Ruby Glass

Chapter 1

The night is quiet except for the gentle hum of dusty wind snaking between buildings. A wind no one could breathe in without choking on sand. Was the air ever clean anymore though? This gloomy, rundown city outside of Yakima is nothing more than dead concrete giants now. Decaying roads, once filled with hovering cars flowing between the tall towers, now a quiet wind through the dead roots of an old forest.

Cranespock, is nothing like it used to be. Not that it was much in its heyday anyways. But a shitty day now is hell compared to what it used to be. Maybe you got fired, got your car towed, maybe even as simple as stubbing a toe. But now, a truly fucked up day for you is running into something that could only be seen in horror films.

Claws for hands and two new sets of javelin like legs now penetrated through the torso creating an insect demon of a human. You get tranced from fear by the bear trap like jaws and giant saber teeth that could cut through bone like scissors. What was once human with morals, now a flesh eating monster with nothing on its mind but a desire to kill. One second you think you are safe, and the next second your corpse is smeared on the pavement. You never know who to trust, because anyone could become a beast. Even someone you would never expect.

Five years ago my father and I were delivering flowers to my mother who was in the hospital. The sun was bright and everyone was greeting us with friendly waves. She was recovering after a car crash and was going to come home that day with us. When we went into the recovery room my father greeted her with a loving kiss on the cheek. He smiled with kindness and pure admiration for his beautiful wife. They were so in love and always have been. My parents were the ideal dream couple and that never changed no matter how many years went by. You'd see a caring gleam in my fathers eyes every time he looked at her. As a child, when I saw how happy my mother was with my father, I promised myself that I would be kind and respectful to whoever I marry one day just like my father was to my deserving mother. We were laughing and making plans to go get ice cream.

It was a perfect day until the moment I saw a shift in my father expression. Something had changed. He stood there, almost acting paralyzed then he dropped the flowers as the petals tore from the stems like my heart did as he suddenly vomited and started laughing. His face morphed and his jaws unhinged as shear like teeth came out of his gums breaking through his teeth like shattering glass with his skin tearing on his cheeks. His eyes turned fully black and he devoured my mother. Screams filled the room including my own. My father was taken to the hospital known as Ruby Asylum, secluded from society. He became a heartless beast, and I became an orphan.

The Ruby Asylum still stands and was originally attached to a lab where they did tests and experiments on the human brain and body. It was there in case the effects of an experiment affected the patient's or scientist's psychological state of mind. They experimented on so many different medicines and treatments for people, and they sometimes would search for new beings on earth that could carry a key ingredient to curing an illness or giving a human stronger adaptations. One day, on a search of new creatures, something went very wrong. They found something that they could has never expected.

A strange glistening red genetically modified cockroach that was discovered deep underground on the coast of Brazil. It was a flightless creature with needle like legs and a red glistening shell. When first looked at, they appear to be a red gem of some sort because of its shape and reflective exoskeleton.

The bug was nothing like any creature anyone has ever seen. When one of the scientists brought over the strange insect to the lab with many other newly found species of creatures, they started observing its strange behavior. It multiplied asexually and by the following morning, cockroaches were infesting the labs by hundreds.