CHAPTER 31: INSIDE THE MAW

[NOTE: Another one off 1st person POV Chapter.]

...

Reid’s POV...

The world ended in green-black.

One second I was standing, Rifle raised, squeezing off a shot into the shimmer. One second, I was with my companions, determined to face the horrors of the apocalypse with them to the bitter end.

And the next... teeth, hooks, and sweet rot slammed around me, and the world ate me whole. Just like that.

Pressure crushed in from all sides.

My shoulder hit something slick, and my ribs scraped on spines. Resin and bile burned into my eyes, my nose, and my mouth.

The stink was sugar turned sour, choking thick. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, I only felt. That instinctive human phobia of tight spaces flared. My Rifle strap snapped and something yanked it down, out of my hands.

I fought. God, I fought. Elbows, knees, boots, anything to wedge space between me and the heaving walls of meat.

But every shove only made the throat convulse harder, dragging me deeper.

Then the system chimed in my head, cold and uncaring.

DING!

~----~

[WARNING: Digestive Cycle Initiated]

[Subject: Reid Carter, F-Rank Awakener]

[Fatal Threshold: 2 minutes]

~----~

To see your fate being callously addressed in such a cold and detached third person perspective was chilling to say the least.

I shuddered.

’Two minutes,’ I thought.

I knew what that meant. It was not theory, neither was it numbers. I’ve seen men suffocate in less.

I clawed at my chest, trying to force breath into my lungs, but all I got was slime and a mouthful of acid-sweet liquid that seared my tongue. My body convulsed in protest, and bile surged up the back of my throat.

’Is this how I am going to die?’

’Swallowed like some rookie too green to watch his flank?’

"Not like this!" I snarled, though no one could hear me. The words drowned under the wet suction pulling me further down.

My vision swam as black dots started edging in.

And then, like a knife slipped into the back of my brain, memories opened, memories of back then before the rift.

...

Before the Rift...

My name is Reid Carter. Corporal, 2nd Battalion, U.S. Army.

I was a marksman long before the Rift tore the sky open. Rifle range was my church. The sight picture, the trigger squeeze, the math of wind and distance, clean, precise, and controlled.

War was messy, but the shot never was.

I was deployed overseas when the first whispers of the Rift came across the wire. "Strange lights, wild animal surges," reports said.

We thought it was terrorism, bioweapons, a new Chernobyl. None of us imagined the world itself would split.

When it hit, I wasn’t in uniform.

I was on leave, back home. I remember exactly where I was. I was in a diner off Route 19, plate of eggs in front of me with a mug of black coffee.

The window suddenly lit white, and the air tore. And then things that had never lived on Earth before screamed their way through.

I shot my first Rift-born monster with a Remington hunting rifle pulled from a rack behind the counter. The cook had tried to fight it with a cleaver. He died anyway.

By nightfall, the military had no orders to give me. Command was gone; the chain snapped. The uniform didn’t matter anymore.

The only thing that mattered was the rifle in my hands.

...

Back to the Maw...

The throat convulsed again, constricting, squeezing me deeper, and the flashback was mercilessly ripped away.

’Bastard!’ I cursed.

Slime filled my ears. The sound of my own heartbeat thundered, then weakened. My chest felt like a locked box with no key.

I thrashed. I pressed a forearm across the slick wall and tried to wedge myself. My ability sparked -Perception Slow- the same gift that let me place a bullet through a coin at two hundred yards.

But here? Here it only slowed the inevitable.

I saw bile drip one bead at a time around me. I felt each throb of the plant’s throat pulling me inch by inch, increasingly closer to the afterlife. My own panic slowed down into a cruel clarity... I was suffocating in perfect detail.

God, I didn’t want to die like this.

Not when I’d made it this far. Not when I finally found a team, not when Ethan finally gave me hope of survival, not when my team still needed a leader to see them west.

I thought of Kara’s arrogance, Jonas’s reckless grin, Mira’s steady hands, and Holt’s gruff patience.

I thought of Travis. He was useless with a rifle, but damn it, he stayed anyway. And Ethan... Ethan, with his cursed Wheel, punching death in the mouth when no one else could.

Would they survive without me?

Would they even try?

My lungs spasmed as my body started giving out. The convulsion drew bile in deep, burning down to my core. I coughed and the cough only let more in. Darkness bit at the edges of my sight, sharp and merciless.

My last thoughts were simple and full of regret...

I should’ve died in uniform, clean shot through the chest on a battlefield that made sense. Not here. Not like this.

But the Rift doesn’t ask what you want. It only decides what you pay.

The last thing I saw before my vision blacked out was a ribbon of light through the slime... followed by the memory of a rifle sight, crisp and straight, bisecting the world into before and after.

I reached for it with everything I had left.

Then the dark swallowed me, same as the maw.