Infection

Theme: Infection

Your feet pound on and your arm drags on behind it.

By Grantaire

Your feet pound on and your arm drags on behind it.

You run through the darkening evening and your arm drags along with you. You cannot look at it: no amount of earthly power can make you.

Your feet pound on and your arm drags on behind it.

You can feel it. But you dare not lift it with your still healthy arm: that would involve both feel and touch.

Your heart, still healthy, vies for attention with its frantic pounding but you ignore it.

Your feet pound on and your arm drags on behind it.

What if there is nothing behind you? What if the monsters which bit your arm are just watching you?

What if they know you’re already done for?

Your feet pound on and your arm drags on behind it.

You must ponder sometimes if there was a life before this day: a life before the constant running, the agonizing horror, and the running once more: unfettered but bound by your own body.

You must wonder if there was a life before this hell.

Your feet pound on and your arm drags on behind it.

You can’t keep going like this. Your breath is gone, and your arm begins to jerk.

Oh God. Oh God.

Your feet pound on and your arm drags on behind it.

You have to stop. You have to just lie down; lie down and die. You must surrender. It’s alive, it’s all over.

No wonder you were left alone.

Your feet pound on and your arm slithers on behind it.

This can’t be happening. You couldn’t stand to cradle your arm, and now it’s cradling you, slipping up and around your shoulders. You open your mouth to scream, but you’re too far gone for more than a rasp to come out.

Your feet pound on and your arm coils on.

Your shoulders are numbing, and your legs pump even more furiously. You can-

Oh God, you can see your arm.

The rasping breaks out again, turning into heaving gasps. The numbness is spreading to your other arm, to your chest, leaving only your legs to pound on endlessly, A sound escapes you at last, a man’s desperate last scream.

Your feet pound on and your body coils about them.

  By John 55555:

I closed the door quietly and hung my hat on the crooked coat rack. It fell over with a crash and my wife shrieked upstairs. Today's not my day.

Despite the infection, my wife Emma tries to keep a neat house. We actually have a second story, a kind of running water, and some small windows. I handled the fortifications. it has been a long time since they attacked in any kind of numbers, but the odd group would still try and get in.

In fact, we're quite safe here. Except for one thing.

I'm a doctor.

I can help these people, sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. When caught quickly enough I could save them by  amputating the infected limb before it spread to the brain. If bitten on the torso, head or upper leg there was nothing I could do.

I went to the sink and tried to rinse off my wound. It was quite small, but a nasty one. I had to twist my head all the way to the left to see it, there on my shoulder. I'm done for.

Emma came down the stairs in her tattered robe. The kids must be in bed already, though the sun had barely set.

Without thinking, I turned to face her, and she saw the bite on my shoulder.  Her face sagged. She knew what it meant.

Gratoraxe:

I ran as fast as I could. The jungle’s thorns, twigs, and rocks pierced my feet and body numerous times in my escape from the beach house. I was awakened earlier that night by screams from my flat mate who had accumulated some odd symptoms. He had lost all sanity and was now chasing me through the jungle of horrors as the natives called it. I tripped and fell. My former friend soon closed in on me. He stood over me with a murderous look on his face when one of the nearby natives issued a call that made him stop in his tracks and faint. “The new monster infection works very well.” He said “I wonder how it would work on you…” And with that, a puff of incense was blown into my face, and I too, became a monster.