The buildings loomed above me in the streetlit night, threatening to crush down on me with their sheer weight, stretching from one side of the street to the other.
“Hey, Steve,” said a voice, followed by a nudge on my shoulder to break me out of my trance. I turned around to see my friend Travis, looking at me with concern. “You okay, man? You freaking out?”
“Sorry about that,” I said, shaking myself. “Just not used to this. Not anymore.”
“Didn’t you once live in St. Louis?” he asked. “I can’t imagine it’s worse here than it was there. We’re barely even a city. Our stadium is for minor league games.”
“The key difference is I spent as little time in St. Louis as humanly possible,” I said. “The closest I got was Jennings, and as far as skyscrapers go the best that area can offer is the Lewis and Clark building.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Just let me know if it gets to be too much, okay?”
“I’ll be okay,” I said, the world encroaching less on me as I centered myself, thinking back to my house in the country, wide open spaces, nothing but grass and trees and all the privacy I could want. My wife working in our barndominium on her latest sculpture, the cats wandering around the property like they owned the place. “Just man, I really don’t get how this city is so… big and clustered.
Travis shrugged. “Guess that’s just how the city planners worked it out.”
Travis had been my friend since college in Columbia, and one of the few people who could actually get me to enter an urban area like this of my own free will. If you like city living, more power to you, but I always feel like I’m getting smashed. As if the wall-to-wall structures looming around me are the closing jaws of a trap about to crush me to bits, or the fangs of a colossal animal clamping shut so I can be eaten alive.
Travis in comparison has always been a city person. He grew up in Kansas City before making his way out east to Columbia for college, and then to this city for his job as a teacher at a local high school. I don’t think I should say the name of this city, and I have a feeling if I did you likely wouldn’t get to read what I’m typing since this isn’t the first time I’ve tried from the gas station I’m currently at now. Needless to say, though, it was very much his sort of place. Towering urban office buildings, everyone crammed in like sardines, mixed-use development throughout so you can go from work to home and everywhere in between without a car.
And lots, lots, lots of people.
This city always struck me as a little enigma of Missouri, this concentrated little nugget of urban development in a state where the iconic monument is a celebration of people who left it. Yet here it was, thriving and growing, drawing in nearby locals and no one else for the past two hundred years like flies to meat. It really was the sort of city that others aspired to be: it was convenient, affordable even compared to rural areas like my thousand-person town, and had jobs across a wide variety of positions. Save civil engineers, oddly, even though there always seemed to be something coming up. It honestly all felt like the best-kept secret in the Midwest, since once you go fifty or so miles out people won’t even know what you’re talking about.
The runaway success in this bizarre utopia resulted in the mayor hosting a bicentennial festival in honor of all the city had accomplished. That led to Travis inviting me to join him to share in the celebration. Normally I wouldn’t go anywhere near a city, even one as admittedly nice as this, but I hadn’t spent good time with Travis since he was one of the groomsmen at my wedding. My wife needed to stay at home to work on a piece, and I owed Travis this one and so much more.
And now here it was, the last stretch of the festival. Every theater and venue had been rented out by the mayor for some sort of simultaneous broadcast from the historic old town hall, with a special message and gift for everyone. We were in line with everyone else outside the small venue of our choosing, the Foundry near the center of town. He was still living the bachelor life, so it was just us as we came closer and closer to the structure.
“So what on earth is the mayor even offering?” I asked. “I swear, it seems like the entire city and most of the nearby towns are out here.”
“Don’t know,” said Travis. He looked to the people behind us, a father holding the hand of his young daughter. “Hey, do you know anything about the mayor’s announcement?”
“Not a clue,” said the older man. “Maybe he’s establishing a city holiday?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Travis, shrugging and turning to me. “What’s that look?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying to drop the subject. Still can’t get how he can do that sort of thing. Meanwhile I’m actively trying to make myself as small as possible.
Thankfully he didn’t have a chance to push further, since we’d made it to the security guards. One clearance of my wallet and phone later and I was in the thresh, joined by Travis soon after. We made our way out to the standing-room-only section of the venue and waited, moving out of the way as a productive family with plenty of small children tried to make their way closer to the stage, the smallest of the bunch on his dad’s shoulders. All of us stuffed together, but thankfully not as much as it would have been at the stadium. I still tried to maintain that open space in my mind, my little house plopped in the center of the image.
It wasn’t long before the projector powered on and the speakers crackled to life. A hush fell over the chattering crowd as the feed started up, showing a podium in the old town hall, a riverside stone structure near the south side of the city. What better way to celebrate the last two centuries than a broadcast from the city’s humble beginnings? A doughy, balding man just entering his fifties took the podium and smiled at the audience through his feed. The mayor.
“Greetings to every last one of you!” he began, arms wide and inviting like he was a preacher before his disciples. “It is such an honor to be trusted with the health and direction of this wonderful city of ours, and to be here to see this city reach two hundred years of age.”
The background image of my house vanished as something vibrated under my feet. Missouri is no stranger to earthquakes, but something about it stuck out to me. I looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed it.
“We’re nearing fifty thousand people who call our city home, and with this festival even more of your family and friends as well as our neighbors from our neighboring towns have come in to share this joyous day with us, and I’m so happy we are able to.”
Another tremor, this one bigger. Travis started, and when I poked him he looked at me. I nodded, and gestured toward the nearest exit. We started making our way over, sifting through the crowd.
“And it is with such jubilation that I am happy to announce a gift to each and every one of you, from those of you watching the feeds in the stadium to those listening in at home and everyone in between.”
A third tremor, bigger, and now other people were starting to notice as well. The crowd thinned out as we got closer to that dim, glowing Exit sign.
“It is a gift that will immortalize each and every one of you as part of the greatest city in the Midwest! It is–”
I’M SO HUNGRY.
That unspoken voice cut through my mind, and I could tell from the looks of everyone else it had gone through theirs as well. Cold, emotionless, androgynous. Empty of everything that made a voice human.
The mayor’s feed cut out with a harsh squeal of feedback right as the center of the venue’s standing room floor caved in.
“Holy crap!” yelled Travis, hauling himself away as fast as he could while I chased after him. He plowed through anyone unfortunate enough to be blocking him while I ducked and bobbed through the people freezing up.
I risked a few glances behind me as I followed, wishing I had something else on my person besides just my wallet and phone. The floor continued to cave in, pulling more and more panicking people into what looked like some sort of service area underneath the venue. The throng erupted into screams of terror as everyone tried to climb over each other to get out of the way as the floor collapsed. So many people had already vanished into the hole in the ground, and then the hole spread further back on the floor, consuming the bar area and pulling those not fast enough to get off their seats down with it.
People tried to get out the main doors, but they had shut and looked like they weren’t opening. For some reason the doors, which I had thought were supposed to open outward, held firm against the throng attempting to break free. The people trying to open them inward got pinned against the doors by the mindless mob desperate for anything that looked like an exit, up until the collapsing floor reached them too. Similar terror swept through the upper balconies, up until they disconnected from the sides of the venue and fell into that cavernous hole like everything else.
I managed to reach the emergency exit, following Travis and a few other survivors who had been lucky enough to be near it. Had we stayed in our original spot, we would have never made it. Even those behind me hadn’t been so lucky, and as I passed that threshold into the cramped alley by the Foundry I saw the woman behind me slip down crumbling concrete. I reached a hand out to grab her, steadying myself against the door frame for support, but even as I grabbed her…
I saw a cable. It looked like it had fallen from the ceiling, but it had somehow wrapped around the woman’s leg. The other half of the cable fell, the large light tumbling down the pit and pulling the woman’s hand out of mine and dooming her. I stared, eyes the size of dinner plates as the squirming mass of innocent people wriggled and writhed like worms, everyone climbing over each other in their desperate attempts to escape their fate.
Then a foul smell hit my nose. A cloying, burning stench like vomit shot up and made me recoil, but not before I saw a sickly green fluid start pouring up between the fallen bits of rubble and survivors. But not for long. A harsh sizzling grew underneath all the screams of pain and shattering rumble, and the crowd cried out even harder than before.
MORE.
A hand on my shoulder broke me out of my trance as Travis hauled me out of the building, his wide eyes staring into my own. “What the actual hell?” he yelled.
“Oh my God!” I yelled back, both of us shaking so much it was a miracle we could stand. “Those people! They’re getting… they’re getting dissolved! That pit’s filling up with acid!”
“And we’re not joining them!” He grabbed me by the coat and pulled me away from the building, away from the screaming shrieks of men, women and children being killed in one of the worst ways I could imagine. “We gotta get out of here!”
I saw something off in the distance that made me start. I broke free and grabbed him in turn, slowing him down. “And to where?” I asked.
“Anywhere but here!” he said. Some of the other survivors were coming up to us, shocked beyond words. “I don’t know what on earth happened but if we stay here any longer we’re going to die.”
I pointed a shaking finger down the street, toward the city’s covered stadium. Even from this distance we could all see its roof caving in, the sides falling inwards, darkness consuming it as readily as the ground did. All around us, screams erupted from buildings just like the one we had escaped. We all stood there in the darkness of the alleyway, turning around in circles as we tried to pinpoint the sources. There were too many to count. I could only hope those making the screams were still managing to escape.
“I don’t think there’s a place where we won’t die now.”
Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17fsq9v/urban_appetite_part_25_city_life_can_eat_you/