Half Life

Morning rush hour was always a nasty slow bitch but today was worse than usual. Accident? Breakdown? Either way it was Mr. Dill in my near future lecturing me on the fact that being late to work was the same as stealing. Yeah. Right on Mr. Dillweed. And I guess the fact that being on salary

  and not getting paid overtime is not stealing from ME? Bastard.

  Then the traffic just stopped. After a few minutes of this the car horns around me began to blare. That’s always a help. Get enough frustrated drivers laying on the horns and soon the world is right again. I tuned in some classic rock and let ‘er rip.

  One hour. No movement, no emergency lights. Nothing. Two guys in a pickup left the cab of the truck and retrieved longneck Bud Lights from a cooler in the bed. A good looking bleached blonde reached her hand out of her Porch and the guys , of course, handed her a brew. For the next half hour the three partied on until the traffic started to inch forward.

  Almost ten. Seriously?  Yeah. And now the slow motion forward movement of the traffic came to a stop once again. I turned off the radio and rolled down my window. Random screams, mostly woman, rang out around me. I saw no one freaking out until…

  A man, an executive type, crawled along the median in a once expensive suit. From the waist down he was nothing but a black and bloody mess of  entrails that he pulled behind him as he crawled.

  Good lord. are we under attack? Terrorists? Another directly in front of my car. A woman dragging hardened guts across the highway. She moved quickly. Crawled, stopped, and seemed to sniff the air and then slithered away again; her elbows pushing at the asphalt more than her hands which were raised in a defensive pose.

  Car doors opened around me and people of all types and ages fell to the pavement missing half their body. Not one seemed frightened or even confused. Just crawled away leaving trails of goop. I looked at my own legs and sighed in relief that they were there and functional. I left the car and began to walk. I no longer worried about Mr. Dill and his lectures. Anyway he was probably crawling along the hallways wondering how he would get into the supply room.

  I wondered how Beth and the girls were. Worried actually. Were they Okay? If so were they seeing this horror. I picked my pace up dodging the...what? people? I guess. Whatever they were there was more and more of them. That’s when my foot fell off. Just fell off. No pain. I hobbled on unsure of my goal. Beth. Yes, Beth and the girls. Both of my knees popped and fell from my pants. I hit the sidewalk and began to crawl. I was surprised at how fast I could move. How tough my elbows were becoming.

  I was relieved when I felt my body from the waist down fall away from me. I moved faster now. Other changes were happening quickly. I developed another set of eyelids, the inner ones transparent. My fingers elongated and claws formed. Others around me had begun to develop stubs of tails. Spiked tails.

  A nearby female waved her tail I recognized that as a mating ritual. I followed her to a nearby drainage ditch. She turned and hissed at me. I hissed back. Beth? I grabbed the female and we disappeared under the shallow water. We can stay here for a long time. Then we will hunt.  end