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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.

[mead1]

Seriously, tear this up. I've been writing it over a long period of time, and my idea for the over-arching plot has changed numerous times. I've done my best to fix any inconsistencies, but I'm sure there are still some left.

[lord_carbo]

I loved this.

A few notes:

That giant oratory. -- At the beginning of each paragraph, open with quotes. Do not end each paragraph with quotes, however. See the bottom of this page: http://www.writingforums.org/blog.php?b=294

"For those of you wondering how I lost my legs, that was it." -- I don't like this sentence. It connects the two narratives way too much, way too early. Part of the joy is watching the two narratives converge. This ruins the magic. The kind of image I'm getting is that these two stories were kind of just shuffled together almost inadvertently, not that there's some guy literally going back and forth between the stories like a dickhead.

"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." -- Double negative. Ew.

"I heard readying a lift so that my segment could be slowly lowered to the ground." -- wat

"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." -- Whoa whoa whoa, way too much passive voice for an action scene.

"This is the point at which I realize what I have done." -- Too meta if you know what I mean

Also, during that entire scene and in a few other instances, you switch tenses, present to past. Stick with one.

When you go back and revise this yourself, pay attention to around the halfway mark to near the end of the story. That's when your writing slacks off.

[All_That_Chaz]

This is awesome. Extremely compelling and well-written. I love your dual-narrative approach. I love how your character's human quirks change with him and translate into his brutal actions later on. You just tell a great story. I'd read more. I'd read it twice. Great job.

Ok well I'm not much for prose but I've listed some small errors and nit-picks here, some of which I now realize carbo already said.

Your verb tenses seem to drift back and forth from past to present. Pick one. You seem to like the present. Go with it.

I don't know how you'd fix this, and maybe it's just because I'm not partial to zombie stories, but that moment that you realize that this is about zombies is very jarring.

"The next day I met with my lawyer again the next day." - fix that.

In the third section when a quote spans more than one paragraph you still put a quotation mark at the beginning of each paragraph.

"I had only one horrible disfigurement at this point, from where I had been shot several inches to the right of my stomach." - This seems incongruous since he's also missing his legs. I'm sure one could argue that this is part of his mentality but it doesn't make sense to me.

"For those of you wondering how I lost my legs, that was it." - I don't get it you just said he lost his legs trying to escape a mission quickly, not while sitting in jail.

"I saw there was many machines attached to me, monitoring my vitals." - were.

"Looking down at my legs, I saw there were lost." - I think you mean "that they."

"After quite a long and profitable partnership with Virgil..." - The adjective "profitable" seems out of place. If you're going to use it, describe how he benefited from it, because it seems like your protagonist wouldn't really care about money.

"I knew a little bit more about the genetic mutations then Seth..." - than

"I heard readying a lift so that my segment could be slowly lowered to the ground." - missing a "them."

Honestly carbo I like the passive voice there when he talks about the murder. It shows how changed from common humanity he is. This is how little effect a brutal murder has on him.

"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." - Didn't he just kill someone because of the smells he was emitting? The smell of vomit doesn't seem to bother him that much.

In general, I wouldn't change much except maybe going more into detail with your description. It gives you the chance to give the reader your protagonist's unique perception of the world.

EDIT: One other thing. When he turns the soldier into a zombie, I was surprised that your character would use the verb "infect" to describe what he was doing, since he considered himself the next stage in evolution. You'd think he'd think more highly of what he was doing, to the point even of saying he was making him better than he was before.

[dood gone krazee]

Everything said by carbo and chaz were all that I found wrong. I really like the over-arch plot idea, it's interesting to piece things together like that as if it were a puzzle, rather than reading a timeline.

How exactly did he lose his legs? From the jail explosion or taking the "quick way out" of a mission?

Can't wait to read more.

[mead1]

The impression I was going for was that he had had to be blown out of jail instead of some more subtle and manipulative method of escape, and that was the quick way out. I will modify that passage in the next edit.

thanks for the feedback guys.

[dood gone krazee]

Originally Posted by mead1

The impression I was going for was that he had had to be blown out of jail instead of some more subtle and manipulative method of escape, and that was the quick way out. I will modify that passage in the next edit.

thanks for the feedback guys.

Ahhh, alright. That makes more sense now that you say it like that. In the passage before the jail blow-out he mentions in the future how he lost his legs in the pase by taking the quick and easy blow-up-the-wall method.

Gotcha.

Can't wait to read part 2.

[All_That_Chaz]

Originally Posted by mead1

The impression I was going for was that he had had to be blown out of jail instead of some more subtle and manipulative method of escape, and that was the quick way out. I will modify that passage in the next edit.

thanks for the feedback guys.

Well I did figure that was what you meant, but it was still too ambiguous that this was what the character meant.

[-paexaea-]

Loved it, dude. Keep at it and take the criticism to heart and look through the bull****.

[lord_carbo]

Originally Posted by All_That_Chaz

Honestly carbo I like the passive voice there when he talks about the murder. It shows how changed from common humanity he is. This is how little effect a brutal murder has on him.

Well if that's the case, Mead can do better than the passive voice, which conveys this attitude poorly and does more to weaken the prose. The passive voice, as it detaches the doer from the action and weakens the imagery, will create a little more sympathy from the reader but I think it fails to convey a sort of "well, whatever, I just killed a guy, big deal" kind of attitude from the narrator much more than the active voice. If anything, the active voice indicates acceptance.

If Mead wants the reader to hate this man's insensitivity as he talks like it's something normal, the active voice is the way to go. If Mead wants the reader to feel for the narrator as the narrator downplays the impact of his events with indirect prose, then the passive voice would be a bit better I say, although I think some Nabokovian word play could do more to convey this feel than any over-abuse of the passive voice.

I'm not sure which attitude Mead is trying to convey, which highlights a big shortcoming of this piece: am I supposed to feel for this man, or am I supposed to detest him? Should I think he's an ok guy who just gets picked on a lot, or should I loathe how detached he is from all the heinous things he's doing? In the former sense, I imagine the narrator would come off as masking his detestable actions with fancy prose, and emphasizing how much people pick on innocent defenseless him and his life changing innovations and his modest desires. In the other sense, I imagine the narrator would be blowing off what others think of him and writing with slightly more direct and vivid imagery, like it's no big deal.

Mead writes more or less an impartial narrative, detailing everything in about equal proportions. Mead's choice to write in first person gives many more options in creating a mood than what Mead has decided to confide himself to. I think Mead hasn't taken much consideration into how the reader should think of the narrator. He should, though. His best writings like "Winter in Auschwitz"-- and the best writings of any writer in general, mind you-- consider how the reader is supposed to feel, and keep a consistent mood in helping the reader feel these things. In "Winter in Auschwitz," the reader is supposed to detest how everything is trivialized and seen so passively. And it's clear that Mead was thinking about this when he wrote that story, and that's why it's such a powerful story.

I mean, I'm not saying that Mead should let the story thrive on the relationship between the narrator and the reader. As a zombie-action-psycho-thriller, it's great. But to at least some extent, Mead should consider this.

For the record, I think Mead is leaning more toward a "well he's a total jerk who should be scorned" feel, so I still say use the active voice.

And in conclusion, I typed up a whole essay justifying that he should use the active voice.

Sigh.

[mead1]

for the record, I got really lucky with Winter. I wrote that in tenth grade and had no idea what I was doing.

[All_That_Chaz]

Carbo, it's funny you bring up Nabokov. As someone who loves Lolita as much as you, I would think you'd prefer a more subtle calm description of events leaving the reader to form his own opinion on the characters, showing our own prejudices against the undead even though the doctor did effectively cure cancer. I guess I consider mead's story here closer to a Lolita than a zombie-action-thriller.

[lord_carbo]

Originally Posted by mead1

for the record, I got really lucky with Winter. I wrote that in tenth grade and had no idea what I was doing.

=(

Originally Posted by All_That_Chaz

As someone who loves Lolita as much as you, I would think you'd prefer a more subtle calm description of events leaving the reader to form his own opinion on the characters

well it's not like everything should be lolita in my eyes. I just like lolita, is all =(

[kitkat9]

I have half the mind to go puke, but I won't. I liked it, it is well written, it is just flat out good.

I did see one thing, you had a very minor typo, something easily fixed.
"The next day I met with my lawyer again the next day."

I do have one question though. Who is it that he is trying to fight? I get that they must have done something horrible to him, but who are they?

Once again well written, I presume that you will, or have a second part, I do look forward to reading it.
=)

[lord_carbo]

Hopefully that will be revealed in subsequent parts!

[kitkat9]

Hopefully.

[mead1]

PART DEUX: PESTILENCE

coming later today probably, I had a burst of inspiration

[mead1]

Pestilence

After escaping the town, we abandoned it entirely. If we stayed in one place, we would be able to be wiped out. We were certainly hard to kill, but after their quarantine had been destroyed, the prelifes were more likely to aim for eradication instead of containment, and nobody wanted to try their chances against the bomb. I had seen many of my children writhe in pain, bodies covered in flames, being eaten away by the one weapon that seemed to effectively destroy us. We left our homes and went on the road. There was a whole world to enlighten. These were the happiest days of our society.

The military had left behind plenty of vehicles suited for carrying many of us at once, but moving an entire population is still no small feat. We had to spread out in different directions. Leaders had to be appointed, plans had to be made. We would fly, and we would fight.

Virgil and Seth were the obvious choices for leaders of the other two factions. The separation would be hard on them, but ultimately necessary. We were powerful, but we were still a tiny minority, and this division would make us even smaller. When attacking the big cities of this world, we would have to infiltrate quietly. An all-out war would certainly lead in our demise. We would have to do this like a virus.

In the front of each convoy, we would have those left less scathed by the mutations, that could pass for healthy prelifes. They would need to begin converting until we had numbers inside the city that were large enough to assault it from the inside along with our assault from the outside. Those not on the inside would wait, preying on travelers, and assisting in the development of our evolution. The lifted lab vehicles from the military would serve as linked headquarters, and so our growth would continue.

The growth that I had observed in the vent seemed to be continuing on it's own. More and more bulbous masses of discolored skin were appearing all over the surface of my body. My arms looked like I had biceps, but there was no additional muscle, just solid mass of hardened skin. My head, which had stayed mostly prelife-looking was beginning to widen, with extra lumps of flesh growing from either side. None of my research could account for this sudden increase in growths. It wasn't a problem yet, not like it is now, so I decided it was not a priority. What the next generation needed was to become stronger, faster, more deadly. We needed warriors.

This new evolution was a bit of a learning process. My original formula had worked well enough, but it was hardly the fulfillment of our full potential. I worked long hours in the lab, watching cells replicate and destroy one another, seeing how I could change our forms without the system of our bodies collapsing. There had been slight modifications to our body chemistry since I had began, but this was going to be much more expansive. I was going to create a whole other race of post-lives to serve this purpose of assault.

This idea actually caused many of the problems in society today. All of the civil unrest is an almost direct result of the biological differences between generations. Can you really call it racism when one group is actually biologically superior to the other? Now I've gone off on a tangent, but the point was the need for warriors. Simply enough I figured out how to increase the strength and growth rate of fingernails. They would have claws. Muscle mass was my next target, but that wasn't so easily done. Ultimately, I decided that for our current purposes, it would be best to increase production of epinephrine so it could be constantly dumped into their systems. There were probably a dozen other small modifications I made, but the one I was most proud of was the teeth. I knew as I was doing it that this was what would win the war. This is what would terrify the prelifes' to the point of panic.

I modified the mouth structure so that the next generation's teeth would be longer and sharper. They would be gleaming triangles right out of a childhood nightmare. They would rip, tear, and shred. All these changes together formed the generation we call “Harpies”. I distributed the serum to Virgil and Seth, and instructed they be used to convert the first travelers unfortunate enough to be caught. I knew Virgil wouldn't do it personally, even if I told him to. He just didn't have it in him.

--

Virgil's son, Seth, didn't have long to live at all when I first met him. It was for him that Virgil made a hole in the prison I was held in. The doctors had done all that they could to make him comfortable, but the feeling was that he wouldn't outlive the month. Due to his father's immense wealth and many connections, he was hooked up to all the most advanced equipment in a sophisticated lab in a bunker I later learned was deep beneath the Ohio dirt.

Seth had more equipment attached to him then I had had in the entirety of my state of the art medical research facility. I had to learn how to operate several things. Virgil spent most of his time sitting by the side of Seth's bed, hoping he would wake up and be able to speak again. The man cared more for his son than any person I had ever seen care about anything. He had everything in the world, and he sat in this bunker wasting away over this small boy.

Virgil himself came from old money, but was far from an aristocrat. The man looked like an albino neanderthal. He had lived his life in almost a state of pure hedonism, taking what he wanted until Seth came along. Virgil never really explained what happened to Seth's mother, but I suspect that he did something awful to her. Perhaps it was because of his care-free lifestyle that he threw so much of his effort into keeping Seth alive. I always wondered if he was searching for redemption by helping me, or if he simply liked hearing the screams.

That's what was so interesting to me about him, more than anything else. The man was cruel. Heartless to any living thing other than his son, Lynette, and possibly myself. He killed for fun and never faltered in his ability to lead and do the intelligent thing, but he didn't seem to be sure that what we were doing was right. When I offered him the vial to keep Seth alive, he told me he couldn't do it.

I told Virgil that I would do it myself if he needed me to. Secretly, I had been hoping that I would be the one to do it. While I was free of many of the petty emotions I had been saddled with during my prelife, I was both proud and elated, holding the serum over the sleeping boy. If this conversion was a success, this was to be the first of many. I was fairly confident, but not quite as much so as I had appeared in the speech I had given. Hopefully he would experience less of the horrible side effects that I had had to endure, and enjoy more of the benefits. If this was a success, it would mean that I could dedicate the rest of my life to perfecting this serum, to perfecting existence. I was terrified, but more excited than I had been even before my own injection. Slowly, carefully, I filled a syringe with the serum. I sterilized the end, then injected the boy's arm.

The effect began to take shape only a few minutes later. Seth's eyes opened, and Virgil jumped to his feet in joy. The joy was destroyed as Seth started screaming a moment later. Horrible, painful howlings, like a creature dying issued forth from his mouth. Virgil slammed me against the wall, demanding explanations I couldn't offer. I told him to wait. I told him that the change was painful when it happened to me too, and that it would pass. In a moment, it did pass. The screams subsided.

Seth stopped screaming and started talking. He rambled about nonsensical things, about the moon and the wood grain of the walls, and the color blue. He was having the hallucinations for the first time. I couldn't explain this to Virgil either, but again I begged him to be patient. It too passed after a few moments. Then Seth slept, his vitals stabilizing. I told Virgil that the transition had been a success, but he refused to leave Seth's side until he knew for sure that his child would live. I asked to be directed to my sleeping quarters. I didn't really need to sleep anymore, but I wanted to give the man some privacy for the tearful reunion that would follow in a few hours time.

In the days that followed, I could tell that Virgil still loved his son, but something was different. Something was off. He just never seemed as ceaselessly devoted to his son as he had sitting by that bed, waiting for some sign of life. Virgil never converted a single prisoner, or assisted in any of my researches into perfecting our forms, though he showed considerable insight and understanding when I told him what the serum would do to his son. I think that behind all his zeal, Virgil believed in the prelifes a lot more than he let on.

--

After I finished the serum for the Harpies, I found myself bored and listless. While I knew there was waiting to do, I just wanted to be out in the field, keeping the advance of my ambitions within my own control. I decided to do something horribly irresponsible and enter the city and establish my own cell. Virgil was totally against this. He said flattering things about how I was the head of the movement, and how it couldn't continue if something was to happen to me. It was his way of expressing concern, I guess, but I was insatiable in my need for action. I gave instructions for my leadership to be deferred to the other two, and readied myself for the journey into the city.

Preparation was complicated, but I knew it was an important step. The first problem to contend with was that I had one of the most recognizable faces in the world. This wouldn't be hard to fix, I just had to drastically modify my face. The easiest way would be to burn it, I decided. There are many chemicals that cause a horrendous scarring of the skin. I strapped goggles tightly around my eyes and prepared myself mentally. I walked into the bathroom and shed my clothes. Prepared, I walked into the shower. Slowly, I poured the liquid down my face.

Pain is just a stimulus. There's no reason to avoid it outside of instinct. We fear pain because our bodies tell us that we are doing something that could result in our deaths. Just like any other urge, the urge to cease painful activities can be controlled. Once you realize that you understand the base instincts of your body, you can overcome them. The burning was intense. My nerves screamed for me to join them in screaming, to flush my face with water, to do something, but I did not. Standing still, I felt the solution begin to drip down to my neck. It was about time for this to stop.

I turned on the shower and let the water wash over my burns, diluting the acid so it scorched my lower body only mildly. The burns were deep, and even the lukewarm water made my senses scream in protest, but the mind rules the body, and the mind understood what it had done. I stood in the shower for a while after the acid had gone, relishing the feeling of total control over my own instincts. Ironically, it was then that the hallucinations returned.

I saw myself this time, but with legs, but slowly growing. The growths on my skin grew rapidly. They expanded. They multiplied. They divided and stacked on one another, slowly swallowing small features like my fingers and toes. As I expanded and became less defined, I saw my mouth open in terror, hoping to issue forth some sort of scream, but to no avail. I saw inside my mouth there was nothing but more flesh, slowly filling up my mouth cavity, then covering my eyes. Eventually I was nothing more than a large bulb of flesh, wriggling slightly, like it was trying to communicate with the world.

This was frightening. It was the first time in a long, long time that I had truly been frightened. It would be a fate worse than death to be trapped within my own body, unable to communicate, but able to think, alone, forever. As the illusion disappeared and was washed away, I looked at the small growths all over my body and shivered. I would kill myself before I let myself become unable to die. Exiting the shower, I looked in the mirror. The acid had done its job. My face was burned and scarred beyond recognition. The first step was done.

Next I needed a new identity. This step would be far easier. All those converted who had joined my cause had identities they weren't using anymore, content to follow my lead to genetic perfection. I couldn't use someone who was from Parasol. Word had gotten out about the quarantine failing. The government was trying to cover up the whole thing, and the rumor was that they were going to bomb the whole thing. Those who hadn't come with me would meet a fiery end, it seemed. I found someone who had been in Parasol on a business trip. A doctor, like myself. In the files I found his social security card and ID. That would be enough to confirm who I was.

Not having legs makes vehicular transportation very difficult. Fortunately, with a steady hand on the wheel and some slight gerry-rigging of a lever to the gas, I could operate a jeep well enough. I would have to think of a story about who I was, and why I was traveling, but I had a good three hours to think about that until I reached civilization. I drove across the open areas until I came to the road and began driving towards the city. Most of my problems solved, I let my mind wander as I sped off.

--

Seth was able to walk and talk only days after his treatment. He went through the several days of hypersensitivity that I had experienced, and complained of near constant hallucinations. I could do nothing but assure him that they would eventually decrease, and that he would acclimate to the sensitivity. I was the only person in the world who could help him with the changes he would experience in the near future. I had never had a child, but I assume it was something like what I went through over those next few months.

He was nothing like Virgil. Where Virgil was a drifter in all things other than his son, Seth had a personality that consisted almost entirely of small intense bursts of passion. He was one of my own mind, throwing himself into what interested him with a cold calculating logic. He was only seventeen, but as I explained the science behind my serum, he understood. What he didn't understand immediately, he read until he could grasp. Before his disease had left him weak, he had been studying high-level genetics. He was far more advanced then I had been at that age, certainly, and I was impressed.

I could have left at any time, but I chose not to. Virgil invited me to stay as a mentor to Seth in exchange for a place where I could lie low and continue my work. Seth seemed eager to learn, so I agreed. I took him as something of an apprentice, teaching him everything I knew about the human genome and it's inner workings. I watched as he made simple mutations, and as he slowly gained the knowledge to assist me on my work with the serum.
Looking back, Seth was the closest thing I had to a son, myself, even though I worked very closely with his father. At the same time, Seth was also the only person who ever manipulated me. He used me to further his own ends, and he did so without remorse, pausing only to plan his next move. Really, I can't fault him for it. He didn't put the real task in jeopardy, and I can see how what he did was rational from his perspective, but it was a hurtful betrayal I'll never forget.

--

I have characterized Virgil to you as a hedonist and a drifter, but at the point where I ran off to live in the city, he was making a decent attempt at settling down. There was another geneticist, a colleague of mine, actually, with whom he had fallen into something vaguely resembling but slightly different from love. Lynette was everything he had been searching for. She laughed at his jokes, she shared all the same habits, and she accepted him for everything he was and was not. The problem that incited the need for all those words before “love” two sentences ago is that she was one of our people.

She had been converted in the final push for Parasol, and had been working for the government on a way to reverse the effects of the “plague” as they were calling it. When Virgil entered the wall several hours after my children had stormed it, he found her, hiding in an air locked freezer to hide her scent amongst the frozen meats. It had been clever, and nobody else was hiding there with her.

Virgil's role in this story is interesting, looking back on it. He knew from the beginning that his efforts to help me would lead only to him becoming the last of his kind, and yet he did it anyway. Through all these years, the one thing that I've never really understood was his motivation. I understood my own break with humanity, but what could motivate him to work towards it's destruction, while holding valiantly on to his own biological inferiority?

It's hard to say how he knew from that moment that he wanted to be with her. I guess it makes a sad sort of sense, in a way. He was to be the last human survivor, and he had just discovered someone who had also found a way to survive, who had not only the will, but the cunning to escape the culling. For whatever reason, I believe that he was smitten before he knew all those things that made her perfect. When he found her, curled in the fetal position amongst hocks of dead pork, he already loved her. When he helped her up, and told her everything would be fine, he loved her then. As he escorted her out into the corridor and learned her name, the love was still there.

It is equally hard to say what Seth thought, as he saw the two exit the freezer. She exited behind him for some reason, so perhaps he thought his father was in danger. Maybe he thought that she was holding some weapon to his back, holding him hostage. This is what he told me that day, and that's what I believed until much later. Now, I think it was something else. I think that it was the hope he saw in his father's eyes. I think that Seth saw, between the two of them, hope for the race that he was so heart-set on exterminating with me. I think, even more than that, it was jealousy. Jealousy because, as someone who was still a pre-life, she was someone her father could truly love. That's what I think was running through his mind as he jumped.

I was moving from the other end of the corridor at that moment, so I got to see the whole thing. I don't even know what I was thinking at that moment. Maybe I was happy for Virgil, maybe I, like Seth, wanted to exterminate her, maybe I hadn't even made the connection that she was clearly not yet one of us. Either way, I pulled myself slowly, stuck in general inaction, as I watched Seth jump.


His leap landed his left hand on the side of her face. In a moment, she screamed, and the rest of him was there. Virgil was yelling something and was moving to pull out his sidearm as Seth's arm ripped Lynette's jaw off to the side. The pistol was swinging up from Virgil's waist, and he was still yelling. Lynette was screaming. Seth was exclaiming “Wait!” as he saw his father draw. Had Virgil even consciously realized who he was about to shoot at this moment? This is another thing I've never known. He pulled the trigger, and suddenly you couldn't hear any of them. For a moment, the flash of powder and resounding bang paved over the sights and sounds that had been flooding my consciousness.

After this moment, Seth fell to the floor, Lynette fell to the floor, and Virgil stared at the gun in his hand. Seth had been shot at point-blank range directly in the forehead, blowing off the top portion of his skull. He would survive this shot, but this thought probably didn't help Virgil come to terms with his actions. He had to choose who to care about at that moment, and he dove to the side of the woman he'd barely known, but had loved. She was human, and she was his hope. Her jaw hanging off to the side, she was still screaming. Her contorted face would be the subject of many of my hallucinations.

As he turned to me, there were obvious tears in his eyes, but I still am not sure who they were for. He yelled at me; “Come here, doc. Do that thing you people do so that she'll live!” As I pulled myself over to him, I knew he had just condemned himself to being alone again. He really did value humanity, and even if this woman was all he thought he saw, he would never get past the fact that she lacked that basic biological distinction. It was his call to make, though, so I pulled my arm to my face, and bit off a small piece, just enough to make it bleed. Touching my wound to hers, I felt her begin to twitch.

I looked up at Virgil, who was still staring at her, as her eyes reopened and she began to scream. He looked back at me for just a moment, and I mouthed “I'm sorry.” I don't know if he understood what I was trying to say, because he just looked back and shook his head as she screamed. Seth was sitting up again, watching the whole affair, though the top of his head was split open. He would be off of top form for a few days, but the cellular regeneration had proved particularly potent in the vital organ area, and whatever brain damage had resulted from the shot wasn't permanent.

I was in the middle of a triangle of heated emotions at that moment. Seth, embroiled in his own hate, Virgil, filled with disgust and sorrow, and Lynette, with intense and mind-altering pain. I sat calmly, waiting for everyone to simmer down. Virgil, if I ever tell this story to you, I want you to know that I truly am sorry.

--

I approached the city now. How things had changed since Parasol. There was a wall around the city, this time to keep us out. The word on the radio was that the walls that had now popped up around many major cities were actually erected by the citizenry who didn't believe the government's explanations and wanted to take protection into their own hands. Good, I would already be dealing with the paranoid and unstable elements of society. I went over my new persona in my head, willing myself to become him, but also someone that a vigilante sentry would let in.

When I approached the door, four men with guns emerged and pointed them at my vehicle. The door was open, but I really doubted I could take on this entire city with the little existing support inside. I would have to enter peacefully. One of them approached my window, and made a motion for me to lower it and have a chat with him. I was happy to oblige.

“You, what business do you have here?”

“I'm a doctor from a Sosa, you know, the little town about fourty miles west?”

“Yeah, why are you here?”

I lowered my eyes and voice, begging the man to empathize with this poor survivor.

“It's gone sir. The whole place.”

“What happened to it?”

“The same thing that happened to Parasol. These things came out, started eating people. It was... the most horrible thing I'd ever seen.”

“How'd you get away from them, eh?”

“There was a fire, they must have thought everyone was dead, or that I wasn't worth their time, since I don't have legs. I got to a vehicle and just drove.”

“Are there no other survivors?”

“I don't know, sir. I just drove. I was too ****ing scared to think.”

“Damnit. I haven't heard anything about Sosa yet. The ****ing feds. All the same, I'm going to need to see some ID so I know you're who you say you are.”

“Yes sir, let me find it.”

It had worked. I handed him my identification, which I knew would check out, and he let me through shortly after. He gave me some literature that his group was distributing on how the government was lying to everyone, and told me that if I ever wanted to help defend the city, my handicap wouldn't be an issue. What a devoted, silly, stupid man.

I drove into the city. It was time to begin the spread. I had studied maps and websites before I came in, and I had a method of attack ready. I drove into the wrong side of town, and watched as the houses fell further and further into disrepair. Finally, I saw a the sign I had been looking for.

The lettering said “The Home of Vice” and beneath it was a caricature of a horse. While it stood erect, it had a beer belly, and a face as green as the top bulb on a stop-light. It was bent over, as though it was about to throw up. This ad campaign had gained this bar a reputation. It was said that you could find any drug or pleasure, but no good would come of it. That's what their forums said, anyway. In addition to the bar's mythology, it also detailed the cheap rooms and food, which I figured probably attracted exactly the element I was looking for. This would be where I would start from.

Before I had set off, I had made a few final modifications to the drug. I had realized that simply converting those that wouldn't be missed would take far too long to gather the numbers we needed. If we were to take this city, we needed another strategy. It was at this moment I recalled the human lust over the quick fix. The vacation brought from a syringe. I could get people to convert themselves if I could make this seem like something they would want.

Methamphetamines are a drug that people care about, that they will pay ridiculous sums to obtain, that they will get hooked on, and that, most importantly, can be synthesized in most basic chemistry labs given proper materials. Once it has been synthesized, prior to it's sale, it can be cut and laced with pretty much anything the dealer wishes. After about four hours work, I had two pounds of relatively pure meth laced with my final version of the formula, which was the same, but reacted with the person's body at a much slower rate, converting them after days rather than moments.

There was a time where the government sought to control such substances, and fortunately, this time had passed. Not that they truly could have stopped the delivery of freedom to the masses, but it would have made me need to be much more cautious. I got myself a room, and walked into the basement lounge. People lay on couches all over the room, and a smoky haze lay over everything. Nobody really noticed my entry, all of them waiting around in their own worlds, staring at undefined points of sky. So these would be the first to live. I left my two pounds in a chair, knowing some enterprising young lad would pick it up. Let him do my job for me.

As I walked back up the steps, I considered my own problems. The growth was continuing at a startling rate. Already my face was forming back into it's old scowl, and the parts of me that had not been burned had become more bulbous. I didn't look fat, I simply looked large. My fingers were pudgy, and seemed to have less of a range of motion with each passing day. None of my experiments had revealed what was causing this growth. The simplest explanation would be that my cells simply couldn't eat each other fast enough, but what reason did they have to slow down?

My hallucinations had simply become a recurring nightmare. I saw myself more and more often becoming that blob of flesh and hair, unable to move or even communicate. This still frightened me. It frightened me more than death, and it frightened me more than failure, that I might simply become a conscious mind unable to affect the world around it. As I sat in my room contemplating this, my cell phone rang. It was Seth.

He had some news for me. He told me the first conversions were going well, but something was going on that was going to be a growing problem for us. I could hear the pain in his voice as he said that Virgil and Lynette were working on what they called a “cure”. I should have seen this coming. I should have known that he couldn't leave well enough alone. This “disease” as they thought it, could actually be brought easily to its knees. If the cell cannibalism was to stop, so would all the affects of the disease. Given the complex genetic gerry-rigging required to make one cell eat another, it would be a relatively simple matter to make them stop doing so. My mind was reeling, and Seth was calling my name, asking if I was still there. I hung up. I had more important business to attend to.

They were both smart. They could do it. If they both really tried, and I hadn't underestimated either of them, it would be within their grasps within days. I should have known. I should have expected. I should have foreseen. Cursing my own lack of prescience, I stormed from the Home of Vice, moving slowly on my arms, but with no lack of fury. I drove quickly back to the wall, where the same man greeted me again.

“Didn't I just let you in?”

“They're already here you moron. In days they'll flood your streets and kill your women. Get out while you still can.”

“Suit yourself.”

He signaled to have me let through, and I saw him mouth the word “paranoid.” If I hadn't been so angry, I might have laughed at that. I sped off on the road, towards the outpost where I knew Virgil was working at this very moment on a cure with his temptress.

They really had almost been happy together. I remember that Virgil came to me once, a few days before everyone left Parasol, and asked me if it was possible for him and Lynette to have a child. I told him I didn't know. I honestly didn't know what would happen if they tried. I knew that the serum rendered men sterile, but left the womb more or less intact. It was certainly an interesting idea, to think that a baby could be born, with a fully functioning ecosystem of cells competing and eating one another already present in his genetics.

He never brought it up again, so I put it out of my mind. Clearly his desire for a child had superseded his drive to assist in human evolution. I pulled up to the outpost, and leapt out of the car, moving quickly, pulling myself hand over hand to the main door. Someone opened it and looked at me.

“Take me to them.”

Clearly I had been expected, because he knew exactly what I meant. The door slid open, and the man motioned for me to follow him. This ex-military compound was full of anonymous corridors, all looking the same as the other. After making several turns, he stopped at a door, swiped his card, and allowed me in. Inside I saw a twist on a sight I had seen before. There was Virgil, kneeling sorrowfully by a hospital bed, with the body on it hooked up to a million machines. Unlike Seth, however, Lynette was conscious. She saw me and motioned for Virgil to look. I pointed at her.

“You. Don't speak. Virgil, come here.”

He did as I asked, unafraid, walking over to me.

“Seth told me everything. He told me you're working on a cure.”

“Doc, the fetus is eating itself. It can't grow. I'm not trying to undermine you, I'm just trying to save my child.”

“You already have a child.”

“One that you've already seen is a violent and deceptive being. I bet he didn't even tell you what our work was for?”

“He told me enough, Virgil. This cure, if it fell into the wrong hands, it would destroy us all. It's a delicate balance that holds us together, and you're going to wreck it.”

“So I'll only make one dose, and destroy my work after it's done.”

“No. I've given you too much freedom. I've given you the option to live. I've given you the power you always wanted. I've let you do more or less as you liked until this moment. This thing that you want? You cannot have it. You cannot be allowed to play God on the other side of the chess board from me. We are allies. We have come so far. We are so close. But this, this is not something you can have.”

“I have to do this. I need to believe that there's some reason I'm still alive.”

“The reason you are, as you say, “alive” is that you requested it of me, and I honored it, because you helped me. Out of respect for what you've done for this cause, I'm going to let you leave this compound unharmed, and none shall come after you. Stay away from cities and you might hold on to your precious humanity for the rest of your life.”

“Doctor, if that's truly the way it has to be, let me take her with me.”

“She's one of us. Now leave us.”

“But-”

“LEAVE!”

And so he left. He didn't say another word. This was going to be so much work to smooth over. I would need to redivide the troops between myself and Seth, I would need to figure out what to do with Lynette, there was so much micromanagement involved. As my mind was beginning to wrap around these new variables, I felt a syringe in my neck, and blacked out.

[mead1]

****ing read this you lazy sons of bitches

[DrugstoreCowboy]

bumping this because I actually really liked the second read.