The air is clogged with their stench. It lingers long after they have moved on, and the destruction they sow leaves a permanent scar across the horizon. They are as alien as they are lethal.
And yet this reek is not entirely unfamiliar to the survivors.
It reminds them of something close by. A tang, bitter as copper, that dances on the tongue. It runs in their veins and flows freely from the corpses they leave behind.
These things are so much more than men, yet not so distant. They walk with an unnatural gait, and scream in warbling code, yet their visage is unmistakably human.
As the odor claws into their lungs, they begin to feel it. That desire. That will to change. To mutate. To purge. That insatiable drive to consume. To spread. To ascend.
And then they begin their march, trailing that sickly sweet rot across a desolate land, seeking bubbles of teeming life and mutable bodies within.
Paddy Dobson
18th June 2022