Chapter 1
The soft sunlight bled through the dusty eggshell colored blinds and washed a part of the room. It wasn’t until nine A.M that the sunlight reached the bed on the other side of the room. It took a few minutes but something stirred from underneath the covers. There was a grumble and a mumble just before a head slowly rose up from being buried underneath the pillow. A pair of bright green eyes squinted and blinked several times letting the pupils adjust to the light, before the head dropped back into the pillow with a moan.
About thirty minutes later the body was startled awake by the end of the world alarm on their smart phone. A hand shot out from underneath the comforter and slapped at the phone, grabbing it in its fingers and pulling it back to the covers. It was a few seconds after the alarm was shut off that the body rose up from under the covers at an alarming pace staring at their phone.
The girl with long red frizzy bed headed hair arose from the mattress hunched over her phone moving her thumb up the screen. Her eyes scanned all of the notifications she was scrolling through on her lock screen. She had never seen so many notifications all at once. Her app notifications were always turned off so they wouldn’t annoy her, and she hardly talked to anyone so that amount of text messages and news alerts gave her a boost of adrenaline that woke her right up.
She had scrolled past a bunch of messages from her family and only skimmed a few as she scrolled past. A lot were asking if she was okay and where she was and if she had enough food and water. She didn’t understand any of these questions until she scrolled all the way to the bottom where the initial alert was at.
It had “ATTENTION” and “WARNING” on the front, so she knew it wasn’t going to be good news. She quickly double tapped the message to open it and was bombarded by large red warning text all over the top of the message.
ATTENTION HUMAN POPULATION OF EARTH
Over the next 24 hours, the government will release a chemical into the earth’s atmosphere known as Redaction BT84S. This chemical, when breathed in, will either kill you or evolve you.
When she read the introductory message, she couldn’t believe her eyes. This was a joke, right? It had to be right? No way something like that was even possible. What did it mean by ‘evolve’? She started reading more.
Redaction BT84S is a chemical, that when breathed in, will change the body drastically. Depending on the biology of the body, the chemical will either
a)Kill the body
b)Transform the body into a flesh-eating monster
c)Give the body a tool, or ability, to survive this new world and eventually reform it.
This chemical is a population control plan that has been accepted by a majority of the governments in the whole world. Around two billion people will fall into one of the three sections, or categories.
SECTION A
Two billion of you will die on contact with the chemical. There will be no suffering and deaths are chosen at random.
SECTION B
The two billion of you that will become monsters on contact with this chemical will be hunted and killed by Section C. These monsters will come in all shapes and sizes with their own strengths and weaknesses. They will survive on human flesh.
SECTION C
The two billion that will be given tools to survive on contact with the chemical will be given a physical or mental upgrade to their biology to hunt down Section B. It is Section C’s job to rebuild the new world.
This is an inevitable process, so it is recommended that you spend the last 24 hours with your loved ones. We apologize for the short notice.
Take care and happy hunting.
She stared and reread the article for what felt like hours until she looked for the publishing date of the message. When she found it, her heart stopped. It was published over twenty-eight hours before. She had slept almost thirty hours.
She felt like someone was pulling a prank on her because she had slept for so long. She scrambled through her phone to find her mother’s phone number and dialed it. When she put it to her ear and looked up, not only did the dial tone go dead telling her there was no service, but she saw something that made the phone slip out of her hand anyways.
Her whole entire room looked like a jungle. Vines and moss were growing along her walls. Grass and flowers poked through the hard wood floors beneath her making it look like she had slept for hundreds of years. She stared for a while trying to process what was in front of her eyes. Everything in her bedroom was covered in green except for her bed. Whoever was pulling this prank was taking it to extreme lengths.
She opened her phone back up and read through her mothers texts.
“Hey honey, did you get the weird message too?”
‘Three missed calls from Mom’
“Honey, I’ve called you three times please pick up.”
“All of my friends are saying they got the weird message. Do you think it’s true?”
“Sweety please answer, you’re scaring me.”
“I’m hearing strange noises and it’s dark outside. I don’t know what to do.”
“I heard screaming in the apartment next to me and another scream across the street. It’s scary. Please answer.”
‘Six missed calls from Mom’
“Please pick up. I saw something scary in the hallway. There’s something weird in the building. It’s making growling noises. It might be a big feral dog.”
“I just saw the damned thing tear apart my neighbor in front of the door. I think it heard me scream. I’m going to barricade the door.”
“Whatever it is. It’s not a dog. It’s a monster like the article said. It’s making really weird noises that doesn’t belong to a dog.”
“It’s trying to get past my door. It’s not giving up. If I die today, I just wanted to let you know that I love you and I’m sorry for everything.”
That was the last message. She wasn’t sure if it was last because the service cut out or because her mother was killed. She slapped her hand over her mouth as tears welled up in her eyes quickly. Her hand trembled as she reread the messages.
Her and her mother didn’t really get along because of her past, but after she moved out her mother would always keep trying. She would sometimes ignore her mother and now she was afraid her mother thought she was ignoring her in what could have been her final moments. That’s what scared her the most. That, and the cries in the distance that sounded less than human.
She jumped and scrambled out of bed feeling itchy grass in between her toes and launched herself over to her window that was shielded by blinds. She separated two rows of blinds and peeked cautiously through them finding something horrifying. Something inhuman and completely terrifying was hunched over a corpse in the in middle of the road that looked like it had been there for a few hours at least. Its ribcage was picked clean and the puddle of blood surrounding it was already just a sticky mess.
The monster hunched over it had a very large bulbous head that had what looked like at least fifty eyes that circled the entire hairless cranium. It did have one large mouth filled with many sharp teeth towards the front bottom of the head where it was stuffing pieces of flesh into with its hands that had three very long fingers. The sight made her sick enough to rush into her bathroom and vomit almost next to nothing into her toilet. After that she was relieved to find out that the water was still running when she went to go wash her face. When she lifted her head up, in the mirror she could see that even the tiles on the bathroom wall were covered in green. She spun around and pulled back the shower curtains. It was like a little forest was growing on the bathtub floor.
She stumbled out of her bathroom in shock and when she turned around, she saw that her whole house was like that. Her living room, hallway, and kitchen were sprouting some sort of plant species. Some of them only grew where she lived, while others only grew on the other side of the world, she noticed.
She leaned against the wall and took in the scenery trying to process everything all at once, but nothing was going through. All she could do for the time being was sit down on the grassy floor and cry for a few hours.
