Morbid Metamorphosis

by Lycan Valley Press

  More than one of them wondered if it was even worth the effort, considering the path that human evolution had taken. They kept hearing stories, via the news, (which was a constant text scroll on the emergency channels), and from texts from their minions coming in and out during the course of the work-weeks (they didn't even measure them in days anymore).

  “This little girl was walking between her parents, and someone snatched the IV gear right off her back,” one minion described to his lab supervisor in a text. “And I saw three other Skellies attacked with no help in sight, on the way to work. It's brutal out there.”

  “Everyone's wearing jackets now, to keep their IV stuff hidden from view, and most people are strapping it to the front of themselves, tucked beneath their rib cages with duct tape,” another worker described, to another supervisor in a country on the other side of the world.

  Piles of skeletal remains lay everywhere, in every street, in every alley, in every building, every field, every yard, every river, every ocean.

  Animals were released from their pens because there was no reason to keep them in captivity anymore, since Skellies needed no food. Ironically enough, by the end of the first week, barnyard animals would outnumber human Skellies six to one.

  DAY FIVE

  There was one commodity that was necessary for the Skellies - well actually two, medical technology and product. And water.

  Skellies maintained the water purification plants as well as the medical facilities and scientific labs. Labs everywhere, in universities and even high schools, were pressed into service to accommodate the monumental needs for the IV supplies.

  But not before three fourths of the human race, already in skeletal form, perished.

  And by the end of the fifth day.

  DAY SIX

  Brian Wells had been the CEO of Cold-Springs Water since he was just out of high school. The company had put him through college, and his sister through medical school. Her degree was incredibly specialized, and she had served an internship with the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia to prepare her with the knowledge she had needed to carry out the company's strategy for human survival.

  The brother and sister met in the conference room located three stories below ground level of their corporate headquarters. Their corporate headquarters was on property adjacent to their residence, a sprawling three-story above ground corporate complex where Skellies clacked around completing tasks they'd been completing for decades past.

  The siblings sipped from bottles of water, and nibbled fruit and cheese, and celebrated their abundance.

  They'd gathered Skellies for crucial operations from every industry vital to their human, fleshly survival.

  “To herd thinning.” Brian held his very expensive glass of Cabernet Sauvignon up for Madeline to clink with her own, his face smug with victory.

  “In a month the serum will no longer be viable, and the "Skellies" as they've called themselves, will begin to grow flesh again.”

  “Not before they shatter each other trying to get hold of the IV supplies,” Brian said, popping a spicy little canape into his mouth, followed by another sip of wine.

  “By the time the human race's bodies are restored, the world population will be so significantly reduced that there will be no shortages of anything.”

  “Except humans,” Brian smiled, munching another.

  “And thus the world is transformed,” Madeline said, in a congratulatory tone, bereft of the remorse that anyone less than a raving psychopath would have felt after slaughtering almost seven billion people.

  “And since we control the water,” Brian started.

  “And the serum that may or may not be introduced into it at any given time,” Madeline continued.

  “We have been transformed into the empress and emperor of New Earth.”

  Just then, a server entered the conference room with a tray of vegetables and breads and cheeses.

  “Oh for God's sake, Nanette,” Madeline whispered. “Please remove yourself from our presence until tomorrow when your body is fully restored.”

  “Pardon, ma'am?” Nanette said, out of habit, then her hand covered her mouth, and she noticed musculature and arteries forming around the bones. Skin had not yet begun to form. She gasped at the grisly body part, her own or not, and realized why her employers were so grossed out.

  She had thought, a few days ago, that her skin and muscles and internal organs dropping away from her bones was gross. Growing back wasn't much better. She nodded towards her employers. “Yes ma'am, right away. Please excuse me,” she said. Hmm, her tongue and lips were back, and apparently her vocal cords.

  All over the world, conversation began between former Skellies who now had lips and cheeks, hearts and lungs, intestines and muscles. As it has been since the beginning of time, those who are born to lead, led, organizing skilled labor into groups, and getting things running again.

  Evolvement and devolvement all within a week. What a malleable race!

  KEEP THE CHANGE

  Dave Gammon

  “I SAID the money, you scrawny prick, and now!” The unwavering confidence of the masked, gun wielding assailant snapped me back to a cold-hearted reality.

  “Move! Are you deaf? Retarded or both? We ain’t got all night.”

  I loosened the embrace upon my cherished companion, Jaime-Lee. As the world swam in and out of focus around me an undeniable sense of surrealism took hold. With great reluctance I cursed myself for being on the opposite side of the counter. The business end, of course, where the panic button reserved for such precarious circumstances seemed miles away. I glimpsed at the bottle of Merlot and a sheet of hand written poetry I’d presented to her mere seconds before this intrusive onslaught. The ring leader caught my gaze and offered his rebuttal, void of any sentiment. “Aww, so sorry to interrupt your Hallmark moment party of one, Solo Romeo, but time’s a tickin’ and I don’t see any cash in hand. Comprende?” For added emphasis, he shoved the barrel of his pistol into the center of my forehead and shoved with over eager vehemence.

  Whether from stark, primal fear, frustration, or the initial stages of one of my world class fugue states I’d become accustomed to as of late, I trembled in reckless abandon. On instinct, my eyes scanned the store for any shred or clue of an equalizer. My eyes returned to the vintage nestled on the counter’s edge.

  “Don’t be a wise ass, lover boy. Nobody likes a god-damn hero.” White hot rage began to swirl and fester deep in the core of my being. This mouth-piece was beginning to push me closer and closer to the edge. Just as his latest tirade was spewed forth, his two matching sidekicks zeroed in. Without a second thought I grabbed Jaime-Lee by the shoulders and whirled her behind me, retreating a step or two.

  A blast ignited the dismal, dusty air, forcing all in the room but one to flinch and cringe from its unspeakable ramifications.

  Lowering his pistol from his vertical stance, the ring leader spoke with calculated precision.

  “Just a little taste test to remind you who’s boss around here.”

  He thrust the barrel against my lips and shoved once again.

  “Next one’s in your, knee cap or this pretty little face. Choice is yours asshole.”

  Behind me, Jaime-Lee gasped and shuddered. My heart shattered into a thousand pieces at my inability to comfort and shield her from this insane invasion.

  “Fuck, Dave! Just do what he says!” She screamed, coming undone and hysterical before me.

  The sidekicks before us just heckled and jeered at my obvious dread and unease.

  Mortality. Nothing prompts one more than a loaded gun brandished by a desperate, wayward soul in your face. Where life is concerned, we use it, abuse it, and take it for granted. We make resolutions to ourselves, promise to be better people and then find ways to deny the things that make us feel alive.

  Cancer. Now that’s an attention grabber. Such an abstract thing for many and holds deadlier connotations for others. I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer c
alled Von Hippel Landau Syndrome about a year ago. At first glance it may appear this is an odd diversion from this tale but it holds a wealth of significance to me and everyone involved in this hellacious reflection.

  Just a little over a year ago I began to experience intense headaches, nausea, dizziness to the point of vertigo and, of course, blurred vision. If you’re familiar with those old 35mm reels of film that are placed in a projector and the squiggles of lines that appear, well you get a firm grasp of what I see out of my left eye at any given time. My wife at the time had strongly encouraged me to go to a doctor to get it checked out. I feigned absolute resistance and it likely spawned from a place of utter fear of the worst kind. Sure enough, a battery of tests were ordered from Ophthalmologists, Oncologists, and just about any other doctor that ended with gist. A quarter sized tumor was found on the bottom side of my retina. The tumor leaked a secretion hindering my vision. The good doctors had offered a somewhat experimental treatment of stitching a time lapsed radiation plaque into my eye that would combat the progression of the tumor over the course of a week. It seemed like everything was well and on the mend again and I would at last attain some sort of semblance towards an otherwise uncertain future. I continued to work throughout the course of this time. In hindsight, considering this ill-fated evening, I would have fared far better to take a leave of absence and lick my wounds in the sanctity of my own darkness. My wife found me insufferable and intolerable and, not entirely by coincidence, left me.

  She had proclaimed, “If you expect me to sit around and watch you die, you’re sadly mistaken.” Yeah. Thanks for the resilient support and for better and worse, sickness and in health and all of that.

  Right around the same time is when Jaime-Lee entered my life. I can honestly say that my life has never been the same. Even when everything seemed right and well again, a second tumor had exhumed this time in the core of my retina. It spread at unfathomable speed to the frontal lobe of my brain. It wasn’t terminal per se as each of the good doctors wanted to remain as evasive about that as possible. Yet at the same time they felt there was conclusive reasoning that the endeavor was inoperable, being too risky and wanted to monitor the progress on a regular basis.

  Wow! That seemed like a whole lot of fluff to me. Forever avoiding the pessimist in me I wanted desperately not to believe that an infection on the brain was one and the same as saying you’re a dead man walking.

  The bitter, twisted irony of it all is these three goons clad in leather, ski masks or balaclavas could shiv me or blow my brains out right here and now and not even be the wiser they would in all likelihood be doing me a favor. But of course there was Jaime-Lee to consider and I had to make sure she made it out of this unscathed if it was the last thing I did.

  Hyperventilating with indignation, my eyes met hers. It took all of a nanosecond for my cheeks to become stained with tears of agony to match her own. I offered my best telepathic expression of comfort I could conjure and burst into life behind the counter.

  “Easy, big man. Keep those mitts where I can see them.” His voice was gruff and haggard, the stuff that years of cheap whiskey and chain smoking was comprised of. “Now if we all play like good little kiddies and do exactly what good ol’ Uncle Knuckles says to the tee than we might just make it on out of here alive.” With a theatrical sweep of his arm, his locked and loaded pistol accentuated every syllable. “What you’re going to do big man, nice and slow like, is turn off the open sign and lock the door. I know you’re just about closed shop for the night so it ain’t no matter, no mind anyhow.”

  “R-right, okay.” I’d found my voice at last, as dry and croaked as it came out. “Just be cool and I’ll get you guys out of here in no time.” The words sounded foreign to me: like a third party in the distance. It seemed the more I spoke the calmer and more reassuring I sounded. Inside was another story. My heart jack-hammered beneath my ribs, prompting bursts of indigo to cloud over my vision. My hands vibrated more than shook, regardless of the nondescript mantra I repeated in my head over and over. Sure enough, this was one of those fugue like states unveiling their ungodly symptoms one by one. These damnable lapses in time that I did everything to keep my barrage of specialists and doctors apprised of from the moment they’d surfaced. Oh sure, they had all the answers. Prescribe tranquilizers, then anti-depressants. Support groups. It’s just anxiety they’d said, a perfectly natural way for the body to react to the affliction.

  Not on your life. I knew exactly what it was. The more often it occurred the more I understood it. The fight to control it, on the other hand, was constant. Being the fool hardy, stubborn block head that I was I continued to work in an environment that often saw hundreds of people a day. Big mistake.

  You see, I have been given the gift (or more aptly, as I like to refer to it as, the curse) of seeing the evil that lurks within. It started off innocently enough, this reawakening. But, boy oh boy, was it a wallop.

  This teen was in line and asked for a pack of cigars, blunts as the gangstas like to refer to them as. My trained, ever perceptive eye asked him how old he was getting prepared to launch in a whole debacle over identification lunged towards the counter’s edge while feeling like I was in a giant snow globe and someone had just turned it topsy-turvy and given it a firm shake for good measure. A translucent red curtain was drawn over my eyes and the voices I heard were like slow motion reverb, almost as if they were underwater. I was in a completely different time and place and saw the world through the kid’s eyes. A synthetic sneer crept over lips that were no longer mine while pilfering cash out of an oblivious parent’s wallet. I flashed forward to an entirely different locale. Billowing plumes of stagnant, rich reefer clouded the room. With the stolen cash, he procured a bag of weed then pinched a piece of his dealer’s stash when he went to the washroom. All of this transpired for this kid in the past half hour.

  “Jesus, mister!” The high pitched squeal slapped me back to the then and now. “Forget the blunts, yo.” He muttered some expletive about freaks and stormed out the door. I’d looked down at my pulsing forearms and was mortified at the thick tufts of blackened hair gradually dissipating before my eyes. My back felt wretched and contorted as it snapped and popped back into alignment. Right then and there I knew something was well beyond off. This was no mere prognosis that over confident doctors swept beneath the rug. This was a bona fide curse that got more and more intense with each occurrence.

  There was the time this middle aged couple was in line buying scratch tickets. His infidelity reeked so viciously I was amazed she wasn’t gagging. Playing the horizontal hokey-pokey with his secretary at work a few short hours ago, in his all too casual demeanor, he figured no one was ever the wiser. That time I actually did fall to the floor. I had to hide the beginnings of talon like claws surfacing where my cuticles ordinarily were behind my back just to save myself from being hauled off to the local sanitarium, zoo or worse. It was everything I had in my quivering tongue to assure them I was fine and they could be on their way. It seemed like every dirty little deed that wallowed in the shadows of the tainted came to life before me in vivid Technicolor. It was getting more intense each time. Yet somehow I could keep it relatively under control. I refused to relent and knew deep down there had to be a reason for all of this.

  “Hey Big Time!” I flinched at the animosity in his growl. “You seem awfully distracted for a dude about to wear his knee cap on the other side.” After flipping the obligatory open sign to its off position I shifted my glance over to Jaime-Lee to see how she was coping. Knuckles preyed upon my sizzled nerves and reefed at the edge of my collar.

  Stale alcohol and chewing tobacco waffled between his lips and curdled my stomach upon impact. Gingerly, almost with finesse, he whispered, “Yeah you’ve got an awful time concentratin,’ Big Time.” With what must have been the cockiest of sneers I saw a tuft of Knuckle’s ski mask rise ever so slightly. “Roach. Skids. Take it in the back so my home boy and me here can take care of a little busine
ss.”

  I jarred around in a panicked frenzy. The light caught the edge of Skid’s machete, blinding me with mockery.

  “No! Let her go,” I’d screamed with everything I was worth. In a pleading, desperate whisper, “Please. This has nothing to do with her. Just let her go. I’ll do anything…give you anything you want.”

  My groveling cries of mercy were met with an uproar of skin crawling laughter from Roach and Skids. Roach’s bandana rippled to punctuate each rasping cackle.

  “Let’s get this party started,” he whirled with new found exuberance to his fellow soldier of misfortune.

  Roach returned his elated sense of enthusiasm with a lewd gesture I’ll refrain from describing here.

  “Oh yeah, boy we’re going to have some F-U-N with this tasty little number.” Unceremoniously he clutched the bottle of Merlot as they made their swift retreat to the back room.

  On sheer impulse I darted from behind the counter in one final, feeble attempt at a last stand.

  “Hey, Dip Shit! Not so fast.” An echoing boom rivaling Knuckle’s earlier warning shot ricocheted off the walls. And then my world went black.

  I have no idea how long I was out for. In the days, weeks and months that had passed I replayed this terrifying ordeal in my mind, asleep or awake, a thousand times. From how it’s been explained to me, Knuckle’s promise to blow out my knee cap missed about six inches north and instantly severed the femoral artery. Let me be the first to testify that the gunshot wounds you read about in books and illustrated in television and movies aren’t exactly accurate. It all happened so fast I had no idea what had hit me except the fact I was vertical one minute and rapidly descending into an unknown, dark abyss the next. Blood on the other hand was pretty much spot on the way you see it in the movies. A rain of dark red splashed against the cigarette shutters, lotto scratch trays, chocolate bar wrappers, bags of chips and pretty much anything else within a ten-foot radius. I don’t even remember falling. All simple laws of physics, time and space seemed suspended. A wave like rush of echoing reverb punched at my ear drums.