Infected (Open) [Halloween RP]

Dannah Heights (W)

"Hello, stranger."

Alec stopped. The sidewalk he had been strolling on was empty as far as he could see. The voice had come from behind and to his right. He turned. A silhouette was leaning against an apartment building, arms and legs crossed. He couldn't see the man's face or clothes.

"Hm?" Alec grunted questioningly. The silhouette reached out with his arm and beckoned. The arm came into the light briefly. The skin was pale and hung loosely, as if the man had just survived a major explosion. Alec, out of more curiosity than anything, stepped closer.

Suddenly, the silhouette dropped his arm and raised his other, flashing a dark pistol in the air to rest, level with Alec's nose, a mere two yards away. Alec froze.

"I've been watching you, stranger," the silhouette said. "Pretending that I never existed. You remember the battles. The bloodshed. Well, now I'm back. This will have been your second opportunity to join me."

Alec's face twisted in puzzlement. "Who are you?"

"I am every single ghost in your past that you have tried to flee, caught up with you all at once. I am the nightmares in your dreams. I am the ghouls in the corner of your eye. I am the memory of a thousand corpses that you have contributed to Hades. I'm here to bring you back."

Alec grunted, and twisted his torso, letting his sub-machine gun fall out of one of his inner jacket pockets. He threw his arm back to balance himself, and used his other to grab the weapon, firing at the figure as it shot at where his chest once was. The silhouette collapsed under the hailstorm of bullets.

Alec walked up to the corpse and kicked at it to turn it over and get a look at its face. Before he could get a look at its face, it rose up, off of the ground, and rushed him. He staggered back as pain swept through his hand. The b*****d had bitten him! He pushed the figure back, and watched as it fled down an alleyway. He looked down at his hand. It bled, though not much. A rotted tooth had become lodged in the skin. He pulled it out and tossed it aside with an angry grunt.

"The freaks these days," he thought, as he turned and continued his stroll. "It's enough to give a man a.........

...headache."

When I was young, I used to catch a cold once or twice a year. Perhaps there's some reasoning behind it that would make sense to a Machine Program. Perhaps it was just a lack of originality in hard-wiring my memories of life in foreign countries. Regardless, I would fall ill with something like the flu once or twice a year- the first time in March and the second time in December.

My mother and I had a theory as to why this would happen. In March, the onset of the symptoms was brought about by a combination of stress and allergies. As the snow began to melt in Graz, my hometown in Austria, the plants and trees would come back to life. They would throw up pollen to spread life about the town and the countryside- and, of course, this pollen would play havoc on my sinuses. The excitement of a new year, the impending summer and my birthday would cause my immune system to abandon its post long enough for the allergy to really get me feeling under the weather.

In December, it was a similar theory. The cause of my two-to-three day sickness was a combination of stress and allergies. You know those incense candles they burn around Christmas? Combine over-powering scents like those and the excitement of the season and you have the recipe for a brief feeling of sickness.

Aside from these theories I had in my Bluepill life, there was one common thread between all of the illnesses I suffered during my childhood. Before I got sick, I would always smell this bizarre scent. It wasn't the pollen or the incense. It was something else entirely. I would call it... well, the best way to translate it to English would be "the sick smell". It always just smelled like sickness somehow. A little like the smell you might detect coming off of an aging and chronically ill relative only weeks before they die. Or like the smell you can detect even over the pungent chemicals in a hospital wing.

It's the smell of suffering. Maybe some of us are just attuned to the emotions and physical well-being of others more so than the rest of the population. Maybe it's just a warning system that our minds are pre-programmed with in some kind of intuition.

In any case, I smelled that smell again today as I walked the streets of Westview. There's normally a stench of decay hanging over that part of the city. But I'd know this smell- the smell of suffering- anywhere. It's something that you just don't forget once you've encountered it once.

I pray, for all our sakes, that no one else encounters it this autumn. But somehow the way the leaves just keep piling up and rotting on the side of the road tells me that this is a sickness which refuses to be ignored. It will just keep rotting, keep festering until it boils up over the rim of the boundaries we set up around it whenever it seeks to spread.