2025 The Next Stage

The thunder shook Jim’s chest by the square shaped apparatus where a leather wire attached itself to his mask.It covered his nose and mouth, where two air chambers sat on his cheeks. A bolt of lightning appeared like a throbbing vein outside the back window. Along for the ride where his father, and grandmother. Both of which were also wearing masks and breathing devices. To keep his mind busy, Jim spent most of the ride scratching at a red bump on his wrist he had secretly hid from his father. They slowed the car down and pulled into a large parking lot. The big flashy neon sign read “Last Night Diner”.

“Here we go champ.” His father said. The car always made a jerk when switching into park.

“Sit wherever you’d like!” said a waitress sporting the same mask and chest piece, as did the rest of the guests and employees. Jim’s father spotted a booth in the corner.

“This place feels like it’s crawling with cockroaches.” Jim’s pruny grandmother uttered.

“Ma, it’s fine. There were roaches in the hotel too.” said the father.

“No there weren’t!”

“Yes there were, and guess what? You loved it there!”

The old woman turned away, as to pretend she didn’t hear her son. Instead she concerned herself with the safety precautions that had to be made when an airborne virus hit some five years ago. Jim sat quietly on his hands. Always analyzing the way his father and grandmother spoke to each other. He was never very social, so for the first nine years of his life, he learned interaction watching his guardians banter.

For Jim though, anything that catches his attention only lasts in small bursts, but he didn’t feel bad about that. He noticed adults are the same way. What did catch his glimmer tonight was a dark van that has been sitting next to his father’s car.

The very same waitress that sat Jim and his family, found herself face down on the floor by force.

It takes a few seconds for her blurry vision to adjust to what is a gun hovering above her. Demanding words spray out to the public like bullets.

Grandma turns. A freshly loaded shell swims through Grandma’s brain. The loud shot was the only thing that bothered Jim. Like lightning.

The whole diner screams.

“Everyone shut up!” the gunman yelled. There were two of them, and they both looked desperate, even when wearing the masks. They were factory workers until the company escaped Earth some three years ago. The second man cocked his gun.

“Alright everyone, I know what you're all thinking. No, this is not about money” he said reassuringly, but it didn’t calm anyone. He strolled down the lanes passing the scared hostages.

“You.” The first gunman’s icy words chilled up the back of a cook. The cook stood behind a counter where a panic button sat underneath...but that would not matter now. The police were considered essential to the elite. The people knew it. The whole planet knew it. They were abandoned.

The diner erupted with more panic by the time the cook’s body thumped to the counter, where blood splattered on a frightened waitress. The cook’s shell withered away as it slid off the counter.

“That was fun!” the gunman cheered.

The second gunman stepped over Grandma’s rotting corpse. Jim’s eyes were stuck on the flies that already appeared, buzzing over the bleeding hole in her head. He hears a click.

BAM!

Jim flinched. He saw his father’s head face down on the counter where flesh separates to vent out the smoke sizzling upward.

“One to go huh?” laughed the second gunman.

Jim sat in his seat in discomfort, holding his wrist unfazed. Still scratching at it.

“Come here kid.”

He doesn’t respond.

“I said…”

a waitress falls backwards when a bullet makes eye contact.

“Come here kid.”

The man’s hard hand almost breaks Jim’s wrist as he forces him to his feet. To some of the hostages’s interest, Jim never made a sound.

“Our future folks!” the gunman laughed.

He turned for one last look at Jim, but something was wrong. Jim’s arm had become red, like a rash. The man pulled his hand back, releasing the boy. Revealing a dark red scab sitting on Jim’s wrist. It seemed to be sprouting black veins that crawled up the child’s arm like running water.

“What the?...”

The strange event caught everyone by surprise. Jim sneezed, and suddenly jerked himself to the ground. His body began twitching as lumps of blonde hair clumped together on the floor. His skin tone and body shape shifted into a beat red hairless child with several humps protruding from his shoulders. As the boy rose to his feet, he noticed his left arm had grown a considerable two feet. He removed his mask, where his jagged teeth flashed a yellow grin.

“What the fuck is this?” fright was obvious in the gunman’s voice. “I...I don’t feel so good.”

The gunman dropped his gun, and came crashing down to the ground. Grunting, and gurgling.

“I can’t breath!” he tried to yell. His face turns bright red, as his body temperature increases, along with his heart rate. He could feel blood pumping through his entire body. Every muscle, every vein, and every artery swells up. A thick liquid puss swished in his neck. He pulls his mask off violently.

“Put your mask back on dude!” the first gunman warned.

Unable to answer, the second gunman’s eyes start bulging out of his sockets. Screaming became a faint almost silent pant. The crowd around him jumped above the tables where they headed for the door in panic. The first gunman’s fear response was to shoot. The numbers dwindled, until…

“Oh shit...I can’t…” he grabbed for his throat, where the bones in his arms began crunching and twisting painfully.

Outside the diner, the scattering ants fill the air with faint screams like the very air they breath is violently cut off. Their bodies distort, bones break open, eyes burst to pieces, fingernails lop off, and invisible forces rips spines through backs. What was a mostly dried up sandy spot on the map, now flowed in thick red chunks of human sea.

Jim watched on. The second gunman’s whaling ceases as his torso springs outward, ripping him in half. What is left of his spine and lower intentions evaporate to a sludgy mush. The same muck oozes from his face like hot bubbling apple sauce.

The violent artwork surrounding the lonely deformed child dissolves to the next newspaper heading. The virus had evolved. Since it’s mysterious arrival, the steps taken to ensure survival have changed. The last of the essential workers would remain on Earth for another month before they brave their journey to Mars, where production on full body suits and helmets will be manufactured. The child’s transfiguration has baffled even the elites on Mars, and certain appropriate actions will be taken into consideration for further answers.