadows that stretch and bend like things trying to escape their bodies. Another child’s crying stops. I don’t look. I don’t ask. I let the question spin through my mind like a cruel game of chance—sleep, death, or something worse like their parents… I dare not say it.

My thoughts drift to my own children. Their laughter. Their smiles. Their final cries for help. I tell myself, as I always do, that there was no other way. There was no other way- was there?

“Ahh—help!” The scream tears through the camp, sharp and sudden. Heads turn—some toward it, others away. We all know what it means. We all know what’s happening. It’s Jordan. Jasper has given into temptation and moves before anyone can intervene. He lunges. Jordan runs—but Jasper’s hunger is faster. The attack is quick. Brutal. I don’t watch the end. I don’t need to. By tomorrow, Jordan will be gone, and Jasper will look just a little less hollow. Just a little.

Another crash. Another crate. This one bursts open in the center of the camp, spilling its contents wide. Most of us barely react. But one does. A child—thin as a whisper, barely tethered to life but she throws herself forward with a desperate, reckless urgency that cuts through the stillness like a blade.

“Wait!” someone shouts.

Then many voices.

“Stop!”

“Don’t—!”

But she doesn’t hear us, or she does—and chooses not to. She scoops what she can, clutching crumbs like treasure, and runs. Her small body weaves through the crowd, frantic, wild. When she stops, she doesn’t hesitate. Her jaw opens—too wide, too fast—and she begins to consume.

We get to her too late. Frantically we seize her, pull her down, pry the food from her mouth. Panic spreads—not for what she has done, but for what will follow. Because no one has ever broken the rule. Not here.

It begins almost immediately. Her body trembles. Then falters. We watch. We cannot look away. She comes apart, not violently, not all at once, but in a slow, terrible unraveling. Pieces of her delicate, intricate—lose their shape, their function, their meaning. We watch as her flagellum falls off, her mitochondria falls apart and her cilia fall to the floor one by one. What made her a little bacterium dissolves before our eyes, fragment by fragment, until there is nothing left to hold.

Her father is the first to turn. The rest of us soon follow. We offer him words, soft, hollow niceties about beginnings and endings, about how life, here, can always be remade. That another can come through binary fission. That another will come.

But we all know the truth. Nothing replaces what was lost. Not even a perfect copy.

Then, at last! The sound. The alarm. A signal that cuts through the air like salvation itself. Five seconds. We count without counting. We feel it. Hope. And then we move. All at once.

Bodies surge forward. Hunger takes control. We consume without thought, without shame. Food is enveloped through phagocytosis, drawn into our single celled bodies, broken down, and transformed. Energy floods through me, sharp and immediate. Life though brief and fragile, it returns.

Even Jasper feeds. Jordan still drifts within him, not yet fully gone. But even that does not stop him. Nothing does.

Not anymore.

When it is over, I rest.

Full? For now.

Alive? For now.

And I find, to my own quiet horror, that I appreciate the rule.

The rule is simple.

The rule is absolute.

The rule keeps us alive.

When food falls from the heavens— we wait five seconds. Because we are germs. And this is how we survive.

-End