Wattpad Block Party - Winter Edition III

GregCarrico Presents: Children of the Plague, the Ugly Beginning

Children of the Plague, the Ugly Beginning

@GregCarrico

I owe so much of my success as a writer to Wattpad, but I am most grateful to you: the readers who vote and share your thoughts in comments. As a thank-you for the thousands of comments, tens of thousands of votes, and over 1.4 million reads on my novel Children of the Plague, I would like to share that story's humble beginnings.

I chopped this section from the beginning of a story called Killing Tiffany Hudson, the short story that later grew into Children of the Plague. Bits and pieces have made it into both books, so readers of those stories may experience some De-Ja-Vu.

I wrote this in early 2011, and while I like to think that I have matured as a writer in that time, I have decided to share this "As-Is", in all its raw glory. The pages you are about to read have travelled through time from 2011 to be with you today, and come before you their original, untouched language. Enjoy!

Cut beginning to Killing Tiffany Hudson:

My three best friends and I cut school on the last day of our senior year to hang out at Tiffany Hudson's house. We drank her father's beers and talked about our plans and hopes for the future, promising we'd stay in touch as our new lives in the Real World tugged us in different directions.

I laughed loud and pure that day, and basked in the warm glow of friendship and expectation. High School was over, and I had a scholarship to a good college two states away. My grandfather's pristine 1970 Shelby Mustang was finally mine. But best of all, Tiffany and I would be attending schools in the same city. Life smelled as sweet as her fawn-colored hair, and I was breathing it all in.

I was the last of our small cadre to leave her house, and the heady emotion of the day swept us into each other's arms. After four years of wanting to, we kissed. When I reluctantly pulled away and opened my eyes, I beheld the most perfect sight I had ever seen. Her eyes opened in slow-motion, and her pale pink lips parted in a soul melting smile.

Xipe ruined our next kiss by stabbing Tiffany's neighbor on the front lawn. She called 911, and I ran outside. I don't know what made me do it, but I chased the knife wielding maniac between houses, hopped a chain link fence, and confronted him by someone's tool shed. He moved with incomprehensible speed. His blue knife blade hummed softly as our eyes locked.

My perception of the world and my purpose in it both changed in that instant. The important things I had discussed with my friends were important no longer. A lifetime of images, thoughts, and memories flooded into my mind as his hand fastened onto my arm like a striking snake.

His name was Xipe, and the images in my head were his, not mine. His world had been ravaged by an alien infestation. Now, the infestation was here, and he came to stop it, if he could.

The aliens were microscopic. They infected humans and fed on the electrical impulses in our brains. They very literally ate our memories, our dreams and ideas, and eventually our waking thoughts as they matured and took over our bodies.

I never saw Tiffany Hudson again. I never went to college, and never got to drive that Shelby. Instead, I abandoned my goals, my hopes, and my dreams to help Xipe exterminate the alien parasites and their infected hosts.

My whole family had been infected, but Xipe killed them before he found me, sparing me the torment of doing it myself. I had been infected, too, but I was one of the rare humans the invaders couldn't tolerate, and they quickly abandoned me. He didn't know what it was that drove them away, but he said we smelled different than other humans.

That was how he found me, and that was how he hoped to save humanity from annihilation. Together, we would sniff out the other humans like me: the ones who had been exposed to the alien nanites, but were no longer infected. If there were enough of us, we could check the infestation, and if we were fast enough, maybe even wipe it out.