You felt long fingers touch your ankle and draw away. A single finger stroked your side, the back of its knuckle running down your arm. You leapt on to all fours, listening, feeling for movement through the floor. You put a hand out in front of you. Your outstretched fingers land heavily on the side of a face. It holds steady as you explore smooth cheeks, broad nose, soft, full lips. A hand slides past your face, fingers thread into your hair. A strong arm pulls you closer.

Lips close on yours. They quiver as they press and shake open your mouth. Teeth graze against yours and your mouth widens. A dry tongue enters you, wetting from your fluids and the flow that drips down it. You taste a bitterness that makes you feel wise about the world. You suck the tongue into you, then push yours back, feel it tingle as its drawn deep within.

Somewhere a well overflows. Deep water from underground. You look into the pool and see forever for a moment. Then you’re gone, looking over your shoulder as you hear footsteps. And you realise it’s only a dream within a dream.

You awake in a sloppy sea of the half-chewed and half-alive. One, barely a torso, gnaws on inanimate flesh. Another, two legs and half an arm, wraps itself on the backs of the dying and plunges its jaws into the feeble necks to drink at least living blood. You push up off the thick, meaty liquid; your arms are both still yours. Reaching under the surface your fingers tap against the hard stub of your left leg, gnawed away below the knee.

For a second you cannot see. You feel the swell of the sea and slip for a moment on your one full leg. Heads turn, bodies slowly turn for their best run; away or towards the new meat.

You bend your good leg behind you. You lift yourself up, raise you arms and let out the fiercest roar.