Necrosis
I.
I should tell you about it. Maybe you know it already-the rise of the number of suicides, the homicides, the murders. The crazy people. And then those shambling things that came afterwards.
I was there when we discovered the spores that started this whole mess.
In the 1980s, an independent group of Scientists-myself included, embarked on an expedition to Africa to search for a notorious, maddening substance only known to locals as waansin. Apparently, this substance was spread through beautiful blomme flowers, which were found around the area.
When inhaled, the waansin spores cause madness and/or dementia in the natives. The effects vary, though most of the time; they turn mad and seek a desire to murder others. I saw them stab themselves with spears and sticks and such, bashing foreheads as they went. They inflicted wounds into themselves. Some injuries were enough to kill them, naturally, but they still kept on moving.
We studied a victim in a lab west of Kijuju, sealing him in a plate-glass sealed room with one way mirrors. We left him adequate food and water and sealed him inside. From him we learned of the necrosis that was happening to his skin.
First, the skin pales-in this case, the native turned his otherwise dark skin into a dry, cracked gray. Blotches start to form, then sores. Through weeks of isolation, we saw the skin turn into a gray, cracked husk into greenish sore, blabbering on in Afrikaans.
Days later, the man self-terminated.
As he was being prepared for burial, we noticed that the corpse was twitching rapidly. It was too strange to be called Necrotic Twitching, it was as if the corpse still wanted to move. After a rapid succession of twitching, the corpse simply hung limp.
We attempted another experiment. Apparently, that led me to my second discovery. The spores induce mutations in the body if tissue damage was severe. Apparently the spores induced cellular reproduction within the bloodstream, creating cell-after-cell-after-cell. We knew something was wrong.
A heavily wounded man exhibiting the symptoms of the blomme spores started to grow an inhuman amount of muscle and tissue around the injured parts of his body. We sedated him and placed him in an isolation room for study. The results were astonishing.
The waansin spores regenerated parts of the wounded man's body with a red mass that gave a red pigmentation on the person's skin.
The infected showed signs of an intense wendigo psychosis-an insatiable desire to feed on a human's flesh. As the days passed by, I started to get weary and tired. I was also frightened.
The other scientists were getting weary, too. When the screaming started, we were on to our knees.
The man screamed his ears out.
The screaming went on for days, until we woke up, heard nothing, and saw a bullet hole in his chest. The reddish man lay there. I asked Peters, our hunter, if he had done the euthanasia. "No." he said. "Angel grabbed my gun when I was sleeping."
We saw Angel, the researcher, curled to a fetal position in a corner of the lab, gun in hand.
She was sobbing and whispering. When we examined her for cuts and bruises, we saw a bite mark embedded in her arm.
"Itbitme.Itbitme.Ican'tbelieveitbitme." she whispered. "I wanted to take a blood sample from him and he bit me. So I shot him. I shot shot shot him. Through the chest. That sick bastard. That sick sick bastard."
