Chapter 3

Three scabs chased me through the maze of fallen trees, branches, and rock. I adjusted the scanner to the night vision setting, which allowed me to move through the forest, but it didn’t give me the advantage I hoped for.

Scabs had no problem traveling in the dark and had no issues traversing the destruction left behind from the beast hordes. I slipped on a patch of dry leaves and landed in a gully. The quickest of them reached me. Too deep to pull myself over and too wet to run through, our fight turned into a pit match.

I wrapped the loop on the club around my wrist and swung at the lunging scab. Despite crushing his shoulder, he wrapped his arms around my waist and dug his claws into my legs. Almost as if we were at cheer practice, he threw me into the air behind him, tearing my pants and slicing my legs.

My freshly healed arm cushioned my fall somewhat, but I still landed hard on the crown of my head. The crash jammed my neck and tingled my spine. After a stomp on my helmet and stomach, the scab grabbed my ankle and dragged me through the gully.

I twisted my body and reached for anything. His grip was firm, and my kicks to his hand did nothing. Finally, after being towed 30 feet, my left arm hooked around a tree root. He yanked several times, but I wouldn’t budge, so he turned around, and I pulled my knee towards my chest.

The scab snarled like a rabid dog and fell forward with a wild swing. Once he was within reach, I slammed the club hard on his head. His body dropped between me and the gully wall, and it twitched for several minutes before going still.

I caught my breath and pulled myself over the gully’s edge.

I wasn’t sure if its dying groans or its bloody scent would attract an essence beast. Most hibernated once they ran out of weaker creatures to feed on. But the thought of dealing with one made my hair stand on end and my stomach drop.

Not all animals turned. Some remained the same or grew larger and turned aggressive, but the animals that turned fed solely on essence. Once human numbers dwindled, they turned on each other until the weaker beast’s population became too small, then they hibernated. Scabs had essence, and so did I.

After heaving myself out, I zigzagged my way through a patch of pine trees along the edge of a marsh. At one time, I would have begged my grandfather to stop and take a picture of Lia and me with the dead trees in the wetland. The place didn’t hold the same eeriness anymore. Now, the drowned trees blended in with most of the forest. There was nothing special about them.

My legs burned from the constant running and deep cuts, so I found a rock and sat for a moment. The marsh coated everything in a hazy rotten egg fog, which I hoped would mask my scent and provide some cover. I didn’t know how scabs tracked. Sight, smell, sound, it was probably all our senses combined. Sitting next to a marsh covered most of them.

The night was windless and dark. How long had it been since I saw the stars twinkle? How long since I saw the moon? By the time the third breach opened, enough particles filled the air to cloud the skies. Only the sun could breakthrough.

Scientists said the breaches were portals to other universes, universes with different laws and particles. There was no way to tell if that was true, and I didn’t care either way. But I missed the blue sky. And I missed the stars. Under a blue sky, even the marsh would look good. And the moonlight shining down would make the scab sniffing the air 100 feet away less disgusting.

Reflective skin, black holes for eyes, and gray splotches where the skin had fallen off; scabs were hideous in the light, and even more so under night vision. Its jaw opened and snapped shut, creating a clicking noise, as if it tried to scare me out of hiding or locate me like a bat. When it came close enough, I jumped.

I swung the club down with every bit of strength I could muster, landing a substantial blow to its neck. An easy kill, until it wasn’t. As the scab fell, it reached with its left arm and pulled me to the ground.

The scab twisted its head beyond a natural range of motion and clamped onto my forearm like a pitbull. I screamed, ripped the club free, and used the sharp flanges like a saw until I reached the bones in the scab’s neck and killed him. The priest didn’t have any protection for his arms or legs, not that I saw. A lot of the frontliners said arm and leg guards restricted movement. Mike was the same. He wouldn’t need protection. His particle manipulation would harden his skin, so a bite from scabs or weak beasts did nothing to him.

I wasn’t so lucky, and my embarrassing cry gave away my position.

The injuries wouldn’t kill me, but they’d take hours to heal and slow me considerably. Warm liquid dripped from my fingers and oozed down my legs. After I stopped the bleeding, I hobbled into the thick pine trees. A large scab, perhaps an athlete at one time, or a weightlifter trailed behind.

Whether souls collapsed or corrupted from essence had nothing to do with size or physical strength. There was no correlation. Just like animals, people reacted differently. A mouse might remain unaffected while a bear transformed into a nightmare larger than a dump truck. The scab creeping through the dense copse proved that. I was tiny compared to him, yet I hadn’t turned.