A rat feeds greedily on rotten meat...
A rat feeds greedily on rotten human meat. A rotting human limb, attached to a living body.
The desperate man knows it will be easier to detach the limb from the body than the rat from the limb. The diner is stronger than the dinner, for the diner has no drug to numb its pain. The rat's head is buried deep in the silver-green flesh, its claws hidden beneath the blackened skin. Only its plump body and twitching rump can be seen as it pushes deeper and deeper into the decaying muscle. The desperate man knows that the hungry rat will never let go. Yet if it remains, how long before it or its friends and relations discover the living meat beyond the putrid thigh? Not very long, surely, and even a rat must prefer fresh meat to foul.
If one is to die, then there are better ways than being eaten alive by enormous flea-ridden rats: even in his weary, drifting state, the man can see that. Swallowing two sparkling capsules, the only bright thing in his dull world, the man waits for the drugs to rush his brain and then takes up his apart before the blade, as if it has been braised. In a moment, man and leg are parted. His mind on other things, he pulls himself away, leaving the rat to its refreshment.
This is how it will be in the century to come. No savage biker tribes, no lone still-human heroes, no Mad Max millennium, only ill, old people and large, hungry rats eating them.
(Ben Elton, "This Other Eden", 1993 by Simon & Schuster, Great Britain) |
