Chapter 6: Total Consumption
The barn held the smell for days. It seeped into the cracked concrete, saturated the old hay, clung to their skin like a second, heavier layer. Mark’s jaw ached with a deep, muscular throb. His throat felt raw, scraped clean. He moved through the perpetual twilight of the barn in a daze, his world reduced to the cycle of Sarah’s needs.
She dominated the space. She could no longer stand. Her form was a vast, pale landscape of flesh, slumped against the far wall of the barn. Her legs sprawled before her, thick as tree trunks, the feet now wide, flat pads that seemed to melt into the floor. The mountain she had produced that first night remained, a hardened, crumbling monument in the center of the floor. They simply navigated around it.
Her appetite was a silent, ticking engine. The fullness that had preceded the cataclysm was gone, replaced by a hollow, gnawing void that made her whimper. “It’s different,” she’d say, her voice a low rumble that vibrated in Mark’s chest. “It’s not hungry. It’s… empty. It needs to be filled.”
He became a forager. He looted the farmhouse, finding cans of chili, stew, thick syrupy fruits. He’d haul them back, open them, and hand-feed her, one dripping spoonful after another. She swallowed without tasting, her eyes distant, focused on some internal gauge only she could see. The food seemed to vanish into her, leaving no immediate trace on her colossal frame. It was as if she was filling a bottomless silo.
“It’s not enough,” she moaned one afternoon, as he scraped the last bit of condensed milk from a can. “It’s just… filler. It disappears.I need volume. I need… mass.”
He remembered the untouched fields surrounding them, gone to seed. “There’s corn,” he said. “Acres of it.”
For a week, that was his life. He ventured into the tall, rustling stalks with a burlap sack, snapping off dry, hardened ears. He’d return, his hands bleeding from the husks, and pile them beside her. She’d take an ear, grind it between her molars with a sound like gravel crushing, swallow the kernels and cob alike. Her digestion, once a quiet process, was now a constant, low growl, a machinery at work.
The effects were not subtle. Her belly, already monumental, began to distend further, but lower, sagging towards the floor with a dense, grainy weight. The sounds from within were audible—crunching, grinding, a slow, sedimentary shift. She was processing roughage, creating something solid and foundational.
“It’s working,” she sighed, a hand resting on the taut, drum-like curve of her lower abdomen. “I can feel it packing in. Settling.”
But the silo needed a different kind of fuel, too. The corn was structure. She craved lubricant.Grease.Fluidity.
“A town,” she said, her eyes finally focusing on him with a sharp, desperate clarity. “There has to be a town nearby. They have… everything. In one place.”
That’s how they found the mall. Or rather, how Mark scouted it. A sprawling, single-story complex off the old highway, its parking lot a cracked graveyard for shopping carts. The main doors were boarded, but the loading docks around back were vulnerable. It was perfect. A cathedral of consumption.
Getting her there was the final labor. She moved like a glacier, an inexorable, crushing slide. She’d roll onto her belly and push with her arms, her legs too heavy to coordinate. She flattened fences, left a wide, muddy trough through the fallow fields, and finally, as they reached the asphalt, a smeared trail of leaked fluids and crushed blacktop. By the time the concrete walls of the mall rose before them, she was panting, her skin sheened with sweat, but her eyes were bright with anticipation.
She breached the loading dock door like a ship hitting a dock, the metal rolling door shrieking as it tore from its tracks. Inside, the air was stale and cool, smelling of dust and forgotten things. She slithered down a corridor, following the faint scent of old popcorn and chlorine from a drained fountain.
They emerged into the food court.
The vast, open space was a time capsule of bright colors and dead commerce. Faux marble tabletops. Chairs stacked on them. A carousel, silent and still. And surrounding it, the skeletal remains of eateries: the stainless steel counter of a sushi place, the faded awning of a taco stand, the iconic golden arches, dark and empty.
Sarah let out a sigh that stirred the dust on the floor. “Home,” she whispered.
She began at the periphery, a force of nature reshaping the landscape. She didn’t open the service hatches; she simply leaned her weight against them until the locks snapped and the metal buckled. Her hands, now broad as shovels, scooped into freezers. She pulled out frozen bricks of pizza dough, bags of ossified french fries, tubs of ice cream freezer-burned into solid, sugary cement.
She ate it all. The frozen food crackled between her teeth. She barely chewed the fries, swallowing them by the frozen handful like brittle sticks. The ice cream tubs she pried the lids off and upended into her mouth, gnawing on the frozen contents.
“It’s cold,” she complained, but didn’t stop. “It’s so cold inside me.”
Next were the dry goods. sacks of flour from a pizza place, ripped open with a finger. A cloud of white powder billowed around her head as she poured it directly into her mouth, coughing, laughing as she choked it down. She found industrial-sized cans of cheese sauce, of chili, of nacho cheese. She punched holes in the tops and squeezed, squeezing thick, congealed ropes of orange and brown directly onto her tongue. It coated her face, dripped onto her chest, mingled with the flour in a pasty, grotesque sludge.
Mark watched, handing her packets of salt and sugar when she pointed, opening stubborn containers. He was her attendant in this temple. The scale of her consumption was beyond appetite. It was geoengineering. She was constructing a continent inside herself.
Her body responded in real time. The low, grain-packed belly began to swell upward and outward, forced forward by the sheer volume of new material. The frozen stuff seemed to act as a core, a cold nucleus around which the powders and pastes adhered. She grew not just wider, but taller where she sat, her midsection rising like yeasted dough, pushing her immense breasts up towards her chin. The skin, stretched beyond any natural limit, was shiny and taut, crisscrossed with a roadmap of purple and red stretch marks. A deep, central groove formed from her sternum down, as if the mass within was dividing into two overwhelming lobes.
She paused, breathing heavily. A low, rolling cramp passed through her. A different need.
“The pretzels,” she grunted, pointing a cheese-smeared finger toward the glass-fronted case of an Auntie Anne’s stand. “The big ones. All of them.”
The pretzels were not frozen. They were preserved in some chemical limbo, soft and pliable under a sheen of oil. Mark brought her the entire rack, twelve massive knots of dough. She took one, studied it, then shoved the entire thing into her mouth. She didn’t chew so much as compress it, her cheeks bulging, before a thick swallow sent it down her esophagus in a visible lump.
One after another. She ate them methodically, purposefully. They were the binder.The glue.
As the last pretzel disappeared, the change was sudden and dramatic. Her whole body seemed to seize. A deep, resonant gurgle echoed through the empty food court, a subterranean shifting. The cold, hard, grainy mass in her lower belly began to soften, warmed and mobilized by the fats and the dense, gummy pretzels. It was no longer a silo. It was a reactor, coming to critical mass.
Her skin, already taut, became translucent in places. Mark could see dark, shapeless masses churning and pressing against the membrane from within. A wet, sloshing sound accompanied every slight movement she made.
She looked at him, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and triumph. “It’s time,” she breathed. “It’s all… moving. It needs to come out. But I can’t… not like last time. I can’t push that. Not yet.” She gestured weakly at her own form. “I need it… soft. I need you to… stir it.”
He understood. He walked around the mountain of her body, his shoes sticking to the spilled cheese and flour. The smell coming from her was overwhelming—sour milk, corn, grease, yeast, and beneath it all, the sharp, gut-churning promise of waste.
He positioned himself behind her. The view was geologic. He reached out, placed both hands on the curve of her left flank, and pushed.
The flesh gave way, but only slightly, before meeting a firm, resistant pressure from within. He pushed harder, kneading like dough. A deep, liquid groan answered from her depths. A wave of movement passed through her viscera, a slow, seismic roll. He could feel it through his palms—entire shelves of compacted matter breaking up, turning, beginning a slow, inevitable migration downhill.
He worked for what felt like hours, moving around her, pressing, prodding, stirring the contents of her vast belly. She moaned, her head lolling back, her mouth open in a silent gasp. It was a pain so profound it circled back into pleasure. With each manipulation, the internal pressure seemed to equalize, then rebuild, stronger.
Finally, she gripped the leg of a bolted-down table, her knuckles white. “Stop,” she gasped. “It’s… it’s ready. It’s at the door.”
She tried to roll onto her hands and knees, but her front was too heavy, too immense. She could only slump forward, her belly crushing against the tiled floor, spreading out around her like a landed blob. The position placed unimaginable pressure on her core.
A low, tearing sound, not from her, but from the very air, was her only warning.
It began as a seepage, a dark, oily stain spreading on the fabric of her leggings. Then, with a sound like a thousand sighs, the seams gave way. Not a flood, but a slow, relentless ooze. A thick, porridge-like stream of brown and yellow and undigested orange began to pour from her. It was filled with recognizable chunks—nubs of corn, bits of pretzel, slivers of frozen pizza—all suspended in a steaming, muculent gravy.
It didn’t fall. It flowed. It poured across the food court floor with the steady, unhurried gravity of lava. It reached the step down into the central seating area and cascaded over, a foul waterfall.
Mark stared, hypnotized by the sheer, ongoing volume. It pooled around the chair legs, began to inch towards the dry fountain. The smell was breathtaking, a complex palette of rot and fermentation and human waste.
Sarah screamed, but it was a scream of release, of ecstatic emptiness. Her body deflated like a punctured hot air balloon, the skin going from tight drum to soft, wrinkling folds. But even as she emptied, the ooze continued. It found a grate, and began to drip, then stream, down to the lower level.
She was still screaming when the first screams answered from below.
From the darkened hallway of the lower-level boutiques, a group of figures emerged.Squatters. Survivors. Their faces, pale in the emergency lighting, were masks of absolute horror as they saw the brown river seeping from the ceiling, dripping down the escalator, flowing towards their makeshift beds.
They looked up, towards the source.
They saw Sarah, slumped in her glory, a deflated titaness atop a flowing mountain of her own making. They saw Mark, standing beside her, covered in her leavings.
Sarah’s screams of release turned into something else.A laugh. Hoarse, ragged, and utterly triumphant. She lifted a heavy arm, pointing a trembling finger at the horrified faces below.
“You see?” she croaked, her voice raw. “You see what I can make?”
The ooze reached the first of them, covering their shoes. Their screams filled the mall, echoing Sarah’s own, a chorus of terror and worship she drank in like wine. She was no longer just full. She was fertile. She was productive.
And everyone would know.
And everyone would know.
The silence that followed her raw declaration lasted only a second. It was the thin, brittle silence of complete disbelief shattering. One of the squatters, a man in a stained jacket, looked from Sarah’s monstrous form to the brown river soaking his pant legs. He made a wet, choking sound.
“Oh, God,” he whispered. Then he screamed. “GOD!”
It was a trigger. The frozen group exploded into motion all at once, a lurching, stumbling ballet of terror. A woman slipped in the ooze falling from the escalator, landing on her hands with a sickening splash. Her shriek was sharp, piercing the vast space. Two others scrambled back, colliding with a rack of forgotten sunglasses that clattered to the floor. “What is that? What is SHE?” someone else yelled, their voice cracking halfway through.
The panic wasn’t quiet. It was a cacophony of slippery foot slaps, gagging coughs, and incoherent shouts that bounced off the skylights. They weren’t running in one direction. They were scattering like insects under a lifted rock, some back into the dark hallways, others toward the distant, boarded main entrance, all of them trapped in the same bowl of the food court with her. The smell hit them fully now, a tangible wall of decay that made another man bend over and vomit his meager dinner onto the faux marble, adding a new, acidic note to the air.
Sarah watched them. Her exhausted panting shifted into a low, wheezing chuckle. “They’re scared,” she said to Mark, her voice full of wonder. She shifted her weight, and another gush of soft waste poured from her with a wet sigh, widening the stream across the floor. The movement drew fresh screams.
“Stop moving!” a tall guy with a backpack shouted, though whether to Sarah or his fleeing companions wasn’t clear. He pointed a trembling finger at Mark. “You! What did you do?”
Mark just stood there, mute. He was still covered in her cheese-sauce and flour paste, streaked with brown. He was a statue in the gallery of her chaos. His silence seemed to inflame the tall guy more. “It’s a disease! It’s a fucking chemical leak!” the guy screamed, backpedaling into a table.
A younger woman, her eyes wide and unblinking, stared at Sarah’s deflated, yet still impossibly massive form. “She’s a monster,” she stated, her voice strangely flat. Then she repeated it, louder. “MONSTER!”
The word cut through the other noise. It hung in the greasy air. Sarah’s chuckle died. Her face, soft and spent a moment before, hardened. She pushed against the floor, trying to heave herself up. The gesture was futile, but the attempt made her bulk quake ominously. A new cascade of waste splattered down the steps. “I’m full,” she corrected, her voice dropping, dangerous. “I’m so full I remade this place. You’re just… things in it.”
The tall guy with the backpack fumbled with a lighter, his hands shaking too badly to spark it. “We need fire,” he was muttering. “Clean it with fire.”
That’s when the real stampede began. The word “fire” did it. The logic of their fear cohered into a single, mindless imperative: Out. They surged as a group toward the closest corridor, the one that led back to the loading docks, the one directly beneath Sarah’s perch. They slipped and slid in the effluence, shoving each other, their cries blending into a single animal sound of pure flight. One man fell and was stepped on, his yelp swallowed by the roar.
Sarah watched them flee into the dark mouth of the hallway. She slumped back, the energy leaving her. The food court was empty again, save for the two of them and the spreading, steaming evidence. The echo of their panic lingered, ringing in Mark’s ears.
“They’ll bring people back,” Mark said, finally finding his voice. It sounded thin.
“Good,” Sarah sighed. She closed her eyes, a profound exhaustion settling into her every fold and curve. Her hand found the sagging, emptied ruin of her belly. “Let them.”
The word “good” hung in the stinking air, a challenge to the fading echo of screams. Mark wiped his cheek, his hand coming away streaked with something oily and brown. He tasted salt and pretzel and something metallic on his lips. “They’re going to call the police, Sarah.Or an ambulance. Or… I don’t know, the National Guard.”
She didn’t open her eyes. A deep, grinding gurgle traveled through her torso, a subterranean rearrangement. “Let them come see.” Her fingers pressed into the soft, emptied folds of her stomach. “It feels… quiet now. Hollow. But it’s not satisfied.” Her eyes opened, fixing on the dark hallway where the squatters had fled. “It wants more than food, Mark.”
He followed her gaze. The pool around them was slowly stilling, its surface forming a thin, gelatinous skin. The stench was a physical presence, a warm, wet blanket soaked in vinegar and rot. “What else is there?”
“That,” she said, a slow smile tugging at her mouth. “Their faces.Their screaming. It’s… filling. In a different way.” She shifted, trying to roll onto her side. The movement produced a wet, sucking sound from below and dislodged a forgotten nacho chip from under her thigh. It skittered across the tile. “Help me up. I want to see.”
“You can’t get up,” Mark said, the absurdity of the statement landing with a dull thud. “Look at you.”
“Then bring me something from over there.” She pointed a languid finger toward the shattered front of the Cinnabon stand. “I smell the sugar. It’s still in the air.”
He picked his way through the muck, his shoes making sick, sticky sounds with each step. The glass display was cracked, the perfect spirals inside now fossilized into hardened, grayish lumps. He broke one off. It was solid as a rock. He brought it to her, a dusty, concrete-like cinnamon roll.
She took it, sniffed it, then put the whole thing in her mouth. The crunch was deafening in the quiet. She worked her jaw slowly, thoughtfully, like a geologist sampling a core. “Stale,” she announced, paste forming in the corners of her mouth.“But sweet. The idea of it, you know?” She swallowed with an audible click. “It’s the idea that counts.”
Another internal shift. This one was visible. The deflated state of her belly, that landscape of wrinkled, slack skin, suddenly tightened. Not with re-inflation, but with a firm, underlying swelling, as if a slow-inflating balloon had been pushed inside the loose sac. The deep central groove began to shallow, pushed outward from within.
She gasped, a short, sharp intake of breath. Her hands flew to her middle. “Oh. It’s starting.”
“What is?”
“The hunger.Again. But it’s faster. It’s different.” Her words came out in a rushed pant. The gentle swell hardened, distending forward. The skin, still wrinkled, now stretched taut over a new, firm mound. It wasn’t the soft, yielding fullness of before. This was dense, purposeful growth. “It’s not an empty hole. It’s a… a demand.”
The gurgles returned, not the slow rolls of digestion but sharp, percussive pops and cracks. She groaned, arching her back slightly off the filthy floor. The flesh of her hips, where they met the tiles, seemed to spread, to press outward with a steady, inexorable force. A faint creaking sound, like a stressed leather sofa, emanated from her.
Mark took a step back. He’d seen her grow before, in the barn, in the apartment. This was not that. That had been a bloat, an accumulation. This was a transformation. The bones of her pelvis, hidden beneath fathoms of fat, seemed to themselves be expanding, pushing the framework wider. New folds of flesh, firm and smooth, rolled over her sides where they met the floor, sealing the space beneath her.
“It doesn’t want junk,” she groaned, her voice strained. “It wants… bulk. Substance.” Her eyes, wide and shining, scanned the food court. They landed on the support pillar near the ruined Auntie Anne’s. It was a square column, clad in cheap, fake marble panels. “The wall.”
“What about it?”
“The wall. I need…” She licked her lips. “I need the plaster. The sheetrock. The stuff behind it.”
Mark stared. “You can’t eat a wall, Sarah.”
“I can,” she whispered, and the conviction in her voice was terrifying. “I think I have to. It’s what’s here. It’s what’s solid.” The growth in her torso was accelerating. Her breasts, resting on the rising dome of her belly, began to swell upward, their under-curves meeting her chin. The stretch marks on her skin deepened from pink to a angry purple, fresh ones sketching lightning bolts across the new, taut landscape. “Please, Mark. I need to chew. I need to feel it break.”
The demand in her voice broke his paralysis. He walked to the pillar, feeling like a man in a dream. He drove his fist through the brittle fake marble. It shattered. Underneath was soft, powdery drywall. He clawed at it, breaking off a chunk about the size of a paperback book. A cloud of white dust billowed around him. He brought the chunk to her.
She took it in both hands, her fingers sinking into the soft material. She looked at it with a reverence usually reserved for holy sacrament. Then she brought it to her mouth and took a massive bite.
The sound was a dry, crunching squeak. Powder poofed into the air. She chewed methodically, her expression one of intense concentration. Plaster dusted her lips white. She swallowed, a difficult, grating motion.A second bite. A third.And she grew.
It was unmistakable now, a visible, relentless expansion. Her shoulders broadened, pressing outwards. The fat on her back piled into new, thick rolls that pressed against the floor. Her arms thickened, the soft undersides of her upper arms now resting fully on the spreading terrain of her own hips. The creaking of her skin was a constant, soft accompaniment to her chewing.
She finished the chunk of wall and pointed, wordlessly, for more.
Mark became a miner, excavating the pillar. He fed her piece after piece. With each swallow, her body seemed to integrate the inorganic material, using it to scaffold her expansion. She wasn’t just getting fatter. She was becoming denser, more massive, her form settling into the food court with a terrifying permanence.
When the first pillar was stripped to its metal studs, she pointed to the next one. “That one too.”
He obeyed. Her growth continued, a slow-mountain building. Her head began to seem small atop the monstrous, ever-widening slope of her shoulders and chest. The spill of her form began to encompass the tables she had once sat between. A chair snapped with a brittle crack as her hip pressed against it, flattening it. The edge of her expanding rear end reached the still-flowing ooze from before, and began to push it outward, creating a new, brown shoreline around her body.
She paused, panting. Her breaths were deep, laboring things that lifted her entire upper body. “It’s good,” she mumbled, plaster dust on her chin. “It’s solid. It’s making me real.”
From the dark hallway, a new sound echoed. Not screams.Whispers. Then a beam of light—a cell phone flashlight—cut through the gloom, landing on her.Then another. The squatters were returning. They’d brought others.
They gathered at the edge of the darkness, a small crowd of maybe ten, their faces illuminated in the stark white LEDs. They didn’t speak. They just watched, their phones held aloft, capturing the scene: the colossal, dust-white woman, the man feeding her chunks of the building itself, the sea of waste.
Sarah saw the lights.She stopped chewing. A new kind of hunger flashed in her eyes.
She leaned back, propping herself on her immense arms, presenting the monumental, still-growing bulk of herself to them. A low, resonant groan vibrated from her core, not of pain, but of display. The growth, fed by their horrified attention, surged anew.
Her thighs, already vast, began to push apart, splitting around her ballooning middle. The sound was a deep, subcutaneous tearing, a relentless yielding of her own form to its new dimensions. The floor beneath her groaned in sympathetic protest. One of her sprawling feet, wider than a car tire now, nudged the broken pretzel case, sliding it several feet with a screech of metal on tile.
“See?” she breathed, the word a ragged exhalation meant for them. “Look what I can hold.”
A woman in the crowd dropped her phone. It clattered on the tile, the light spinning. No one picked it up. They were transfixed. Repulsed. Awe-struck.
Sarah’s smile was a white slash in her dust-covered face. She took the next chunk of wall from Mark’s trembling hands, never breaking eye contact with the crowd. She bit down. The crunch echoed through the court.
And she grew larger.