Morbid Metamorphosis

by Lycan Valley Press

  “What?”

  “This ancient grove is protected. It’s sacred.”

  “I’m standing up now,” cried Lester. “I’ll protect this place, just as you are!”

  Joey hesitated. He could see the sincerity in the boy’s face, but the other force longed to sate itself on the boy’s blood. Joey pushed back, but the grove proved stronger.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, half sighing. “This isn’t up to me any longer...”

  Lester cried out as the roots of the nearest tree erupted from the ground, ensnaring him. As he was yanked to the ground, other roots snaked into his mouth, silencing him.

  Rooted tendrils exploded from the boy’s chest.

  Joey collapsed to the ground, spent, smiling as he felt the grove’s former occupants cry out from beyond with gleeful pleasure. They’d found their new earthbound leader, a young man ostracized from the world just as they had been, a tortured soul eager to please and instrument their revenge. The perfect construct of their own.

  There was much to do. The grove needed protection and more sacrifices to fuel it, strengthen it.

  And Joey had just the right people in mind.

  THE SKELLY EFFECT

  Terri DelCampo

  DAY ONE

  MARY Ellen Sonnet went to work feeling like crap, tempted to call in sick but not in the financial position to do so. Every day's pay counted - especially to her apartment complex and the bank holding the title to her car.

  The sickness came as a surprise, though, for that rarely happened to her. As a pharmacy tech, with absolutely everything coming across her counter from colds and flu to stomach bugs, poison oak, herpes and AIDS, her immune system, during the past nine years, had become an impenetrable fortress. She hadn't had to call in sick in the past eight years, and the last time she had it had been because she'd twisted her knee, not because she was ill.

  But when she thought about it, the lousiness she felt wasn't a sickness per se. It was nothing she could really put a finger on - and besides, nobody had said anything about sickness actually - she'd just assumed.

  Across town, Devon Johnson had no such qualms about calling in sick, though his paycheck was very much needed in his household. He lived at home with his Dad - his mama had died last year and skunked his plans for college since she'd made half the wages, a big chunk of which went toward college funds for Devon and his sister. May was still a freshman in high school, so nothing really got messed up for her, because by the time she was ready for college Dad and Devon would have the money situation mostly caught up. Devon, however, had been a senior, and when half the household money disappeared, so had his dreams of engineering. He had no idea how he was going to hold down a job, even a part time one, and keep up with his studies at the same time. It's not that he minded - his parents were top shelf and had always seen to his and his sister's needs - he accepted the responsibility just fine with not a shred of resentment (well, maybe a little at God for screwing his mother into the ground - literally). He simply realized that he was not the kind of student who could slide through school without cracking the books. He needed time to study, to absorb the material, sometimes even to write things out or do extra research, looking things up on line, taking the time so that he would commit every aspect of what he was studying fully to memory.

  But there was no choice - school equaled job. A full time one, which meant putting off entry for a year to raise the funds, at least for a while until his dad could figure something out. So he hit the shut off for his alarm instead of his customary snooze, and turned over, his stomach following out of a delayed reaction. Ugh! He might actually puke, he thought. Not fair - he hadn't even been out beering with his buds last night.

  Later in the day, Mary Ellen and Devon sat in a drugstore clinic waiting to be looked at by a professional (well, let's say a quasi-professional). Muscle aches, nausea, and sniffles were not among their symptoms, just a general malaise that they seemed to feel deep down - bone deep. Something was vitally wrong with them, as well as the forty or so men, women, and children also sitting in chairs waiting on the clinician, and those who spilled beyond the chairs into the vitamin aisle of the store, some sitting on the floor, leaning against shelves (toppling vials and bottles, to the absolute delight of the pharmacy staff - and yes, that was broad sarcasm).

  The line crawled - snails would have made those in it look as if they were moving in reverse, and the place became more and more packed as the day went on. By the time Devon's name was called, there was a line of patients, double-wide snaking through every aisle of the store, out the entrance, down the side of the building, almost reaching the drive-thru prescription window.

  And that was one little pharmacy clinic among hundreds of clinics, hospital emergency rooms, and doctor's offices across the country, and around the world as well.

  No one wanted to say the word epidemic, let alone pandemic or global outbreak. But then again, no one really had to.

  “There's nothing wrong with you,” the clinician pronounced, while at the same time, doctors, interns, nurses, and holistic healers all over the world made exactly the same pronouncement for billions of patients all complaining of the same, vague symptoms: something wrong deep in each of their bones.

  Truth be told, the medical practitioners would have been relieved to find something wrong, to be able to label the problem, for many of them had the symptoms too. In fact, all of them did, to some degree. However, they were looking for a diagnosis for something that had never happened before in the history of humankind.

  But medical personnel would be all-too-familiar with the phenomenon all-too-soon.

  DAY TWO

  What had started out as an ache in Mary Ellen's bones had turned into a fiery burn that terrified her. She rolled out of bed and made it to the bathroom, squatted on the toilet as usual to deposit her business, and noticed it had a strong rancid odor. When she turned around to flush, she saw that her pee was deep brown, and she knew that meant blood in the urine. “Fuck me. Not an infection after all this time. That must be what the hell's wrong with me,” she muttered, following through on the flush and turning to the sink to wash her hands. But then, she wondered, why didn't the doc in the clinic come up with that? And she didn't have a low-grade fever which always accompanied the many UTI's she'd been plagued with all through college. Weird.

  It wasn't until she stepped up to the vanity to wash her hands that she gasped at what she saw looking back at her from the mirror. “Holy fuck!” she whispered to herself, barely recognizing her face with its sunken eyes, and pale - no, actually gray, sagging flesh that hung from her bones like old gauze wrappings on a mummy. “What the hell is going on with me?” she wondered aloud, and pressed her fingers into the hollows of her cheeks.

  She screamed when the skin there came off on her fingertips.

  She shrieked in utter horror when a chunk of flesh dropped off her arm, landing into the sink with a plop, splattering the front of her habitual tee-shirt and sweats with dark, rancid blood that she wouldn't believe could keep her alive in its current gelatinous state.

  The farthest thing from her mind was calling her boss. What would she tell him anyway? “Hey, Mike, I'm just falling apart today - literally.”

  Devon couldn't move his arms and legs. It felt like they were weighted down in jelly-filled sacks that each weighed about seventy-five pounds. "What's up with that,” he thought, still under the covers, raging heat overtaking him from the inside out, feeling like it was cooking his flesh. He couldn't believe he hadn't had a fever yesterday at the clinic. This had all started well before he'd gone there in a last-ditch effort to find out what was wrong.

  He tried again to move his arms, just to push the covers back, and couldn't do it. He heard something, though, from beneath the sheet and comforter, that sounded squishy like Hershey squirts coming out of his butt, but there were none. He was not shitting the bed - so what was that gushy, squelchy sound?

  He looked toward his chest and sc
reamed like a little girl. The comforter, spread over a blanket, which was over a sheet on top of him as he lay in tank and boxers, was saturated with the darkest blood he'd ever seen. He continued to scream as his lips and scalp slid away, slipping off his skull and wide-open jaws, all that was visible from the bed as it shrieked in horror and pain. The only thing fleshly left were his eyeballs, which without lids, could not blink away what came next.

  Mary Ellen dragged herself out of the bathroom, through the hallway, and into her bedroom, leaving a bloody trail of gooey skin, muscle, stomach, intestines, tongue, and lungs behind her. She no longer screamed, but slumped against the side of her bed, trying to get her head around what was happening to her. Her bones - phalanges, metacarpals, ulna, radius, and humerus of her arms, pushed up through the surface of her remaining, resting flesh, tearing through, freeing themselves of its weight, splashing foul blood over the rest of her as the bones tore through.

  Then her phalanges, the nails and bony points, curled into claws.

  Devon's fleshless hands and arms stole out from beneath the covers and pushed them down, exposing his body to the knees. That grisly image alone was more than he wanted to see. The bones were visible through his flesh, his rib cage and pelvis already poking through it. His skeletal hands came together and the fingertips approached one another. He used them sort of like a snow plow to push the flesh off his torso, pelvis and thighs. It pushed away easily, like meat that had been roasted to the point that it literally fell off the bone.

  He sat up then, or, to put a finer point on it, his skeleton sat up, creating a great suction noise as his bones tore up and out of his flesh. He could no longer scream. Or taste. He could hear, because, after all, it's the bones in your ear that register sound - and his brain was still safely tucked within his cranium. But there was no outer flesh on his skeleton.

  He looked at his boney self in the mirror, with bits of flesh and blood dripping off his new skeletal body, and wanted to throw up. Looking back at the bed, though, he saw his stomach, esophagus, trachea, and tongue were still there - where his newly evolved skeleton had discarded them. So why the urge to puke? A phantom spasm, like someone who's lost a limb and still feels pain in it? Oh my God, he thought. What the fuck?

  Mary Ellen's skeletal hands clawed away what was left of her flesh - all of it - on her face, her tits that had once garnered such affectionate attention from young and old men alike, her belly - for once she wished she could hold onto the pounds - and her legs. Her sharp phalanges raked it all away, and her bones up-righted themselves, struggling upwards from her fleshly remains with a sucking gurgle that would have made her shriek in fear and pain had she a larynx left to produce the sound.

  She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. For the first time in her adult life, she was a size zero, and her cheeks had that hollow, supermodel look. Her skull went through the terrifying motions of a laugh, but no sound came forth, other than her teeth chattering together. Her lower jaw was frozen in place, the bone fused, as all the bones of her skeleton seemed to hold together - sort of like they were magnetized.

  She left her apartment just as Devon left his dad's house, and they both made their way to the bus stop, where they'd exchanged "Good mornings" every day for the last year or so. Out of habit they went there this morning, and didn't recognize one another, and couldn't have said hello had it even occurred to them, in spite of the shock. They waited there for a bus with six other skeletons, all exchanging astonished once-overs, though the emotion didn't show, for there was no musculature or fleshly facial features to register it.

  They were all trying to get their boney heads around this new phase of human evolution.

  Suddenly a huge German Shepherd showed up, barking, then growling as it tore out a woman's Fibula. It ran off happily, dreams of picking bones for the rest of its natural life, while Mary Ellen, Devon, and the others thought, “So much for human beings' dominion over animals.” But that was another story.

  And it wouldn't be the first time that day that they considered it would probably be politically incorrect from now on to use the phrases "I have a bone to pick with you," or “let's get together and chew the fat.”

  Such is the perverse humor that human beings come up with when faced with the completely fucking unbelievable.

  DAY THREE

  It didn't take long before the Skellies realized their brains needed nourishment. The very old ones and young ones began to collapse after the first ten to fourteen hours. They showed up at hospitals where the personnel there were already solving the problems, experimenting on themselves.

  Doctor William Gray gestured toward an exam room, and a skelly couple, the father carrying his little girl (or what passed for a little girl on Skelly Earth) followed him inside. Had they been capable of speech, they would already have been pleading for the doctor to help their daughter. As it was, they simply stood, phalanges braided, frightened with no facial features on which emotions like that could register.

  The medical team went to work on one of their first outside patients, inserting IV needles into the vertebra and pelvic bones.

  One of the team approached the parents, gestured to chairs. She whipped a cell phone out of the jacket of her lab coat, and tapped out a message which the parents read.

  “We are administering intra-marrow injections to keep your daughter's bone marrow hydrated and nourished, which in turn feeds the brain.”

  The parents nodded, understanding. The mother pulled out her cell. “What happened to us? To everybody?”

  The medic tapped her own phone with the naked bones and nails of her fingers. “The skeletons seemed to secrete acid to loosen the flesh so that the bones could free themselves. All that remains of the flesh is the brain, marrow deep within the bones, and some of the joint tendons holding the bones together. And yes, there are reports of this phenomenon all over the earth.”

  When the parents had read the message, the medic tapped out another message. “We will provide you with a portable IV bag for your daughter and yourselves. You must stock up on them. It's first come, first serve. You are very lucky.”

  DAY FOUR

  Skellies worldwide all started to collapse at once, sounding like runes clattering on a table when the bones dropped in heaps to the ground. Many Skellies noticed that some of the others moved about with IV bags attached, so in confusion and desperation they flocked to hospitals, clinics, and private doctors' offices in unimaginable hordes.

  The injections were not terribly painful if the injector knew what they were doing and didn't hit nerves. But the Skellies put up with whatever pain there was because the IV packs meant the difference between survival and demise.

  The demise part began to show up everywhere - on sidewalks, in vehicles, in homes, in back yards, in forests, in the ocean.

  While Skellies maintained their normal routines, at least the ones with the IV packs, they found that much of the work that had consumed their lives no longer was necessary: No food to prepare, hence no dishes to do, no gardening, no slaughtering of animals (well not so far, anyway). They wore only shirts, mainly to make themselves more identifiable to family, friends, and colleagues. They could still drive automobiles and watch TV, oddly enough, with the only fleshly organs left being the brain and the eyeballs. Banks were pounced because the IV treatments weren't cheap, but then, all the money used on food and clothing and all that crap could be geared toward medical expenses.

  A routine was established.

  Right up until the medical institutions ran out of the IV contents. They were basically banana bags with additional blood, marrow, and neurological chemical components added. But never in the history of modern medicine had there been such an enormous demand for them. Every single human being needed IV's to survive.

  And the sources were drying up; the production, while humming right along, was still not fast enough to accommodate the entire human race.

  So in true human fashion, things got right ugl
y, right fast.

  Daddy hadn't said where he'd gotten the IV bag and tubing, just texted for his son, who was dangerously low on the vital fluids, to get in the car, that they would be waiting in line at the clinic, forever as it was.

  There were detailed signs at the entrance to the clinic and every ten feet, along with ropes to keep people from becoming a mob if at all possible. Not that mob situations hadn't occurred - the National Guard had been deployed at more than one hospital, as had been expected by the hospital personnel, but the governors of states were not in the thick of things as was their main, shared characteristic.

  THIS LINE FOR PATIENTS WITH THEIR OWN IV BAGS & TUBING

  THIS LINE FOR PATIENTS NEEDING IV SUPPLIES

  Of course, where the second sign was concerned, there were makeshift signs over almost everyone at every medical facility worldwide that read:

  Due to extraordinary demand, IV supplies are exhausted - indefinitely.

  Medical facilities were in a real ethical bind. The signs indeed created panic, however, when skeleton-people waited in line for hours, sometimes days, for the supplies to keep them or their loved ones alive, and then were told that those supplies had run out, they tended to panic anyway, and become infuriated for wasting the precious energy to stand/sit/lie in those lines, especially when they had their children in tow.

  Brawls ensued.

  Muggings increased by a thousand percent in every city, town, and province around the world. Money wasn’t the problem. IV paraphernalia was more precious than any metal, any gemstone, any substance on Earth.

  Scientists slaved twenty-four-seven trying to synthesize the components of the IV solution in massive quantities. They even turned to non-medical people, who they trained to do menial but crucial tasks while they concentrated on the project at hand: to save the world and what was left of the human race from extinction.