by J. K. Norry
Chapter 8
In a privatized prison, which received thirty-five thousand dollars a year for each inmate it could coax or keep inside, Warden Johns literally sat at his desk counting his money. It wouldn’t be long before he could retire and live forever in the Philippines, instead of only spending two weeks a year there. They were just numbers on a computer screen, but they meant more than that to the warden. They meant freedom: sweet, intoxicated freedom in the arms of a blurred stream of beautiful exotic women who couldn’t say his name right even if they knew it. At the same time, in the same country…
Elayna was not going to eat anyone. Maybe Maya hadn’t gotten as deep into her mind, or maybe the thought just turned her stomach a little too deeply. Whatever it was, she was not going to eat anyone. She would fight the gnawing hunger in her gut until it consumed her from within. She would let the pieces of her skin that kept falling in her lap sit there for anyone to notice. She wouldn’t smile, and show her teeth; but she wasn’t going to eat anyone either.
Elayna could still see through Maya’s eyes; the more her resolve strengthened, the more fuzzy the images became. It happened gradually over the long flight. She watched through Maya’s eyes as Maya watched through the others’. She watched her father land first, calmly hail a cab and climb in. He left his luggage spinning round the airport carousel; they had only packed to avoid arousing suspicion. His deodorant wasn’t going to stop him from stinking like rotting flesh, and his toothbrush would fray to uselessness if he tried to use it. He didn’t even need the passport or money in his pocket anymore, or he wouldn’t in a few days; all of that would be useless paper soon if Maya had her way.
Mallory bit the driver as soon as he closed the door behind him. The man opened his mouth to scream, or protest, but a strong hand covered his mouth. The hand became stronger as change swept over them both. Raw primal power coursed through the professor’s body, and he held the other man easily. He felt the driver begin to tremble as the bite did its work. There was only a few moments of struggle before the man relaxed in his grasp and sighed.
“Drive,” Mallory said. The car pulled away from the curb as Elayna watched from her unique vantage point. She thought for a moment that it had been a lucky find, for him to climb into a car in China and have the driver speak English. Thinking about it, watching the scene, she realized that hadn’t been the case at all. She realized it when the driver spoke words that she had no reason to understand. Somehow she knew what he had said, as did Mallory.
“I know,” Mallory responded. “I know you’re hungry. I am too. We need to get away from the airport. Go somewhere with people that isn’t too busy this time of day.”
They were communicating in images sent from one twisted mind to another. Elayna saw them as clearly as the scene, or her own rotting hand in front of her face. The professor sent him a string of pictures: the cab stopping again and again to pluck someone off the street, only to drop them changed a block or so later. Many of the images were of the driver or the professor rending flesh with their teeth, splattering blood about in what looked like an ecstatic feasting.
Elayna tuned out the scene before they could pick up their first victim. She thought of Todd next; immediately she felt awash in a sea of power and blood and hunger. It was hard to look back in his thoughts to see if his first bite had been deliberate disobedience or if the twisting hunger had simply been too much for him. He was still aloft, but the airplane cabin had become a sodden mess of blood and bodies. There was not a single human left aboard. All of them had changed, bitten by Todd or someone that he had bitten. Many of them had changed again, and they were feeding on those that remained in the vulnerable first stage.
There was no fighting at this point, although the state of the cabin was covered in evidence of struggle. There was only feasting, one type of monster consuming the raw protein and liquid iron that the others gave freely. Several of the creatures with thick ridged skulls and long limbs and rows of jagged teeth would flay one of the others, eating them in strips and drinking them in gulps. The victim would lie or sit in a welcoming pose until the light went out in their eyes and their bodies relaxed into death. The stronger ones would continue to feed until the bones were stripped clean, their skulls growing dense with iron and their muscles thickening along their lengthened limbs.
When they were done, they would join another feeding frenzy already in progress, or take down someone wandering the cabin looking for their first bite. The more vulnerable creatures were not like Elayna and her friends had been when they first changed; they were mindless, moaning animals. They were consumed with a hunger that they couldn’t slake, and the lack of live human scent on the plane had them drifting aimlessly about on foot or sitting in their seats awaiting consumption. They had the slow steel grip of death in their hands, but no human to grasp and no flesh to flay with their starter teeth.
The others were horrific. They were not mindless, or slow; they were fast, intelligent, aware, and so much stronger than the others. Most of them were bent over a meal, and it looked like a cabin of bears or giant wildcats that had been skinned alive and were trying to regrow it by eating as much as possible as quickly as possible. They tore limbs from torsos, cracked bones with their teeth, and sucked the blood from stringy veins and dead arteries. Raking at the vulnerable creatures with their claws and rending their flesh with their teeth, the monsters were surprisingly civil toward one another. More than once, as Elayna watched, she saw one creature tear a scrap of flesh in two and hand it to another. She thought it was sweet, in the most disgusting way possible.
It was them she was able to see through. The ones that hadn’t tasted flesh were distant animal cousins to Elayna; the others were a part of the same mind she was, the mind that drove their personalities deep inside the gnawing hunger like the change had driven their innards up behind their rib cages. She could see through their eyes, just as she could see through Todd’s as he watched the gory chaos happily. He had turned the crew, and the door to the cockpit stood open. The pilot and co-pilot chewed on morsels that the flight attendants brought them. Elayna watched through Todd’s eyes as the creatures consumed each other, then switched to another view to watch him and the crew behind him through one of her sister’s eyes.
The thought made Elayna shudder.
Not my sister, she thought to herself, despite the connection. Not my family, not my kind. They are delighting in their hunger; I defy mine.
Todd was the most grotesque creature on board. He was even taller than before, his muscled arms leaner and longer. His skull was huge, thick heavy armor that he swung side to side as he watched the feeding. Every few moments, a feasting monster brought him a slab of flesh or a strip of skin, and Todd would chomp merrily on the bloody hunk. Elayna found herself wishing that he had transformed into something she couldn’t recognize; but that was definitely her friend, eating human flesh and staring out through those rusted eyes.
The vision started to fade as the hunger gnawed painfully at her belly. She tried to check in on Allen; all she got was a glimpse of him sitting still as death in an airplane seat. Elayna didn’t notice that the clumps of flesh that had fallen from her face were no longer in her lap. They had dissipated like so much dust, drifting further up and down the enclosed space of the cabin. Tiny particles of who she used to be floated invisibly in every direction to cling to people’s clothes and shoes and tickle their nostrils. Every passenger had a little piece of her attached to them somehow by the time the plane landed a few short hours later.
Chapter 9
On a floating island made of twenty years of technological trial and error, Christina stood at the sanded beach that ran the length of one coastline. The floating structure was her home, her creation, a solid testament to her brilliance and her hope for the future. It moved with the schools of fish that they herded along in huge gossamer nets, always turned in the morning so the sun rose over the sandy shore and always positioned so the sun set on the same beach. The dr
ift was designed to give every dwelling a perfect day of light every day; the placing of the beach had been a clever afterthought. Meanwhile, twenty thousand feet in the air…
Allen felt Elayna’s feeble thought reach out to him. He hadn’t fed either, but he had maintained an almost constant connection with Maya. Their link was sustenance enough for Allen to stay hungry for flesh and suspended in this temporary cocoon. He felt the changes trying to happen within him, wanting to happen within him; he awaited the transformation like his boyhood self had looked forward to manhood. He didn’t feel the angst in Elayna’s thoughts, and he didn’t wonder for long why the contact had felt so hazy and distant. Allen was one with Maya, in a way he never knew he could be, and he watched her awesome presence reach out to encircle the globe from where she lay in the desert. He had no idea that it was possible to be more in love with her than he had been before; but this was even more than love. Allen was awed by her.
He brushed the pieces of flesh that flaked from his face and hands from his lap with deliberate slowness. He knew what effect they would have. Allen watched them hit the floor or the seat and burst into a million unseen floating bits of unborn death. The only reason that he knew how the professor handled his part of the spread was because Maya felt him there with her, and she showed him. She thought it was a great idea, and Allen followed the same easy template when he finally landed.
The gnawing hunger that had been clouding his vision and slurring his speech was not satisfied with a single bite. His sight became clear, and better than ever, at the taste of blood. His thoughts and words were crisp and concise when they came back to him, and Allen used them both.
“Go somewhere with people,” he said, “but not too crowded.”
He sent the driver a forceful mental image to illustrate, and collapsed back in the seat. The blood and flesh from that one bite was working in him, changing him from weak and vulnerable to strong and powerful. Allen felt his bones growing denser, his neck getting thicker as his skull became heavier. It wasn’t enough to armor his ribcage or pull his insides further up inside him, that one little bite; and as he stared at the driver’s bloody shirt, their eyes met in the rearview mirror. The man nodded, as if to coax Allen to bite him again. Allen shook his head.
“There,” he pointed. “Pull over to pick her up.”
She was an older woman with dark hair and eyes. She approached the door when the car pulled up to the curb, only to step back as Allen threw the door open. She peered curiously inside.
“Come here,” Allen said.
She brushed back her hair, putting her other hand on the roof of the car as she leaned in. Her hair drifted forward again as her body tilted, and Allen’s hand shot out to grab it. He yanked, stronger than ever, and she piled on top of him in the back seat. She opened her mouth to scream, but the driver clumsily grabbed her from behind. His fingers sunk into her mouth instead of covering it; something about the taste or the invasive contact made her gasp, rather than cry out, in that moment.
It was all Allen needed to bite her, that moment; almost as soon as he did, she stopped struggling. Instead she began pressing herself into him, like a lover desperate for his touch. He shoved her off, too hard; not because he was repulsed but because he was still so hungry. She bounced off the back of the passenger seat, then off the door, and sprawled in the street. Allen saw her raise her head, her eyes shot with blood and stark with hunger; he shouted at her before slamming the door shut.
“Feed!” he cried. He turned to the driver, sent him another mental image. “Go!”
It wasn’t long before he saw another, a man standing alone on an otherwise deserted stretch of lane. “This one’s yours.”
He probably should have been a little more specific. Allen watched in horrified amusement as the car jumped the curb and took the pedestrian’s knees out. The driver barely waited until the vehicle had stopped before he opened the door and went after him. All Allen could see from the back seat were the droplets of red and bits of flesh that began to stick to the windshield and hood. The driver stood up once, covered in blood and baring rows of jagged teeth, and howled with primal abandon. Then he went back to feeding with such frenzy that blood and bits of flesh continued to obscure the already bad view.
After a minute, Allen sighed. He slid across the back seat to the driver’s side and stepped out of the car, moving behind the wheel a moment later. He hadn’t known how to drive a stick, or the layout of the town, until his mind touched the driver’s once more. The mental contact was enough to make his own gnawing hunger twist his belly. He could feel the change taking place in his brother, and the sublime satisfaction of one mouthful after another of hot bloody flesh. It took him a moment to disengage from the ecstasy and engage the clutch. The windshield swiped away blood in stubborn red streaks as his eyes scanned the sidewalk.
He hadn’t driven a mile before he saw a child, skipping down the street and swinging a backpack. It was only one bite, like the others, but it was a big bite. His teeth were sharper, and more numerous, and his mouth opened wide around the little boy’s arm. He felt his teeth scrape against bone in passing, and his heart twisted at the child’s agonized scream; then he was pushing the little boy away as he tried to offer Allen his other arm. His mouth was full of flesh, his face was covered in blood, and he smiled as he leaned over his hungry little creation.
“Go,” he smiled. “Feed.”
The little boy turned and ran off, and Allen heard a scream as he climbed into the cab once more. It had been a dumb stroke of luck, but he recognized the genius in it at once: children would be able to approach adults without alarming their victims until it was too late. Humans may have invented the strategy, but that didn’t mean Allen couldn’t use it as well. It was natural for an adult to let a strange child close, especially if it looked hungry or scared. Allen’s spawn may not have looked scared, but they certainly looked hungry. He filled the city with them, driving around in a yellow car covered in red streaks, stopping every mile or so. When he drove down a street filled with shuffling starving mindlessness and the creatures feasting on them, and then another, Allen found a freeway and headed for the next big city.
Chapter 10
In two feet of fresh frozen powder, with sweat running in rivulets between her shoulder blades, Deanna sawed at the bear’s thick hide. Red stained the pure pretty white of the beast’s coat where she had unzipped it with her knife, and she was layered in it up to her elbows. She couldn’t wipe at the sweat, or the blood, and both flowed unnoticed as she worked. Night would fall soon, and with no one to depend on but herself she had to harvest as much meat as she could before it did. The snow had been deep for some time now; and as more prey succumbed to the cold, more predators turned scavengers. There would be nothing but bones left in the morning, and whatever she had been able to carve from the steaming carcass. Far south of all this…
Elayna had fallen away like her skin, and there was nothing left of her at this point but that alien hunger and her fading resistance to it. She wandered familiar streets until they became unfamiliar, avoiding anywhere she knew how to get to. Staying away from people as much as possible, sticking to the shadows and hiding her face with her hair, Elayna’s pace slowed to a slow stiff shuffle gradually over the first day and night. It was pain to keep moving, pain to resist the hunger, and pain to think of making the pain stop. As the sun rose on the second morning, Elayna knew she would be mad with a gnawing hunger for flesh by sunset.
She tried to order a breakfast burrito from a food truck, but the words wouldn’t come. The man trying to take her order kept asking if she was alright, if she needed help. Elayna finally gave up, shuffling off as quickly as she could. She had snagged a bit of croissant from a deserted table at an outdoor cafe, then been chased off by a shrieking waitress. It had turned her stomach to even put it near her mouth, but she had forced herself to chew and swallow the buttery bite. A few moments later it had all come up, along with blood and bile, and now her shirt wa
s stained in streaks of red and yellow.
The only fast movement she was capable of were the involuntary twitches in her hands and neck. The slower her shuffling steps grew, the more her hands twitched and her head lolled uncontrollably. Even if the streets she trudged today had been familiar, she wouldn’t have recognized them. Everything was a dull haze of gray through her eyes, except the hot red living streaks that she needed to stay away from. She would have ordinarily been fascinated by her ability to see heat signatures if her mind had been working. Today all of her will was spent on the simple task of not grabbing one as it passed and sinking her teeth into it.
As the sun set on the second day, Elayna found herself standing on the steps of a police station. It took a full minute for her to pull open the door, another to shuffle to the counter. The woman behind the thick glass partition wrinkled her nose at her.
“There’s no loitering in here,” she said distastefully.
Elayna moaned. It was the closest she could come to words.
“Listen, lady,” the woman said. “We can’t help you here. There’s a mission a couple blocks down. Why don’t you go there?”
Elayna loosened her grip on her hunger enough to form a single word. She chose the only one that might explain the situation to the tight-lipped officer with her hair pulled back severely and knotted in braids down her back. She hated to have to say it, as if speaking the word would somehow make her transformation complete without any need for a mouthful of flesh. It was a one-word admission of her own guilt and shame at the aberration she had become, and she said it as clearly as her rotten lips would let her.
“Zombie,” Elayna gasped. Her voice was a chilling sound to what was left of her ears, and it conveyed the message as clearly as the word. Still the woman looked at her impatiently. She began to open her mouth, presumably to tell her to get lost again; Elayna gave up and gave in to her hunger. She pressed up against the glass, biting and clawing at it as she reached for the woman. The officer recoiled, and moved her hand to her sidearm.