Ben hated this moment. The moment he opens his eyes, and his head fills with the blaring tones of his alarm clock. The moment when the peacefulness of his hard earned weekend is officially over. Monday morning, 6:00am. The 31 year old office worker quite literally lived for the weekends. The monotony of his weekday existence weighed on him until he finally, at 5:00pm on Fridays, go home and either play video games, watch movies, or browse the internet aimlessly. By all accounts, Ben lived an aimless life, and it showed no signs of finding a destination any time soon.

 

Ben rolled over and turned off his alarm, finding it strange that the clock read 6:16. He knew he hadn’t slept through his alarm for even one minute, let alone 16. As he laid on his back for a moment, he felt different, but couldn’t quite place what it was. He had a strange sort of unfounded energy. Not energy in the sense that he could hop out of bed and effortlessly get through his morning routine, but a sort of drive within to do something. What that something was, he didn’t know. Feeling anything other than pure fatigue and regret for not doing more with his existence made him curious, but he didn’t think too much of it.

 

Ben got out of bed and walked to the kitchen to start his coffee, just like every other day. As it was brewing, he got a mug out of his cabinet, then opened the silverware drawer to get out a spoon, but when he did, he took particular notice of the steak knives sitting there; the sunlight was hitting them in such a way that the glare was nearly blinding. He grabbed his spoon and closed the drawer.

 

He finished the rest of his routine while the coffee brewed; he brushed his teeth, got dressed, styled his hair. He still couldn’t figure out what the strange feeling he had inside him was. Nearing 6:45am, Ben prepared to leave the house to head to work. He locked his front door and turned around to approach his car in the driveway. As he was making his way to it, a neighbor jogged by with her dog on a leash, and it stopped him in his tracks.

 

The woman waved as she passed, but Ben just stood there. He didn’t know why, but his body filled with contempt at the sight of the woman running. Or perhaps it was her dog. He didn’t know. Something about the situation had made Ben feel an anger he had never before felt, a sense of anxiety he was blissfully unfamiliar with. Long after the woman had jogged down the street, Ben stood there trying to collect himself. When he finally was able to continue on, after he’d stopped trembling with unfound rage, he got in his car and began to drive the nearly 30 minutes to work.

 

He pulled up to a stoplight, and to his right noticed the 5 people sitting at the bus stop on the corner. As soon as his brain registered what he was seeing, that same feeling of hatred came back. Ben gripped his steering wheel until his knuckles were as white as paper, while at the same time his face was beet red. He had never felt this before, and he didn’t know why he was feeling it at all. He had never had this problem before. Every muscle in his body wanted to get out of the car and hurt those people, but he controlled himself and waited for the green light.

 

He pulled into the parking lot of his office building and sat in his car for a moment, worried that he was going to feel the same disdain for everyone there that he had felt for the 6 people he’d taken note of on his way to work. That’s when he saw Grace, the woman he’d had feelings for for quite some time. He took note of his feelings when he saw her; they were normal. He didn’t feel like red-hot rage that he had felt for the others.

 

Then Grace was met by Tom, her boyfriend, and those feelings of hate came rushing back. Ben stuffed them all down inside him and exited his car. He stood there for a moment and collected himself before walking inside his building.

 

As he walked into the main lobby, he saw the elevator was full of people, one of which was holding the door for him. He stood there, silent, keeping down his urge to explode with all the hate and rage within him, before calmly walking to the stairs. He took these stairs to the third floor, where his office was.

 

As he passed by other cubicles, those now familiar feelings were boiling to the top; it was taking Ben’s every effort to not let them take over. He walked into the empty break room, put his lunch in the refrigerator and again calmed himself down. And with that, he left the break room and rushed to his cubicle, ignoring the people (and the barely subsided negative emotions) between him and it.

 

He sat down in his cubicle and got to work, attempting to drown out the angering voices of those in the area around him, but to no avail. As he sat there typing on his computer, he could hardly focus, it was as if the sounds coming from everyone else’s mouths were amplified. With every second that passed, Ben clenched his fists tighter and tighter, and clenched his jaws together hard enough to nearly break his teeth.

 

Finally, it was time for lunch. After getting no work done, and being on edge for the entirety of the morning, he was looking forward to getting his lunch and going to his car, so as to avoid everybody entirely. The problem was, other people had decided to start lunch a few minutes early, and the break room was already packed full of people.

 

Ben kept his head down as he walked in, ignoring his coworker’s greetings, and made his way to the refrigerator. As he opened it, the claustrophobia of the room began to take its toll on him. He paused for a moment, trying to understand the feelings rushing through his body. He finally realized what it was. It was of course a mixture of anger, hatred, and blind rage, but more than anything, it was hunger. Upon this realization, Ben gave in.

 

He slammed the refrigerator shut and turned around, reaching out for the first person his eyes caught. The unfortunate one to be in the closest proximity to Ben was a middle aged woman named Laura. Ben gripped right right hand around the back of Laura’s neck and pulled her in close. He then proceeded to sink his teeth into her neck, sending blood spraying all over everyone, most of whom still didn’t know what was going on.

 

Screams began erupting within the room, and with only a thought, Ben somehow managed to lock the door, trapping everyone inside the break room with him. He found himself able to move much quicker than he had been able to before, and was much stronger as well. While still maintaining a firm grip around the gushing neck of Laura with his right hand, he took his left and reached upwards to the hanging fluorescent light fixture and tore it down, bringing both glass and the entire fixture down on the heads of numerous coworkers.

 

He then began going around the room, digging his teeth and fingernails into his former peers, tearing them apart and consuming their flesh. His teeth were also inexplicably more durable, as evidenced by the snapping and grinding of his victims bones with ease. When he was through feasting on the unfortunate people in the break room, he took his newfound mission, and abilities, to the rest of the office.

 

Again, with just a thought, he threw desks in front of both the front exit and the fire exit in the back, effectively sealing everyone inside. His hunger drove him around the office, mindlessly slaughtering everyone in his path. Before long, the mangled corpses of his former “office friends”, or what remained of them, lined the walkways between the cubicles that he had spent so much fruitless, pointless time in. Blood dripped down from the ceiling, and splashed against the walls.

 

Once he had decimated what he thought was every living person in his (now former) workplace, he stopped and admired what he had just done. He breathed heavily, half in shock from what he had just found himself capable of doing, and half pleased that he had done anything at all. He hadn’t even stopped to consider why he was doing all this. In the midst of his heavy breathing, he heard a whimper from across the office. He focused for a moment, and noticed that it was coming from, quite literally, all the way across the office. He also had improved hearing abilities.

 

He quickly made his way over to where the whimper had come from, and found Tom and Grace huddled under a desk together. They screamed when he suddenly standing over them. He ordered them both to stand up; they naturally abided. Without another word, Ben reached forward towards Tom and forced his mouth open. He then took his own mouth and opened it far wider than he ever had before, and took Tom’s entire lower jaw, from his chin to the top of his bottom row of teeth, and engulfed them in his own gaping maw. With a loud *crunch* he bit down with force, shattering the bottom of Tom’s face, and ripped it away.

 

He spit out the teeth and broken pieces of jaw and redirected his attention to Tom’s neck, aiming for his jugular. He bit down, and let the blood spray into his mouth, drinking every bit that surged out of the boyfriend of the woman he so deeply cared for. Meanwhile, Grace just stood there, unable to process what she was witnessing. Ben dropped Tom’s twitching body to the ground and turned his gaze to Grace, who immediately started begging for her life.

 

Ben simply took her hand and led her through the carnage he’d just created to the back door of the office, where they then descended the stairs to the back parking lot of the building. They eventually made it to Ben’s car, where he secured her in the passenger’s seat before making a silent drive back to his house. Once there, he calmly took her into the house, where he proceeded to tie her up to a chair in the center of his kitchen. Then began the process of his draining her blood into empty milk gallon jugs, slowly.

 

Eventually, night came, and Ben was then drawn again to the steak knives in his silverware drawer, which now glistened in the moonlight from the nearly full moon outside. He used his sharp cutlery to cut different pieces of her and went on to cook them, consuming his most recent victim in a much more civilized, calm manner. Her screams were like music to his ears, but useless in locating help, as Ben lived on the outskirts of town and didn’t have a neighbor close enough to hear her agonizing pleas for help.

 

At one point, Ben stopped to take a break. During this time, Grace fought through her ever-increasing weakness and managed to get a hand free, and reached over to the nightstand to her right, where one of the blades had been left haphazardly by Ben. Before she had time to cut herself free, Ben reentered the room, and she took a swipe at him with the knife. Ben was shocked to find that not only did he not feel pain from the blade slicing the skin on his arm, but the wound healed almost instantly. He simply laughed and tied her back up before continuing to filet the object of his affection.

 

When she had finally passed, Ben went on to get rid of the evidence by feeding on her in her entirety. He ate her organs, her skin, her bones. He went so far as to lick the blood soaked carpet underneath her she had been tied to the chair; his appetite was insatiable, but the need to feed had subsided for the moment. He realized at this moment that he hadn’t needed to feed on Grace at all. He didn’t have the feelings of rage and hatred for her that he had with everyone else. As the events of the day had gone on, he had found that he wanted to do to Grace what he had done to everyone else. He enjoyed it.

 

Once finished, he went to his bathroom to clean himself up. He knew his life would never be the same. He didn’t know how it had happened, but he knew his hunger wasn’t going to go away. He knew that this was who he was now. He knew that he wasn’t going to let this go to waste. He was someone who had spent his entire life in the background, always the servant, never the master. He was someone who had never before experienced power. But as he looked in the mirror at his blood soaked face, he smiled. And for the first time, he felt power as he watched his teeth turn from a blood stained red set of average teeth, to jagged, needle-like bones protruding through his gums.

 

He couldn’t wait for the next day to begin.

 

Tuesday