VIGNETTE
The blood was black. Tar-like as it oozed from the shallow cut on his arm rather than the smooth up-welling of red from before.
It had been a gradual change. Painful at first until nerves became numb and dead.
Dead like me, he thought.
His vision had grown dim and narrow, as though a vignette filter had been snapped over his view of the world. His ears felt muffled, sound distant and directionless. His brain had become slow, his thoughts anchorless yet deep.
He’d thought that dying was terrifying and final. Instead, for him and others like him, it was a gradual transition from vibrancy to distant echoes.
There was an ache in his chest where his heart had once beat–thump thump–but had fallen to silence and stillness. It wasn’t pain, but loss. The realization that something that had always been had now ceased to be.
He was still moving. Still realizing. Still existing in some semblance of self.
But it was only a matter of time before he began to rot. When his skin would begin to slough off and the collagen between his bones would congeal and his flesh would fester and bugs would burrow into him.
He was dead, but he was still moving. He was a living soul trapped in a decaying flesh prison.
There was no treatment, no cure, no vaccine. Survivors out there, huddling in their hideaways, they could maybe be saved by some future medical science. But for those like him that had already been bitten–infected, killed–there was no turning back. No chance to return to normal.
There was only waiting for the inevitable loss of self that would culminate in mindlessness and the instinctive drive to consume human flesh.
He could already feel it. Not hunger as he once knew it, but something like it. The closest concept he could imagine.
Hunger had always been centered in the belly, but this was a whole body need for warmth and filling. A sense that if he didn’t fill himself, he would collapse empty and deflated after his body ate itself to nothing.
He was dead, but he was still dying. If he ate, he would taste warmth and life. He would be able to move and exist for a little while longer.
His mouth wouldn’t be so dry and shriveled. So tasteless and empty.
He walked toward the front door. Worked the locks and pulled the door open. And went out into the world.
To eat.
=END=
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