The effect though was not what he hoped as she stiffened in memory. Instantly, she was transported to the previous night.
She remembered suddenly her head being picked up with ridiculous ease and slammed back into the pavement – the blow that had left her temporarily paralyzed while he finished off the poor man she had found when she went around the corner.
Then she remembered something else. Need. Crawling. Hunching over the butchered man as his attacker and the police officer fought. Then she recalled a taste, cold and greasy. Her head buried in the smashed cranium.
I’m a monster! she screamed in silent condemnation, a voice inside her own head as she replayed the snatches of violence she could remember in slow motion, pieces of it clicking together.
In the real world, the arm tightened around her neck and a hand punched her in the ear, making it ring - if her head had not been spinning before it almost certainly would be now. Anger at last welled up in her from a pit in her stomach. Hot and burning. Emma had long thought the pit filled in and buried beneath a pleasant but dull patio, her inability to buck existence forcing her into the mousey form she had come to accept.
Here it was, however, a red hatred that burned her insides but still left her whole - unearthed by chemical deficiency and circumstance.
Her last thought – before she lost control – was I am not a monster! Emma thought this and then watched her hand take the arm wound around her throat and snap it like a twig.
Chapter 4
The man with the broken arm screamed and Emma’s body did too, much to her surprise – causing the other would-be attackers to back off a step. Hers was not the scream of a victim but a warcry; a violent, bloody, raw growl that rose in intensity and volume.
Shut up! thought Emma to herself. Her body seemed disinclined to take her suggestion.
I just broke his arm – the police would probably arrest me as soon as them. Still her body showed no sign of obeying, as it was seemingly hooked directly in to some primal survival instinct. Twirling around, Emma watched herself jump onto and bring down the smelly thug with a broken arm. She wasted no time in gnawing hungrily but ineffectively at his temple as he screamed in horror.
Her subconscious clasped her hands together and brought them down in an overarm strike powerful enough to cave in the tricky cranium and she fell onto the spilling mass of tissue and bone, scrabbling the larger chunks of his skull aside to gorge on his brain as the body twitched.
One of his friends – a medium build man with sandy brown hair - yelled in anger and ran forward, caution forgotten in the face of this new horror. He looked out of place with this group, like a stupid kid who lost his way. Emma’s opinion of him soured slightly during the next few seconds as he landed punch after punch to her face.
Hey, hey! Emma tried again to wrest control of her limbs but completely failing That’s my face! I need that face and the brain behind it. A sickening crunch told the story of her jaw being broken.
Another fist smashed against her cheek and her ears rang once more, Emma’s vision wobbled and she knew she was close to blackout.
The pain almost restored her control. For a second, she felt human again - a lonely young woman who had never had a life of her own, just a debt of responsibility that had been shoveled ever more deeply on her. How stupid her quest to become a geneticist seemed to her now, a doctor who hated blood with a passion and squelchy pulsing organs doubly so.
Pulsing organs, reminded her of .. something. A kick to the kidney? No that was external, it wasn’t part of her needs.
Pivoting Emma distractedly smashed a hand above the knee and grabbed the ankle with the other. Yanking upwards the leg’s owner suddenly became extremely double jointed. He screamed, an obvious case of buyer’s remorse. After market modifications are always so bothersome.
Emma resumed her meal if you could call it that. The brain was already getting cold and it had chunks of bone sticking out of it, like a macabre version of operation. Whatever was in control of Emma did not care at all as it shoveled the greasy meat into her mouth, small shards of bone slicing painfully down her throat as they were swallowed.
With a small jump, the force controlling her moved to its next victim – the man with the broken knee. Her mouth was on his face, it would almost look seductive for a second to an onlooker before they saw the teeth. Her teeth were tearing divots out of the cheek and ripping his mouth open all the way up the left side, giving him a freaky one sided smile like he was in on the joke.
Emma felt her lungs rasp as she took in a ragged breath, which led to a brief coughing fit. Blood sprayed lightly with each cough, onto his good cheek, into his eyes and mouth. The thug sobbed lightly as he lay there on the path, his blood mingling with hers as she smeared it over his face as she ineffectually tried to bite her way past his flesh. The end effect made him look painted with her blood like it was war paint, applied by Van Gogh.
Arms circled her from behind and started dragging her off of the fallen man, her body flailed wildly and found this latest target’s windpipe with the side of her hand. The invisible assailant immediately dropped her and began gasping for air – his gasps became screams as a second later Emma was tearing with her nails at his face and eyes.
Emma hooked her fingers into his mouth, stopping to smash the lower half of his face to pieces when he bit her. She resumed and pulled until the front of his skull gave way, his eyes falling free as it hinged above the forehead and then came clear completely. Emma instantly fell into the feast of flesh, eating as if bobbing for apples. An eye got in the way and was popped as squeamish Emma squealed to herself, trapped within her own brain.
Looking for the fourth man, Emma saw him sprinting way down the path but the recently doubly fed young woman seemed disinclined to run after him. If necessary she could probably follow the fresh trail of urine later.
Stupidly, Emma sank to her knees beside the bodies, screams fading to low moans as pain caused the man with the broken knee to pass repeatedly out of and back into consciousness.
Halfheartedly, she tried banging his head back against the ground, bit his face and the back of his skull but her heart wasn’t in it. The demon within was temporarily sated.
She sat there, control slowly returning as she swayed gently back and forth. Her first act as newly reinstated president of her body was to heave. Yet again though, her body refused to relinquish its newly found supply of chemicals. The memory of the eye popping haunting her mind, playing again and again but try as she might, nothing beyond a little bloody bile would find its way to her mouth.
The serotonin she had just ingested slid slowly through her torn blood brain barriers and entered her CSF – Emma felt cold in her stomach but warm everywhere else, her skin flushing from renewed blood flow. She sat there rocking slowly and felt the fire as her body renewed itself. Emma’s breathing became more normal as her lungs, which previously rasped with each breath, did the necessary fixes to her pulmonary artery to restore normal function. The pain that had been building in her chest with each cough slowly faded into nothing.
After what seemed like forever, Emma got unsteadily to her feet and wobbled in the general direction of her home.
While the jog out had seemed like a breeze the stagger back home seemed to take forever. By the time she finally made it in, Emma was convinced she could sway for her country.
Her sea legs barely under her she swerved through one room after another until she victoriously stumbled into the bedroom. Shoes still on, blood and more caked head to toe, she once more made a concerted attempt to stain her sheets in perpetuity. The results of her neglect would have to wait though, for she was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
Back on the path, the man with the broken knee was awoken by an irresistible urge to cough uncontrollably, culminating in a big wet spray of blood straight from his lungs. Rolling over he felt his lungs filling with blood and instinctiv
ely coughed until bright red blood splattered the pavement. Experiencing a powerful hunger that he had no control over, he slowly dragged himself the few feet to his nearest friend, his left leg trailing stupidly from one side to the other.
The man had no chance to pause, his instincts forcing him to hungrily shovel leftover cold gobs of brain, pieces of bone and scalp down his throat. Finally, hunger temporarily sated, he flopped back onto the path.
Beside him where he lay sat Emma’s college id, shining slightly in the light from a halogen lamp illuminating the now dark path.
The photograph that Emma had always hated smiled into the night, an unreadable expression. If the hated picture had any problem with the difficulties she posed for Emma Prime, she was not letting on.
Chapter 5
Channel 4 WBZ CBS Morning News
A man has been killed in a bizarre cannibalistic attack outside a gas station in Mattapan. Reasons for the attack are still as yet unknown. Though it is thought to be related to the death of two men in Esplanade park last night.
The attacker has been tentatively named as Steve Kerchak, who has been previously convicted of armed robbery and aggravated battery.
Members of the public are warned not to approach this suspected gang member as he is thought to be extremely dangerous.
“Okay this is definitely bluer.” Emma looked around in frustration, taking in a vase her mother had given her. In fact, everything looked hospital bright, the whites were outstandingly white and everything had a tint of blue. The sunlight streaming in the window looked almost hazy, like waves of light blue smoke were dissipating from it.
Following a hunch, Emma looked into a large ornamental mirror that had been in her family for generations. Etched flowers surrounded her face and uttered questions perfectly.
“What the fuuuuuuucccck?” Emma questioned, earnestly. Her Irises were tinged yellow. She had always had deep brown eyes yet here before her she could clearly see light brown eyes with a hint of yellow.
She had been up not half an hour and things were already weird.
On the good side, her lower jaw had mostly healed itself while she slept, though it popped painfully when she rotated it from side to side. A not so minor miracle considering before she went to sleep it had been completely disconnected on the left side.
“So, swings and roundabouts I guess,” she spoke to herself – seeking the most intelligent – and only – conversation available.
Noticing another difference in mirror her, Emma peered deeper. The difference was the damned wrinkle that had blighted her for the last couple of years - a long, semi-fine horizontal rule she had been fighting with anti-aging creams, balms and salves. They had been applied and discarded serially and all had proven completely without merit.
Today it was completely absent.
Two years of fighting the march of time and stress had yielded precisely no result. Now one day as a monster saw it completely vanquished – it was almost anticlimactic.
Picking up her iPhone, Emma flicked through her calendar for a full five seconds before she realized it was Saturday and her schedule was almost completely at her own discretion. For once, she was not inclined to head into school and catch up on labs – her oft-practiced Saturday morning activity.
Moving to the living room, she chose from the wide array of furniture available to sit on. There was the old but semi-comfortable chair of her grandmothers or the – well that was it really.
Her roommate had provided most of the furniture in their arrangement so now the house was very bare.
Does my inability to so much as accommodate a second person’s buttocks in my home make me a hermit? She wondered. Probably.
The fact was her parents – especially her mother – had taught her early that trusting others meant inevitable disappointment. To her credit though, Emma’s mother had never read her diary – because Emma had never kept one. Some things even as a child you just know, and her lack of privacy was always a given. Consequently, Emma had always been most at comfort inside her own mind.
Her lack of trust extended to the opposite sex as well. She had enjoyed a few trysts but always lacked the ability to truly trust anybody. To make it worse there was the ever present focus on school and eventually her career – the few boyfriends she had soon figured out they came second.
Sitting, she turned on the TV and was rewarded with Spongebob. Clucking her tongue she hunted around the cushions on her old chair for a remote. A ghost of a child or a pothead must inhabit this tiny apartment she thought because every damned time I turn on the TV, Spongebob!
Finding the remote after what must have been twenty seconds of furious searching, she switched to the news with a flourish.
Where she was greeted with a grainy video of herself annihilating/emasculating/masticating the thugs come would-be rapists from last night. Even with the terrible camera quality they had to stop the footage before she managed to truly do any damage, choosing to blow up a near unrecognizable grayscale side view shot of her face. To think she had signed a petition for better cameras in the parks a few months ago. Guess I chose the wrong side of that debate she mused sarcastically. Thank goodness for blazing fast governmental response.
Emma sat back, remembering smashing her hands into a man’s face until his skull gave way. She did not feel bad for what she did – given her victims choice of social activities - but was disturbed at how she had felt so alive when she did so. She then remembered leaning down and – No! Thought Emma, clamping her eyes shut, refusing to remember.
Opening her eyes, Emma refocused on the T.V. - and started coughing as she inhaled sharply, taking spit into her lungs. Fumbling with the remote through her coughing fit, she paused the live footage leaving the screen frozen with an image from tonight’s advertised movie.
There on the screen was the vacantly staring, mid-shamble figure of a Zombie - reaching directly for the camera as though electronics were the new dish du jour.
“No!” said Emma aloud, a little too loudly. There had previously been little cause to test the thickness of the walls in this apartment.
Thinking frantically, Emma started ticking off properties of Zombies from her very limited knowledge on the subject. Slow (or fast?), Unable to think, Able to take tremendous damage, Eat Brains…
Deciding she needed this iterated more clearly, Emma reached to the side table and a just out of reach notebook. Stretching she brushed it with fingertips on a couple of passes before finally pulling it her way.
Carefully, she removed the attached pen and write down in clear lettering the word “Zombie” and then delineated the page into two with a quick divider. Pausing at the top of the second column, Emma finally wrote “Me”.
In the Zombie column she wrote down the items she previously iterated through, each as a different bullet on the Zombie list of shame.
Moving over to the other column, she tried to answer each one with a frank description of her own state of affairs – a checklist of her condition.
Next to where she wrote “Sometimes Slow, Shamble” in the Zombie column she paused before writing a tenuous “Normal” under her own area. That means nothing she answered herself. Zombies are slow or super fast, depending on the movie.
Moving on to the next bullet, she remembered being unable to control her actions. That seemed pretty Zombie-ish.
“But!” she said out loud again, trying to persuade the air to give her another chance. “I am thinking now! I would like to see a Zombie make a list!” she finished triumphantly and put “Normal” into her column for that as well. Part of her hindbrain raised a hand at this, a child in class who is unsure if the answer on the board is actually correct. The rest of her brain, playing the role of teacher perfectly, chose to ignore her.
Moving to a more worrying part – taking damage. Emma sat with the pen in her mouth for a minute, remembering how badly her neck had hurt after the initial attack, lacerations
easily accessible to her questing fingers. Feeling her neck now, it was smoother than ever. Another flash of last night and being punched in the cheek repeatedly and yet when she just studied herself in the mirror there wasn’t even a sign.
Zombies don’t heal she thought, outraged. They decompose. In a fit of annoyance she went to write “Normal” in her column but paused. Choosing a slightly less disingenuous answer, she simply wrote “Heals Fast” before moving to the final bullet.
Emma stared at the list for a while “Eats Brains” stared back at her, accusingly. There was no denying that one. With a shaky hand, she slowly wrote “Eats Brains” under her own column too and stared at it for a moment.
Her mind empty from shock, unable to process the implication, she picked up the remote and clicked back to live T.V.
Emma found they had returned from break to regular programming, the news anchor was now showing much clearer footage of a different scene, apparently taken around dawn outside a gas station.
“Mmm mrrr marr meen mmtmmmt a munomo mmms mmrmmn,” the anchor reported, very quietly. Fumbling with the control, Emma restored the TV to a more audible volume.
The video continued with someone running away from a limping man who changed target and fell into a hapless bystander who had previously been pumping gas. Though the camera was somewhat distant, Emma thought she recognized the assailant as one of the attackers from last night – wasn’t he the one whose knee I smashed? she asked herself and then in a moment of clarity remembered an item she left off of her list. Infectious thought Emma, a cold chill walking slowly down her back. I forgot that one on my list…
Had she left him alive? She barely remembered. Given that he was up and meeting new people in a variety of exciting settings seemed to suggest so.
Oh my god, I’m infectious Emma thought numbly. I bit him and he went on to kill that poor old guy by the gas pump she realized with a start, the consequences of her actions hitting her like a hammer.
The weight of her self-accusation forced her back in the chair.
Tiredness be damned, I have to go to college. They have facilities where I can … what? She questioned. Test any fluid I can think of she answered herself firmly. Saliva, blood, even my spinal fluid if I can somehow take a sample.