I ran as soon as I knew that it was possible for me to do so. The beings that had been holding me still as Pride had attacked me had loosened and then slowly released their grip. At first I simply couldn’t take my eyes off my own heart. It wasn’t still beating or anything as dramatic as all of that, but it was there and even with the significant blood and the scraps of viscera which surrounded it, it was unmistakeably a human heart. I still hadn’t turned my head but I heard one of the creatures who had bound me in its own limbs moments ago begin to shuffle away. It was this noise which brought me back to my senses and I crawled backwards away from Pride before rising unsteadily to my feet. And then, as I said earlier, I ran.
I heard Pride laugh musically from behind me and then I ran without direction or sense. The tears in my eyes prevented me from being able to see any of the other creatures that surrounded me. Surprisingly, I did not run into them. It was only much later that I realised that they had parted to make way for me. My lungs burned almost instantly (I’m a scientist, not a runner) but even though the sound of laughter getting fainter reassured me that I was not being followed, I didn’t slow. That could at least be explained as fear for my apparently now neverending life – perhaps more perplexing was the fact that once I realised that I was still holding the camera I did not for one moment consider dropping it.
When I saw Gluttony my first thought was that I’d managed to double back on myself. I quickly realised that was incorrect though as this particular Gluttony had tried a similar trick to Pride. Whereas she’d given herself more eyes all the better to see herself with, this Sin had given themselves more mouths in order to be able to feast more effectively. Their was one extra mouth on their leg and another on the left side of their body. Each was eating away at the sand that surrounded them. There were no arms on this creature, skeletal or otherwise, and nothing was at any point being shovelled into the one mouth on their head. Either they were using that one to breath or for some other purpose.
I only truly noticed that I’d been filming once I sat down. It was also only at that point that I was fully aware of how close I was to Gluttony, well within attacking distance for all I knew. I didn’t know how fast they could move but I didn’t care. Something inside me was numb to the idea that I could be in danger. Perhaps in a smaller way it always had been.
I’d known when I’d accepted the task of researching the Sins (or pleaded for it, if I’m being entirely honest) that whilst the ideal result was that I would come home with lots of fantastic new data, and maybe even a saved Sin if I was insanely lucky, that the other possible outcome was death. I’d thought that those were the only two possible results available to me – succeed or perish. That there could be a third option wasn’t something I’d had any way of anticipating.
Well fuck it then, I thought to myself. If I’d believed that those were the only two possibilities initially then there was at least one of the two that I could still make happen now. I set down my camera and walked closer to Gluttony and then yelled.
“You! You! Over here! Come and fucking get me!”
This might be the point where you’re wondering what exactly I’d hoped to accomplish, given that I already knew I was immortal. The thing is though, there is often a difference between knowing a thing and knowing a thing. I feel quite uniquely qualified in pointing out to you that immortality is one of those things that takes a little while to get used to. Besides which, it’s not like we’d ever really tested the immortality of the Sins in a wide variety of situations. We knew they were tough, we knew shooting them didn’t work and we knew that they were so dangerous that we dropped them in a desert and hoped that they’d never get back out. What we had not tested was what happens if we tried to force one Sin to eat another. Well, not until this point.
I stood there fearlessly right up until the point that gluttony actually lunged for me and then all of the self preservation instincts that I’d thought I no longer had raced back towards me in the form of pure terror. I screamed and Gluttony’s leg mouth clamped down onto my arm. I waited for it to finish me off but instead something entirely different happened.
Gluttony threw its head back and made this bizarre noise up towards the heavens. It was a mixture of whale song and a car crash, if you can imagine such a thing. It made my ears hurt and I swear I saw the sand around me shift just a minuscule amount. As it waited with its head tilted backwards I desperately tried to yank my arm free to no avail. After a couple of minutes of this with Gluttony motionlessly waiting for something it eventually realised that whatever response it was waiting for was not forthcoming and so it set me free.
Well, in a fashion.
The pain as its teeth snapped through my arm was unbearable. When Pride had attacked me I hadn’t felt a thing due to either clinical shock or some effect personal to Pride herself but this time, this time I felt everything. The pain made my knees weak and if Gluttony had wanted to finish me off, there would have been no issue. Yet for some reason, Gluttony had no interest in me beyond my arm. In fact, it pulled away from me ever so slightly so I was no longer in the way of it eating its sand. I crawled from Gluttony, slowed by the lack of an arm. Bit by bit, I pulled myself away until I was where I’d been sat initially. I knew this of course, because the camera was there.
It turns out that I can film just as well with one arm as two. I spent a while continuing my filming there and thanks to the timer on my camera I can tell you that I was there for an hour. If I’d had to tell you solely based on memory I would not have been able to tell you if I’d been sat there for five minutes or five hours. Gluttony seemed as though it was in a trance in the way it was eating – a state that seemed like it had far less in common with binge eaters than it did with monks. I moved only when I couldn’t get a good angle or the lighting was unfavourable to what exactly it was that I was trying to capture in that moment in time. As the lighting became more and more unfavourable I realised that was because dusk was approaching. Reluctantly, I took out my tracker and headed to the crate that was waiting somewhere nearby in the desert with the supplies that had been left for me. I should have been thirstier than I’d ever been in my life but instead the promise of scientific equipment and means to build a vehicle and shelter were the main draws.
The light was getting very low when I finally found the crate but her silhouette was instantly recognisable. It was the slow, constant movements of her arms that did it, beautiful and strange. I should have run that time perhaps but I guess her earlier assessment of me might have been more true than I cared to realise. God help me, I even think I waved.
“Hi there!” Pride announced merrily as if we were already old friends. “Sucks about your arm! Are you ready to hear all that I’ve got to tell you?”