The Feast Beast Virus
The era of feast and famine came upon us without warning. Some say it was a sign of the times. End days stuff. Science claimed an airborne adenovirus settled in the human appetite center of the brain wreaking havoc with our ability of self-control in regards to food.
Five years of this infection brought eighty percent of the world population into ravenous, dull-witted wights, with no other drive than to fill their stomachs with anything organic.
At first, we thought corporations found the new ingredient to drug the masses even more potent than sugar. People didn’t just overeat to the point of disgusting gluttony. Think Mr. Creosote of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. After the commercial production of food crashed in six months, people turned to hunt and scavenging. Paper currencies and economies moved to swap, and then it devolved to the survival of the fittest. The feast beast, as it came to be known, drove all civilized society to neanderthal depths.
All sense of preservation, prudence, or foresight were lost. People ate whatever they could find, even if there was a supply beyond measure. In the early stages of the virus, one would find people slumbering next to food vendors and grocery stores aisles, cleaning out reserves. Cities fell to masses. Farms and rural communities had crops and gardens ravaged and production animals slaughtered, it all turned into mindless depravity.
Then the food shortage.
We have been so accustomed to secure access to consumables; we lost the ability to find food. Those that knew how to hunt thrived in these periods, but the feast beast drove flooded the minds of the hunter, and it all became a Gollum lifestyle of eating creatures/ insects that were in the way.
One would think the world became a place for the Overwights, another evolved erm for the most successful eaters of the area, but most people starved within months. There was not enough to keep people from dying. Fishermen threw away the tools of the trade for relentless hours, scouring the shores. Doomsday preppers savaged their stores of food in their hideaways. Primitive peoples picked off each other in agony as cannibalism drove them forward like a demonic taskmaster.
Only those familiar with the concept of fasting held off or resisted the viral infection. They huddled in groups and rationed what they could. They prayed in their homes and implored to the Almighty for an end. The prayer was answered with three children — the fabled White Robes.
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