Round 7 - And Now the End is Near... (Taed v Kaez)

[James]

Write a story that ends with...

It was only then that Alec truly noticed the rivers of blood. Some part of him had seen the trickle following him through the street. The barest trace of red burying deep into the corner of his eye. A universal warning sign, stop, danger ahead. As it grew thicker with each house, though, it hardly registered within Alec's mind. The mist descended over his senses and he concentrated on the task at hand. He knew the disease was going to fight back. When a tyrant reigned for how ever many generations, it didn't disappear into the darkness at the first revolt. Only once he wandered out onto the beach and collapsed on the fine sand did he see the product of his work.

Valleys had been carved into the beach. Thick, red blood flowed back and forth across the sand, channels criss-crossing all around Alec. He couldn't tell if it was meant as a threat or a snarl. A confident riposte or a feeble attempt to delay the inevitable. Staring out across the scarred coast, Alec saw the smooth, obsidian black sea staring back at him. Somewhere out there, the disease had once laid in wait. It seemed fitting to return the last carrier.

The blood reared back like a beast, rising up into a tsunami wave frozen in time. Alec's breath lodged within his throat as he took a step forward. Even now, he wasn't sure what would happen. It didn't rush him; it fell away. With a grim smile, he knew he was facing down a wizened king and not a proud warrior. Alec took another step forward. The blood retreated. He took another. The red mixed with the inky, black waves. Breathing in one final mouthful of clean air, Alec strode into the sea.

The village burned orange behind him.

[Matteo ((Taed))]

In the beginning it started small.

Every year there were a few more earthquakes, a few more hurricanes, a few more flocks of mysterious dead birds in Arkansas. Most people didn't worry too much. The doomsday preppers had another reason to buy canned food and shotgun shells. The environmental lobby had more blame to lay at the feet of hydraulic fracking and climate change. But ordinary folk basically just moved on with their lives.

It was even sort of fun at first. Just about everyone wound up with at least one good story of adversity they'd had to deal with. People love to talk about the time it snowed so much they couldn't get out their front door. They love when the roads flood and the canoe collecting dust in their garage is suddenly needed for a trip to the grocery store. Some of Alec's fondest memories were from when the blackouts were hitting Brooklyn in a big way.

He'd had a heavy-duty laptop for work, with a brick of a battery meant to run the system so hot that it couldn't actually rest on your lap anymore. With all the bells and whistles disabled it had stayed juiced up for days, and Alec and his friends had crowded around it like an electronic shrine; laying their lesser devices on its altar to charge.

They'd clammed up in warmth and comfort with scented candles and iPads set to low brightness. The looting was minor, and far away in any case, and their neighbours had all been friendly and generous with their booze. Together they held a post-ironic Mein Kampf book-burning on the roof, where they got drunk and toasted marshmallows, and it was all generally just a nice break from the noise and bluster of big city life.

It was a while before things started to turn weird. When they did, it was all so surreal that many people assumed it was some sort of insane prank. Many others assumed it was an act of God--many still believed that, in fact.

Alec had been on the ferry when he witnessed it first-hand himself. He'd heard scattered news reports and internet rumours from other parts of the world, but dismissed them out of hand. When it started, he was leaning on the railing, and so had a clear view as yellow-green bubbles began to rise up and spread across the surface of the water. They had flowed in glutinous streams, joining and combining until the ferry was surrounded entirely by the thick, milky fluid.

The smell was vile, but also disturbingly familiar. Other people on the ferry had gagged and plugged their noses, and loudly declared that whatever new industrial travesty had been visited on the East River, it was one step too far. Alec had somehow instinctively known the truth, however. This wasn't some nameless pollutant or factory runoff; this was identical to every ingrown nail or untreated cut he'd ever had.

The East River had been inundated in human pus.

From there it all kept coming fairly quickly. Miners started unearthing seams of compacted meat and bone. Mountaineers found calcified cysts amidst fields of boulders and scree. The passé rains of blood were joined by blizzards of dandruff and hailstorms of tumour. Tumbleweeds of limp, wispy hair became commonplace.

The Earth was literally sick, and no one could understand why.

There were theories, of course. Various new technologies were held under scrutiny for their potential role. Researchers in nanotech and stem cell therapy were given particular suspicion, but nobody could make anything stick. Some university physics dropouts who never really got over the Large Hadron Collider hysteria blamed CERN, trotting out every crackpot idea from "Quantum Waveform Morphic Field Resonance," to "Einstein-Rosen Atemporal Microbe Dispersal" (hippie voodoo and germs from the future, essentially).

Regardless, people began to discuss environmental problems in different terms. Earthquakes and hurricanes were suddenly palsy and bronchitis. Global warming was a worsening fever. The increasingly overcast skies were the onset of myopia, turning the Blue Marble into the Grey Cataract.

This went on for a while. Things weren't actually much worse than they had been before, but the tenor of the public response had decidedly changed. With every new symptom came the unspoken question of what would happen if the planet, just, never got better.

For Alec, the next stage began in a doctor's office. He had been badly ill, and shelled out for the works: blood tests, CAT scan, MRI. He waited in a small examination room for the results to trickle in. Every movement rasped the paper of his hospital gown against the paper covering the padded table he sat on, so he found himself staying unnaturally still.

When the doctor returned, it was with a thumb drive containing the data. Plugged into the room's computer, it revealed Alec's brain in greyscale slices, and the dark mass lodged there just behind his frontal lobe. Various words were said in his direction, like "inoperable," and "radiation therapy," but he listened to very little of it, and drove himself home in a daze.

That night Alec's dreams were very strange. The images themselves were hazy and indistinct, but he felt as though he perceived them with remarkable clarity; as though he were awake, but looking at the world through gauze or deep water. Faces and voices loomed out of the murk, but rather than menacing him they seemed as scared and confused as he was. As the dream progressed the faces grew clearer and clearer, until finally one came tearing out of the shadows straight at him, and he woke with a start.

Lying in his sweat-drenched bed, Alec realised that he had recognized the last face: it had belonged to a barista who worked at his local coffee shop. Reggie, or Rudy, or something like that. Silently cursing Sigmund Freud and the caprice of his own subconscious, Alec had tried and failed to get back to sleep.

The next day, partly out of morbid curiosity, and partly out of a moderate caffeine addiction, Alec had gone to the coffee shop. The barista had been there behind the counter, exhaustion written on his face, and 'Rory' written on his nametag.

What followed was the agonizingly slow dance of two men trying to confirm a crazy theory, but desperate not to appear crazy themselves in doing so. Alec and Rory went round and round like this over seven dollar macchiatos, until finally the truth tumbled out and it became apparent that they had both been diagnosed with malignant blastomas, and they had both had the same dream the night before.

Neither one really knew what to do with this information, and they awkwardly parted company over an exchange of loose change for poppyseed cake.

Shortly after that people started finding brain parts in the ground. Ridged lobes and ganglia growing out of the earth like cauliflower. Like the other organic manifestations, these popped up just about everywhere, and also like the other organic manifestations, they made no sense at all. There were no visible nerve fibres connecting the disparate components, and yet impulses measured in one could be found affecting others a thousand miles away.

Slowly, with the caution and reticence of those raised on X-Men comics and ET: The Extra Terrestrial, the story began to emerge of people with similar quirks of neuroanatomy. Their hesitation was justified, as a number of them were stoned to death or whisked off to CIA black sites almost immediately. Luckily, Alec had been more prudent, and less trusting of his doctor's discretion, and so had left the city before any G-men could lead him to the dissection table.

Staying in a friend's cabin upstate, he watched the story unfold via an ancient rabbit-ears TV, and the dispatches of his own unconscious mind. Both returned essentially the same message: there appeared to be a presence, an intellect, behind the planet's mounting illness. It had not communicated as such--no individual microbe had stepped in front of a camera to volunteer a list of demands--but there appeared to be a definite purposefulness to its actions.

This intelligence came to be known as the Phage.

The theory was that it came from the sea, growing in some deep and alien niche of biochemistry. Carried eventually to land by rainstorm and ocean swell, it slept in the earth and fed on the viscera of graveyards and petrochemicals. In human tombs it learned complexity, and became self-aware of its innate need to spread and consume. Life had filled the ground with meat and bone, and the Phage built its army and its kingdom in kind.

This was stopgap science; futile attempts to explain a phenomenon that was already well past the scope of human understanding. But as the disease began to spiral into ever greater acts of destruction, it was all that anyone seemed able to do. Concerted efforts to research a cure found themselves the target of everything from tornadoes to wildfires. Cities emptied under the fresh onslaught of disasters, and the human race found itself unexpectedly at the center of an apocalyptic scenario.

Alec kept himself mobile as things began to unravel. He, and the human race in general, both discovered a surprising resilience to armageddon. With seven billion people as the starting point, even tremendous losses and the erosion of morale they brought failed to wholly topple civilization in the manner that was usually expected. And the sheer proliferation of power and information infrastructure even meant that the remnants could maintain a modicum of global community, if only to check up on precisely how many of their foreign fellows were dying all around the world.

Moving from town to town; refugee camp to militia base, Alec continued to feel the pull of familiarity exerted by those who shared his condition and his dreams, and he pointedly headed in the opposite direction. He heard many stories of communities formed by those marked with the virus, but wanted no part in any of them. Partially because of the quasi-religious, "chosen people" vibe that graced many such gatherings, and also because he still remembered how most of humanity responded when they believed someone was in any way complicit with the Phage.

Staying one step ahead of those who wanted to welcome him into the fold, and those who wanted to beat him out of it, Alec drifted across the months, and then across the years and decades as well. Whole cities vanished into the sea as the Phage brought its ancestral home inland, redrawing coastlines across the world. A plague of telepathic tumours spread like wildfire through whole populations, and Alec's dreams became vivid and conceptual.

Amidst the usual low throbbing, like a heartbeat or the rush of waves, there were shouts and whispers in every language. Abstract geometry and crudely realized patterns seethed amidst the flow of faces, and murky grey hues became shot through with bright colours. The sermons of Tumour Popes cut in from time to time like a clarion, announcing the awakening of the Phage from base animalism into something truly alive. Though many humans had died, the remainder would be united in harmony.

And then, as quickly as this pathological renaissance arose, it toppled. Sheltered ecosystems overbalanced, and carefully balanced disease vectors tumbled out of homeostasis. Custom-grown cities of bone and sinew were overwhelmed by the disasters that had formerly passed them by. The uninfected dregs of pure humanity lashed out with tanks and missiles they had vouchsafed from their parents era, and ground ossified buildings into a charred white powder.

One by one (or, more often, hundreds at a time) the faces in Alec's head began to blink out, until, faster than he could have believed possible, he was all but alone in the dark, throbbing emptiness of the Phage.

It was a virus, after all. The ultimate expression of parasitism and self-replication. Even jumped up on human brain tissue, it was a mind ill-suited to foresight and restraint. Many have called humans themselves irresponsible with their environment, but human selfishness has nothing on that of a plague. It had spread itself across the population, not out of some religious missionary effort, but because that was the entirety of what a virus hungers to do. It had let those populations die because that it also what viruses do.

There was a tiny outcropping of surviving faces that felt quite nearby. On a whim, Alec set off in their direction. He had always spurned his people; even spurned the idea that their shared affliction made them a common people at all. But somehow he felt that these few survivors could use another shoulder to lean on right now

Alas, he arrived too late. Sometime between now and the last time he had dreamed their presence, this tiny village on the edge of the sea had been set ablaze by napalm. Watching the flames illuminate their own plume of inky smoke from within, Alec realized that he was the last one left, and he pondered what that meant.

The Phage had existed before it was introduced to humanity, but its godlike power had not. Undeniably, it had been growing stronger and more alive as its number of followers grew. What did that mean for it now that those followers were almost gone?

Alec found himself walking down past the village and towards the water's edge. He shed his survival gear as he walked: his rucksack, his tattered duster, his pistol and machete and bowie knife, all scattered in the ashen dust behind him.

It was only then that Alec truly noticed the rivers of blood. Some part of him had seen the trickle following him through the street. The barest trace of red burying deep into the corner of his eye. A universal warning sign, stop, danger ahead. As it grew thicker with each house, though, it hardly registered within Alec's mind. The mist descended over his senses and he concentrated on the task at hand. He knew the disease was going to fight back. When a tyrant reigned for how ever many generations, it didn't disappear into the darkness at the first revolt. Only once he wandered out onto the beach and collapsed on the fine sand did he see the product of his work.

Valleys had been carved into the beach. Thick, red blood flowed back and forth across the sand, channels criss-crossing all around Alec. He couldn't tell if it was meant as a threat or a snarl. A confident riposte or a feeble attempt to delay the inevitable. Staring out across the scarred coast, Alec saw the smooth, obsidian black sea staring back at him. Somewhere out there, the disease had once laid in wait. It seemed fitting to return the last carrier.

The blood reared back like a beast, rising up into a tsunami wave frozen in time. Alec's breath lodged within his throat as he took a step forward. Even now, he wasn't sure what would happen. It didn't rush him; it fell away. With a grim smile, he knew he was facing down a wizened king and not a proud warrior. Alec took another step forward. The blood retreated. He took another. The red mixed with the inky, black waves. Breathing in one final mouthful of clean air, Alec strode into the sea.

The village burned orange behind him.