Evolution

  Prologue

      It’s not our fault, it never was. It was in our nature to be so curious. It could have been our scientific minds working overtime to comprehend something never before seen. Either way, our superiority complex over the world at large brought the destruction of our own species.  When the first specimen was reported in a lab in San Francisco we still stood a chance. We could have destroyed it and keep humans on the top of the food chain, but it was in our nature to want to examine it. The millions of years it took evolution to produce such creatures should have warned us that time was limited.

      If you want to look back a wink or two, Joan Redman could have saved us all when she stumbled upon the first pod producing plant in New York. She could have ripped it out of the concrete and smashed the horrid offspring’s before they produced. Our fate rested in her hands. On that sunny afternoon however, Joan noticed the small plant with the embriotic nightmares attached to the leaves and became curious. Frogs, little frogs being born from a plant that required no water and minimal soil seemed like the discovery of the century. I’m sure she felt the dread wash over her. Deep down she battled with her own demons to an extent, but in the end, Joan Redman wanted the fame. She watched as it wiggled in its little bubble waiting to be Mother Nature’s first born. The green veins pulsed and the plant shook all the way to its roots as it tried to escape. She simply smiled to herself as she carefully plucked it from the cracked sidewalk and walked it home. It took less than seventy two hours before she had it documented and sent to Dr. Moore’s lab in San Francisco.

      I guess I could also argue that it was Dr. Moore who started it all, but than I would be pointing a finger at a brilliant man. He wanted to study it, to learn from it. He found it to be out of place in the modern world and feared it. He was convinced he could learn the internal secrets it held and prepare mankind for a fate worse than death…evolution. It was actually his partner Dr. Balm who was eating up the limelight. Between the articles in the magazines, the television interviews, and the seminars, he was eager to push it to the next step. He secretly injected  hormones into the first pod animal, making it grow at an alarming rate. He introduced it to shallow water and mud full of nutrients. Day after day, he would watch the frog grow.

      It wasn’t long after that, when Dr. Balm noticed new plants growing in the mud. He injected the hormones directly into the stems, helping things move along nicely. It took less than a week for the plants to produce new eggs and a few days longer for them to hatch. This time, things were different. The plants were larger and the eggs were oddly shaped. It was at this point that the nightmare truly began. By the time the lab opened the next day, all the eggs had hatched and were running wild. Instead of cute little frogs, baby alligators and poison tree frogs were produced. Tiny plants already started growing through the microscopes, on the table, in the cracks of the wall, and everywhere else the creatures germinated.

      By the time the bodies were found by the authorities, the plague of pod creatures had began. That was ten years ago. Even now, the vast darkness of the underground tunnels make me shiver, but it is our home. Our only goal is to survive the daylight.

      Chapter 1

      New York City

      I walk through the dark hoping to see. I can feel the train tracks beneath my feet and smell the stagnant air in the subway, but nothing more. The cold metal of the ball-bat and few paperback books I salvaged from Earl’s bookstore has been my only friends these many weeks. Up until now, the only luck I have had for survivors were little clues of their existence. In the many crevices of the subway maze were hand carvings and left over ashes from hour fires. The hour fires were always a risky venture.