Hunger is a painful thing.

The blanket of quiet remains heavy over the ship, not a word on the lips of those awake. Max and Jessica’s deaths have left everyone emotionally empty. The brief peak of happiness from the prior day has only intensified the dropoff. There’s nothing left to say or do. The fear, the sickness, the exhaustion, the insomnia. Piling up, and up, and finally breaking them. Numbness takes their place. But above all of that is the hunger. Hunger won’t be numbed so easily.

The last of their rations are gone and none would dare open the freezer to eat the dead. Most are scarred from having eaten it once, they wouldn’t touch it even if they were nearing death. The mere thought of how joyous they had felt while unknowingly eating another person makes them sick. And those less tortured by that lie, those who may be able to stomach further cannibalism wouldn’t dare. Lewis guards the key to the freezer, and he doesn’t sleep anymore.

Lewis’s silence is perturbed by an occasional mumble as his inner thoughts leak, unintelligibly through his lips. He’s jumpy, paranoid. Every sound sends his hand to the gun on his hips. Sleep seems unwilling to touch him as his eyes remain wide, shifting at all times, eyelids never so much as drooping. He patrols the ship, wandering pointlessly, eyeing everyone who passes. Sometimes he hears footsteps behind him and turns only to find nobody there and he can’t be sure if it’s in his head or if it’s another of Julia’s tricks.

And those that do fall under Lewis’s gaze cower as he stares, feeling his judgment. And those that think perhaps they should continue eating their dead wouldn’t dare because of this.

Still, it’s an awful existence. Already weak from almost three weeks of rationing and vomiting, starvation is coming quicker. It blots out every other ailment. As the reactor’s poison and the sleepless nights fade into blunted numbness, those ailments no longer receive even a second thought. Every waking moment, the hunger blots out all else. Even as the shadows slip from the walls around them to slither through the air, even as the fog grows and climbs up the skin and through the hair, even as haunting noises echo through the hall when nobody’s around, they pay no attention, for the hunger tightens its grasp on their thoughts with every passing hour.