by Eli Nixon
Had I really been about to eat Titan? I looked around for him and found the little guy sitting calmly on the slope beside me, picking a briar twig off his back as if to remove the final traces of our forest purgatory. I suddenly realized that I'd left the shotgun and the backpack on the ground when I started chasing Titan. The pistol was firmly holstered on my belt, but I still believed I was saving those bullets for Jennie and Theo's captors.
Was it coincidence that we had come here to the edge of this housing development? Or had Titan actually led me out of the trees, baited me forward with his bites?
It seemed impossible, but fuck, what did I know about impossible anymore? They say cats can see into other worlds. Maybe they're right.
The twig removed, Titan turned back to face the forest and meowed loudly. I looked back, following his gaze, and Jesus, maybe I hadn't really imagined those pink lights in the night.
A line of people, naked and nearly completely white, stood in the trees a hundred feet away. Like the creatures at the farm with Dinkins, they simply stood there and watched. More of them materialized out of the shadows. Their white skin gleamed, now just a few patches of the rotted, torn flesh remaining.
Darkness crowded me again at the sight and I took a step toward them. Titan hissed, and I snatched my step back. I was suddenly struck by the impression of two opposing forces engaged in some invisible war here on the border of the dark woods, Titan on one side and these strange new beings on the other. Lightness and dark. Good and evil. And I was a yo-yo in between.
As a single entity, all of the white zombies stepped forward in a synchronized motion, each leg lifting at the same instant, each foot coming down on the carpeted forest floor with the same shushed thud.
Titan bristled, arched his back, looked up at me and cooed.
What the fuck was going on here?
CONSUME.
My knees became jelly. I was sober. I began to sink to the ground but fought it. Just a few more minutes. Here were houses. Where there were houses, there were drugs. The people in the woods came another step closer, and I turned and ran down the sunlit slope toward the closest house. Titan jogged at my heels, and I swear he was purring.
I let the hill give me speed, let that speed carry me straight into the patio door of the first house, the one with the backyard that ran straight up into the woods line.
My body flew through the glass door in a blizzard of tinkling glass shards. The shards sliced me in a million places, slivers buried beneath my skin, but I didn't care.
Bleeding and panicked, I stumbled to the bathroom and ripped open the medicine cabinet. Toothpaste, aftershave, razors.
"Fuck!" I yelled, slamming the mirrored door so hard the glass cracked.
The hallway was filled with silent lightning. I shook it away, just a few more minutes, please God. I wrenched open the front door and spilled out onto the sunlit concrete stoop and smashed into a reeking body that clutched at my shirt.
I tried to shove the zombie away, but his grip was too strong. My knees were weak. I didn't realize until I thought about it later that even though the creatures in the woods looked so much different, this guy had continued to decay. A normal zombie, if there was such a thing. They were splitting into two breeds.
I grabbed his head in both hands and twisted it, and his neck had decayed so badly that the head simply popped off in my hands. The smell of rot rolled out of the neck stump. The broken top of his spine was a white disc in the center of the bloody black and red stump. The flesh on his head was sickly green, cheeks fallen away so far the bone was visible under his face. Normal bone. Not the pure white of the other things.
Disgusted, I dropped the head. The body had fallen still gripping my shirt, and I ripped the fingers away and kept running, cutting toward another house across the street. The lawn was dotted with shambling zombies that turned their heads toward me as I breezed past. Titan wove between their legs like a ferret. More of them stepped onto the street from other lawns, coming in my direction.
Miraculously, the front door was unlocked. Just before I stepped in, I looked down at Titan. If I went under, he was the first thing I'd go for. He'd given me too much. It was time to repay the favor.
"Stay here, Titan," I whispered, the words garbled, my chest tight. "Stay."
He would be fine. He had to be.
I slipped inside and closed the door.
Chapter 10
The zombies were closing in fast; not the ones outside, but the ones in my head.
I could feel them crowding the edges of my thoughts, reaching with rotten, dead fingers into my psyche, whispering with the voices of the damned. I dropped to the cold linoleum floor and curled into a ball, hands pressed against my temples like vice grips, and with a quaking voice I yelled, "Leave me alone!"
Fuck me, though: That shout attracted the attention of the shambling flesh-eaters outside.
They were converging on the source of a shout, sniffing it out like bloodhounds.
The bathroom around me dimmed in slow, pulsing throbs, and a streak of lightning shot across my brain.
They were getting in. The whispers, unheard by everyone but me, were getting louder, taking form and weight. A gnawing hunger unfurled inside my belly like a living thing.
And in my head, the voices gnawed into my sanity with the same voracious appetite.
You are one.
You are a part of Vitala.
I stood and tore open the mirrored medicine cabinet set into the wall over the porcelain sink. Without reading the labels, I scooped out every pill bottle I could carry, shoving the first handfuls into my pockets and then racing out of the bathroom with the rest clenched between my shaking fingers.
Down the hallway at my back, the bathroom door which I'd slammed shut as I passed collapsed in a splintery roar under the weight of dozens of bodies.
Fighting the urge to transcend to the dark side, I lunged to the right, up a flight of carpeted stairs.
At the end of the upper hallway, a door stood ajar. Something grazed my ankle and I took off running toward the open room.
I reached the room, threw the door shut, and dropped to the carpet in front of it, pressing against the wood with my back. It was a bedroom, a little girl's by the looks of the pink bedspread and mountains of stuffed toys spilling out of an open closet. Sunlight beamed through a window and smacked every surface with a golden glow. The light beams had an edge to them, though. They were sharp and deadly. Innocence took on a shade of menace in the grip of Vitala.
All good things died and were replaced with abominations of thought and sound and smell. Deep in its clutches as I was, I felt a thrill of terror even here in this pleasant relic of a child's happiness. Every shadow held a mouth, every dim corner and closet held a searching pink eye.
Even beauty could bite.
The first thump against the door at my back brought me clawing back up the slippery slope of my own mind. Back to reality, where tangible forms and impressions solidified from my nightmares.
Quickly, I scanned the two bottles in my hands. Nizatidine, 150 milligrams. A histamine H2-receptor agonist used to treat heartburn. I pitched the bottle across the room. It came to rest against the fuzzy brown arm of a toppled teddy bear.
I looked at the next label. Lubriprostone, 24 micrograms. Use for chronic constipation. Who were these people? Another body slammed into the closed bedroom door, knocking my head forward and making me bite painfully down on my tongue. The taste of copper flooded my mouth as I dropped the second bottle and dug through my torn jeans for one of the bottles I'd shoved in my pockets. I scraped them out like a shovel and three more translucent orange tubes tumbled to the carpet beside my butt. My eyes scanned them like a man searching a riverbank for his drowned lover.
Fluconazole, an oral antifungal. Useless.
Wham. The door jerked under my back.
Cimetidine, another heartburn chem. No good.
Wham. A shower of splinters and chipped paint and dust fel
l into my hair.
Darvocet, an opioid analgesic for the relief of minor pain. It'd have to do.
My fingers were jittering like water in a frying pan and it took two tries to pry the child-safety lid off the Darvocet bottle. After what seemed like the heat-death of the universe it came free with a smug little pop and I upended the bottle straight into my mouth. The door shuddered behind me again and one of the hinges shrieked free of the jamb. The incessant, phlegmy chatter of the zombies came through the opening with heightened frenzy. Fingers wormed their way under the opening. I tried to imagine what they looked like on the other side, heaped over each other like a mound of debris, squirming with their insatiable hunger, the ones against the door being slowly crushed as more and more of their brethren came barreling down the hallway in response to some unheard signal. The signal of prey, of flesh.
I chewed up the Darvocet as well as I could before swallowing, helping it into my system by way of the mucus membranes in my mouth. The tablets crumbled into a dry, bitter chalk, and I gagged as I tried to dry-swallow. Tiny chunks mixed with bloody spittle flew from my mouth before I clamped my teeth shut and forced myself to swallow again.
Duration: Three hours, give or take.
Onset: Twenty minutes. Give or take.
I was a walking medical dictionary; it's what had kept me alive so long. But all the knowledge in the world wouldn't make it any easier to get through this next twenty minutes.
So here we are, back where we started.
All things return to the beginning. The universe dies inside the Big Bang, the old man's soul becomes a newborn child.
Time is a reversal of itself, a repetition without end.
All things return to the beginning.
My body jerked to the rhythmic thud of the door at my back. The little girl's bedroom faded to black. In its space, Vitala rose before me in all its grotesque majesty.
Time ceased to flow. Inside Vitala, time became the point at which all moments in history converged. Past and present shattered over me in that little pink bedroom.
Chapter 11
The air in the northern plains grows colder by the day. Already, several nights have been marked by the soft, fluttering white flakes that fell from the sky and killed the vegetation. The apes know it without speaking: It is time to move again, before the food disappeared entirely.
Under heavy gray clouds which threaten yet another snowfall, the troop gathers together and makes preparations to go south. They don't have any understanding of what south is, have no inkling of their place on the Earth, a planet in space, but generations have taught them that when the cycle of cold descends over the plains, traveling with the first light to their left will take them into warmer lands.
Communicating with low hoots and infrequent louder cries, all of the troop's members manage to stay fairly close together inside the high plains grass, some of which grow over fifteen feet high.
It is important to stay together. Traveling like this is always dangerous. The great beasts of the northern plain vastly outnumber the dozen or so members of the troop. The troop knows to walk quietly, staying low, sometimes leaning forward onto hair-covered knuckles to distribute their weight. Running with four legs on the ground also gives them speed, their main defense should their journey be discovered by the massive plains cats.
But there is no true defense. The troop once numbered in the scores. Slowly, the long-toothed cats whittled them down to their present population. Squat, with long, dangling arms and bristly black hair over their whole bodies, the creatures live in constant fear. All they know is food and danger. If there is danger, they run. If there is no food, they move.
Distantly, as if from dreams, some of the creatures remember the sensation of height, living in trees, far from the predators below. But great fires destroyed the trees, created the windswept plains. Although their bodies were unfit, there were enough of them leftover from the fires to scavenge a life on the ground.
For a time.
Although they do not know it, their particular species of ape is nearing extinction. They have become prey to greater and stronger beasts. Only quick adaptation has kept their species alive for this long, barely two hundred years since the fires. They have learned to stay together. Their agile fingers, meant for clinging to tree branches, have learned to grasp at stones which can be hurled to keep the cats at bay.
After many days, the troop of apes reaches a wetland. Small, red mushrooms appear in patches beneath low, woody shrubs. The apes have not eaten in days. They descend on the mushrooms with a voracious appetite, consuming both the mushrooms and the large, serpentine insects which live beneath the shrubs.
But the mushrooms are poison. One ape falls over sick, swiping at himself as if covered in thousands of invisible ants. Other apes wander away from the group in a daze, unaware of the danger they're placing themselves in by going off alone. Others merely sit on the wet ground and stare at their hands, hooting in confusion.
None of them notice a second, larger troop of apes approaching from the east.
The newcomers move quickly, sweeping through the grasses with the confidence of predators. Their thick, flat teeth are chattering incessantly. A strangeness has come over their eyes.
They descend upon the smaller troop of apes like wildfire, attacking and biting and tearing the apes limb from limb. Delirious, the northern apes fight back as best they can, but half of their number are dead before they finally flee.
The mad apes follow. Some of them stumble, unsure of their footing in the boggy wetlands. One by one, the apes with the strange pink eyes pick off stragglers and dismember them alive.
Only four of the original troop remains when they finally outpace their attackers. They are deep in the wetlands now, hopelessly lost. The poisonous mushrooms have not killed them, so the young apes continue eating the bright red caps. They have no choice. There is no other food.
For two weeks, they wander the marsh before finally reaching its end. There, ahead of them, is a sight which they have never seen, but somehow recognize, perhaps from genetic memory: Trees. A vast forest, green and lush. It excites something deep within them, a yearning which had always been there but never made itself known.
Home. It was the sight of home.
Hooting to each other, the four apes run across the open land toward the tree line.
Just before the forest, a new ape steps out from the beneath the trees. The four come to a stop, regarding the newcomer warily. It is a strange ape, almost hairless and standing fully erect on its hind legs. It peels a patch of skin and hair off its chest and throws it to the ground. Its other hand holds a heavy stick.
The four apes hesitantly step closer. It is not a cat, and it doesn't appear mad, like the apes which killed their troop. They are curious. One ape hoots in greeting, but the new ape does not reply.
Its feet, they can now see, are not the same as theirs. Longer and flatter, without the big toe which grabs as easily as their hands. Its arms are shorter as well. Its shoulders do not lean forward.
It is a strange ape indeed.
A rustling sound to their left startles the four apes, and they turn just in time to see another of the strange apes swinging a stick. It strikes one of the apes in the head and he falls to the ground dead.
Fear. Now three, the apes try to run but there is another upright ape behind them. He also has a club, which he uses to bash at their faces and shoulders. More of the naked apes step out of the grass, surrounding the three apes from the northern plains.
Finally, only one hairy ape remains. He is not fighting back. He is on the ground, rolling between his dead comrades, grabbing his head in his leathery hands. The grasses around him fade into darkness. A nameless voice calls to him.
The naked apes bring him with them into the woods. He is already changing. If Vitala finds him worthy, he will soon be human, like them.
Chapter 12
I came to my senses with the sensation of rocking, as if on a ship anc
hored at sea. I cracked my eyes open and choked on a scream. Pale white faces loomed above me. The freaks from the woods, or at least more like them. They weren't looking at me, though. They were looking ahead, bobbing back and forth, swinging my prone body with the motion.
They were carrying me.
Holy fucking shit.
I let my eyes open a little more, terrified to move and reveal the fact that I was awake. My eyeballs shot left and right, seeing only a throng of white bodies. Houses flickered behind them, moving in and out of sight between the sea of white torsos. We were still in the neighborhood. The things moved silently, serenely. Quick, but unhurried.
My brain was awash in memories from the last...shit, maybe twenty minutes or so? Had it only been that long? I'd lived a lifetime in the dreams of a moment. I'd finally gone completely under before the Darvocet took effect and carried me back to the surface, like an inflating life vest pulling me off the deck of a ship sinking to the ocean floor.
The visions I'd seen scared me down the bone. No, not visions. Memories. Memories of lives I'd never had, memories of millions of years into the past. Vitala's memories. It was alive and changing us.
I finally understood.
Humanity had risen from the blood of this same plague. The missing link in our evolution.
Vitala lived in all of us. It always had. It was part of our DNA. Every hundred thousand years or so, the right conditions triggered it. It awoke and swept the planet clean, paving the way for the next stage, the next dominant species. Once its work was done, it folded its wings and went back to sleep to wait. A hundred thousand years ago, a zombie plague broke out on the surface of a primeval Earth and began civilization.
And now it had happened again and created the creatures that were carrying me away. They were the new humans. Post-humans. As much as our civilization differed from that of the apes, their civilization would contain wonders we could never dream of.
