I'm in Survival Hell, You're in Party Heaven

They reached the second door. Mom stopped and called for the housekeeper.

"Bring out a few gas masks. One for everyone."

Mom held her hand over her nose. "The ventilation system down there is fine, but that kid's hygiene has been absolutely atrocious lately. It's going to smell terrible down there. I don't want anyone feeling unwell."

The group put on the masks with giggles and grins, like they were getting ready for a costume party. Someone even struck a pose.

"Do I look like that guy from that zombie video game?"

Mom fastened hers on. "Let's make this quick. The food upstairs is going to get cold."

The pressure valve hissed open, and immediately a wall of stench hit them through the gap in the door, rot and blood and waste all fermenting together in the enclosed space for three days straight.

Dad's brow tightened. Even he hadn't expected it to be this bad, though he recovered quickly, smoothing his expression back into place.

"This is what survival smells like, folks. You all need to get used to it."

The heavy iron door ground open. Sunlight from outside poured down the corridor, cutting into the darkness. Even through the masks, a few of the guests gagged.

"Good lord..." Gerald wrinkled his nose, his voice muffled behind the mask. "That's worse than rotten meat..."

Mom's face went cold. "How many days has that child gone without a bath? How did she let herself get like this?"

She was still muttering as they moved forward, still blaming me even as the stench of my corpse filled the air. To her, it was nothing but proof that I was filthy and lazy.

Dad picked up a heavy-duty flashlight from a shelf by the door and clicked it on. A sharp white beam swept across the walls, slick with damp and green with mildew.

"Watch your step, everyone. And stay quiet. I want to catch her first reaction."

The beam moved along the wall, and that was when it found them. Deep gouges scratched into the concrete, one after another, some of them still caked with dark, dried blood.

I had clawed those marks into the wall at the very edge of my sanity when the pain and the fear and the hunger all became too much to bear at once.

Dad stopped walking and held the flashlight steady, the circle of light fixed right on the scratches. "Look at these. Fingernails dragging against the wall like this means the anxiety levels were through the roof. This is exactly what a psychological collapse looks like right before it happens."

He pulled out his phone and snapped a photo, voice still bright and clinical. "This data is incredibly valuable. It proves our starvation and pressure strategy is working exactly as planned."

I trailed behind him, watching the back of his head, and felt something close to a laugh rise up in my chest.

The beam kept moving. It swept over a broken bowl on the ground, over the tangle of my shredded bedding scattered across the floor. And then it stopped.

At the very back corner of the room, a pool of blood, long since dried and turned black, spread across the floor. It was big enough to cover nearly half the corner. And curled up in the middle of it, small and still, was me.

One arm hung loose at my side. The wound on my wrist was torn open and ugly, the skin peeled back, but it had long since stopped bleeding. The flashlight beam hit my face full on. My skin was ashen, my eyes half open and glassy, staring at nothing.

The air went completely still.

No one breathed, and there wasn't a single sound except the low drone of the ventilation fan somewhere overhead.

Dad's mouth opened, but whatever he was about to say died in his throat. The flashlight shook in his grip, the beam trembling and throwing wild, uneven shadows across the walls.

Right next to my body sat the tin of spam, unopened, the one Dad had told me was the last one in the world.

And on the wall above me, scrawled in blood, were a few words in shaky, uneven letters.

"Mom, Dad, now there's one less mouth to feed. You'll last a few more days."