Cleanliness is Next to Heaven

I never realized just how nice it is to be clean. I waited until dark and snuck out of the garage. I had nibbled on granola and sipped on some juice from my supplies. My stomach was too small to hold much, I'd eat a little, sip a little and doze. Sometime later, I don't know how long, the dogs returned, Luke stretching along my spine and better than an electric blanket and Liz curling up between my neck and shoulder. Being dogs they undoubtedly felt the filth I was covered with was a bonus.

After darkness fell I snuck out -- using the dog door too, just in case anyone had put some sort of a trap or alarm on the garage door. A bit paranoid, I know, but the burned out hulk of my home was all the reason I needed to indulge in paranoia. I never knew why the garage or the houses next to us didn't burn too. Luck is luck, I guess.

I skulked through the neighborhood, the dogs at my heels. They were still uncharictaristically quiet. I scoped out three houses, but passed over each. One had clear signs of current habitation in the form of laundry drying on the chainlink fence. Another was silent, but the dogs growled quietly when I approached it. The third gave ME the creeps, and the dogs were crouched, hackles up. But the fourth seemed empty. When I entered and searched it I saw signs of either a hasty exodus by the family or a ransacking -- possibly both. Fortunately, cleaning supplies had been overlooked in favor of food or things people considered valuable. I had a funny feeling that money and jewelry wasn't going to be worth much now, but what do I know? I haven't even finished high school.

The water in the shower was even hot. I reflected on how much easier it was to feel indulged in a crisis situation. Before this, a hot shower was usually a chore my mother made me indulge in far more often than I felt necessary, now, it was heavenly. Not just to be clean again but to be "normal" if only for a few moments. The family had a daughter close to my age and I was able to scrounge clean clothing. I put together a few more changes of clothing too and returned to the garage to think.

I didn't know how long I'd been out of it and sick. The neighborhood seemed half deserted and the half that wasn't deserted was a bit frightening. Surely there was still a government out there, though. My house wasn't the only burned house I'd seen but most of the houses were still standing. And there weren't any dead bodies lying in the streets or anything. So the question was, find the government and hope for safety or go into hiding?

I looked in the mirror again. The tubes growing in place of hair on my head had opened up into feathery violet antennas, a cross between feathers and undersea-type fronds. They framed the upper part of my face like an exotic headpiece and, creeping even me out, they moved in the still air. Then I looked at the dogs, sitting quietly and alertly at my feet. I never heard of a government run rescue camp yet that took pets, but Luke and Liz weren't just pets, they were family. No, finding whatever government was left didn't seem like a good option, and neither did staying here. Surely someone was doing regular sweeps to remove bodies or take in sick people. I guessed the only reason they hadn't examined the garage was that Luke scared them off. He could be pretty intimidating when he wanted to be.

So I needed to figure out a good place to go -- to hole up and maybe bring others like myself. I heard the angry, frightened voice demanding my house burn again and shuddered. There were undoubtedly more like myself -- what would happen to them?

"You need a place that is isolated and hard to reach." The alien in my head had been silent up until now. "And you need to consider that there are going to be a lot of children and infants who survived the plague but are helpless to move themselves."

"I know a place that is isolated and hard to reach, but it would take a long time to walk there." I thought back at my mental guest. I had a quick glimpse of Jordan, a state park in the middle of the Rocky Mountains -- deep valleys, a strong river, lots of trees and wildlife, but also at a higher elevation and likely to still be covered in snow. It was only March and even though most of the snow was gone in Spokane, I knew it would still cover the ground there. And it took us three or four hours to drive there, which I knew would be a really long journey on foot.

"You need companions and a plan."

"Yeah, I kind of figured that out myself. How the heck am I supposed to find them?"

"You are no longer as you were. The changes are not just in your body, they are in your mind and your abilities. And you are not the only ones changed. Our virus did not just inhabit humans. I don't think the "government" realizes it but animals and plants are effected too. And one more thing -- we need to figure out how to destroy the virus."

"W-what? Why?"

"We are not killers. We never intended to harm others, but we have killed countless in this one city of yours. It cannot be allowed to spread. We would never agree to destroy your world to save ourselves. We must end the virus' ability to infect your world."

"Ummm, I don't think I can do that. I'm just a kid."

"You are more than you know and you won't be alone. For now, eat again, sleep and in the next evening we will prepare to move."

I couldn't argue with that. Showering and dressing had exhausted me. I threw the fouled airmattress and bedding into the remains of my house, inflated my parent's airmattress and pulled their sleeping bag over me, asleep almost as soon as I lay down.

I don't know how long I was sick. It was a blur of heat, thirst, and a bone deep ache throughout my body.  My mother coaxed and encouraged me through the worst of it -- which was kind of disturbing as she was dead. I think that I knew I'd survive when I finally was able to ask her about her presence.

"I'm not really your mother."

"I know." And I did -- the voice was right and it looked like her, but even in that hot, achey place I KNEW that wasn't really my mother. "But you aren't me either."

That I wasn't so sure about. I thought maybe the fever had left me with brain damage and I was now crazy or something.

"No, I'm the virus really." She explained.

Suddenly I was enveloped in a flashback to someone else's life. The sky was a chaos of red and orange clouds threaded through with continual violet lightning. The world was remarkably lush from my point of view because I KNEW that the cloud cover was constant and I also knew that plants needed sunlight to grow.

"Not here." My mother murmered quietly. "These aren't plants as you know them."

Indeed, as I watched something very like a red and brown, two headed giraffe walked up to a "tree" with branches drooping towards the ground and tipped with flexible sacks. The giraffe sucked one of the sacks into one mouth and drained the contents.

"Water." my guide supplied. "The plant provides water."

And then the giraffe turned and dropped an unmistakable of pile of dung at the base of the tree. And the base of the tree rippled and the dung disappeared in moments.

"The tree extracts liquid from our atmosphere in return for nutrients from the mobile lifeforms. Photosynthesis wasn't possible on my world."

"Wasn't?" Don't ask me why I picked up on that, but it seemed enormously significant.

"It hasn't existed for eons of your time. A moon or large asteroid or comet -- some solid body was captured by the pull of our sun and put in an orbit around our system. Some of our finest thinkers realized that it was intersecting our planet's orbit by the effect it had on our system each time it passed close. We didn't have a technology like your planet -- we manipulated the structure of life to create what we needed. But the one who realized the danger had a plan."

Now I was in the center of a large crater, countless creatures all around me as another creature beside me spoke. No two were exactly alike. Some were bipedal, others centaurlike, and others were insectoid. There were tentacles and feelers, feathery looking appendages and flippers. It looked like the fevered imagination of a sci-fi/horror film special effects master.

"It will collide with us." The being next to me said firmly. It looked like a four armed, onyx humanoid. The two upper arms were powerful looking, the two lower, longer and with finer apendages. The triple eyes on its face were a solid gold except for a single oval pupil in the middle of each. "When it does, it will destroy our planet. It will be broken apart completely and all life will die."

"You can't know that." Shouted someone from the sides of the crater.

"I can. I have modeled the impact over and over -- we will all die."

"That was unthinkable. Our people lived unimaginably long lives by your standards. Our planet was subject to much radiation, the thick cloud layer was all that made life possible but even with that survival required all life on our planet to be very adaptive -- very hardy. Since we learned how to manipulate the basic structure of our bodies, very few had actually died -- and those were only through accidents. What Verdithyl described was unimaginable to many."

"But there is hope." Verdithyl added into the shocked silence.

"We created a tiny lifeform, similar to your own viruses and bacterias, which were encoded with our memories as people. All who believed Verdithyl did so, and we formed hard, dense shells filled with our creations, the dorman seeds of our civilization. These lifeforms were programmed to recreate our people when they landed in place with the right building blocks of life. It was a very long chance, but it was all we had."

"You are turning me into you?" I asked, horrified.

"No! Well -- I am now IN you. But we never thought that there would be other intelligent life anywhere. We weren't even sure there would be another planet to grow a new civilization on. But I have halted the virus in your system. You will not change any more."

"Anymore?"

"You are now different. Your --- cells have altered." I got the impression that my alter ego was finding the terms for this discussion directly from my own mind.

"Of course I am. We didn't speak like you do either."

I pushed myself to my feet, just now noticing that I was disgustingly dirty. Sweat matted my hair and while I was completely out of it my body had continued its natural functions without recourse to a toilet or shower. I was going to have to clean up soon or my skin would just crawl off of my body. The next thing I noticed was that Luke and Liz were gone. I hoped they were just out foraging for food.

I looked at my hand; the fingers were longer, the skin slightly pebbley and my arms also seemed thinner and finer -- but was that just weight loss from being ill? I turned to unearth the huge mirror my mother had stored in the garage several years ago. And my eyes teared up as I realized I'd never complain about Mom keeping everything under the sun again.

The mirror wasn't hard to find, it was just propped up against the wall and covered with a blanket. I took the blanket off and studied myself critically.

I was shocked to see how much thinner I was. I'd always been a little plump, and teased about it in school, but now my face was all angles and hollows. My hair at the temples was receding and something new seemed to be growing through, thin tubes or something. My skin was pale, but mottled with pale blue lines like countless veins crossing the skin. I looked somewhat like a cross between a cadaver and a zombie, but with a fine coating of filth. Why didn't any of the books I read ever mention the need to deal with bodily functions and cleanliness? I needed a shower -- really badly.

The End of the World (As We Know It)

My lungs burned with the need to take a breath and I exhaled as silently as possible before slowly inhaling, resisting the urge to suck in air frantically. Outside the garage were angry, frightened voices and the dogs cowered closer to me, remarkably silent.  A flickering light appeared on the floor of the garage, the orange of flame and I heard glass breaking as something was thrown through them.

"Burn it down!" A woman screamed shrilly, her voice trembling with anger and, most likely, terror.

I smelled the acrid fumes of gasoline and hunched even further into the corner beneath the workbench in the garage. The windows to the garage were unbroken -- I was pretty sure they didn't know I was here, but if they decided to burn the garage "just in case" I was doomed. At least the garage wasn't attached to the house.

More glass broke and then the woosh and crackle of hungry flames reached my ears. My home, with the corpses of my mother and father still inside, burned fiercely. Tears streamed silently down my cheeks and I buried my grief into the neck of Luke, our big, black dog as he leaned comforting into me. Liz, my tiny Yorkshire Terrier, snuggled more deeply into my lab, shivering with fear but still licking my bare legs to offer all the comfort her tiny body could offer. The moose and the mouse my dad had always called them. I was so glad they were with me and deeply grateful that they weren't barking like they usually would.

The sounds of the mob moved down the street but I didn't try to emerge. I was afraid that someone was waiting and watching. The people were afraid and frightened people did terrible things in their fear. Before the plague took him my father had explained our danger. He and Mom had gotten sick in the first wave, while there was still a semblance of law and order, but now too many were sick.

"Civilization isn't natural to humans, and if anything causes a break in civilization then people revert to savages. Not everyone, but you have to be careful. Think of the rioting and killing that happen so often following a natural disaster. People you used to trust might hurt you. Hide. Don't trust anyone lightly. And get out of the house. Take everything you can and find a hiding spot. Remember, Mom and I love you. We always will."

He slipped into sleep after that, exhausted from the effort of speaking, I think. An hour later he had a series of siezures and twenty minutes later he was dead. Mom had already died, I just hadn't told Dad about it. She had gotten sick first and Dad had carried her to their room. Then he had collapsed on the couch. I tried to help them, did everything Dad had done for Mom, everything I could think of. But the fever was so high and nothing seemed to work. They both died within two days of getting sick. When it got dark I took everything I could think of and made my nest in the garage. I set up under the workbench, trying to hide and more frightened and feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my life. Now Dad's advice proved true. And I felt the cold terror give way to a flush of anger. Then the flush receeded and the cold came back. I felt my forhead, terror springing anew.

Even to myself I felt burning hot. Luke whined and licked my face as I curled up on the air mattress I had set up. I had caught it too. Was I going to die now?