Twenty-seven years old, six million followers on YouTube, nearly eleven million on TikTok. He wasn’t a comedian. He wasn’t a chef. He wasn’t a game dev.

He was just...there. A face. A laugh. A constant presence in the algorithm’s bloodstream.

His content wasn’t about quality. It was volume.

Let’s Plays, rage reactions, prank collabs, hot wings challenges, unboxings of shit people didn’t need.

He was loud. Crude. Smug. His smile stretched wide over veneers too white for nature. Every video a sensory assault: screaming intros, digital confetti, industrial trap music that made your gums itch.

Then came the girl.

Seventeen. A fan. Regular in his Discord server.

Said he messaged her at 3 a.m. Said he sent her photos. Said he’d told her to keep it secret.

The screenshots went viral in hours.

Cameron denied it immediately. He even posted receipts: metadata, timestamps, a shaky but plausible alibi.

Didn’t matter.

Twitter fed on it like starving rats on a bloated corpse.

In twenty-four hours, every sponsorship deal evaporated. RazorWire Gaming. GrubVault. GamerJuice Energy. All gone.

His YouTube account was demonetized. Twitch froze his payouts.

His wife—their marriage already fractured from the strain of public life—packed the kids and vanished without a goodbye. By the end of the week, she’d filed a restraining order, citing “Potential risk to minors.”

The court of law never saw a case. But the court of the comment sections did.

And it burned him alive.

He tried to fight it at first.

Put out a weepy apology video. Claimed innocence. Showed proof.

But the likes-to-dislikes ratio drowned in red. The comments boiled.

“Nice crocodile tears, predator.”

“Cry more, fatass.”

“Eat a fucking bullet already.”

So he vanished.

No one heard from him for five months.

Then, quietly, a new channel appeared.

“CAM-EATS-LIVE”

No thumbnails. No intro music. No schedule.

Just him, sitting at a sagging dinner table in what looked like a rotting apartment—drywall yellowed with damp, cockroaches twitching on the baseboards, one bare bulb flickering overhead.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t blink.

He just ate.

The first videos were quiet, almost meditative in their wrongness.

No intro. No voiceover. Just a man in a collapsing apartment, sitting hunched at a wobbling dinner table under a naked bulb that buzzed like a dying fly. Mold crept like bruises across the plastered walls. Paint curled from the ceiling like flaking scabs.

Cameron stared into the webcam like it owed him something.

And he began to eat.

Lukewarm spaghetti, clumped and gummy, dragged into his mouth with bare, trembling fingers. He didn’t twirl it. Didn’t chew it properly. Just shoveled it in, strands slapping against his chin, sauce dripping down his wrists, forming red-orange puddles in the crooks of his elbows.

Next came the rotisserie chicken.

He didn’t carve it.

He ripped it apart, hunks of steaming flesh yanked from bone with the ferocity of a predator at kill, grease streaking down his cheeks like tears. Bones cracked. Skin tore. Occasionally, a wet pop echoed as a joint gave way.

He chewed with his mouth wide open—slow, deliberate.

Each bite a viscous symphony: the slurp of meat sliding across teeth, the wet grind of molars on cartilage, the guttural squelch of throat swallowing too much too quickly.

The click of teeth on bone.

The gulp of grease thick as syrup.

He didn’t look at the food. He didn’t look away from the camera.

Just stared—blank, hollow, like his soul had checked out and left a bloated puppet to finish dinner.

The live chat detonated.

Fascinated, viewers couldn’t look away. Not even disgust.

Something drew them to Cam-Eats-Live—a morbid magnetic pull.

“Bro lost it.”

“Peak performance art.”

“This is a cry for help.”

“LMFAO I can’t stop watching.”

“His dead eyes tho.”

He streamed every night.

No breaks. No explanations.

7 p.m. sharp, like a ritual.

A man consuming himself—one calorie at a time—for the world’s entertainment.

By the second month, the meals had begun to deteriorate into deliberate culinary assaults.

He no longer ate for hunger. He ate for reaction.

• Gushers stuffed inside hot dogs, microwaved until the candy melted and oozed down his forearms like sugary pus.
• Dog food stew, the cans cracked open with a rusty hammer, ladled into his mouth with a gardening trowel. He gagged on the first bite—then took another.
• A plate of raw liver, still twitching slightly, soaked in bubble tea pearls that burst like soft cysts between his teeth.
• Twinkies dipped in neon-blue slushie, the chemical foam fizzing on contact with the sponge cake like acid on flesh.

Each dish was worse than the last.

The chat bayed like a mob, demanding more.

And Cameron obliged.

His body transformed under their gaze.

He ballooned. His cheeks puffed into jowls. His neck swelled until it was indistinguishable from his shoulders—a fleshy slope of sweat-slick fat. His skin turned yellow-gray, tinged with vein-blue bruises that spiderwebbed across his gut.

His eyes became sunken, shadow-ringed holes—never blinking, never changing.

Sweat poured from him in sheets, soaking his shirt until it clung like skin.

His hands left greasy fingerprints on the camera when he leaned too close—smearing the lens with fat, sauce, and flecks of chewed food.

He began to wheeze audibly. A wet, labored breath. His lungs struggled against the pressure of his ever-growing mass. His belly groaned with each shift of his body—a sound like a leather sack full of spoiled milk.

And always by his side: the steel bucket.

He tried to fight it. At first.

There were nights his face twitched with something like shame. Or fear.

But the body doesn’t care about dignity. It only cares about thresholds.

And Cameron crossed them all.

When the nausea built—when the meat turned in his gut—he would lean sideways, one hand gripping the table, and vomit violently into the bucket.

Thick. Viscous. Loud.

Chunks and bile. Strings of half-digested candy. Pink sludge.

Then—silence.

Then… he’d look back at the camera.

And with a twitching, trembling hand, scoop it back up.

Scoop. Swallow. Stare.

The chat lit up like fireworks.

“HE’S DOING IT”

“NO FUCKING WAY”

“EAT IT YOU LEGEND”

“I’M GONNA HURL LMAO”

Reaction channels caught fire.

Dozens of content creators existed solely to react to Cameron’s stream.

They gagged. They laughed. They screamed.

Millions watched him rot. Together.

His channel hit three million subscribers.

He no longer addressed the audience. Not a word.

He never acknowledged his rise.

He didn’t need to.

They were addicted.

To the sound of his body falling apart.

To the sight of a man’s slow death—one fetid spoonful at a time.

By the sixth month, food was no longer food.

It was ritual.

It was performance.

It was sacrifice—of flesh, of sanity, of self.

The dishes became insane, bordering on the criminal.

• Pig brains marinated in cough syrup and crushed sleeping pills.
• A wedding cake, left out in the sun for a week, crawling with ants—which he did not brush off.
• Raw chicken tenders rolled in cigarette ash and dipped in bleach-yellow nacho cheese.
• A turducken stuffed not with other birds, but with a bouquet of tampons, used bandages, and shredded bills marked “FINAL NOTICE.”

Sometimes, he set the food on fire first—blew it out, and ate it scorched and black, smoke curling from his lips as he bit down.

There was no seasoning, no thought to taste.

This wasn’t about pleasure. It was about humiliation. About the crowd.

His apartment—once merely dirty—now looked like the inside of a dying organ.

The walls were slimed with rot, damp blotches in the corners bursting into black mold that bled when touched. The floor was a patchwork of grease, vomit, and food wrappers, layered so thick they squelched beneath his chair.

And Cameron?

He had become unrecognizable.

His body had long since abandoned any resemblance to the human form.

What remained of Cameron Voss was a monstrosity of sagging, oozing tissue, a pulsating monument to excess and collapse. His skin, once pale and freckled, had transmuted into something sickly and necrotic—a slick yellow-gray membrane, translucent in patches, like melted wax that had bubbled and blistered too close to a flame. Fungal blooms speckled his shoulders, where dampness had seeped in and made a home of his rot.

His eyes no longer blinked—two bulbous orbs bulging from puffy sockets, marbled with bursting capillaries, their whites stained the color of old milk. They wept constantly, leaking a slow, syrupy ooze that trickled down his cheeks in yellow trails. He didn’t wipe them. Couldn’t. The nerves were too fried, the muscles too buried beneath layers of soft, fermenting fat.

His lips were shredded—a ring of meat peeled in jagged flaps, constantly splitting, constantly bleeding, ribbons of dried gore crusting the corners of his mouth. Every bite tore them wider. The sound of his chewing was joined by the squelch of splitting flesh and the sticky suck of bloodied gums trying to hold themselves together.

And his tongue—Jesus Christ, his tongue.

What had once been a pink and nimble organ was now a bloated gray slug, swollen and too big for his mouth, its surface mottled with purple lesions and dead spots where taste had long since died. It lolled sideways, flapping wetly against his chin as he gasped for breath between bites, each wheeze a wet gargle of phlegm and undigested pulp.

His neck had disappeared entirely—swallowed by rolls of fused flesh, where fat met muscle met skin in a formless, sweating fold that stretched from jaw to chest. There were no lines anymore. Just meat.

His body was an obscene sack of gelatinous ruin, a peristaltic heap that twitched and sagged with every sluggish heartbeat. His stomach, once soft, was now a groaning globe, distended to the point of translucency, blue veins worming across its surface like cracks in dying ice. His gut hung over his lap like a pregnant boil, pulsing with fluid and gas. Viewers could hear it move—a slosh, a burble, a squeal—as if something inside it were still alive.

Every movement was agony.

The audience could see it—etched into his face, around the tight squint of his eyes and the flutter of his eyelids when he chewed too hard. His fingers trembled violently, slick with grease, the knuckles swollen and purple, nails curling inward like claws softened by rot. Every time he raised his arm, it resembled the act of lifting a corpse underwater—slow, clumsy, as if the limb itself didn’t want to obey.

When he leaned forward to vomit—and he often did—the skin across his lower back would split, forming a thin, sickening crack of red—like a sausage casing bursting from pressure—and a hot gush of blood and pus would soak the chair beneath him. He never noticed. Or if he did, he never reacted. Only groaned. Only kept chewing.

He was digesting himself alive, one horrifying inch at a time.

And still... he kept eating.

And still... they kept watching.

Exactly one year from the night he returned, the thumbnail appeared without warning.

A crimson dinner plate.

No food. Just a single human tooth, gleaming atop it like a pearl drowned in blood.

The title, in bold serif:

“THE LAST MEAL—LIVESTREAM TONIGHT.”

Within an hour, the Internet buckled.

Reddit threads ignited. Discord servers rang out like air-raid sirens. TikTok flooded with countdowns, duets, morbid fan art.

Instagram went black in solidarity, thousands of accounts posting nothing but red plates.

Over thirteen million tuned in.

When the stream began, the chat erupted in emojis and noise—then fell into eerie silence.

He emerged from the shadows like a bloated ghoul at his own wake and took a seat on his steel throne of filth and ruin. His tuxedo, once crisp and black, was now stretched to tearing, the seams fraying against the vast swell of his ruined body. The fabric strained over rolls of flesh, split under the arms, exposing oozing sores beneath the sleeves. Pus soaked through the satin lapels.

He had powdered his face death-white, like a corpse fresh from the slab. But already, sweat ran in yellowish rivulets along the creases of his nose and the pockmarks of his cheeks, dragging streaks of makeup with it. His lips, painted a garish candy-apple red, were split and raw—bloody fissures crusted at the corners where the skin had torn from previous smiles.

His eyes?

Two dead bulbs. Bulging. Mismatched. Glossy.

They didn’t blink.

The table had been set for a massacre masquerading as cuisine.

Melted wax dripped from warped candleholders—some reduced to puddles of grease, fingernails, and bits of hair. Around the edges of the tablecloth, flies nested in the folds, twitching with hunger.

The meal sprawled before him like a banquet for Hell’s nobility.

Thick Wagyu steaks, bloated with fat, floated in green absinthe—the liquid sloshing and fizzing as if acidic.

A stack of pancakes, soaked through, glistened beneath a coating of clear syrup—and jammed between each layer, syringes protruded like bones from a corpse’s ribcage. Their contents? Unlabeled. Still full. Still ready.

A mound of foie gras, frosted white with a dusting of powdered cocaine, spilled over the edge of a plate like a melting tumor.

Doughnuts, slit open like surgical wounds, dripped black caviar thickened with something more viscous—mucus, maybe, or semen. No one could tell.

At the center of it all: a roasted swan, still twitching.

Its eyes open, blinking slowly.

Its beak sewn shut with dental floss. Its skin golden. Its feathers scorched.

He began eating without ceremony.

No cutlery. No napkin. No prayer.

Just his hands, swollen and purple, nails yellowed and curling, tearing into food with the urgency of addiction. He moaned with each bite, not from pleasure but from exertion—his lungs rattling like broken bellows, the fat around his throat jiggling with every chew.

He ate for six hours.

Six hours of groaning, slobbering consumption. Of sauce running down his chest. Of sweat soaking his shirt until it turned nearly translucent. Of urine dribbling from beneath him, pooling at the foot of the throne.

He vomited three times, then re-ate the slurry with his hands, like a dog reclaiming lost food.

He screamed once, when something in his jaw cracked.

Then kept going.

The chat, tens of millions strong, was a rolling flood of text:

“THIS IS IT”

“GOD HELP ME I CAN’T LOOK AWAY”

“I’M CRYING”

“MORE. MORE. MORE.”

And then, finally, the banquet ended.

He sat back. Face glistening. Belly twitching beneath the strain. Breathing like a punctured accordion.

Then he leaned forward, his throne creaking beneath his weight, and whispered the only words spoken on his channel in twelve long months:

“Now…for dessert.”

He reached under the table and produced a knife.

A long, serrated steak knife.

The blade was blackened with old grease. Bits of congealed fat still clung to the edge. The handle was sticky with blood.

He smiled, wide, cracking his lips open like a ripe fruit. Blood poured from the corners.

And then, with a sudden scream—a noise so sharp it caused microphones to crackle and countless viewers to instinctively recoil—he plunged the blade into his own gut.

It slid in deep. A gout of black-red blood exploded, splattering the webcam like a paintball, dotting the lens with obscured splotches of gore.

He didn’t hesitate. He began to saw upward, the serrated edge ripping through flesh, fat, and muscle, sending ropes of intestine and stomach lining spilling into his lap.

The scream turned to sobs.

And yet, he reached in.

Hands trembling, he scooped up a steaming, coiled loop of intestine, held it to his face like a sacred offering—and bit down.

The wet snap of teeth through gut was indescribable. He chewed. Swallowed.

His body convulsed.

Bile surged from his throat, splashing back down onto the open wound.

Chunks of pancreas, half-chewed, fell from his lips.

But he kept going.

He tore another section free and slurped it like bloody pasta, the ends trailing from his mouth like worms.

Tears poured down his face.

Mouth full. Jaw trembling.

He tried to smile again.

Failed.

Blood poured from his lips.

His final words, garbled but unmistakable:

“You…liked…this…”

Then his body shuddered.

The open cavity in his torso burst, spilling not just blood, but fluid, bile, semi-digested meat, and what looked like clotted milk onto the floor in a wave of death.

The camera lens cracked.

His head lolled.

And with one final exhalation—wet, rattling, syrup-thick—Cameron Voss died.

The stream didn’t cut.

For twelve straight hours, the camera held on his corpse. No fade-out. No endscreen. Just the bloated, ruptured remains of Cameron Voss, slumped across the ruined feast table like a gutted boar.

His torso lay split wide open—a ragged, yawning cavity, pulsing gently as gases continued to escape. Coils of intestine had slithered halfway to the floor. Black bile pooled beneath his chair, glistening in the candlelight like crude oil. His skin—once bloated—was now beginning to sink inward, sagging around bones, the process of collapse and fermentation well underway.

Flies blanketed him, so thick it looked as if his body had grown fur.

The chat stayed open. Still scrolling.

Some laughed. Some screamed. Others simply stared.

“He’s still there holy shit.”

“He’s gonna get up. He has to.”

“Did... did anyone else hear breathing??”

“This better be fake. Please let this be fake.”

And then...

It began.

At precisely 3:33 a.m.—twelve hours to the minute from the moment of his death—the screen glitched.

A sharp, digital chirp stabbed through the speakers, followed by a distortion—like an old VHS tape melting in the player. The colors inverted, then snapped back. The camera juddered, the frame warping with waves of static and bitrate decay.

Cameron’s eyes—once dead, milk-glazed and unmoving—twitched.

Once.

Twice.

Then they rolled.

His mouth, slack and blood-caked, quivered. Not with breath—but with movement from within.

The chat erupted.

“WTF WTF WTF”

“NOPE NOPE NOPE”

“HE’S ALIVE”

“BRO WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING”

The corpse shuddered, not as a man returning to life, but like a sack of meat being manipulated from within.

A sound—wet, meat sliding against meat, bone grinding like a broken gearbox—rose from the gut cavity.

From the torn abdomen, something moved.

Something pushed out.

Not a limb. Not Cameron.

But a thing.

It emerged slowly, slick and steaming—a creature of meat and wire slithering from the corpse like a parasite exiting its host, its body a congealed mass of half-digested food, camera cables, and intestinal tubing twisted together in a tapestry of pulsing biological horror.

Its shoulders were ragged slabs of muscle, still twitching with residual nerve activity. Shreds of stomach lining hung from its flanks like wet banners, dripping with fluid. It dragged itself forward on limbs made of spliced HDMI cords and vertebrae, its fingers nothing but coils of fiber-optic sinew.

And its face—

God help them—

Its face was Cameron’s, but wrong.

A synthetic mimic, as if someone had rendered his likeness through corrupted .jpeg compression, then stapled it over raw meat. It blinked out of sync, eyes flashing like router lights, lips trembling with residual code. When it opened its mouth, viewers could see teeth—too many—shifting inside like loose dice.

Some people screamed.

Some unplugged their devices.

Others tried to close the tab, only to find their browsers frozen.

The video seized control. Fullscreen. Unstoppable.

The creature leaned into the lens, smearing it with a trail of hot, viscous grease, until its face filled the frame.

It smiled—or tried to.

When it spoke, the voice was Cameron’s, as if fed through a garbage disposal:

“You Made Me”

The screen froze.

Then faded to black.

And then, in clean, sterile Helvetica:

“THANK YOU FOR SUBSCRIBING”

EPILOGUE

It started in the ERs.

Hospitals across the globe began reporting anomalous clusters of young patients flooding triage with violent abdominal pain, nosebleeds, nausea, and prolonged vomiting of black bile. All of them had one thing in common.

They had watched The Last Meal.

Teenagers. Stream junkies. TikTok addicts. Diehard fans. Curious newcomers.

They came into emergency departments pale, trembling, with dilated pupils and distended bellies, whispering nonsense between retches.

They all said the same thing.

“I feel full.”

“There’s something moving.”

“He’s inside me.”

“I can’t stop chewing.”

Dozens were found gnawing on their own lips, cheeks, fingertips—biting down until they struck bone. One woman in Austin was discovered in the psych ward with twenty-three fingernails in her stomach and her mouth full of broken teeth, smiling through the blood.

Autopsies yielded nothing. Organs were intact. But doctors swore the tissue looked digested, as if the body had begun consuming itself from the inside. In several cases, stomach linings showed signs of mucosal erosion shaped like fingerprints.

And yet, the hunger never stopped.

Patients demanded raw meat, bleach, cooking oil, soap.

They would eat anything—except vegetables. That was the only consistency.

In one especially grotesque case, a teenage boy from Iowa was found dead at his kitchen table.

His abdomen had ruptured violently, spilling a sludge of half-digested cereal, blood, and what appeared to be strips of carpet across the linoleum floor.

A fork had been jammed into his eye socket, self-inflicted, the metal tines driven all the way through to the base of his skull.

But it was the writing on the wall that chilled authorities.

In smears of feces and blood, the jagged, trembling letters read:

“I’M THE CONTENT NOW.”

The death was ruled a suicide.

But the paramedics never forgot the smell—not just of death, but something older, something rancid and artificial, like rotted meat stewed in screen static.

Soon after, urban legends took root.

Not rumors.

Rituals.

A set of instructions, whispered in online forums, shared in Discord servers eventually sealed by law enforcement. They all began with the same warning:

“If you watch the full video at 3:33 a.m.—alone, unbroken, no lights on, no blinking—something happens.”

Those who followed the ritual to the letter described the same phenomena:

First, a tightening in the gut, as though your organs were being wound like rope.

Then, a sharp taste, metal and mold, blooming under the tongue.

Then...the voice.

Right behind the eardrum, nestled into the static hum of silence.

“It’s your turn.”

Some claim to have awakened the next morning with grease under their fingernails, their mouths sore from chewing. One girl in Warsaw said she found a single tooth in her hand and couldn’t remember where it came from. She had no missing teeth and it didn’t match her dental records.

Others say it doesn’t stop.

Once you’ve heard the voice, you begin to feel it—a constant gnawing presence inside you. Like you’re being digested from within, even as your body screams to consume, chew, swallow, repeat.

Authorities tried to bury it.

The CDC denied its existence.

YouTube issued a blanket statement about “malicious content” and removed millions of associated links.

It didn’t matter.

The video doesn’t need a server.

It lives in the collective retina, in the memory of pixels, in the sticky residue of screen addiction. It replicates itself in dreams, in audio glitches, in flickering LED lights at night.

It knows your face now. It knows how long you watched.

It knows what you didn’t look away from.

And now it waits.

Because somewhere out there, tonight, someone is sitting in the dark at 3:32 a.m. The cursor is hovering over the thumbnail.

They think it’s just a story.

Just a video.

They don’t know yet.

But they will.

The hunger is always patient.

And Cameron’s knife is already in their hands.

THE END.

BUT YOU’RE STILL WATCHING.

AREN’T YOU?

AFTERWORD: The Smile Behind the Knife

This story came to me during a fever.

Not metaphorically. Not in the poetic sense writers sometimes use to describe inspiration.

I mean it literally. I was sick, some passing infection, or perhaps something stranger—and for three nights I drifted in and out of a damp, delirious half-sleep where time unraveled and the walls seemed to breathe.

But on the third night... that’s when I saw him.

He sat at a table. A man of impossible size, bloated with indulgence, his skin slick with sweat and his mouth glistening with grease. He was silent. He was smiling. A smile that did not touch the eyes—because the eyes were dead things, glassy and twitching.

He didn’t eat food.

He tore open his own stomach—I saw the blade sink in, saw the wet flap of flesh peel open like an unzipped meat suit—and from within, he began to feed.

Handfuls of intestine. Chunks of liver. The slither of gut slipping between his lips.

He chewed with joy. He cried as he swallowed.

And through it all, that smile, wide, broken, and grateful.

Not for the act. But for being watched.

I awoke sweating, bile in my throat, hands clenched around my bedsheets. I was starving and sick at once. I didn’t eat that day. I couldn’t.

But I couldn’t shake the vision. That image, that man. That act of final, intimate consumption. The unholy fusion of hunger and exhibition.

What would it mean, I asked myself, if the world watched a man destroy himself…and liked it?

What if the horror wasn’t what he did…but how we responded?

And so I wrote The Last Course.

It’s a fiction, yes. A grotesque performance of body horror and digital obsession. But I believe some stories arrive whole, birthed not from imagination but from the darker rooms of the unconscious, places we don’t walk willingly.

I didn’t create this man.

He came to me, already eating, already smiling.

And now, he’s with you.

Just remember to look away.

While you still can.

Chris McAuley

One week after the dream

About the Author:
Chris McAuley is an award-winning, New York Times Best-selling writer who is most famous for creating the popular StokerVerse franchise with Dacre Stoker (Bram Stoker’s great grand-nephew). This continuation of Bram’s work has proliferated from graphic novels, books, audio dramas, table-top games into the world of television and film. He has also created a successful science fiction franchise with Hollywood actress Claudia Christian (star of Babylon 5) called Dark Legacies. Chris has recently been nominated for the highest award for writing in tabletop games—The Ennies for his Three Musketeers vs Chthulu RPG, which has also become a comic book series. He is also known for his work on Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Terminator franchises. Away from writing duties he is the co-owner of X-G3 Productions, a film company spearheaded by CNN’s George J Giakoumis and Peter S Giakoumis as well as a multiple award-winning executive producer on The Stranded Warrior Sci-Fi film and InterFleet Broadcasting PBS streaming show.