Part One of Four: War
So you want to get inside my mind? To understand me? To judge me as either the monster I am hailed in some circles, or the messiah I am hailed in others? There is much to tell of this story, so I'd recommend you make time before you begin it. As far as beginnings go, this story doesn't have much of one. I was a rather normal teenager, about seventeen years old. At the time I had hair which stretched down to my shoulders. My father, being a man of good standing and raised in a more “proper” generation, thought this did not fit someone seeking respect in the workplace, and so compelled me to get it cut.
He dropped me off at the hair cuttery half-past noon on a bright September thursday, sending me inside with a stern word and a crisp twenty-dollar bill. As I pushed lightly on the black handle which melted seamlessly into the door frame, a bell rang. Instantly, four or five heads turned in my direction. I was drawn to look at each face that was suddenly surveying me, but I resisted this temptation and quietly walked to the front desk.
The receptionist was a dark-haired beauty, engaged in the most common receptionist pass-time: nail-filing. Her thick brown glasses curved to a point at either end and sat just slightly too low on her nose, threatening to jump at any moment. I folded my arms, resting my elbows on the table. The rustling of my jacket causing her to spring into awareness. She looked up at me with a mixture of hatred and forced enthusiasm, at once both a smiling tour guide and a crouching lynx.
“How can I help you sir?” she asked with entirely too many teeth for me to be comfortable.
“I need a haircut.”
“What's your name, sir?”
I gave her a fake name, lest she track me down the following night to punish me for my transgressions against her self-improvement. She indicated the wait would be upwards of thirty minutes, so I took a seat next to the cleanest looking individual I could find. In front of me, a glistening steel table, as modern as the rest of the salon. Resting on it I found several magazines on women's fashions. Digging through the pile yielded an old issue of Popular Mechanics. While not particularly interesting, the magazine gave me something to hide behind while I observed the people around me.
It amazes me how much people are put off by being observed. When you take a moment to consider the massive time and money invested into our outward appearances, stares from strangers should be met with a hearty “Thank you”, but that tends to not be the case. Some people are afraid of being watched, others even become hostile if they see a wandering pair of eyes, and so I hide behind a magazine.
The man sitting beside me seems nervous about something. His thumbs wag back and forth, dancing an anxious dance above his interlocked hands. His hands briefly unlock and a hand twists at his wedding ring. As the tip of his finger pushes the gold band in a clockwise circle it slides further down his finger, until, nearly halfway down, it reaches a full slide. He catches it and shoves it quickly into his jacket pocket. I watch, I don't judge. I flip a page in the magazine.
To my other side there's a boy about my age wearing an Eagles beanie atop a mass of red hair. Everything about his appearance reeks of skateboarding and “punk”. I should note that there is no seat on this side of me. He is leaning against the wall, arms folded across his front, with one foot propped sideways against the wall. He uncrosses his arms and lifts one to his face. My eyes follow his hand, as it itches his nose, and briefly the tip of his thumb enters his mouth. A nail biter. He chomps ravenously at his nail, tearing at it and the skin near it's base. This all happens quickly and secretly, with nobody the wiser but the biter and I. As his hand moves back to waist-level, he suddenly re-scans the room. Our eyes meet and he quickly looks down. Looking down at his newly-groomed hand, I see he is flicking me off.
The receptionist lets out a shrill call. I recognize the assumed name I gave her and rise from my seat. I smirk at the punk to my right and walk past the reception desk into the bowels of the cuttery. I pass deserted chairs and mirrors inhabited only briefly by my still-smirking visage until I reach the back of the shop where there are three women working. Two are hard at work spinning, measuring, cutting hair into new forms. The last is dusting off her chair, lightly removing any trace of the last customer. She turns and greets me pleasantly. I flash a quick smile and a few nondescript words of greeting, and lower myself into the black leather chair. She asks how I want my hair cut.
Now, this is quite an interesting question to me. I don't actually want my hair cut, but for the purpose of easy conversation, I'm not going to bring that up with this woman. I survey my face in the mirror. It is incredibly hard to guess how the rest of the world will see you. I guess I'll just go with the usual.
“A few inches off all around, layered in the front, long in the back.”
She beckons for my glasses, and I oblige. The world instantly shifts out of focus. Without aid, I'm nearly blind. I see the blurry black shape of the clean cut man who had previously sat beside me move shapelessly to the equally unclear blob that I believed to be the receptionist. My lips curved once more into a smirk, and the chair turned. I was greeted with a sight I found quite unsettling.
Finally, I was facing the mirror again. Without my glasses, my shape was horribly transfigured. Being that my projected image was much closer than the living mannequins of the lobby, I could make out the shapes that made up my being. What made the vision so unsettling were my monstrous eyes. Blurred beyond recognition, they resembled dark inky pits. The effect caused my entire face to seem more of a skull than anything else, dead and empty.
As I tried to tune out of the world around me and submit my hair to be cut, those words wouldn't leave my mind. Dead. Empty. Weren't we all just dead and empty? Looking back, if there were one particular moment in my prelife that defined my break with humanity, it was right here. Here, in a barbershop of all places, my mindset changed drastically.
--
Years later, after I had begun living, I would be sitting in the first vehicle we dared to bring anywhere near the end of the zone. I was seated passenger-side, as I had lost my legs by this point. Tonight was the night I was to go into the wall. I had spent the last year planning and arranging things for this moment, and finally, we could get out. We had had to procure blueprints, find weapons, train the troops, and hardest of all; we controlled what they knew about us. They didn't know how intelligent we were, and they didn't know how organized. First I had to complete my mission, then in several hours, we would feast.
Virgil drove far faster than the others. His hair flowed white behind him. He was the only one behind the wall still left in prelife who was allowed to make that choice. He had helped me enough in all my doings that I would not force it on him. To look at him now, you couldn't easily tell him for one of us, his face charred, his clothes in tatters, the telltale orbs of flesh starting to protrude from his hands as if the growth had begun. This was my doing. While I trusted his judgment, there were others who certainly would not. He used to talk more, before the quarantine.
Looking over at the lake we were passing, I thought I saw a man on horseback illuminated slightly by the moonlight. The man himself was fairly nondescript, save his ponytail of fiery red hair. Protruding from his skull about three inches, it then hung halfway to the ground. Much more remarkable than the rider was the horse he sat upon. The grunting and growling beast of burden was coated in armor I likened to that of Arthur's court. Plates ran down either side, and a skull-like helmet protected it's face. In the darkness, it almost seemed to snort fire from it's nose. I blinked a few times, and the horse and it's rider had both vanished. These strange hallucinations were the only thing about this change that still unsettled me. It was as though my own mind was attempting to intimidate itself away from the task at hand.
Finally, we neared the perimeter. Lights from helicopters darted across the landscape further down the line of our sight. Further still was the wall, the wall they had erected to contain us. Us, the bringers of the new day, the ones who brought with them the next stage of human evolution. They feared the change, they feared the future, and so they feared us. Tonight I was here to bring them just one step closer to what they feared.
The jeep quietly came to a halt a ways off of the perimeter. We didn't want them to see the vehicle. We didn't want them to see us working together. They had no idea what we were capable of yet. Soon they would know. My comrade put his rotted, dying fingers to his mottled lips in our symbol for good tidings, and gestured for me to go. I lifted myself off the seat and fell to the grass.
It had rained today, and the grass was still damp, the ground still muddy as a swamp of the warmer countries. I dragged my shirtless form through the muck, hand over hand, sliding forward with great speed, but never moving off the ground. My handicap had made me quite adept at moving undetected, and in this situation, it was important firstly that I not be seen.
As I dragged myself closer to the wall, the moon disappeared in favor of a vision of her face, the same as ever, with one eye missing, and her jaw hanging to the side. Her mouth gaped, although the state of her jaw gave her little choice, in a scream. Her remaining eye swiveled madly, finally fixing right on me. Her uvula moved in tune with the wind issued by her scream. Fortunately, nobody but me could hear or see this shrill utterance. I pushed it out of my mind and trekked onward.
A spotlight headed in my direction. I quickly moved off to the side to avoid it's trajectory. Hand over hand, I moved closer to the wall. It had been so long. It had taken so much planning. We were almost there. It was then that I noticed that I was breathing. I had never really managed to beat that habit. I was far more advanced than any other in most ways, but sometimes you just sort of fell back into your prelife ways.
I took a moment to calm down, stop breathing, survey the ground I had left to cover. There was not much space left. The wall was so close. I simply had to make it past the marching sentries and I would be there. So close. The sentries were actually a much more cunning defensive tactic than many of my kind realize. There are some among my kind that simply want to take the sentries and make a new plan afterwards. What they don't realize is that the sentries aren't meant to contain us, so much as their presence is meant to be a temptation.
In case you've begun wondering, that's why a cripple such as myself is on this mission that may decide the very future of my kind. For my physical shortcomings, I am much farther along the path of mastering my mental state than any of the others. I can control the hunger. I can hold it back. I don't like to, but it's possible. This is why I alone can scout past the sentries.
As I crawl past them, the hunger boils up in my stomach. I want to feed, I need to feed, but I know that this is far more important than a simple feeding. There are prelifes still hiding in the city. I can find one later. I have to pull through. Several times, I almost lose it. I almost jump out and gorge myself. Almost. But I wait, and I crawl, and I sate my hunger, focusing instead on my lust for revenge for my imprisonment and for this quarantine.
--
I remember the first time I encountered the press. I had a lawyer at my side who told me to say nothing. There were hundreds of reporters speaking many different languages. Everybody wanted to be the first to question the first. That time, I took the lawyer's advice. I said nothing. I merely walked, because I still had my legs at this point, into the jailhouse. Looking at all the police, I found myself falling back into my boyhood habit of watching people, observing their nervous ticks. It was almost comical, the thumb-twiddling, the teeth grinding. This place was full of nervous ticks. Guns, sticks, pepper spray, and these people were all still very afraid of me.
Then another revelation came to me. If I really commanded so much power, even in this cell, it wasn't simply me as a person they were afraid of. They were all afraid of me as a concept, an idea, as a mystery. Right now I was something they couldn't understand, and the moment I lost that, they would be able to fight back. When they could analyze my actions, empathize with my motives, then I became like them, then I became a person. What I needed to do wasn't to sit here and wait for the moment, I had to make the next move before I became understandable.
The next day I met with my lawyer again the next day. This man was also afraid of me. He was stocky and bald, and right up above his eyebrows were a few slight wrinkles which dampened as he spoke to me. He told me I could beat these charges. I could show them how much I had changed, and how much I regretted what I had done. He told me he knew, deep down, that I was a good guy, and that I didn't deserve the railroading they wanted to give me. I had just had some problems recently, gotten a little too into my work, and taken it out on some poor guy in a subway bathroom. All this rationalization.
I told him that I wanted a press conference. He wanted to know what I had to say. He wanted to know what the plan was. I told him only that I had one, and that I was confident in it. He told me that he wouldn't call a conference unless I talked it over with him. As he told me this, I saw the wrinkles deepen. I saw the sweat glisten. He folded his hands in front of him.
“If you don't call a television station right now, I will leap across this table, and take a bite out of your arm.”
“You can't. I'll call for the guards.”
“And they will run in here, and find me with a large chunk of flesh in my mouth, and you, sobbing next to me, possibly bleeding to death.”
I saw his lip quiver. I smirked. I raised my own hand to my mouth, nibbling slightly on my index finger, making sure he could see just the end of my tongue. There it was, at last, a visible bead of sweat, running down the forehead. He was going to give. He was close. Time to seal the deal. I snapped my teeth together, ripping off just the tip of my finger, swallowed, then smiled, the blood still staining the front of my teeth.
He conceded. He even made the calls while I was there in the room with him. What a nice man. Tomorrow at noon. My fifteen minutes of fame wouldn't have faded yet. People would hear what I had to say. I had planning to do. I thanked the man for his time and returned to my cell. In my mind, I was already forming the words.
I was disappointed about the turnout the next day. I guess my crime, no matter how heinous anyone thought it was, wasn't worth the attention of too many major media outlets. That was fine. Some would see it, and those would tell their friends, and those friends would tell their friends, and somehow, everyone would hear about it. I wore a prison uniform and had my hands cuffed behind my back, legs clasped by shackles. I leaned towards the podium, and began speaking.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I would like to thank you for coming to my little party. I wanted to talk to you all mainly to address a few preconceived notions that you may have. Firstly, I am not crazy. Different, unique, a little bit cynical, I'll agree to any of those terms and a million others, but not to crazy. I am, in the basest sense of the word, change.
You all have come from different backgrounds. You grew up in different towns, and you have different values. You have different hair colors, and you have different favorite foods, you are different from one another both in your choices and in your genetics, and yet you are all exactly the same. Looking out at you, I can tell this isn't something you wish to readily accept. As humans often do, you seek to individualize. You want so badly to be unique. Let me ask you a question: What is the first thing you do when you walk outside in the morning? No, I'm not asking any one of you, I'm sure there's a few answers that range from humming to skipping, but the point is; you make assumptions before you do any of these things. When you walk outside, you're assuming gravity is still as you left it, you're assuming your house is still where it was when you entered it, you're assuming the world still works in just the way you think it does.
Most of the time, these assumptions are fairly safe. Gravity has never failed you, and your house rarely if ever moves. The problem is that sometimes there are exceptions to these rules, and you fail to see them. This is how you are all the same. You are all blind to things that don't agree with your particular view of reality. I am one of those things.
Now I've done it. I can see it in your eyes. You think I'm crazy. Just as I said that last statement, you ruled everything else that I have to say as bull****. When someone says they're something special, instead of just thinking it, you write them off. This is another rule you all follow, and another one you're going to have to get over. Let me explain a little bit that will make you a little more hesitant to forget what I have to say.
I was supposed to die about three months ago. As you all are probably aware, before the incident that has brought me into the public eye, I was a top researcher who was best known for his work on a cure for cancer. People have developed ways to treat the symptoms, sometimes prevent specific forms, but I wanted to solve all of them at once. For those of you who don't understand the illness itself, it's basically uncontrolled cell growth. Your body rapidly produces cells that do your body no good, but compete with cells that do for nutrients. Cancer kills you for many different reasons, but none of them would matter if only your body found a way to deal with the unwanted cells.
This is what I worked on, developing a method of gene therapy that would allow healthy cells to cannibalize those cancerous cells, to use them as fuel for their own mitosis. Ladies and gentlemen, about six months ago, I did it. I cured cancer. What is not well know about me, even now, is that I've been battling with pancreatic cancer for quite some time now. I have signed papers with my lawyers allowing my medical records to be officially released so that this fact can be validated. I administered the drug to myself, hoping to save my own life. Slowly, it changed me, it healed me, it made me better. I should have died three months ago, but here I stand.
This therapy has possibilities that are almost literally endless. Cancerous cell growth, which has been the most dangerous and deadly disease mankind has known short of the black plague, is actually the key to our full potential. When I was incarcerated, I was nearing a blocking drug that would allow the rapidly dividing cells to slowly naturalize to the rest of the body. With work, humans could heal faster, and more efficiently, possibly to the point of full limb regeneration. In several years time, it's possible we could regenerate other sorts of cells, and who knows, maybe some day we will be able to defeat death itself.
As long as I am kept in a cell, my cure shall die with me. I can recreate it in any decently sophisticated scientific lab, and I have several treatments saved in places known only to myself. These shall be administered to the individual or individuals who takes it upon themselves to free me. Sometimes, in the name of the greater good, we must take the law into our own hands.”
There was no clapping, just an almost horrified silence.
--
Having finally reached the wall itself I was grasped by an elation I hadn't felt since my first conversion. As the sentries walked in the other direction, I climbed the grate. Four screws secured it, barring my access to the air duct. I had only one horrible disfigurement at this point, from where I had been shot several inches to the right of my stomach. I reached my hand inside the slightly damp wound and rifled around until I found a plastic grip. I withdrew the screwdriver from my innards and began to unscrew the grate.
Once the four screws were removed, I let the grate drop quietly to the ground, and crawled into the ventilation system. The lights never directly hit the wall, so I figured I was covered. They didn't think that we could make it past the sentries, so there was no real need for wall security. This was the most important part. I had to make sure I planted the charge in just the right spot. I pulled myself along the grates, going over the plans we had stolen over and over again in my head.
I pulled myself past the next four vent exits, hand over hand, moving slowly so I wouldn't alert anyone who might be inside. For all intents and purposes, this area should be entirely deserted, but you can never be certain, and there was entirely too much at stake. Small bits of my skin that were still the first natural layer felt the cold metal sliding beneath it. I felt much less than I had practicing yesterday. The growth was speeding up. I would have to study further when I got back to the lab.
Finally, I was there. Fortunately, this grate was not screwed down, so I could escape. I climbed up into the room, and there I saw it, the main power grid. If this was taken down, their advantages would all disappear. They would have to target us manually in the dead of night, without the aid of their lasers, their power locks, or even their lights, and there were going to be a lot of us. I unscrewed a panel from the side and left the charge lovingly inside. Only about an hour until it was detonated, until the war started.
Right now, I needed to leave. The guard would pass by here in exactly eleven minutes. I could take on a few of them, but I couldn't last an hour in here. I needed to buy time until the assault began. I pulled myself back over the the grate, lifted it off, and disappeared back down inside. I heard footsteps. This was much too early. Something was wrong. I heard the door open and the sound of their damnable boots. I scooted several feet backwards and let myself listen.
“This room registered a pressure shift just a moment ago, sir.”
“Are you sure?”
“It might have been a glitch, but I've never seen a radar ghost that stayed on the screen for several minutes.”
“God help us it was anything else. Commander, initiate alert level four until further notice.”
A voice from a radio gave a garbled reply. Suddenly, the light leaking in from above got much brighter. I could hear the blaring sirens. There was no way I was getting out quickly and cleanly. I was going to have to choose one or the other. I had lost my legs the last time I'd chosen quickly, so it looked like I was going to have to wait this one out.
--
I had been sitting in jail for nearly a week after I made the speech. I knew someone was coming. I didn't know who it was, and I didn't know how they were coming, but I knew. Until then, I just had to wait. I passed the time by planning my next move. The problem was, this mainly depended on which type of person came to rescue me, a giver or a taker. I was contemplating which was more likely when the wall I was leaning against exploded.
For those of you wondering how I lost my legs, that was it. When I awoke, I was in a makeshift hospital in a place I did not recognize. I saw there was many machines attached to me, monitoring my vitals. Beep. There was a bag of blood beside me. Beep. Looking down at my legs, I saw there were lost. Some people would be slightly more emotional when losing appendages, but I wasn't particularly worried. Beep. I didn't need legs to achieve my purpose. Nor did I need any of these machines. Beep. I pulled the wires and needles from my flesh.
I figured that whoever had come for me, they would be coming down shortly to see what was the matter. I was not mistaken, as minutes from my rejection of the machines, a man came down the stairs. I'm going to spend a little more time describing him here than I did the other characters of this tale because this man would become possibly the most important ally I would ever have. He was a stocky, almost brutish man, probably about six feet tall, around two hundred and fifty pounds. He walked with the confidence of a man who knew he could rip you in half, and was proud of this fact. His clothes were plain, his hair was long and white, his skin was horribly pale, and his eyes glowed a faint pink. An albino, how rare, I thought. When he smiled at my conscious form, I could see two rows of teeth as white as his hair.
“So you're awake doctor?”
“Yes. Quite. Thank you for removing me from that cell. I assume this place is safe?”
“As safe as it could be, with half the nation looking for you, and the other half talking about you.”
“So where is this stronghold at?”
“You think I would tell you? No offense, but if you are taken back in, I want you to know as little about me and about this place as possible.”
“None taken. That decision certainly seems to be in your best interest. So why did you break me out, then?”
“My son. The doctors have given him three months to live, and say there's nothing left to be done about it. Your records check out. You can save him.”
“Not without the treatments I have saved near my laboratory. I'm going to need to go there.”
“No, you will tell me where to get them, and I will bring them back to you.”
“Fine. After I've saved your son, what do you intend on doing with me?”
“Doctor, I'm a concerned parent, not a monster. After you save him, you're free to go.”
“Very well. I didn't catch your name earlier.”
“That's because I didn't mention my name. For the sake of our partnership in this, call me Virgil.”
--
After quite a long and profitable partnership with Virgil, I had ended up there, in the wall ventilation shaft, waiting for the quarantine to be lifted. I realized I had been there in a state of rest for quite a while. By this time the grate I had dropped was sure to have been discovered. They knew I was here. As I came to this realization, I became aware of scuffling underneath me. Certain I was about to be discovered, I scrambled madly away from that segment of the ventilation shaft, dragging myself purposefully over the cold metal, and hopefully into the next room.
I had to assume they knew I was here. I had to assume they could track me. Ultimately, my mission had already been successful. The charge was planted, and so far undetected. It mattered very little if I survived this or not. I knew a little bit more about the genetic mutations then Seth, but there was precious little he could not gain from studying my notes. He was the leader of the next generation.
Slowly, my survival instinct came under my control, and I stopped panicking. I slowed my mad scramble to a crawl. It didn't matter anymore. For a brief moment, I considered simply letting them kill me. This evolution would take it's course with or without me, and I could finally let nature run it's course, having done my part. For that moment, I closed my eyes, and imagined what it would be like to finally end, after dedicating so much time and sweat fighting against death. While it was comforting, I decided I could not do it. Not when I was so close to seeing all this work come to fruition. If my internal clock was to be believed, the strike would begin in an hour or less. Opening my eyes once more, the maddening hallucinations began again. Blood dripped through the vent segments, and the walls looked more and more like rotting flesh. I focused myself on seeing what was really there. It was the same vent I had studied, made of metal. I had to crawl.
If nothing else was to be achieved, I had to at least get away from the charge. It was probably ten feet away from me at this point, and I would surely be killed in the resulting blast. Turning around, I saw the segment I had been lying on only a moment earlier pulled down into the room below. I watched to see if some stupid prelife would poke their head up to see if I was here.
Nothing. Not a word or a sound but the marching of feet to the next segment. They were going to find me eventually. I had to figure out a way to turn this situation into something that could help the main force. I once more crawled, putting as much distance between myself, the charge, and the quickly disappearing shaft as possible. I got to where I knew the vent ended, splitting off into two grates into the room above and below, and I waited.
As I watched, one by one, the vent segments came down. Eventually they would get to me, and I would come down too. I was sure by this point they had someone waiting for me in the room above, and probably in the one below too. What I had to do was make my descent at least a little surprising. I moved forward two segments. I was directly above the galley, if the blueprints were to be believed. I began to unscrew the segment beneath me. I loosened all four bolts, then I waited.
Finally, I saw the section in front of me drop. I heard the feet march. I heard readying a lift so that my segment could be slowly lowered to the ground. The second I heard the feet positioning the lift underneath me, I pulled out all the bolts. As I rushed down towards the floor for what felt like an hour, I recalled the first time I had had to force the hand of progress.
--
I was standing on a subway train. It was packed. The smells were worse than the crowd itself. I could feel each awkward elbow and every slight hip movement, and neither really perturbed me. The smells, however, were a different matter entirely. It was as though I was trapped in some twisted zoo of exotic scents, each with a different meaning, all fighting for the attention of my two frightened nostrils. I tried to divert my thoughts with work.
It had been six days since I had administered the drug, and the effects were becoming more and more obvious. I had become paler, and my eyes had shrank back into their sockets, although the last one could be a result of the lack of sleep. When I closed my eyes, it was that much harder to ignore the hypersensitivity to smell I had developed.
Damnit, I had thought about the smells, and now I could feel them all again. The sweat, the flesh, the feces and blood, a tangled assault like the head of a gorgon snarling at me as I cower. As I quiver slightly, my internal cowering becoming slightly visible, a man turns to me to ask if I'm alright. The space being as small as it is, he's felt my shaking. Taking a better look at me, and observing my non-response, he asks again if I need any help.
Why won't he stop talking? He's tapped someone else on the shoulder so that they can pass judgment on if I'm “alright” or not. Oh, man number two doesn't think I look well at all either. He's shining a flashlight in my eyes. Must be a cop. I had better respond before this gets out of hand. I stammer out a remark informing the train of how fine I feel, and how I've just had little sleep the last few nights, and the cop turns away, shifting back into the wall of flesh and thread. I've almost got the smells under control. My stop is coming up.
As the doors open, the shifting writhing gargling mass pours out and dissipates. I find my way to the door, and at once am greeted by the enormity of the personal space I now have. It's almost lonely. In this space the smells have much more room to spread their invisible tendrils, and I can breathe again. Suddenly, the man from the train walks back up to me, telling me that he's a doctor and that I need to get some help. He smells, oh god how he smells, he hasn't showered in at least a day. It makes me want to vomit. I push past him and run into the bathroom. I hear his footsteps and concern chasing me.
Pulling the door open, the smells only intensify. Smaller room, more sweat and feces in this one too. I dash to the sink, staring at myself in the mirror. A new lump has appeared right under my left eye. The side effects are getting worse. If this hypersensitivity is anything like the others, it will only last a day or so. I've almost got it under control now. I turn on the cold water, and splash it over my face, closing my eyes and letting my senses settle. Then he barges in.
He puts his hand on my shoulder, continuing his garbled yammering about whether or not I'm alright. His smell bombards me with the same ferocity as his touch and his voice, and I suddenly know that I can't take it. Not for another moment. He had to be stopped. My arm snaps out to the side and grabs him by the neck. With one quick jerk forward his wide-eyed visage is smashed into the mirror in front of me. At the moment of contact, I'm greeted by the scent of blood. Unlike the scent of the man himself, this scent doesn't repulse or overwhelm me, it simply makes me wish to spill more. The shattered mirror has left hundreds of ready tools for this all over the floor. Swinging my arm in the opposite direction, I fling him to the floor.
This is the point at which I realize what I have done. The force of the impact has broken the man's skull. His blood flows freely from the wound, beginning just now to taint the floor. The smallest section of brain is exposed right at the point where his head contacted the mirror. This man is either dead or dying, and it doesn't matter which. My attempts to hide the changes to myself are all for naught. If I am to succeed in my mission of conversion now, I can now longer do it subtly. I must make a spectacle.
The glittering shards littering the floor attract my eye. I attempt to pick one up, but cut my hand. Tossing it back to the floor I realize I have no need for tools. I have been blessed with ten fingers and innumerable teeth, together they are the only tools I need. Envisioning the final product in my mind, I set eagerly to work ripping, tearing, and snapping where need be. This would be something nobody could ignore. This would be art.
Of course I am discovered in the middle of it. A man peeks inside hoping to relieve himself several minutes after I've begun my work, and immediately begins to vomit. I leave him alone, knowing he's an important part of this process. He staggers outside yelling incoherently for help. I know I have little time left.
The taste of blood still on my lips I fall back to the ground once it is done. The whole room, coated in my victim, excepting the mirror. Though it was cracked, the message I wrote was clear. In looping script it said “Life is fragile”. I smiled as a policeman walked in. He visibly gagged at the sight, but he never lowered the weapon he pointed at me. I didn't stop smiling as I raised my arms into the air. This would do fine for a start.
--
As I fell towards the ground I took stock of the room below me. There were only two of them. Their weapons were all being raised towards the descending segment. One of them would be hit by it. I positioned myself to fall directly on the other, mouth and eyes wide open. My hands grabbed on to his torso and he collapsed to the floor. I swung my head and took a bite out of his neck, teeth tearing easily through the weak flesh. He screamed and thrashed, and his comrade, having recovered from the prior impact, began firing. I felt as the bullets began to rip into my back.
Back so long ago in that subway, I was much weaker. I ate flesh to make a statement and for attention back then, but now it was so much more. I swung the thrashing man in front of me. I was resilient, but not invincible. Bullets continued to be fired into him. The other had seen the bite, and knew his friend was lost. I hurled the meat shield at its mate, and moved in for the kill. I threw aside his weapon, and I heard him try to speak to me.
“Please, let me join you. I know you can make me one of whatever you are. Don't kill me.”
A coward. I liked cowards. I already had a full body to restore what I had lost, so I decided his request wasn't totally unreasonable. He probably didn't know how painful it was, or exactly how the process worked, because he kept screaming as I ripped open his arm. His continued squirming was going to make opening my own wound difficult.
“Hold still, or I will eat you.”
He stopped moving, and his screaming was reduced to a loud sobbing. On my right arm there was a long jagged scar running straight down to the elbow. I bit and tore until it bled profusely, the dark and discolored infected blood of true life. Holding our wounds together, I waited. It only takes a little bit of blood contact to spread the infection.
You can always tell when it's working. The screaming gets much louder. I'm glad that I was converted through the syringe, because the screams of a man as his blood attempts to boil itself away are far worse than any I've heard anywhere else. The battle the body fights lasts only a few short minutes. Soon, the circulatory system begins working again, spreading the infection to the rest of the flesh, and the cells begin to multiply and cannibalize each other.
This is where our lovely resilience comes from. I reasoned long ago that the cancerous multiplication could be used and harnessed if cells could multiply faster than they could eat each other. Already the bullet wounds in my back were caked over by the gray lumpy flesh that characterized my kind. Modern miracles were all preformed by science. I had to leave this man alone for a while, he wouldn't be ready to talk or even move for several hours. I feasted on the flesh of his ally, fueling the endless cycle of cell production and destruction. The flesh eating is no longer just for show. The body cannot restore itself from particularly nasty wounds without a little extra material.
I savored the flavor. It's something I learned to appreciate over time. This man had been in shape, had kept his body well. Licking my lips, I heard a blast. The lights went out. Soon the screams would begin. The war was on.
So you want to get inside my mind? To understand me? To judge me as either the monster I am hailed in some circles, or the messiah I am hailed in others? There is much to tell of this story, so I'd recommend you make time before you begin it. As far as beginnings go, this story doesn't have much of one. I was a rather normal teenager, about seventeen years old. At the time I had hair which stretched down to my shoulders. My father, being a man of good standing and raised in a more “proper” generation, thought this did not fit someone seeking respect in the workplace, and so compelled me to get it cut.
He dropped me off at the hair cuttery half-past noon on a bright September thursday, sending me inside with a stern word and a crisp twenty-dollar bill. As I pushed lightly on the black handle which melted seamlessly into the door frame, a bell rang. Instantly, four or five heads turned in my direction. I was drawn to look at each face that was suddenly surveying me, but I resisted this temptation and quietly walked to the front desk.
The receptionist was a dark-haired beauty, engaged in the most common receptionist pass-time: nail-filing. Her thick brown glasses curved to a point at either end and sat just slightly too low on her nose, threatening to jump at any moment. I folded my arms, resting my elbows on the table. The rustling of my jacket causing her to spring into awareness. She looked up at me with a mixture of hatred and forced enthusiasm, at once both a smiling tour guide and a crouching lynx.
“How can I help you sir?” she asked with entirely too many teeth for me to be comfortable.
“I need a haircut.”
“What's your name, sir?”
I gave her a fake name, lest she track me down the following night to punish me for my transgressions against her self-improvement. She indicated the wait would be upwards of thirty minutes, so I took a seat next to the cleanest looking individual I could find. In front of me, a glistening steel table, as modern as the rest of the salon. Resting on it I found several magazines on women's fashions. Digging through the pile yielded an old issue of Popular Mechanics. While not particularly interesting, the magazine gave me something to hide behind while I observed the people around me.
It amazes me how much people are put off by being observed. When you take a moment to consider the massive time and money invested into our outward appearances, stares from strangers should be met with a hearty “Thank you”, but that tends to not be the case. Some people are afraid of being watched, others even become hostile if they see a wandering pair of eyes, and so I hide behind a magazine.
The man sitting beside me seems nervous about something. His thumbs wag back and forth, dancing an anxious dance above his interlocked hands. His hands briefly unlock and a hand twists at his wedding ring. As the tip of his finger pushes the gold band in a clockwise circle it slides further down his finger, until, nearly halfway down, it reaches a full slide. He catches it and shoves it quickly into his jacket pocket. I watch, I don't judge. I flip a page in the magazine.
To my other side there's a boy about my age wearing an Eagles beanie atop a mass of red hair. Everything about his appearance reeks of skateboarding and “punk”. I should note that there is no seat on this side of me. He is leaning against the wall, arms folded across his front, with one foot propped sideways against the wall. He uncrosses his arms and lifts one to his face. My eyes follow his hand, as it itches his nose, and briefly the tip of his thumb enters his mouth. A nail biter. He chomps ravenously at his nail, tearing at it and the skin near it's base. This all happens quickly and secretly, with nobody the wiser but the biter and I. As his hand moves back to waist-level, he suddenly re-scans the room. Our eyes meet and he quickly looks down. Looking down at his newly-groomed hand, I see he is flicking me off.
The receptionist lets out a shrill call. I recognize the assumed name I gave her and rise from my seat. I smirk at the punk to my right and walk past the reception desk into the bowels of the cuttery. I pass deserted chairs and mirrors inhabited only briefly by my still-smirking visage until I reach the back of the shop where there are three women working. Two are hard at work spinning, measuring, cutting hair into new forms. The last is dusting off her chair, lightly removing any trace of the last customer. She turns and greets me pleasantly. I flash a quick smile and a few nondescript words of greeting, and lower myself into the black leather chair. She asks how I want my hair cut.
Now, this is quite an interesting question to me. I don't actually want my hair cut, but for the purpose of easy conversation, I'm not going to bring that up with this woman. I survey my face in the mirror. It is incredibly hard to guess how the rest of the world will see you. I guess I'll just go with the usual.
“A few inches off all around, layered in the front, long in the back.”
She beckons for my glasses, and I oblige. The world instantly shifts out of focus. Without aid, I'm nearly blind. I see the blurry black shape of the clean cut man who had previously sat beside me move shapelessly to the equally unclear blob that I believed to be the receptionist. My lips curved once more into a smirk, and the chair turned. I was greeted with a sight I found quite unsettling.
Finally, I was facing the mirror again. Without my glasses, my shape was horribly transfigured. Being that my projected image was much closer than the living mannequins of the lobby, I could make out the shapes that made up my being. What made the vision so unsettling were my monstrous eyes. Blurred beyond recognition, they resembled dark inky pits. The effect caused my entire face to seem more of a skull than anything else, dead and empty.
As I tried to tune out of the world around me and submit my hair to be cut, those words wouldn't leave my mind. Dead. Empty. Weren't we all just dead and empty? Looking back, if there were one particular moment in my prelife that defined my break with humanity, it was right here. Here, in a barbershop of all places, my mindset changed drastically.
--
Years later, after I had begun living, I would be sitting in the first vehicle we dared to bring anywhere near the end of the zone. I was seated passenger-side, as I had lost my legs by this point. Tonight was the night I was to go into the wall. I had spent the last year planning and arranging things for this moment, and finally, we could get out. We had had to procure blueprints, find weapons, train the troops, and hardest of all; we controlled what they knew about us. They didn't know how intelligent we were, and they didn't know how organized. First I had to complete my mission, then in several hours, we would feast.
Virgil drove far faster than the others. His hair flowed white behind him. He was the only one behind the wall still left in prelife who was allowed to make that choice. He had helped me enough in all my doings that I would not force it on him. To look at him now, you couldn't easily tell him for one of us, his face charred, his clothes in tatters, the telltale orbs of flesh starting to protrude from his hands as if the growth had begun. This was my doing. While I trusted his judgment, there were others who certainly would not. He used to talk more, before the quarantine.
Looking over at the lake we were passing, I thought I saw a man on horseback illuminated slightly by the moonlight. The man himself was fairly nondescript, save his ponytail of fiery red hair. Protruding from his skull about three inches, it then hung halfway to the ground. Much more remarkable than the rider was the horse he sat upon. The grunting and growling beast of burden was coated in armor I likened to that of Arthur's court. Plates ran down either side, and a skull-like helmet protected it's face. In the darkness, it almost seemed to snort fire from it's nose. I blinked a few times, and the horse and it's rider had both vanished. These strange hallucinations were the only thing about this change that still unsettled me. It was as though my own mind was attempting to intimidate itself away from the task at hand.
Finally, we neared the perimeter. Lights from helicopters darted across the landscape further down the line of our sight. Further still was the wall, the wall they had erected to contain us. Us, the bringers of the new day, the ones who brought with them the next stage of human evolution. They feared the change, they feared the future, and so they feared us. Tonight I was here to bring them just one step closer to what they feared.
The jeep quietly came to a halt a ways off of the perimeter. We didn't want them to see the vehicle. We didn't want them to see us working together. They had no idea what we were capable of yet. Soon they would know. My comrade put his rotted, dying fingers to his mottled lips in our symbol for good tidings, and gestured for me to go. I lifted myself off the seat and fell to the grass.
It had rained today, and the grass was still damp, the ground still muddy as a swamp of the warmer countries. I dragged my shirtless form through the muck, hand over hand, sliding forward with great speed, but never moving off the ground. My handicap had made me quite adept at moving undetected, and in this situation, it was important firstly that I not be seen.
As I dragged myself closer to the wall, the moon disappeared in favor of a vision of her face, the same as ever, with one eye missing, and her jaw hanging to the side. Her mouth gaped, although the state of her jaw gave her little choice, in a scream. Her remaining eye swiveled madly, finally fixing right on me. Her uvula moved in tune with the wind issued by her scream. Fortunately, nobody but me could hear or see this shrill utterance. I pushed it out of my mind and trekked onward.
A spotlight headed in my direction. I quickly moved off to the side to avoid it's trajectory. Hand over hand, I moved closer to the wall. It had been so long. It had taken so much planning. We were almost there. It was then that I noticed that I was breathing. I had never really managed to beat that habit. I was far more advanced than any other in most ways, but sometimes you just sort of fell back into your prelife ways.
I took a moment to calm down, stop breathing, survey the ground I had left to cover. There was not much space left. The wall was so close. I simply had to make it past the marching sentries and I would be there. So close. The sentries were actually a much more cunning defensive tactic than many of my kind realize. There are some among my kind that simply want to take the sentries and make a new plan afterwards. What they don't realize is that the sentries aren't meant to contain us, so much as their presence is meant to be a temptation.
In case you've begun wondering, that's why a cripple such as myself is on this mission that may decide the very future of my kind. For my physical shortcomings, I am much farther along the path of mastering my mental state than any of the others. I can control the hunger. I can hold it back. I don't like to, but it's possible. This is why I alone can scout past the sentries.
As I crawl past them, the hunger boils up in my stomach. I want to feed, I need to feed, but I know that this is far more important than a simple feeding. There are prelifes still hiding in the city. I can find one later. I have to pull through. Several times, I almost lose it. I almost jump out and gorge myself. Almost. But I wait, and I crawl, and I sate my hunger, focusing instead on my lust for revenge for my imprisonment and for this quarantine.
--
I remember the first time I encountered the press. I had a lawyer at my side who told me to say nothing. There were hundreds of reporters speaking many different languages. Everybody wanted to be the first to question the first. That time, I took the lawyer's advice. I said nothing. I merely walked, because I still had my legs at this point, into the jailhouse. Looking at all the police, I found myself falling back into my boyhood habit of watching people, observing their nervous ticks. It was almost comical, the thumb-twiddling, the teeth grinding. This place was full of nervous ticks. Guns, sticks, pepper spray, and these people were all still very afraid of me.
Then another revelation came to me. If I really commanded so much power, even in this cell, it wasn't simply me as a person they were afraid of. They were all afraid of me as a concept, an idea, as a mystery. Right now I was something they couldn't understand, and the moment I lost that, they would be able to fight back. When they could analyze my actions, empathize with my motives, then I became like them, then I became a person. What I needed to do wasn't to sit here and wait for the moment, I had to make the next move before I became understandable.
The next day I met with my lawyer again the next day. This man was also afraid of me. He was stocky and bald, and right up above his eyebrows were a few slight wrinkles which dampened as he spoke to me. He told me I could beat these charges. I could show them how much I had changed, and how much I regretted what I had done. He told me he knew, deep down, that I was a good guy, and that I didn't deserve the railroading they wanted to give me. I had just had some problems recently, gotten a little too into my work, and taken it out on some poor guy in a subway bathroom. All this rationalization.
I told him that I wanted a press conference. He wanted to know what I had to say. He wanted to know what the plan was. I told him only that I had one, and that I was confident in it. He told me that he wouldn't call a conference unless I talked it over with him. As he told me this, I saw the wrinkles deepen. I saw the sweat glisten. He folded his hands in front of him.
“If you don't call a television station right now, I will leap across this table, and take a bite out of your arm.”
“You can't. I'll call for the guards.”
“And they will run in here, and find me with a large chunk of flesh in my mouth, and you, sobbing next to me, possibly bleeding to death.”
I saw his lip quiver. I smirked. I raised my own hand to my mouth, nibbling slightly on my index finger, making sure he could see just the end of my tongue. There it was, at last, a visible bead of sweat, running down the forehead. He was going to give. He was close. Time to seal the deal. I snapped my teeth together, ripping off just the tip of my finger, swallowed, then smiled, the blood still staining the front of my teeth.
He conceded. He even made the calls while I was there in the room with him. What a nice man. Tomorrow at noon. My fifteen minutes of fame wouldn't have faded yet. People would hear what I had to say. I had planning to do. I thanked the man for his time and returned to my cell. In my mind, I was already forming the words.
I was disappointed about the turnout the next day. I guess my crime, no matter how heinous anyone thought it was, wasn't worth the attention of too many major media outlets. That was fine. Some would see it, and those would tell their friends, and those friends would tell their friends, and somehow, everyone would hear about it. I wore a prison uniform and had my hands cuffed behind my back, legs clasped by shackles. I leaned towards the podium, and began speaking.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I would like to thank you for coming to my little party. I wanted to talk to you all mainly to address a few preconceived notions that you may have. Firstly, I am not crazy. Different, unique, a little bit cynical, I'll agree to any of those terms and a million others, but not to crazy. I am, in the basest sense of the word, change.
You all have come from different backgrounds. You grew up in different towns, and you have different values. You have different hair colors, and you have different favorite foods, you are different from one another both in your choices and in your genetics, and yet you are all exactly the same. Looking out at you, I can tell this isn't something you wish to readily accept. As humans often do, you seek to individualize. You want so badly to be unique. Let me ask you a question: What is the first thing you do when you walk outside in the morning? No, I'm not asking any one of you, I'm sure there's a few answers that range from humming to skipping, but the point is; you make assumptions before you do any of these things. When you walk outside, you're assuming gravity is still as you left it, you're assuming your house is still where it was when you entered it, you're assuming the world still works in just the way you think it does.
Most of the time, these assumptions are fairly safe. Gravity has never failed you, and your house rarely if ever moves. The problem is that sometimes there are exceptions to these rules, and you fail to see them. This is how you are all the same. You are all blind to things that don't agree with your particular view of reality. I am one of those things.
Now I've done it. I can see it in your eyes. You think I'm crazy. Just as I said that last statement, you ruled everything else that I have to say as bull****. When someone says they're something special, instead of just thinking it, you write them off. This is another rule you all follow, and another one you're going to have to get over. Let me explain a little bit that will make you a little more hesitant to forget what I have to say.
I was supposed to die about three months ago. As you all are probably aware, before the incident that has brought me into the public eye, I was a top researcher who was best known for his work on a cure for cancer. People have developed ways to treat the symptoms, sometimes prevent specific forms, but I wanted to solve all of them at once. For those of you who don't understand the illness itself, it's basically uncontrolled cell growth. Your body rapidly produces cells that do your body no good, but compete with cells that do for nutrients. Cancer kills you for many different reasons, but none of them would matter if only your body found a way to deal with the unwanted cells.
This is what I worked on, developing a method of gene therapy that would allow healthy cells to cannibalize those cancerous cells, to use them as fuel for their own mitosis. Ladies and gentlemen, about six months ago, I did it. I cured cancer. What is not well know about me, even now, is that I've been battling with pancreatic cancer for quite some time now. I have signed papers with my lawyers allowing my medical records to be officially released so that this fact can be validated. I administered the drug to myself, hoping to save my own life. Slowly, it changed me, it healed me, it made me better. I should have died three months ago, but here I stand.
This therapy has possibilities that are almost literally endless. Cancerous cell growth, which has been the most dangerous and deadly disease mankind has known short of the black plague, is actually the key to our full potential. When I was incarcerated, I was nearing a blocking drug that would allow the rapidly dividing cells to slowly naturalize to the rest of the body. With work, humans could heal faster, and more efficiently, possibly to the point of full limb regeneration. In several years time, it's possible we could regenerate other sorts of cells, and who knows, maybe some day we will be able to defeat death itself.
As long as I am kept in a cell, my cure shall die with me. I can recreate it in any decently sophisticated scientific lab, and I have several treatments saved in places known only to myself. These shall be administered to the individual or individuals who takes it upon themselves to free me. Sometimes, in the name of the greater good, we must take the law into our own hands.”
There was no clapping, just an almost horrified silence.
--
Having finally reached the wall itself I was grasped by an elation I hadn't felt since my first conversion. As the sentries walked in the other direction, I climbed the grate. Four screws secured it, barring my access to the air duct. I had only one horrible disfigurement at this point, from where I had been shot several inches to the right of my stomach. I reached my hand inside the slightly damp wound and rifled around until I found a plastic grip. I withdrew the screwdriver from my innards and began to unscrew the grate.
Once the four screws were removed, I let the grate drop quietly to the ground, and crawled into the ventilation system. The lights never directly hit the wall, so I figured I was covered. They didn't think that we could make it past the sentries, so there was no real need for wall security. This was the most important part. I had to make sure I planted the charge in just the right spot. I pulled myself along the grates, going over the plans we had stolen over and over again in my head.
I pulled myself past the next four vent exits, hand over hand, moving slowly so I wouldn't alert anyone who might be inside. For all intents and purposes, this area should be entirely deserted, but you can never be certain, and there was entirely too much at stake. Small bits of my skin that were still the first natural layer felt the cold metal sliding beneath it. I felt much less than I had practicing yesterday. The growth was speeding up. I would have to study further when I got back to the lab.
Finally, I was there. Fortunately, this grate was not screwed down, so I could escape. I climbed up into the room, and there I saw it, the main power grid. If this was taken down, their advantages would all disappear. They would have to target us manually in the dead of night, without the aid of their lasers, their power locks, or even their lights, and there were going to be a lot of us. I unscrewed a panel from the side and left the charge lovingly inside. Only about an hour until it was detonated, until the war started.
Right now, I needed to leave. The guard would pass by here in exactly eleven minutes. I could take on a few of them, but I couldn't last an hour in here. I needed to buy time until the assault began. I pulled myself back over the the grate, lifted it off, and disappeared back down inside. I heard footsteps. This was much too early. Something was wrong. I heard the door open and the sound of their damnable boots. I scooted several feet backwards and let myself listen.
“This room registered a pressure shift just a moment ago, sir.”
“Are you sure?”
“It might have been a glitch, but I've never seen a radar ghost that stayed on the screen for several minutes.”
“God help us it was anything else. Commander, initiate alert level four until further notice.”
A voice from a radio gave a garbled reply. Suddenly, the light leaking in from above got much brighter. I could hear the blaring sirens. There was no way I was getting out quickly and cleanly. I was going to have to choose one or the other. I had lost my legs the last time I'd chosen quickly, so it looked like I was going to have to wait this one out.
--
I had been sitting in jail for nearly a week after I made the speech. I knew someone was coming. I didn't know who it was, and I didn't know how they were coming, but I knew. Until then, I just had to wait. I passed the time by planning my next move. The problem was, this mainly depended on which type of person came to rescue me, a giver or a taker. I was contemplating which was more likely when the wall I was leaning against exploded.
For those of you wondering how I lost my legs, that was it. When I awoke, I was in a makeshift hospital in a place I did not recognize. I saw there was many machines attached to me, monitoring my vitals. Beep. There was a bag of blood beside me. Beep. Looking down at my legs, I saw there were lost. Some people would be slightly more emotional when losing appendages, but I wasn't particularly worried. Beep. I didn't need legs to achieve my purpose. Nor did I need any of these machines. Beep. I pulled the wires and needles from my flesh.
I figured that whoever had come for me, they would be coming down shortly to see what was the matter. I was not mistaken, as minutes from my rejection of the machines, a man came down the stairs. I'm going to spend a little more time describing him here than I did the other characters of this tale because this man would become possibly the most important ally I would ever have. He was a stocky, almost brutish man, probably about six feet tall, around two hundred and fifty pounds. He walked with the confidence of a man who knew he could rip you in half, and was proud of this fact. His clothes were plain, his hair was long and white, his skin was horribly pale, and his eyes glowed a faint pink. An albino, how rare, I thought. When he smiled at my conscious form, I could see two rows of teeth as white as his hair.
“So you're awake doctor?”
“Yes. Quite. Thank you for removing me from that cell. I assume this place is safe?”
“As safe as it could be, with half the nation looking for you, and the other half talking about you.”
“So where is this stronghold at?”
“You think I would tell you? No offense, but if you are taken back in, I want you to know as little about me and about this place as possible.”
“None taken. That decision certainly seems to be in your best interest. So why did you break me out, then?”
“My son. The doctors have given him three months to live, and say there's nothing left to be done about it. Your records check out. You can save him.”
“Not without the treatments I have saved near my laboratory. I'm going to need to go there.”
“No, you will tell me where to get them, and I will bring them back to you.”
“Fine. After I've saved your son, what do you intend on doing with me?”
“Doctor, I'm a concerned parent, not a monster. After you save him, you're free to go.”
“Very well. I didn't catch your name earlier.”
“That's because I didn't mention my name. For the sake of our partnership in this, call me Virgil.”
--
After quite a long and profitable partnership with Virgil, I had ended up there, in the wall ventilation shaft, waiting for the quarantine to be lifted. I realized I had been there in a state of rest for quite a while. By this time the grate I had dropped was sure to have been discovered. They knew I was here. As I came to this realization, I became aware of scuffling underneath me. Certain I was about to be discovered, I scrambled madly away from that segment of the ventilation shaft, dragging myself purposefully over the cold metal, and hopefully into the next room.
I had to assume they knew I was here. I had to assume they could track me. Ultimately, my mission had already been successful. The charge was planted, and so far undetected. It mattered very little if I survived this or not. I knew a little bit more about the genetic mutations then Seth, but there was precious little he could not gain from studying my notes. He was the leader of the next generation.
Slowly, my survival instinct came under my control, and I stopped panicking. I slowed my mad scramble to a crawl. It didn't matter anymore. For a brief moment, I considered simply letting them kill me. This evolution would take it's course with or without me, and I could finally let nature run it's course, having done my part. For that moment, I closed my eyes, and imagined what it would be like to finally end, after dedicating so much time and sweat fighting against death. While it was comforting, I decided I could not do it. Not when I was so close to seeing all this work come to fruition. If my internal clock was to be believed, the strike would begin in an hour or less. Opening my eyes once more, the maddening hallucinations began again. Blood dripped through the vent segments, and the walls looked more and more like rotting flesh. I focused myself on seeing what was really there. It was the same vent I had studied, made of metal. I had to crawl.
If nothing else was to be achieved, I had to at least get away from the charge. It was probably ten feet away from me at this point, and I would surely be killed in the resulting blast. Turning around, I saw the segment I had been lying on only a moment earlier pulled down into the room below. I watched to see if some stupid prelife would poke their head up to see if I was here.
Nothing. Not a word or a sound but the marching of feet to the next segment. They were going to find me eventually. I had to figure out a way to turn this situation into something that could help the main force. I once more crawled, putting as much distance between myself, the charge, and the quickly disappearing shaft as possible. I got to where I knew the vent ended, splitting off into two grates into the room above and below, and I waited.
As I watched, one by one, the vent segments came down. Eventually they would get to me, and I would come down too. I was sure by this point they had someone waiting for me in the room above, and probably in the one below too. What I had to do was make my descent at least a little surprising. I moved forward two segments. I was directly above the galley, if the blueprints were to be believed. I began to unscrew the segment beneath me. I loosened all four bolts, then I waited.
Finally, I saw the section in front of me drop. I heard the feet march. I heard readying a lift so that my segment could be slowly lowered to the ground. The second I heard the feet positioning the lift underneath me, I pulled out all the bolts. As I rushed down towards the floor for what felt like an hour, I recalled the first time I had had to force the hand of progress.
--
I was standing on a subway train. It was packed. The smells were worse than the crowd itself. I could feel each awkward elbow and every slight hip movement, and neither really perturbed me. The smells, however, were a different matter entirely. It was as though I was trapped in some twisted zoo of exotic scents, each with a different meaning, all fighting for the attention of my two frightened nostrils. I tried to divert my thoughts with work.
It had been six days since I had administered the drug, and the effects were becoming more and more obvious. I had become paler, and my eyes had shrank back into their sockets, although the last one could be a result of the lack of sleep. When I closed my eyes, it was that much harder to ignore the hypersensitivity to smell I had developed.
Damnit, I had thought about the smells, and now I could feel them all again. The sweat, the flesh, the feces and blood, a tangled assault like the head of a gorgon snarling at me as I cower. As I quiver slightly, my internal cowering becoming slightly visible, a man turns to me to ask if I'm alright. The space being as small as it is, he's felt my shaking. Taking a better look at me, and observing my non-response, he asks again if I need any help.
Why won't he stop talking? He's tapped someone else on the shoulder so that they can pass judgment on if I'm “alright” or not. Oh, man number two doesn't think I look well at all either. He's shining a flashlight in my eyes. Must be a cop. I had better respond before this gets out of hand. I stammer out a remark informing the train of how fine I feel, and how I've just had little sleep the last few nights, and the cop turns away, shifting back into the wall of flesh and thread. I've almost got the smells under control. My stop is coming up.
As the doors open, the shifting writhing gargling mass pours out and dissipates. I find my way to the door, and at once am greeted by the enormity of the personal space I now have. It's almost lonely. In this space the smells have much more room to spread their invisible tendrils, and I can breathe again. Suddenly, the man from the train walks back up to me, telling me that he's a doctor and that I need to get some help. He smells, oh god how he smells, he hasn't showered in at least a day. It makes me want to vomit. I push past him and run into the bathroom. I hear his footsteps and concern chasing me.
Pulling the door open, the smells only intensify. Smaller room, more sweat and feces in this one too. I dash to the sink, staring at myself in the mirror. A new lump has appeared right under my left eye. The side effects are getting worse. If this hypersensitivity is anything like the others, it will only last a day or so. I've almost got it under control now. I turn on the cold water, and splash it over my face, closing my eyes and letting my senses settle. Then he barges in.
He puts his hand on my shoulder, continuing his garbled yammering about whether or not I'm alright. His smell bombards me with the same ferocity as his touch and his voice, and I suddenly know that I can't take it. Not for another moment. He had to be stopped. My arm snaps out to the side and grabs him by the neck. With one quick jerk forward his wide-eyed visage is smashed into the mirror in front of me. At the moment of contact, I'm greeted by the scent of blood. Unlike the scent of the man himself, this scent doesn't repulse or overwhelm me, it simply makes me wish to spill more. The shattered mirror has left hundreds of ready tools for this all over the floor. Swinging my arm in the opposite direction, I fling him to the floor.
This is the point at which I realize what I have done. The force of the impact has broken the man's skull. His blood flows freely from the wound, beginning just now to taint the floor. The smallest section of brain is exposed right at the point where his head contacted the mirror. This man is either dead or dying, and it doesn't matter which. My attempts to hide the changes to myself are all for naught. If I am to succeed in my mission of conversion now, I can now longer do it subtly. I must make a spectacle.
The glittering shards littering the floor attract my eye. I attempt to pick one up, but cut my hand. Tossing it back to the floor I realize I have no need for tools. I have been blessed with ten fingers and innumerable teeth, together they are the only tools I need. Envisioning the final product in my mind, I set eagerly to work ripping, tearing, and snapping where need be. This would be something nobody could ignore. This would be art.
Of course I am discovered in the middle of it. A man peeks inside hoping to relieve himself several minutes after I've begun my work, and immediately begins to vomit. I leave him alone, knowing he's an important part of this process. He staggers outside yelling incoherently for help. I know I have little time left.
The taste of blood still on my lips I fall back to the ground once it is done. The whole room, coated in my victim, excepting the mirror. Though it was cracked, the message I wrote was clear. In looping script it said “Life is fragile”. I smiled as a policeman walked in. He visibly gagged at the sight, but he never lowered the weapon he pointed at me. I didn't stop smiling as I raised my arms into the air. This would do fine for a start.
--
As I fell towards the ground I took stock of the room below me. There were only two of them. Their weapons were all being raised towards the descending segment. One of them would be hit by it. I positioned myself to fall directly on the other, mouth and eyes wide open. My hands grabbed on to his torso and he collapsed to the floor. I swung my head and took a bite out of his neck, teeth tearing easily through the weak flesh. He screamed and thrashed, and his comrade, having recovered from the prior impact, began firing. I felt as the bullets began to rip into my back.
Back so long ago in that subway, I was much weaker. I ate flesh to make a statement and for attention back then, but now it was so much more. I swung the thrashing man in front of me. I was resilient, but not invincible. Bullets continued to be fired into him. The other had seen the bite, and knew his friend was lost. I hurled the meat shield at its mate, and moved in for the kill. I threw aside his weapon, and I heard him try to speak to me.
“Please, let me join you. I know you can make me one of whatever you are. Don't kill me.”
A coward. I liked cowards. I already had a full body to restore what I had lost, so I decided his request wasn't totally unreasonable. He probably didn't know how painful it was, or exactly how the process worked, because he kept screaming as I ripped open his arm. His continued squirming was going to make opening my own wound difficult.
“Hold still, or I will eat you.”
He stopped moving, and his screaming was reduced to a loud sobbing. On my right arm there was a long jagged scar running straight down to the elbow. I bit and tore until it bled profusely, the dark and discolored infected blood of true life. Holding our wounds together, I waited. It only takes a little bit of blood contact to spread the infection.
You can always tell when it's working. The screaming gets much louder. I'm glad that I was converted through the syringe, because the screams of a man as his blood attempts to boil itself away are far worse than any I've heard anywhere else. The battle the body fights lasts only a few short minutes. Soon, the circulatory system begins working again, spreading the infection to the rest of the flesh, and the cells begin to multiply and cannibalize each other.
This is where our lovely resilience comes from. I reasoned long ago that the cancerous multiplication could be used and harnessed if cells could multiply faster than they could eat each other. Already the bullet wounds in my back were caked over by the gray lumpy flesh that characterized my kind. Modern miracles were all preformed by science. I had to leave this man alone for a while, he wouldn't be ready to talk or even move for several hours. I feasted on the flesh of his ally, fueling the endless cycle of cell production and destruction. The flesh eating is no longer just for show. The body cannot restore itself from particularly nasty wounds without a little extra material.
I savored the flavor. It's something I learned to appreciate over time. This man had been in shape, had kept his body well. Licking my lips, I heard a blast. The lights went out. Soon the screams would begin. The war was on.
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