by Amy Cross
"What are you waiting for?" I ask, turning to Toad. "Kill it!"
"So much blood-lust in such a pretty young woman," the creature says with a smile. "I like it. You're a lot better than the ones who just scream."
"I want to know everything," Toad says, with his gun still aimed at the creature. "I want to know what caused all this."
"Of course you want to know," the creature replies. "You want to convince yourself that there's still a chance you might stop it. Do you really see yourselves as heroes? Billions of people around the planet are infected with a virus that, as far as I know, can't possibly be defeated. It's only a matter of time before the rest of you pathetic creatures can be picked off, and then this planet will have reached its evolutionary zenith. Billions of organisms, all of them with one unified soul. Isn't that better than having loads of pesky individuals, butting heads with one another? At least this way, we can cooperate. Everyone will be the same. Once I've picked off the last few survivors, anyway."
"What are you?" Toad asks, keeping his gun aimed down into the pit.
"How about you help me up from here?" the creature replies. "I'll be happy to explain everything before I kill you. You'll be the lucky ones. You'll get to know what's happening before you die. Then again, maybe that makes you the unlucky ones instead."
"You're not making any sense," Toad replies. "How about you tell us, nice and simply, what the hell you are. Stop talking in riddles, stop dancing around the subject, and just tell us the truth."
"As far as I can tell," the creature continues, "this body used to be a mountain ranger of some kind. Definitely something linked to law enforcement. He died in a cabin, a few miles away, just on the edge of your property. He was a very fit young man, which is useful, but he had another use. Would you care to guess what it is? Do you have any idea why I was so pleased to get control of this particular body?"
"No-one's doing any guessing," Toad says firmly.
"Fine," the creature continues. "I'll show you." With that, he switches his position a little, and I realize that he's got a gun in his left hand; before I can react, a shot rings out.
Instinctively ducking out of the way, I land hard on the forest floor. As Toad lands next to me, I turn and see that there's a huge red wound in his left shoulder, and his eyes look empty and glassy. For a fraction of a second, I'm convinced that he's dead, but then he lets out a gasp and a pained groan, and I realize that there's still just about some hope.
"The fucker had a gun!" the creature shouts from the bottom of the pit, firing several more times into the air. "Can you believe my luck? There was a gun in his hand when he died! I didn't even have to pick it up! I just took over his body and there it was, already clutched in his delicate little hand!"
"Are you okay?" I ask, watching as Toad blinks a couple of times. With the rain continuing to fall, much of the blood from his shoulder wound is already starting to flood down onto the forest floor. He opens his mouth, as if he's trying to say something, but the effort is too much. He might be alive now, but he won't be for much longer unless I can find a way to staunch the flow of blood and patch him up properly. For a fraction of a second, I can't help thinking back to the moment a few days ago when I watched Henry die. Is the same thing about to happen again?
Panicking, I reach into the pocket of the waterproof coat and take out my gun. I check that the safety catch is off, and then I decide that I've only got one chance here. Filled with anger, I listen for a moment to the sound of the creature laughing in the pit, and then I step forward and fire straight into its face. The first shot blows one side of its head clean away, and as it slumps back down against the spike I fire again and again, and finally three more times until the gun clicks and I realize that I'm out of bullets. I stand and stare for a moment, convinced that the damn thing is going to still be alive, but finally I realize that I've blown its head apart. There's no hint of life, and no more movement other than a trickle of blood flowing from the neck. Still feeling breathless, I look down at the gun and realize that my hands are shaking.
With rain still falling all around me, I put the gun back into my pocket and hurry over to Toad. As soon as I kneel next to him and check his pulse, I realize that he's still alive, but he's bleeding heavily. For a moment, all I can do is stare at him, as if my mind has completely frozen. Finally, however, I realize that I have to do something. If I just sit here and wait, he's going to die, the same way that Henry died. I might not have much of a chance, but at least I have to try to save him. There's got to be a way.
"Can you hear me?" I ask, trying not to panic.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out.
"What do I do?" I continue. "You've been shot in the shoulder. What am I supposed to do? How do I fix it?"
For a moment, he seems to be trying to say something, but the effort is clearly too much.
"I'm taking you back to the cave," I say, struggling to pick him up. At first, I figure that there's no way I'm strong enough to carry him, but finally, somehow, I'm able to get to my feet while holding him in my arms. The effort require to carry him is immense, and I feel as if I'm going to collapse at any moment, but finally I start staggering across the forest floor, heading back the way we came. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do, but I have to try to do something. Three days ago, I lost my brother to a gunshot wound, and there's no way I'm going to let someone else die. If it's the last thing I ever do, I'm going to find a way to save Toad and get us back to the farm.
By the time we reach the cave, however, I'm almost ready to collapse. I place Toad on the ground, out of the rain, as I realize that the fire has already burned out. There's a rumble of thunder high above, and I look down at Toad's face, hoping for a sign of life.
"Wake up!" I shout, with tears running down my face. "You have to wake up!"
No response.
Reaching down, I check his pulse. To my surprise, I realize that he's not dead yet, even though he's lost a lot of blood. Still, he's unconscious, and he clearly doesn't have much time left. I know I should do something, but I'm scared that I'll just make everything worse. Blood is still flowing from his wound, and he's starting to look pale. If the situation was reversed, he'd know what to do; he'd fix me up and get us back to the farm. I'm useless, though. I don't know the sfirst thing about saving someone from a gunshot wound.
Outside, the rain seems to be falling more heavily than ever, and lightning is still arcing across the sky in the distance. I have to do something. I have to save Toad, and then I have to make sure that we get back to the farm. Right now, however, I feel as if I'm frozen in place. This is what happened when Henry died. I failed him, and I'm going to fail Toad. I'm no use in a crisis, and I can't even begin to save the life of someone who's been shot. He's going to die right here in front of me, and then I'll be trapped alone here, lost in the wilderness. It's over. I'm going to die out here.
Thomas
Missouri
Sitting in the corner of the basement, with my back to the wall, I stare across at the dead body by the far wall. I've been over here in this corner for hours now, too scared to move, but I can't take my eyes of the horrific sight that I uncovered when I pulled the sacks away. I swear to God, this whole house is the creepiest, weirdest place in the world.
"Please," I whisper for the thousandth time, "get me out of here." I've spent the past few hours praying, desperately hoping that God might take pity on me and find a way to get the door open. Then again, God hasn't been much in evidence lately. Why would He allow the world to go to hell like this? Why would he let my parents die, and my brother, and all those other people whose bodies I've seen? Why would he let that Lydia woman die in such a painful and horrible way? I want to believe that there's some kind of plan here, that the world hasn't just fallen into chaos, but right now it's as if everything is falling apart.
Finally, after hours and hours of doing nothing, I get to my feet and start walking toward the far corner, where the dead body is partially
uncovered. I've been putting this moment off for as long as possible, I figure I need to take a look and try to work out what happened. I've seen a hell of a lot of dead bodies over the past week, but I'm still not used to the damn things. Then again, as I get closer, I realize that this body is different to the others. She's not bloated or decomposed, and she doesn't seem fresh. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd say she's been dead for a hell of a long time. Years, maybe even decades.
Although my gut instinct is to turn and run, I crouch next to the body and stare at her face. Her mouth is open in a kind of twisted scream, and although her eyes have long since shriveled up, I'm pretty sure she was staring up at something. Her skin is totally dry and gnarled, and her limbs are almost like the roots of a tree. There's some long black hair still attached to the top of her head, and I can't help noticing that part of her neck looks to have been damaged, as if it's been eaten away. She's too far gone for me to be able to tell what killed her, or even how old she was when she died, but as I stare at her face, I'm overwhelmed for a moment by a feeling of pity.
Reaching down to the cloth sacks, I pull them away from her feet and see that there's a pair of iron chains still attached to her ankles. Did she also happen to stumble upon this house, many years ago? Did the old man capture her, the same way he captured me, and keep her down in this basement until she died? I've been assuming until this moment that the old man's madness has to be connected with everything else that's going on in the world, but what if it's completely separate? What if this girl was captured back when the world was normal? What if he just likes to leave people to die in his basement? Turning to look over at the door, I suddenly realize that maybe he isn't ever coming back.
Epilogue
No-one comes to move him.
For the first few hours, the television continues to fill the room with light and sound. Eventually, however, the signal is abruptly cut and the screen goes dark. There's still noise from the city, but this too fades over time and eventually it's as if the whole world has fallen completely silent. Later, there's the brief sound of rain against the window, but this doesn't last too long.
Silence.
Joseph's body remains absolutely still. He's on the bed, with sheets covering him all the way up to his chest. His dead face stares up at the ceiling, as if he was expecting something to appear above him as he died. There's still a faint grin on his face, but his eyes are dead and his body has started to stiffen. Already, his eyes appear to have sunk deeper into the sockets, and the skin on his face looks tighter. Deep inside his torso, the process of decomposition has begun. He's the first, but not by much; soon, billions of people all over the world are going to follow him into death, but there's one crucial difference.
For Joseph, this is only the beginning. This is the moment when everything starts again, and soon the whole world is going to be remade in his image. Even as he drew his last breath, Joseph was absolutely certain that he would rise again in billions of new bodies, his conscious mine shattered and poured into all those new souls.
On the far side of the room, sets of notebooks are piled on top of a small desk. These are the notebooks that contain all his plans. If everything works out as he expected, the world is about to enter a period of necessary darkness that will pave the way for an eventual explosion of light. Joseph took a risk, and part of that risk involved his own death, but he was convinced - even up to the very last second - that the pain and misery would be worth every second. He knew that he simply had to get through these final moments and embrace the darkness, and he knew that there would be something else waiting for him on the other side. Something triumphant. Something beautiful and spiritual and real. He knew that he would wake up again one day. One day soon.
But not in this body.
This body, the original - the prime - is useless. In a way, it always had to end this way. By the time his body has fulled rotted away, however, he hopes to be back in the world. His world.
Day Twelve
Prologue
"Has anyone seen Joseph?" asks Dr. McNulty, stepping into the faculty office.
"Not since Thursday," replies Dr. Groom, taking a sip from a cup of coffee. Pausing for a moment, she looks over at her colleague and sees that he seems worried. "Why? Don't tell me you actually miss that pedantic asshole?"
"It's not about missing him," McNulty says, pouring himself a cup. "It's about being responsible for a departmental budget that pays the salary of a man who seems to have gone walkabout." He pauses for a moment. "There's also the small matter of some missing inventory in the store-room. Someone's been taking things, nothing too important, but I'd still like to get to the bottom of it."
"Probably Joseph," Groom replies nonchalantly. "I don't know why you even keep him around. The guy's more trouble than he's worth. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he's started taking bits and pieces. Seriously, he just grinds everyone else down all day."
"You don't know what he's been working on."
"Then tell me."
McNulty sighs. He's been carefully keeping the true nature of Joseph's work from the rest of the department for the past few months, but now it's starting to look as if the whole project is falling apart. "It started as a private research proposal," he says after a moment, still feeling as if maybe he's revealing too much information. "Joseph was interested in the generation of intelligent, targeted viruses. He'd been sequencing some patterns that seemed to indicate..." He pauses again, aware that the whole thing is starting to sound a little foolish. "He was curious about the possibility that individual virus strains might have their own personalities."
"In other words," Groom replies grumpily, "science-fiction."
"That's what it sounded like at first," McNulty says, "but his proposal was actually quite good. He showed that there were some avenues for possible investigation, and I figured it might be worth taking a look. The date indicated that supposedly identical viruses sometimes showed certain predilections toward particular actions, and Joseph was convinced that this was more to do with emotional response than any kind of biological mechanism."
"Emotional response?" Groom asks with a smile. "In a virus?"
"He only wanted a couple of weeks and a few thousand dollars, so I told him to go ahead. If nothing else, I thought it'd be good to get him out of the way. It worked, didn't it? The guy stopped bugging the rest of us."
"And then what?" Groom asks. "He fucked off?"
"I just checked his personal account on the server," McNulty replies. "Before he left, he deleted everything. Not just a few files. Every single piece of data. And then he saved over the disk several times with garbage, just to make sure that we couldn't reconstruct what he'd taken. This wasn't someone deleting his history. This was someone making damn sure to scour everything so that there was no trace left behind. Whatever he was doing, he was clearly determined to make sure that we couldn't get into his files."
"So he wasn't just an asshole," Groom says. "He was a paranoid asshole."
"Maybe, but he wasn't an idiot. Obviously he signed all the necessary paperwork, but I'm starting to wonder if he discovered something more useful than he'd expected. If he's shopping his work around to the highest bidder, it'd make sense for him to wipe away any incriminating evidence first. He knows that anything he discovered while he's under contract would automatically belong to the university."
"So you think he's trying to make a quick profit?"
McNulty takes another sip of his coffee. "If it was anyone else," he says eventually, "that's exactly what I'd think. But Joseph's different. He's bitter, and he seems to hate everyone. Sometimes that guy worries me, and now I'm starting to wonder if I should have paid more attention to what he was doing."
"You make it sound like the guy's insane," Groom says. "From what you've told me, it seems far more likely that he just disappeared down his own rabbit hole while he was trying to justify some kind of insane theory. The only mistake you made, from the sound of things, is that you indulged his r
idiculous endeavors. Seriously, wouldn't it have been better to have just shut him down and tell him to go fuck himself?" She waits for an answer, but McNulty is clearly lost in thought. "What's wrong?" she asks eventually. "I've seen that look on your face before. You're really worried about this, aren't you?"
"I just feel that maybe I misjudged Joseph," McNulty replies cautiously. "I was too eager to buy into the idea that he's some kind of crank, but what if he was really onto something, and what if he's got some kind of end-game in mind?" He pauses. "I think it might be an idea to see if there's any way to get that data off his hard-drive after all. You never know. Meanwhile, someone should go and take a look at his apartment, see if there's any sign of him."
"I've got nothing better to do," Groom says, finishing her coffee and getting to her feet. "I'm still on the clock, of course. I don't want this written off as some kind of personal trip. Also, I'll be stopping off for another coffee once I've checked on him. That's my fee for this ridiculous trip." She heads to the door, before turning back to McNulty. "Come on, lighten up. Yeah, the guy was a freak, but he wasn't some kind of mastermind. He's just gone off the radar, and if we're lucky, he won't be coming back. Let's just celebrate the fact that maybe we've got rid of him without too much trouble."
With that, she heads out of the room, leaving McNulty to hope that she's right. He can't shake the feeling, however, that Joseph might have had other plans.
Elizabeth
Pennsylvania