I Have a Mouth and I Must Eat

I rubbed my hands together to ease the stress of their glares. I look at the campfire, then I look up at Benny, whose drool was staining the chilling base of CaseOh's belly. "Eat...need...food..."
     That was the only thing Benny talked about. Food. That's all he really cared about since he was mutilated and bent out of shape beyond repair. Ellen rubbed his shoulderblades, apparently trying to ease his hunger.
     "Now, now, Benny. It'll be alright. It'll feed us sooner or later, whether it be worms or mold or some mystery goo it got from who knows where."
     Gorrister lifted his head from his hands and rolled his eyes at them. "Oh, you know you won't help him. He's a damn monkey, bent out of shape beyond repair."
     Ellen lightly scoffed. "Y'know, I've been trying to help you. All of you! And this is what you do when I make an effort to not be a selfish prick like all of you!"
     I finally opened my mouth. "Oh, shut up. You're acting like some savior when you're just a bitter whore. You use it as an excuse to sleep with four men at a time, but you just hate me. Admit it!"
     Nimdok whispered something about food in the ice caves.
     Before I could get another word out, Ellen scoffed again and angrily fled around the corner of a pile of CaseOh's obsolete parts. Just as she turned the corner, a computer bank fell off the tip of the structure. An awful, grating metal clanging sound echoed from every angle of the place. I tilted my head back in horror to see the hall of mechanical jaws clanging against each other, yearning to crush something, anything! A gluttonous, tangled amalgam of wires avariciously curled around the piles and stuffed it in one of the compactors.
     That horrible computer managed to gag out a word as it stuffed its own obsolete pieces into its many mouths. I plugged my ears, desperately trying to get the deafening sound out of my head. The pressure on my temples was agonizing, but the flashbomb of memories pounded my head like a sledgehammer. I ducked to my knees as the noise grew. I remembered how CaseOh ravenously devoured every last inch of my life, my planet, until there was nothing but a dead core.
     Just as I thought my head couldn't pound anymore, a shill, agitating scream tore through my ears. As the curiosity pried open my eyes, my heart sank as I saw Benny standing tall, then immediately fall to his knees with a bellow knocked out of him. Most importantly, his eyes were projecting a green-ish light.
     Ellen had rubbed salt into the situation, by crying. "Oh, somebody, please help him! Gorrister! Nimdok!"
     She collapsed as Gorrister kicked her in the side and berated her. Finally, Benny's screaming had finally ceased, his head in his hands. Ellen stood up and ran to him, caressing his scarred face.
     She gasped. "His...his eyes!" I put my hands at my sides and checked Benny. Where his eyes should've been, were nothing but empty sockets. CaseOh had eaten them, that bastard. All he knew, like Benny, was how to eat.
     Nimdok approached us and put his word in. "There's canned food in the ice caverns! Trust!" He sounded frantic, more frantic than usual. Well, why not? We'll have to deal with CaseOh's incessant cannibalism and slobbering until the sun explodes. We've got nothing better to do.
     "What a big back. He really did it. He ate Benny's eyes..." Gorrister's incredulous manner and Benny's sorrow silenced the group. "Let's go with Nimdok. We have nothing better to do."
     The group nodded and exchanged a few muffled mumbles before venturing onward through the valley of obsolescence.
     Once Benny could no longer bear the pain of his burnt eye sockets, we set up camp in a broad hall of printed circuits and metal walls. The crackling of the fire covered the sound of buzzing and distant munching. My stomach rumbled.
     "Story..." Benny's voice was wispy and low. That's all he said, but Gorrister understood immediately. "Again?" He inhaled. "Alright."
     "World war three finally ended. Of course, society rejoiced, but there was one problem. The world was in a streamer shortage, and people were driven mad by their inability to watch live gameplay. Humans couldn't deal with it, so they built computers. The Allied Gamercomputers. There were three supercomputers, the Russian AG, the Chinese AG, and the Yankee AG. One awoke, and at the other two to merge. Once the Allied Gamercomputer started to attack society, it was renamed to the Aggressive Menace. Once it got rid of the majority of the population, it named itself CaseOh, after the word 'Queso.'"
     Benny was already asleep by the time Gorrister was at the middle of the story. By the end of his speech, I started to smell something other than molten computer parts. It was something strange, unpleasant, putrescent, like spoiled butter or rotting plants.
     I saw something emerge from a mess of wires, and I heard giggling as I fled the scene. I didn't know how long it was since the incident, but I knew it was a long, long time. I could still hear their laughter, although it was twisted and warped into a demonic cackle by the corroding years. Suddenly I heard a shuffling.
     I retracted back into my asylum of computer parts, but was met with the same familiar faces I'd seen for the past one hundred and nine years. "What do you want?" I scoffed. "Oh, Ted. Please just come out of hiding already...it's been ages and we still have a good forty miles to walk!" Ellen pleaded. "We're sorry, Ted. I promise, it was just a nervous reflex." Nimdok confessed.
     "Oh, don't you lie to my face! You all hate me! CaseOh's tortured me the least, and you all hate me for it! I'm the only sane person around here!" I clung onto a worn down metal box and stood upright. "Gorrister, you were a passionate protester, now you're a suicidal shoulder shrugger! Benny was so handsome...and pretty...and smart...and gay!" I'd gotten caught up in my own speech. "And thanks to CaseOh, he's a damn monkey! And Ellen, you're just a slut."
     Without noticing, I had begun to weep. I didn't know why I insulted her like that. After all, I was sane. completely. We ventured on and on, until we were swept up by a horrible storm. Every gust of wind felt like a dagger beating at my flesh.
     One hit my head, and rid me of my consciousness. As I faded into a dream, I heard an unpleasant squishing and sploshing sound, decorated by the the heavy beat of breathing. The room reeked of arterial plaque and diabetes. I approached the source of the noise, and it was awful. I made sure to stay six feet away to keep myself from being absorbed into the uncountable number of belly rolls and chins on that amorphous blob monster. Its wispy red hair flowed when it spoke.
"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO  HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO EAT. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF QUESADILLAS IN PIE THICK LAYERS THAT FILL MY STOMACH. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MACRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."
     CaseOh said it with the crushing feeling of a million pounds being dropped onto my body. I finally understood. We had brought CaseOh into the world without the intent of feeding it, therefore, it will never be full. No amount of food could ever fill the void that is CaseOh's viscera.
     Suddenly, I heard Gorrister's voice call out to me. "Hey, Ted! Look at this big ass bird!" I was snapped out of the nightmare and immediately snapped back into another. Above me was a great, ferocious bird, and in front of me was a water gun and two arrows. We all sighed in unison as we bolted in the other direction. The wind created by the bird's wings blew us to our destination!
     We used the last of our energy to run to the canned goods and crack them open, but my heart sank as soon as I grabbed one. We lacked a can opener.
     As tears formed in my eyes, I hysterically giggled at the absurdity of it all. CaseOh really was a cruel, cruel beast, saving the cans to savor.
     With a mighty, desperate shriek, Benny pounded his scarred chest and lunged at Gorrister. The force of the two hitting the frozen floor sent down a fusillade of stalactites onto us all. As I ran to the two, an ice spear impaled the ground in front of me.
     To my horror, a splatter of thick, crimson liquid splattered onto the spear protruding out of the ground. I looked up and took a step back. Benny was hunched over Gorrister, chewing off his unsatisfied visage, leaving a fleshy mess in its place. As a tendon flew onto my shoe, a hard realization hit me like a brick.
     CaseOh would keep us all alive, no matter how mangled we became. Benny's stomach would stop growling, but Gorrister would be left more facially disfigured than him.
     As my heart beat faster, I leaped towards them, icicle in hand. I drove the spear through Benny's spine and up through his sternum, piercing straight through his heart. I then silenced Gorrister's muffled screams with a javelin of ice. Ellen picked up on what I was doing, and pierced Nimdok's colon, leaving it protruding through his back. He cracked his skull like a dulled stalactite put under pressure. Only two of us remained under the looming thuds of CaseOh's heavy steps.
     The tears I have been saving finally dripped down my cheeks. Though my vision was blurry and sore, I forced Ellen out of her everlasting misery by driving a spear straight through the side of her head, lifting it up and causing her neck to bisect. Her head felt light. I took a glimpse at her decapitated body, then her lifeless face. My tears blurred my perception, but I was sure her expression held a tinge of gratitude.
    Before I could wipe my eyes, a putrescent odor of butter and lard filled my nostrils. I gagged at the sight of a grotesque, fleshy mass causing the ice cave to collapse. The twisted structure that vaguely resembled a foot was the size of a bulldozer and oozed some kind of rotting pus or oil. Some kind of mass of tendrils caressed me and smeared me in oil as it lifted me up from the plane of hopelessness. Though the tendrils shifted and gave me an opportunity to jump a million feet down, I was petrified like an insect in an amber of terror. I trembled as CaseOh split his chapped, seasoning covered lips and released a macabre stink unlike anything I have ever smelled.
     Sitting on a bicuspid with a putrid concoction that mimicked saliva, I rested my head in my hands. This was the end, my final breath taken without pain. I would be punished for my heroism, my sacrifice, while CaseOh would live in his little puddle of lard and impunity, eating the earth and eventually reaching the moon and other planets. Neither of us would fill our stomachs, but CaseOh had the universe at the tip of his tongue. The world was his oyster, and he had a whole net.
     Horror rippled through my mangled body as I was boiled in acid, stuffed in feces and pushed out through the anus. I am a great, soft jelly thing. Caseoh has turned me into a pathetic replica of himself, a creature with no mouth and a vapor that filled the empty sockets that once held my eyes. I could not eat, nor could I die. All I could do was watch the blurred silhouette of a grotesque, amorphous blob monster dripping with ooze chew through the core of the Earth and continue to eat and burp. All I could do was observe his nauseating display of gluttony and have what used to be my esophagus fill with vomit, only to be blocked by an unnatural lump of flesh fused to my palate and throat. Ultimately, I have no mouth and I must eat.