The House of the Starved

This place is a shithole. Whatever this building is, it’s in poor shape. The glass windows are broken or just plain dirty to the point where you can’t even see light coming in. The floors and walls are all made of some old lumber. I’m in a barren room with a blanket, pillow, and a plastic bin that feels rather heavy to move around. When I open it, I see packets of microwaveable rice. The same kind of rice I bought in real life but this one seems to be more numerous in quantity. It’s not the first sort of meal I would want to eat but it’s all I have in this room.

I look outside and the area looks like a wasteland. Empty worn down houses and streets with grass growing on them. You would think this would be some kind of movie set for It’s also pretty cloudy outside and I can’t see the sun. I appear to be in some two story housing complex and I must be on the second floor. In any case, I don’t want to be here. I leave my room but I take extra care to seal my room door shut on the way out. I don’t have much but I have to protect it. As I make my way down the hallways and down the stairs into the main floor, there’s a line of people waiting in line mumbling and begging for food at some counter. There’s another guy behind the counter trying to tell everyone to be quiet and line up one at a time. I don’t recall the exact details of this guy but he’s around my age and is wearing some kind of military multi-cam uniform but it’s all disarrayed and mismatched. He looks to me and then tells me to fetch another box of rice as his supply in the first floor had all but ran out. There’s a bunch of people pushing and shoving as they try to reach the counter but they are all cramped and crowded like it was some kind of concert. I don’t wait any longer as I am given instructions to carry another box of rice to the bottom floor. There’s a storage room where most of these boxes of rice are stored and it’s also on the second floor. I head to this room and there’s like 4 or 5 boxes left in what was supposed to be a room full of boxes of rice. I get one of the boxes and though it is heavy, I carry it downstairs where the counter is. Someone tries to jump in front of the line and attempts to dash for the staircase. I’m still coming down as this guy tries to get passed me as he is desperate for food. I have no choice but to shove him off with the box I am carrying and he falls down and is knocked unconscious from the stairs. It’s just nonstop screaming and yelling as I finally place the box next to this military personal who’s trying to keep the crowd under control and hand out the packets of microwavable rice in the boxes.

The people aren’t civilized when they try to get their rations. There’s a lot of pushing and shoving and some people get trampled on as they attempt to get in front of the crowd. Within a minute or so, the boxes of rice are all empty and I have to go up the stairs once again to fetch another box. The whole mood was chaotic and it was only a matter of time before the crowd breaks loose and tries to ransack what little supplies we have in this house. The soldier downstairs nor I have any firearms and just have some kind of nightstick on our belts as an only means of defense. I am not sure of the circumstances of how things got this bad but suffice to say, something severe must had happened for people to be begging for food in a place like this.

This cycle of coming up and down the stairs with the next box of rice only for it to be completely emptied out within a minute went on and on until we were down to our last box of rice. The guy bellow then told everyone to leave as he got his night stick and started shooing people away. Another guy got desperate and thought it was good idea to try to climb up to the second floor. I had to run up there and barricade the window he was trying to get into. This crowd wasn’t going anywhere and the tension felt more chaotic and worse until all of a sudden, I woke up in my bedroom and felt relieved (for now) that what I experienced was hopefully just a bad anxiety dream. Perhaps all this talk of recessions from the public lately has got me worried. Maybe it’s a sign of how bad things could really get the following year.