run

prologue : 2322

She stands over the corpse of her husband, a corpse she kissed with blackened lips as she tried to revive him. But it was too late. He lies on the side of the road, one arm slung into the cornfields, his fingers now fat, puffy, swollen, stiff.

He was the first, but he won't be the last.

He lies there looking like roadkill, neck snapped back at a wrong angle, at a disturbing angle, limbs splayed, his intestines spilling out from his abdomen from where he clawed them out, screaming in pain, screaming a demented scream, a twisted sound that bubbled out from his mouth in black, acidic froth that ate at his lips. His stomach swims in a pool of dark red blood infused with a black cloud.

She hasn't left him, and although she knew it was a mistake staying with him when he first came home wild-eyed, wide-eyed, twitchy and disturbing, she stayed. Strange things, he said. Odd things. He would wake up and point at the door of their room as she lay curled up around him, with her arm slung over his chest like his arm lies slung over a bloodied corncob. And he would tell her, in a hushed voice, that he saw demons inside the walls of their small home. That he saw monsters. And she told him the only monsters that exist are the ones under the bed when you're five years old, but he refused to believe her.

He only got worse. She told him to go to the doctor's, and the poor man sat there covered head-to-toe in a plastic bag as he examined her husband, shone a light down his throat and into his eyes, checked his temperature, and prescribed him some anti-anxiety pills to help him with his nightmares. They didn't help, so they went again, and the doctor prescribed stronger pills, and some more to help with the fever that was growing.

She suggested they go to the countryside.

They left the city and she drove them out into a small cabin in the woods, out into the middle of nowhere, with cornfields that stretch a hundred miles in every direction, with luscious green fields and not another person in sight, with shady forests and cool air.

And she loves him still. It hurts, to love. It hurts, to live. It hurt for him, and it hurts for her, still. She hasn't left his side since he collapsed on the side of the road as they went for a walk. Forced to watch him as the star inside his head turned into a raging supernova, exploding, turning his brain into sludge that drooled out from both ears. She retched from the smell, took several steps before kneeling down beside him and trying to calm him down. When he wouldn't stop, she tried calling 911, but there was no service on her cell phone. They were out here, all alone, but they had each other. Now, all she has is his corpse.

▿

She stands up, sits down, the concrete hard and uncomfortable against her tailbone, but she crosses her legs nevertheless and bends forwards, her eyes watering from the acrid air surrounding her husband. She turns her head to look at him again, as a startlingly bright flash of blue appears, but it's only the t-shirt he'd clawed to bits. His fingernails are caked with fat, flesh, grime, black and red.

It's difficult not to look, but bile rises in her throat and she looks away just in time to keep it down. She clutches her stomach, the bump now big enough so its shape seeps through the fabric of her dress. It's a flowery dress, white, patterned with petaled forget-me-nots. Their pale and dark blue petals look like dots on the fabric, bright and lively, distasteful to her, and ironic, because everyone will forget them, because they will be laid to rest under a white sheet and under piles and piles of suffocating blankets from governments, from the media. And everyone will forget how they died.

Her hand moves over the unflattering bulge in her stomach, caressing it, consoling it, as though it would help with consoling her.

And it will start to ache, to cramp up, and her fingers will tighten around the bulge in her stomach. And it will only get worse.

▿

The bump swells at an alarming rate, stretching the skin of her belly so quickly that she feels as though she'll split in two. Sometimes intuition helps predict the future. Her skin has reached the limit of its elasticity, but the baby- or whatever abnormality this is- keeps growing. And like an elastic band that's pulled too hard, it begins to break. A fine, red line. A red line that expands, blooms wide open like a bleeding rose in spring. It stretches; she screams. The thread-like cut expands into a gaping wound. She pulls the dress up as blood seeps through it, turning the blue forget-me-nots black, bundling the skirt and hugging it to herself.

She throws her head back, shudders, closes her eyes tightly and takes in hollow, rapid breaths in an attempt to stall the pain. Then, the sound of fabric ripping- but it's not fabric, it's tissue ripping. Fat, muscle, organ. She lets out a scream of pain that the wind carries over the golden fields of corn that bathe in the rays of an afternoon sun, but there's nobody to hear her.

Besides, it's too late to hear her, and she knows it.

She's still alive, just barely, as, among the inner organs that are spilling out, with streams of bright red blood, a dark mass begins to move out. It's black, as black as an endless, starless night sky, infinite in colour, invasive as it moves out of her. It looks like one would expect a virus to look like - round, but at the same time spiked, animated as it moves. All she sees before her head rolls back and hits the road as she dies is it climbing onto the street, using her spilled organs as a stepladder down.

She was the second, but she wouldn't be the last.

Thus lay two mangled corpses on the side of an infinite road, in the middle of nowhere, amongst the yellow cornfields of the countryside, and their murderer- an animate, unknown life-form, disappeared into the bush.

And the trail it left behind wouldn't be seen as anything other than an 'accident' until fifty years later, when the world was in despair.