Children of the Plague, the Ugly Beginning

@GregCarrico

I owe so much of my success as a writer to Wattpad, but I am most grateful to you: the readers who vote and share your thoughts in comments. As a thank-you for the thousands of comments, tens of thousands of votes, and over 1.4 million reads on my novel Children of the Plague, I would like to share that story's humble beginnings.

I chopped this section from the beginning of a story called Killing Tiffany Hudson, the short story that later grew into Children of the Plague. Bits and pieces have made it into both books, so readers of those stories may experience some De-Ja-Vu.

I wrote this in early 2011, and while I like to think that I have matured as a writer in that time, I have decided to share this "As-Is", in all its raw glory. The pages you are about to read have travelled through time from 2011 to be with you today, and come before you their original, untouched language. Enjoy!

Cut beginning to Killing Tiffany Hudson:

My three best friends and I cut school on the last day of our senior year to hang out at Tiffany Hudson's house. We drank her father's beers and talked about our plans and hopes for the future, promising we'd stay in touch as our new lives in the Real World tugged us in different directions.

I laughed loud and pure that day, and basked in the warm glow of friendship and expectation. High School was over, and I had a scholarship to a good college two states away. My grandfather's pristine 1970 Shelby Mustang was finally mine. But best of all, Tiffany and I would be attending schools in the same city. Life smelled as sweet as her fawn-colored hair, and I was breathing it all in.

I was the last of our small cadre to leave her house, and the heady emotion of the day swept us into each other's arms. After four years of wanting to, we kissed. When I reluctantly pulled away and opened my eyes, I beheld the most perfect sight I had ever seen. Her eyes opened in slow-motion, and her pale pink lips parted in a soul melting smile.

Xipe ruined our next kiss by stabbing Tiffany's neighbor on the front lawn. She called 911, and I ran outside. I don't know what made me do it, but I chased the knife wielding maniac between houses, hopped a chain link fence, and confronted him by someone's tool shed. He moved with incomprehensible speed. His blue knife blade hummed softly as our eyes locked.

My perception of the world and my purpose in it both changed in that instant. The important things I had discussed with my friends were important no longer. A lifetime of images, thoughts, and memories flooded into my mind as his hand fastened onto my arm like a striking snake.

His name was Xipe, and the images in my head were his, not mine. His world had been ravaged by an alien infestation. Now, the infestation was here, and he came to stop it, if he could.

The aliens were microscopic. They infected humans and fed on the electrical impulses in our brains. They very literally ate our memories, our dreams and ideas, and eventually our waking thoughts as they matured and took over our bodies.

I never saw Tiffany Hudson again. I never went to college, and never got to drive that Shelby. Instead, I abandoned my goals, my hopes, and my dreams to help Xipe exterminate the alien parasites and their infected hosts.

My whole family had been infected, but Xipe killed them before he found me, sparing me the torment of doing it myself. I had been infected, too, but I was one of the rare humans the invaders couldn't tolerate, and they quickly abandoned me. He didn't know what it was that drove them away, but he said we smelled different than other humans.

That was how he found me, and that was how he hoped to save humanity from annihilation. Together, we would sniff out the other humans like me: the ones who had been exposed to the alien nanites, but were no longer infected. If there were enough of us, we could check the infestation, and if we were fast enough, maybe even wipe it out.

The nanites the aliens left in my body changed me on a cellular level. My wounds would heal a hundred times faster, even regenerating lost parts. My brain would be a thousand times more efficient as the tiny particles forged new connections between areas of my mind that other humans couldn't use.

Only hours after Xipe found me, I could move things with my mind, I could listen to other's thoughts, and I could detect which people had been infected. To test my newly awakened abilities, we went to a shopping mall. One of every ten people there was already infected.

Xipe pointed out a middle aged man who would soon reach the infectious stage, and we followed him. He returned a woman's blouse and some shoes to J Crew, and, mission accomplished, headed briskly towards the exit. I was to kill him at his car, but when he turned into the restroom at the last second, Xipe gave me his knife and sent me in.

I pictured Tiffany's smile, but it corrupted into a frown, and then a scowl of revulsion at what I intended to do to this man. I couldn't do it. I followed him back out of the restroom, and bowed my head at Xipe's palpable disapproval.

"Pay attention," he said, tapping his forehead.

He caught up to the man, and without any sign of violence, he stabbed a focused blast of mental energy straight into his brain. All of his thoughts ceased, and he dropped like a sack of pudding with a deeply disturbing slap against the cold tile floor.

Even though I didn't kill him, I considered him my first. In a matter of minutes, I experienced a range of emotions, from guilt to sadness to rage, and finally acceptance. By the end of the day, I had killed three people; two with Xipe's knife, and one as Xipe had done, with a thought.

Everywhere we went, we killed. I couldn't help but wonder what my friends were doing with their last summer before college. I wondered if they would see pictures of Xipe or me on TV in connection with the killings. If we were stopped by the police or failed in our mission, there would be no college for them, or anyone.

We moved constantly. We found others like me, awakened them, as Xipe called it, and sent them out in pairs to find even more, killing hosts as they built an army of awakened minds. We were Exterminators. Xipe intended to call us all together in a week or two; sooner if there were enough of us to carry out his plan.

We even met another of Xipe's people, one of the five who came with him to Earth. She only stayed with us for a few minutes. They talked briefly, he gave her some orders, and she went on her way.

In a single week, our combined efforts had resulted in hundreds of new exterminators. Worldwide, unexplained deaths and murders reached staggering numbers. Still, each host we killed was the equivalent of a single ant in a hive, but we honed our skills and became more efficient with each one.

Two weeks later, our numbers plateaued, but the ratio of infected had gone to three in ten. In that time, I had killed dozens of infected people across six states. With each kill, Tiffany's smile tormented me. It accused me of horrible crimes, but I still embraced it. It had become an icon of the humanity we once shared.

Every so often, a rogue thought or desire would force its way into my consciousness, expressing a wish for things as they might have been. All I could do was suppress such thoughts and pass them off as moments of weak sentimentality.

More weeks passed, and still Xipe hadn't called the exterminators together to execute his plan. He wouldn't talk about it, but I had a feeling that we had taken too long, and our window of opportunity had closed. Fully half of the population was infected, and the number of exterminators wasn't growing to keep pace.

Three months after we met, Xipe and I sat in a hotel room listening to the talking heads on TV. They explained that the world's leaders were devoting unprecedented funds to research scientists and hospitals. They were desperate to find out why over half of the world's unborn children were reaching birth stage in a single month. Children were born as horribly mutated monsters that killed their mothers in birth. They were dangerous as infants, but deadly when they reached maturity in two days. It was the beginning of the end.

I sensed something new that day. I felt it through the hotel room wall. Xipe called it a thinker. He said that if we already reached that stage, it was probably too late. He would call the exterminators for a last stand, and with luck, we might be able to carve out a defensible quarantine zone for the remaining pure humans. Humanity was likely doomed, but what else could we do? We had to try.

The thinker was tough. It could do everything I could, and more. Its powers had developed while the aliens still infected it, making it a formidable foe. Xipe made me listen to his mind, so I could see how to defend against its mental attacks. He made a barrier around himself that deflected mental energy. He called it a block.

I wasn't fast enough, though. After his block went up, I couldn't hear his thoughts. I tried to duplicate it, but the thinker was already in. It planted false thoughts in my head, and suddenly there were two thinkers. One of them had Xipe's knife.

I surprised it with the speed and ferocity of my attack, breaking its arm and catching the knife in midair. Before it could recover, I slashed and stabbed it a dozen times. Xipe's knife was alien tech. It hummed at a very precise frequency that disabled any nanites it touched, preventing the wounded flesh from repairing itself.

The other thinker blasted me with some sort of mental attack, but my block was working by then. It still made my head hurt and my whole body feel tingly, like when your leg goes to sleep, but I was still faster than it expected.

I spun on it with the knife, and in just a couple of seconds, all that remained of the thinkers was two, mostly dissolved corpses. Of course, one of them wasn't a thinker at all. It was just Xipe, made to seem like an enemy by the real thinker. He never got the chance to call the exterminators together, or even explain his plan to me.

After that I didn't think about Tiffany or her smile again. Another month passed, and the world's governments collapsed. The dwindling populations of pure humans hid themselves in quarantine vaults in secluded parts of the world.

I walked across half of North America looking for humans I could rescue and guide to the nearest vault, but when the offspring started getting big, even the vaults couldn't keep them out. Still, I walked, I killed, and I survived.

Life was a restless nightmare of constant vigilance. When I wasn't hiding or fighting offspring, I battled the despair of knowing that my efforts would ultimately be fruitless. One day, I would mess up and they would kill me. They were getting bigger, smarter, and faster.

When I fought them, I used Xipe's knife as much as possible. It drew less attention, and let me conserve energy for defense. Using mental energy against them was effective, but it was like ringing a dinner bell. They sensed it, and would come running from blocks away. That's when it was time to run, so I could keep walking and keep fighting my futile war.

I found other exterminators from time to time, but our numbers were dwindling. Even though we all craved companionship and conversation, we didn't dare stay together for very long. Apparently two awakened minds together were easy for the offspring to sense, whether we used our powers or not.

A few of the others I met had been awakened by Xipe's fellow off-worlders. They spoke of Xipe with respect and even reverence. He was apparently a bit of legend, even among his fellows. I never mentioned that I knew him.

I met an exterminator named Richard somewhere near Philadelphia. He told me that there was a safe zone for humans in New York City. It wasn't the typical pipe dream that survivors always fell for in zombie movies, either. He had been there.

Some bespectacled exterminator came up with a way to reactivate and reprogram disabled nanites. He made them produce the frequency that disabled other nanites and set up a perimeter around an old hospital. As more offspring tried to cross the perimeter and were killed, he used their corpses to enlarge the safe zone until it covered the most of Manhattan.

I had become so attuned to my despair that couldn't let myself even hope it was true, but then again, I had always wanted to see the big apple.

It was a long walk, but from an elevated highway in New Jersey, I saw the famous New York skyline for the first time. About a mile away, a burst of movement caught my attention. Several offspring were attacking something, but I couldn't see well enough to count them, or make out what they were killing.

I risked a quick scan with my mind and found that the area was crawling with offspring. I could tell the ones ahead of me were attacking an exterminator because I sensed a block instead of thoughts. I also found four humans. The exterminator must have been leading them to the safe zone.

I ran towards her, waiting until I got close to use any mental energy. The last thing I wanted was to bring more offspring to the fight.

The exterminator was a joy to watch. Her weapon was a long pole with a curved blade on the end, which she used to great effect. She spun and rolled and swept and leapt like a deadly dancer. She was a beautiful blur of acrobatic grace, weaving among slashing claws and tentacles to strike with surgical precision.

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That's it! Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed my entry for the Block Party, be sure to click the Star to register your vote. And if you would like to read more of this story, Killing Tiffany Hudson picks up exactly where this leaves off, and then Children of the Plague expands the story to novel length. Both can be found on my Wattpad profile page, and Children of the Plague can be purchased in paperback or eBook from most retailers.

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