THE DAY

eat the rich now

It started like any other day.

The sun was shining. Dogs barked behind garden fences. Children hurried past with their parents, backpacks bouncing, shoes untied, breakfast still clinging to the corners of their mouths. Buses sighed at the curb. Coffee machines hissed. Somewhere, a radio played an old love song.

And then the newspapers arrived.

It was the headline that turned heads.

EAT THE RICH.

Three words.

No explanation. No byline. No photograph.

Just those three words, printed in enormous black letters across the front page of every major newspaper in the country.

People stopped walking.

A man lowered his coffee cup. A woman standing at a bus stop slowly unfolded her paper, then unfolded it again, as though a different message might appear beneath the first.

Someone laughed.

Someone else said, "What the hell?"

By nine o'clock, the headline was everywhere.

On television screens. On phones. Across digital billboards that had advertised luxury watches and investment opportunities only minutes earlier.

The stock market stumbled.

The news anchors smiled nervously.

The government called an emergency meeting.

And somewhere in a glass tower overlooking the city, a billionaire locked his office door.

Because he had seen something the others hadn't.

There was a photograph on the back page of his newspaper.

It showed a dining room.

A long table. White linen. Silver cutlery. Twelve empty chairs.

At the far end sat a thirteenth chair.

And on the plate in front of it was a human tooth.

---

By noon, the first rumours had begun.

A technology mogul had disappeared from his private island. A property developer had been found hiding in a maintenance room beneath one of his own apartment towers. An investment banker had abandoned his car in the middle of a highway and run barefoot into the woods.

The stories grew stranger by the hour.

A video appeared online showing a crowd outside an exclusive restaurant. The windows were blacked out. Something scraped against the glass from the inside.

Then came the screaming.

The video ended.

Nobody knew who had filmed it.

Nobody knew what had happened inside.

But by evening, the internet was filling with photographs that no one could explain.

A dinner plate on a velvet cushion.

A pair of expensive shoes beside a drain.

A handwritten menu featuring the names of people who, according to the news, were still alive.

The authorities called the images fabricated.

The platforms began deleting them.

That only made them spread faster.

And beneath every image, beneath every rumour, beneath every shaky recording uploaded in the middle of the night, appeared the same three words.

EAT THE RICH.

People began to panic.

Some cheered. Some prayed. Some bought weapons and barricaded their doors. Others stood in the streets holding cardboard signs, unable to decide whether they were witnessing a revolution or the beginning of something far older.

The billionaires hired security.

They moved their families into bunkers.

They turned off their phones.

But the strange thing was this: the people disappearing weren't always the richest.

They were the ones who had become famous for believing themselves untouchable.

The ones whose names appeared in court documents, leaked messages, private flight logs.

The ones who had laughed when asked how ordinary people were supposed to afford a place to live.

One by one, their photographs appeared on the front pages.

Then their names disappeared from the news.

Then their photographs disappeared.

And finally, people began to notice that the stories were no longer about missing men and women.

They were about empty chairs.

---

Sarah had been reading for nearly an hour when she reached the chapter titled The First Supper.

She had picked up the book at a secondhand shop. No author was listed. No publisher. The cover was plain black, with three words embossed in a dull, metallic red.

EAT THE RICH NOW.

She'd thought it was satire.

A strange little underground novel. Something written by an angry person with too much time on their hands.

But the details were unsettling.

The dates.

The locations.

The names.

Some of them were real.

She turned the page.

A photograph had been printed between two chapters. It showed a banquet room, with a chandelier shaped like a crown hanging above a table set for twenty.

Sarah frowned.

She knew that room.

She had seen it on the news last week, in a story about a private gathering of the world's wealthiest investors.

Only the photograph in the book was different.

There were twenty place settings.

Twenty silver plates.

And at the head of the table, a single black napkin folded into the shape of an open mouth.

Sarah felt a cold sensation creep up her spine.

She turned the page.

A list of names.

She recognized the first one.

Then the second.

The third belonged to a man who had vanished two nights earlier. His family had released a statement saying he was taking time away from public life.

The fourth had died in a private hospital, according to an announcement that had been quietly removed from the internet.

Beside each name was a date.

And beside each date, written in red ink, was a single word.

SERVED.

Sarah's hands began to tremble.

She flipped ahead, faster now, pages whispering beneath her fingers.

There were photographs of dining rooms, private jets, underground garages.

There were transcripts of conversations that had never been made public.

There were descriptions of things she couldn't quite bring herself to read.

And then she reached the final page.

It contained a single paragraph.

You laughed when you first heard the rumours. Everyone did. You thought it was a joke, a metaphor, a slogan printed on a protest sign. You thought the world was too civilized for such things.

Below it was a line of text.

Civilization is a very thin tablecloth.

Sarah stared at the words.

Her mouth went dry.

Outside, a dog began barking.

Then another.

Then all the dogs on the street seemed to erupt at once.

Her phone vibrated on the table.

A breaking-news alert.

She looked down.

BILLIONAIRE REPORTED MISSING — POLICE INVESTIGATE UNUSUAL SCENE.

A second alert appeared.

Then a third.

Sarah stood so quickly that the chair toppled behind her.

She remembered the rumours now. The jokes people had made. The strange posts that appeared and vanished. The stories about private kitchens and locked rooms, about people who had paid fortunes to keep certain things quiet.

She had laughed at those stories.

She had told her friends they were ridiculous.

The room seemed to tilt.

She looked back at the book.

The final page had changed.

Or perhaps she simply hadn't noticed the words at the bottom before.

A sentence had been written beneath the paragraph, in the same red ink.

SARAH WILL READ THIS AT 8:17 P.M.

She checked the clock.

8:17.

Her face went white.

The book slid from her fingers.

She stumbled toward the bathroom, barely making it to the sink before she began to vomit.

When she finally raised her head, she saw her reflection in the mirror.

Behind her, on the open book, another line had appeared.

She has finished the first chapter.

And somewhere downstairs, the front door opened.

Sarah stopped breathing.

A voice called her name.

It sounded almost friendly.

Then came the soft, unmistakable scrape of a chair being pulled out at the dining table.

And a voice she had never heard before whispered:

"Whose hungry?"