Plague

A Story by panopticon

A mysterious plague has struck, and mutants are rapidly taking over.

It was colorless. It was gray; it was unwelcoming. And it reeked of death itself.

The town had been coated by an abhorrent stench of unwashed bodies, and a faint miasma of blood that was mingled with infection crawled the land. Disease lurked at every corner. Fear was contagious. There was no escape. The land was like a prison in and of itself- Old, untamed, and so distant that even the distant sunlight failed to break through the cloud of ashes from the burning dead.

Scorpions infested the corpses. Large, dark ones with pincers spiked with venom. They would sting and gouge holes in the flesh whilst it was still warm, feasting off the rotting meat and spawning in their thousands within the host before emerging once again through the semi clotted holes they themselves had created. It was granted that these weren't normal scorpions, but mutated beings adapted to survive through what could only be described as an apocalypse, taking the form of the infamous predatory arthropod.

There were also the swarms of wasp-like creatures, creating dark storms around every withering tree and lightening the deathly silence with a dowdy buzz. These were the transporting mediums of the plague itself, their burning stingers inked with virus strains that bring an entire day of agony to the victim. Nausea. Hallucinations. Disorientation and even insanity- These were the symptoms that one had been affected by the accursed plague. For 365 days they would live as a being deprived of even its own will: A zombie, a puppet of death.

Then the only light at the end of the dark tunnel would be the afterlife itself.

The young, the old, weak and vulnerable were the first to go, but certainly not the last. Some of those who remained had cowered in despair as the scorpions seeped through cracks under doors to feed on their loved ones, in fear that they were the next target of the wasps. They had hid frightfully, penned up in their own homes.

Others had been more courageous. Setting fire to the fallen as a final act of respect, exterminating the pests the best they could with the amber flames. The sacred light was the only relief from the cold darkness. One or two had even tried to escape the wrath of the doomed town, yielding plans to call for help from neighboring cities. They had never made it though, brutally torn limb from limb by the vile creatures born from the Plague.

Not a single whisper or rumor of the event managed to escape the vicious town, for even the wind had been so very still that no word travelled with it. Only a few unlucky survivors remained, surrounded by the living dead.