Honey, I Ate The Neighbours
Mar. 17th, 2009 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
awmperryRemember that competition I entered? Well, Fairytails And Inkwells got me through to the final. So, on Saturday morning I got a genre and a topic, and 24 hours to write a story of no more than 2500 words. Good game...
It's not terribly good, to be honest, and I don't have particularly high hopes for it, but at least I got something written and entered, which is the main thing.
Anyway, here's the end result. The genre was sci-fi, and the topic was neighbours.
I know it’s a cliché, but Frank Jones’ brain really did taste like chicken.
Of course, my tastebuds aren’t what they used to be, so I might just be imagining things. Hell, it could have tasted of Christmas tree and chips for all I know.
Anyway, you probably want to know how I ended up like this. Folks like me weren’t that common a week ago.
I used to be a bit of an arse, to be honest. Sarcastic, always ready with a mean little jibe. I’m not like that any more, though I probably should point out that it’s because I can’t actually vocalise words any more. And hey, now I eat people, which some would say is slightly worse.
The whole mess had started when that bloody satellite crashed in my back garden. I’d thought it was a meteorite or something that had made the whacking great hole in my perennials, but no – when I went out to check it, there was a bundle of crumpled, roasted metal in the middle of a crater that had wiped out most of the garden.
+++ ALERT +++
+++ UNSCHEDULED DEORBIT DETECTED +++
+++ PROJECTED IMPACT: CONTINENTAL/INHABITED +++
+++ AGENT BLUE VICTOR CONTAMINATION RISK: HIGH +++
> project contamination spread
+++ WITHOUT INTERVENTION, 7-DAY PROJECTION ≈ 110 INDIVIDUALS +++
> implement test protocol Inf/03 and contain
+++ CONTAINMENT MEASURES INITIALISED +++
+++ INF/03: HUMAN EFFECT/COMMUNICABILITY STUDY IMPLEMENTED +++
In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have gone down to have a poke at it, but I did. There was really only scrap left, dribs and drabs of mangled metals and wires. I’d heard all the stuff about not touching things like this, but come on – how often does something that’s been in space land in your back garden?
I’d dropped down into the crater and had a good rummage around; there was nothing I could recognise. Everything had been melted or scorched to oblivion, so there was really just slag left... apart from a little canister of something. It had been torn open by the impact, and some curious green goo had been oozing out of it. It was bubbling and sputtering and steaming – another clue, as if I’d needed one, that the wreckage was probably a bit toasty.
I’d started to back off – even I’m not daft enough to get too close to bubbling green ooze – but a little gobbet of the stuff had spluttered out and landed on my arm.
It had stung pretty badly, fizzling and spitting, so I’d scrambled out of the crater, grabbed a dock leaf and tried to wipe the stuff off. It stopped stinging, left a little red mark, but I’d reckoned that’d be it.
I’d looked back at the pile of scrap and decided I probably should tell someone, so I’d gone back indoors to the phone.
“We just got a call, sir. It’s come down in a little suburb in the UK, and a guy’s asking what to do.”
“Tell him it’s absolutely safe.”
“Uh, sir... the testbed package has a two-pound load of Blue Victor in it. He could...”
“We’ve discussed this. We’ve wondered about human effects. We couldn’t deliberately expose anyone, but now...”
“You mean...”
“Accidents happen. Quarantine it, get a monitoring team in, and tell him the crash site is absolutely safe.”
“You’re a first-class asshole, sir.”
“Whatever gets the job done.”
I’d been standing in the garden again, examining the wreckage – the guy I’d spoken to had told me it should be perfectly safe, after all – when Frank, my neighbour, leaned over the fence.
“New rockery, Harry?”
I’d turned to face him; I still remember how he recoiled when he saw my face, although I hadn’t figured out why at the time.
“Satellite,” I’d grunted. “Fell.”
The words hadn’t seemed to be coming out properly, and the sentences I’d been laboriously constructing had somehow gone missing. I’d absently scratched my arm, and when I glanced down at it I’d got the first indication that something was quite badly wrong.
The slight reddening had expanded to cover most of my arm, with blisters and flaky bits here and there. I’d jabbed a finger at my wrist; it had gone through.
“You all right, mate?”
Frank had clambered across the fence and started approaching me.
“Janet,” he’d called back over his shoulder, “better call an ambulance.”
She’d just come out onto the patio when I caught a whiff of something off Frank. Something appetising, drool-inducing, something that ignited a curious appetite that seemed to subsume everything else.
It’s funny. I’d never had cravings for brains before, but there they were.
Anyway, that’s pretty much how it all started. There I was, picking the Joneses’ gristle out of my teeth, and there was a nagging feeling that I was supposed to feel remorseful about something, but it wasn’t quite clicking.
I got a bit of a shock when I got back into my house and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror; it’s probably the decomposing flesh that did it. And when my wife’s car pulled into the driveway, things got even worse.
“Honey,” I’d meant to say, “about the Joneses...”
But it came out as a sort of gurgling growl, and it went downhill from there.
I ate my wife that evening. I felt a bit bad about that.
DAY TWO: Subject 1 increasingly aggressive. Limbic system, moral considerations and higher reasoning faculties appear almost entirely devolved. Cerebellum, though not cerebrum, appears vital to all subjects. Latest subjects appear to follow pattern of losing speech and comprehension within 1-2 hours of exposure. Most subjects appear to hunt by smell.
Communicability appears most severe through contact with deceased prey or through non-fatal fluid contact encounters; infectees appear to consume the brain in most cases, which according to Dr Osswimler’s theories may be a primitive form of population autoregulation.
Experiment timeline slightly accelerated; recommend early termination.
I woke up, having spent the night curled in front of the radiator in my living room; some vague memory made me want to go to bed, but I couldn’t quite remember what that entailed, and the doorknobs were causing me some difficulty.
And I was hungry. There were a few of us now, and everyone else had tasted very nice, but there was no food left.
I’m not sure why or how, but the rest of us seemed to have had the same idea, and we ended up in a throng in the middle of the main road toward Camberley.
There was food in that direction, we could tell by the scent. We set off.
TO: [REDACTED]
FROM: [REDACTED]
SUBJECT: Blue Victor Inf/03 contingency – Test abort
PRIORITY: URGENT
I think we have sufficient data to safely categorise Blue Victor as extremely virulent and communicable. [REDACTED] in Observation reports a large group of subjects are preparing to leave the QZ in the direction of a major population centre. We should pull the plug on the experiment immediately.
Talk to someone at State and in Security. We need to make this mess go away.
There was a whole row of food, all neatly lined up behind a chain-link fence. I wondered briefly why they were all there, but they smelled so tasty.
We hobbled closer, towards that tantalising mass of dinner.
“None leave the quarantine,” one of them shouted. “Fire on three... two...”
The words didn’t mean much to me, but a distant part of my mind, a memory from a previous existence, suggested that it wasn’t a good thing.
Then guns started going off. One man, perhaps six or seven yards away, raised a shotgun, aimed at me, and fired.
Time seemed to freeze. Everything stood still – but I did find myself wondering why the cluster of double-aught buckshot was still getting closer. And then it hit me.
Funny thing about brains... They look a lot less appetising when they’re your own.
PROJECT BLUE VICTOR
REFRIGERANT / GENERAL ANALGESIC B/V73e
STATUS: FAILED – MAJOR SAFETY ISSUES IDENTIFIED
PRODUCT RECALL RECOMMENDED
Any thoughts, folks?
It's not terribly good, to be honest, and I don't have particularly high hopes for it, but at least I got something written and entered, which is the main thing.
Anyway, here's the end result. The genre was sci-fi, and the topic was neighbours.
Honey, I Ate The Neighbours
Being a zombie wasn’t so bad.
It was the diet that got tricky.
Honey, I Ate The Neighbours
Being a zombie wasn’t so bad.
It was the diet that got tricky.
Honey, I Ate The Neighbours
I know it’s a cliché, but Frank Jones’ brain really did taste like chicken.
Of course, my tastebuds aren’t what they used to be, so I might just be imagining things. Hell, it could have tasted of Christmas tree and chips for all I know.
Anyway, you probably want to know how I ended up like this. Folks like me weren’t that common a week ago.
I used to be a bit of an arse, to be honest. Sarcastic, always ready with a mean little jibe. I’m not like that any more, though I probably should point out that it’s because I can’t actually vocalise words any more. And hey, now I eat people, which some would say is slightly worse.
The whole mess had started when that bloody satellite crashed in my back garden. I’d thought it was a meteorite or something that had made the whacking great hole in my perennials, but no – when I went out to check it, there was a bundle of crumpled, roasted metal in the middle of a crater that had wiped out most of the garden.
* * *
+++ ALERT +++
+++ UNSCHEDULED DEORBIT DETECTED +++
+++ PROJECTED IMPACT: CONTINENTAL/INHABITED +++
+++ AGENT BLUE VICTOR CONTAMINATION RISK: HIGH +++
> project contamination spread
+++ WITHOUT INTERVENTION, 7-DAY PROJECTION ≈ 110 INDIVIDUALS +++
> implement test protocol Inf/03 and contain
+++ CONTAINMENT MEASURES INITIALISED +++
+++ INF/03: HUMAN EFFECT/COMMUNICABILITY STUDY IMPLEMENTED +++
* * *
In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have gone down to have a poke at it, but I did. There was really only scrap left, dribs and drabs of mangled metals and wires. I’d heard all the stuff about not touching things like this, but come on – how often does something that’s been in space land in your back garden?
I’d dropped down into the crater and had a good rummage around; there was nothing I could recognise. Everything had been melted or scorched to oblivion, so there was really just slag left... apart from a little canister of something. It had been torn open by the impact, and some curious green goo had been oozing out of it. It was bubbling and sputtering and steaming – another clue, as if I’d needed one, that the wreckage was probably a bit toasty.
I’d started to back off – even I’m not daft enough to get too close to bubbling green ooze – but a little gobbet of the stuff had spluttered out and landed on my arm.
It had stung pretty badly, fizzling and spitting, so I’d scrambled out of the crater, grabbed a dock leaf and tried to wipe the stuff off. It stopped stinging, left a little red mark, but I’d reckoned that’d be it.
I’d looked back at the pile of scrap and decided I probably should tell someone, so I’d gone back indoors to the phone.
* * *
“We just got a call, sir. It’s come down in a little suburb in the UK, and a guy’s asking what to do.”
“Tell him it’s absolutely safe.”
“Uh, sir... the testbed package has a two-pound load of Blue Victor in it. He could...”
“We’ve discussed this. We’ve wondered about human effects. We couldn’t deliberately expose anyone, but now...”
“You mean...”
“Accidents happen. Quarantine it, get a monitoring team in, and tell him the crash site is absolutely safe.”
“You’re a first-class asshole, sir.”
“Whatever gets the job done.”
* * *
I’d been standing in the garden again, examining the wreckage – the guy I’d spoken to had told me it should be perfectly safe, after all – when Frank, my neighbour, leaned over the fence.
“New rockery, Harry?”
I’d turned to face him; I still remember how he recoiled when he saw my face, although I hadn’t figured out why at the time.
“Satellite,” I’d grunted. “Fell.”
The words hadn’t seemed to be coming out properly, and the sentences I’d been laboriously constructing had somehow gone missing. I’d absently scratched my arm, and when I glanced down at it I’d got the first indication that something was quite badly wrong.
The slight reddening had expanded to cover most of my arm, with blisters and flaky bits here and there. I’d jabbed a finger at my wrist; it had gone through.
“You all right, mate?”
Frank had clambered across the fence and started approaching me.
“Janet,” he’d called back over his shoulder, “better call an ambulance.”
She’d just come out onto the patio when I caught a whiff of something off Frank. Something appetising, drool-inducing, something that ignited a curious appetite that seemed to subsume everything else.
It’s funny. I’d never had cravings for brains before, but there they were.
Anyway, that’s pretty much how it all started. There I was, picking the Joneses’ gristle out of my teeth, and there was a nagging feeling that I was supposed to feel remorseful about something, but it wasn’t quite clicking.
I got a bit of a shock when I got back into my house and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror; it’s probably the decomposing flesh that did it. And when my wife’s car pulled into the driveway, things got even worse.
“Honey,” I’d meant to say, “about the Joneses...”
But it came out as a sort of gurgling growl, and it went downhill from there.
I ate my wife that evening. I felt a bit bad about that.
* * *
DAY TWO: Subject 1 increasingly aggressive. Limbic system, moral considerations and higher reasoning faculties appear almost entirely devolved. Cerebellum, though not cerebrum, appears vital to all subjects. Latest subjects appear to follow pattern of losing speech and comprehension within 1-2 hours of exposure. Most subjects appear to hunt by smell.
Communicability appears most severe through contact with deceased prey or through non-fatal fluid contact encounters; infectees appear to consume the brain in most cases, which according to Dr Osswimler’s theories may be a primitive form of population autoregulation.
Experiment timeline slightly accelerated; recommend early termination.
* * *
I woke up, having spent the night curled in front of the radiator in my living room; some vague memory made me want to go to bed, but I couldn’t quite remember what that entailed, and the doorknobs were causing me some difficulty.
And I was hungry. There were a few of us now, and everyone else had tasted very nice, but there was no food left.
I’m not sure why or how, but the rest of us seemed to have had the same idea, and we ended up in a throng in the middle of the main road toward Camberley.
There was food in that direction, we could tell by the scent. We set off.
* * *
TO: [REDACTED]
FROM: [REDACTED]
SUBJECT: Blue Victor Inf/03 contingency – Test abort
PRIORITY: URGENT
I think we have sufficient data to safely categorise Blue Victor as extremely virulent and communicable. [REDACTED] in Observation reports a large group of subjects are preparing to leave the QZ in the direction of a major population centre. We should pull the plug on the experiment immediately.
Talk to someone at State and in Security. We need to make this mess go away.
* * *
There was a whole row of food, all neatly lined up behind a chain-link fence. I wondered briefly why they were all there, but they smelled so tasty.
We hobbled closer, towards that tantalising mass of dinner.
“None leave the quarantine,” one of them shouted. “Fire on three... two...”
The words didn’t mean much to me, but a distant part of my mind, a memory from a previous existence, suggested that it wasn’t a good thing.
Then guns started going off. One man, perhaps six or seven yards away, raised a shotgun, aimed at me, and fired.
Time seemed to freeze. Everything stood still – but I did find myself wondering why the cluster of double-aught buckshot was still getting closer. And then it hit me.
Funny thing about brains... They look a lot less appetising when they’re your own.
* * *
PROJECT BLUE VICTOR
REFRIGERANT / GENERAL ANALGESIC B/V73e
STATUS: FAILED – MAJOR SAFETY ISSUES IDENTIFIED
PRODUCT RECALL RECOMMENDED
Any thoughts, folks?
