Most people have a hard time understanding the things I've done.
I think it was what any average man might do, given my same circumstances. Not a good man. If I'd been a good man I would never have been where I was, doing what I was doing. I know that now. And a smart man would not have made my mistakes. An average man…ignorant, reckless, petty, selfish, frightened. Human. A man who was having his life robbed from him, a man being hunted. And on top of all that, a man whose humanity was slipping swiftly through his fingers. Desperate, I latched on to the only hope available to me.
That hope was Christopher Johnson.
He's coming back. He promised. That probably has every human on the planet a little nervous. It's filled nearly every Prawn in these slums with a sort of hope. I share that hope, for my own reasons. I can only pray that what he said was true, that I can be saved from what is happening to me. That, after he returns, I can somehow get my life back. That I will see Tania again.
Three years, though. That's an awful long time…
Wikus's mind swirled slowly back into consciousness, his entire body feverish and aching. He was disoriented. As his last memories drifted back to him, he found himself wishing they hadn't. Though he would certainly lose little time mourning Kobus, the messiness of the mercenary's death was one of the last things that Wikus would have chosen to relive at that—or any other—moment. It was difficult to guess how much time had passed since then; hours or days might have gone by for all he knew. Though, the state of his body hinted that it probably had not been long…
It took several agonizing moments of fumbling before he could muster the energy to raise his head, but when he did he could see that his right arm and hand—upon which he gratefully cradled his head as stars of pain blossomed behind his eyes—were still mostly human.
For a while longer he lay face down in the dust. It tickled unpleasantly in his lungs, threatening to turn each breath into a fit of coughing. He could feel the dry, gritty soil clinging to the perspiration on his cheek, caked with blood and other grime into his moustache, around his mouth. His breathing tense, he lay still and silent, waiting for the pain to subside.
It didn't.
He managed with great difficulty to roll onto his shoulder. Every muscle screamed at him from one trauma or another, whether the cause was bruises or hated alien chemistry. A biting pain had taken up residence behind his left eye. It felt hideously swollen in its socket, crushed by an uncomfortable, squirming pressure, as though a snake had coiled up inside. Struggling against throbbing in his head and nausea in his belly, he was able to keep his eyes open long enough to see that he lay on the dirt floor of what he was sure was one of District 9's many shanties. A thin, filmy light had fought its way in through sections of plastic bag and grimy tarp taped over the shack's windows. There was an uneven quality to it, seeming dim and grainy, and at the same time desaturated and over-bright…in either case, an incoherent blur.
His brief, delirious glance had only managed to assure him that he was quite alone.
He tried with little success to stir from his prone condition, his limbs weak and heavy-feeling. His best efforts were barely able to raise him to his knees before he was brought down by his own weight and a crushing weariness that left him shaking. Panting hoarse, strangled half-sobs, he was forced to rest. Exhausted, resigned, he waited in aching helplessness.
The air held an oppressive, stifling heat. It pressed in heavily, chafing his throat and coaxing his skin to break out in a thick, oily sweat. But while he could definitely feel the alien limb as a part of himself, a Prawn's exoskeleton was not sensitive to temperature in the way of human skin. The strange half-numbness suggested by the loss of that information was playing tricks with his heat-addled mind. It was easy, for instance, to imagine that the chitinous appendage wasn't his—not truly a part of him, but of some thing growing inside of him, replacing his flesh with its own. That when the transformation was over, Wikus himself would just be gone.
The thought made him clench his left hand. Hot white pain lanced through what remained of his severed thumb-claw. He squeezed harder, until the joints creaked, his teeth grinding together at the pain that erupted in the pincer-like digits. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth, wrung from his bleeding gums. Yes, it was all him. And it would still be him, even after everything that had made him human was gone. He wondered, dizzily, which was worse.
Hours later, as he drifted back into unconsciousness, he still hadn't made up his mind.
The next time he awoke, it was to the prodding of a spiny Prawn claw.
Wikus recoiled from the contact instinctively, though in truth it was barely a flinch for all the energy in the motion. His vision still blurry from sickness, he could not see the creature in front of him. He could smell it, though… There wasn't anything on Earth that smelled quite like they did. It was something he had come to be familiar with in all his dealings with the aliens for MNU—a strong musk he'd once described to Tania as being a cross between vinegar and burnt hair. A smell, the ghost of which had not left his nostrils since he's come to hide in District 9.
A smell he'd begun to notice clinging to his own flesh like an unwelcome guest.
Then a bowl was shoved in front of his face, and he smelled something else as well. The scent of raw meat, metallic and strong in the heat, caused him to gag. He was unable to see the meat clearly through his fevered fog—he could hear flies. All the same, the smell called attention to the grinding hunger that had been churning within his gut ever since this nightmarish ordeal began. Almost without thinking, he found his fingers closing around the rim of the bowl.
"Eat." The inflection which colored the words escaped him, though some form of impatience or irritation seemed most likely. The guttural Prawn speech sounded right next to his ear. The alien's breath was hot on his skin. It carried with it the smell of carrion and tire rubber, which didn't make the task it commanded any easier.
He hesitated, fighting a mental fog desperately for some adequate protest. Though, he was unsure who he would be arguing with, the alien or himself. Whatever unimaginable process was operating inside him needed fuel with which to effect the change. He could not remember a moment of the past four days in which he hadn't felt he was starving to death—being devoured from the inside. He could not remember a moment in the past two in which he had not been too busy running desperately for his life to address it.
A painful, if pathetically short interval passed before he finally gave in.
Dragging the bowl underneath his nose was an effort in more ways than one. There was click, a scuffling, the creak of a metal door as the creature, seeming satisfied, left him alone once more in the empty hovel. Tears of self-pity stinging his eyes, Wikus was glad for the privacy. With an effort born of desperate hunger and a dwindling amount of concern for his own well-being, he choked down the offered food as best as he could. Against the tips of his fingers the meat was roughly the same warm temperature as the room, clotted and gummy. He fought with the dryness in his throat, taking thick, hurried swallows to avoid keeping it in his mouth for long. His stomach threatened to empty itself more than once as he struggled, the blood clinging in his throat. The feeling he was left with at the end of the battle tasted bitterly like defeat.
Drifting off once more, he wept that his fastidiousness was the least of what Wikus would be forced to abandon if he was to survive the coming years in the alien slums.