ecstasy | corpse husband

chapter 34.

SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT
DAY EIGHT

Hudson can see how it would be absurdly easy to lose your mind in solitary confinement.

It wouldn't take long at all in the circumstances he's in. No windows, no socialization, no way out. The air he's been breathing for hours is stale, imbued with rot from the corpse in the middle of the room. The room itself is dim, no sources of light besides the singular light bulb hanging in the middle of the ceiling. He isn't even trapped inside of a cell, but the feeling of entrapment is enough to have him on edge constantly.

The part he didn't anticipate, though, was the the way he would lose track of time. There are no clocks, no devices, nothing for him to gauge how long it's been since he got stuck in here. Hours or days, he can't figure out. All he goes by is the growing sensation of parchment in his throat; he tries to ignore it, to pretend it isn't a thought in his mind, but he's thirsty. Hungry, too, but it's dehydration that's going to kill him first.

And that fucking smell...

It's putrid. It's been countless hours and he hasn't gotten used to it, not even a little bit. It still makes his eyes water every time he gets a particularly strong trace of it, like he's enduring it for the first time again. He's resorted to sitting in the opposite corner of the room with his shirt pinched over his nose but the odor is seeping into that, too.

In all of his time to just think, he starts to wonder why there is only the one dead body in the room. Not that he's complaining, as he doesn't think he could withstand more rot, but with the number of skin-eaters that rushed out of here, it seems odd that there was only one victim in that throng.

It's like this person was used as a communal food source.

There must be some sense of selectiveness to the people they murder. Or else, why wouldn't they eat each other?

They must've also been human upon being locked in here in the first place. It's likely they were arrested on New Year's night, normal convicts. He doubts the police would have been able to capture and restrain that many cannibals and survive. Which means they must have changed upon being in here, and they had to have already been infected before that. Is it a time constraint or something else that triggers the virus to fully consume a person?

Hudson stands up then, a bit faint, and his stiff bones grind in the movement. He winces from the way the wall scrapes his back, reminding him of the wound he has there. One bit him. It has concern plaguing his mind, but it isn't the pain he's worried about, or the fact that he can't properly clean it. It's what it might make him become.

They never could quite figure it out. Him and his group, that is. They would toss around theories about this virus, how it would transfer between hosts, how it altered people's minds, but never did they come up with a sound explanation. Contagious through bites was the best they came up with, like zombies, but there was never a chance to test it.

It seemed the most probable theory, though. Hudson was always wary of that.

Being stuck in isolation has only given him more reason to think about this predicament of his, and his mind was suffering for it. He would sit there trying to list off things about himself—his name, his family members, his favorite brand of cigarettes—to ensure he was still himself. More like a reassurance, if he's being honest. If anyone heard him talking to himself like this, they would think he's a madman.