And this is how it starts

The waning afternoon faded the color of the sky into a blue-purple tinge. The roof of the train station suddenly crackled with light, causing Mary to jolt her gaze slightly upward. She was zoning out again. Behind the wire fence in front of her was a street experiencing minimal traffic. A quaint and quiet suburb stretched out behind it.

Mary heard a ding, and suddenly, the familiar voice of the train announcer spoke through the speakers. Shortly afterwards, the train arrived. One of it’s doors stopped a little to the left of Mary’s seat. She got up, shouldered her backpack on, and stepped off of the platform and into the train.

As Mary walked home from her train station stop, she hardly thought about a thing. She kicked small rocks on the ground when she could, and kept her head up while her gaze looked down. Mary had just graduated high school two weeks back, and now that summer vacation had opened its doors, she just walked around, trying to find a purpose with her time. However, the job interviews she signed up for ended up being a waste of time. She’d go up to the storefront, step inside, looked around, and walked out in a fit of shaking and tension in her chest.

Mary turned the key to her front door and stepped inside. Her parents weren’t home yet, and neither was her sister. Probably out with friends, she thought. It was already 6:30 pm. She decided to retreat to her room.

She laid down on her bed, and closed her arms around her face. Before she decided to get comfortable, she got out her phone and played a song. She didn’t disconnect her headphones from her phone, and she turned up the volume. It sounded like a faded radio. She placed her arms over her face again.

The chemicals that make her love don’t seem to be working anymore.

Those words bore a weight in her chest and she leaned into her own arms more. The space of her room was comforting to her. The floor seemed so far down from her bed.

Mary started to hear phrases in her head that she couldn’t say out loud.

I don’t want to feel so tired..

Why don’t I think that I’m enough..

Why can’t my feelings be.. real..

Mercy Kasei’s story is set in Japan. In this world, a large sudden uprising had just occurred worldwide, and not a single nation was prepared to give the other aid. A biological warfare ensued amongst opposing sides - the main weapon being a gas released among the cities, turning those who inhaled it into vegetative life forms.

Living organisms, such as humans, inhaling the gas would grow fatigued and rest in a place, only to find trouble moving from their fixed spots of rest. Gradually, their biological matter would loosen, seemingly melt and spread over that area, turning green as it grew over the surface. Leaves and plant life would sprout from the organism. Duration of disease before official fatality - 2 weeks.

Upon hearing about this weapon, every nation had began a protocol to save as many lives as they could, and so handed out gas masks to every civilian they could reach. However, the focus faltered amongst the nations, as they had neglected to take care of the farming industry; the gas had spread to open fields, and killed most, if not all of the animals used for consumption.

The world went into chaos due to the largest meat scarcity in history.

Mercy Kasei was a law student at a prestigious university. She had a close group of friends, but had a great relationship with all of her teachers. One day as she was walking in the corridors, she felt a strong tremor from all around her, like a strong earthquake. She hid for cover fast, and was buried amidst the rubble of her dorm building.

When she awoke, she couldn’t breathe, and a sharp tingling scent passed over the air. Suddenly, she saw light break through, and a hand extending to help her. It was one of her teachers, and she placed a gas mask over Mercy, as she carried her limping body to a different facility.

Mercy awoke a second time, but was inside of an emergency room with only a few other people. She recognized her teachers and other older people standing and talking amongst each other. Mercy felt her injuries, and was starting to get hungry and thirsty. One of her teachers handed her some food and water to energize her, and then receded to talk with the other teachers.

The others in their beds in the ER got up and looked towards a sign posted on one of the walls - ‘Population of Japan 20,376,890/126,399,500 (and decreasing)’. Everyone was horrified, including Mercy. A heavy realization settled upon their shoulders that everyone was afraid to address. They all looked outside the window and found that the facility they were in had incredibly secure parameters. Getting out would be easy; getting in is a different story.

One of the teachers spoke loudly to those in the ER, and briefed them on what happened. The agricultural industry fell dramatically, and the rest of the world fell as a result. He then went on to tell them that a large explosion of the biological weapon was set off in the heart of the city by an unknown source, causing severe structural damage and hundreds of thousands of deaths. The city streets are still ridden with infected air.

Everyone erupted into a riot of shouting and cussing. People yelled, asking about their families and friends, each knowing that they’re all most likely dead. An angry tension and hatred built up amongst the people.

As the teacher attempted to calm down the group, he explained that even in this most dire situation, the sciences department are developing a vaccine that will allow people to become immune to the toxicity in the air. In order to conduct tests, they must use human subjects. Then the students were faced with an ultimatum:

“Either be a test subject yourself, or go and find one.”

Some of them wanted to go find whoever left the mess that was created and to kill them. Others rejected the idea of going outside for fear that they would get killed by the air. But upon realizing that none of them would be able to survive outside the facility on their own, they all decide to comply with the orders given. Some of them prep themselves to become subjects figuring it was the safe route, and others group together and decide the pros and cons of heading out.

Mercy sat on her bed and looked towards the ‘subject’ line, considering she was injured and couldn’t move effectively. Eventually, she lines up with the subjects, but she was filled with the same hatred that the rest of the others did.

Mercy passed day after day being prepped and tested. At one point, all she was doing was sitting and waiting to test a version of the vaccine. The other subjects had gone and now are waiting to be tested for the long term results, but she hasn’t even been anywhere close to the test lab. She often heard the teachers clamor in anger, terror, or sadness over whoever terrorized them in the first place, and how much they feel the loss.

She looked out the glass divider, and saw the ‘runners’ come and go each day with different people in gas masks. They praised the runners for bringing them to a safe haven; they didn’t know that they’ll also be test subjects for the vaccine. Only a few people came in at a time, so there wasn’t an issue with rationing for a mass of people.

One day, Mercy was asleep, when she heard a tap on the glass divider. It was Ambrose Psuedés, the Greek exchange student who was studying as a biology major. Utterly confused, she asked what was wrong, but all she saw from him were hand gestures telling her to get out of the room and to follow he and his group. Mercy hesitated for a moment, but decided to follow him anyway.

Ambrose told her that they needed one more person for their 5-person run team, and they’ve passed by her every day and wondered why she hadn’t been picked to be tested on yet. He asks if she’s healed from her injuries and she said yes. Even though she agreed to go with them, she was unsure if she was up to the challenge.

Mercy and her team went out at night and looked for people in the ruins of the city. They each have gas masks that have a sensitive filter, which accumulates too much bacteria over a 5 hour time span, and must be regularly cleaned at base. They ran slowly and inefficiently due to their gear.

The team were pretty much used to their surroundings by now, but Mercy couldn’t bear to see the destruction of the city. She’d heard about the symptoms of the weapon, and was sickened to the stomach upon the realization that every instance of plant life that stained the buildings and the streets around them, used to be human beings. She recalls the information she heard about the organization that terrorized them, and festered an even stronger hatred for them.

The team, on their run, usually grew hungry. The facility was running out of edible portions to give out, and everyone ran on three small portions a day. The group also scoured to find some preserved food in the city, but most of the time they were half-starved.

One day, they came back to base, and Mercy’s old teachers, who were now the heads of the facility, had figured out that she had switched from becoming a test subject to a runner. One of them approached her and talked to her about a location where they suspect one of the bases of the organization were hidden. This teacher of hers wanted her team of runners to go out and find anyone from this location, and bring them back to base under sedation. The heads intended to interrogate them for the original formula for the gas weapon to aid the development of the vaccine.

Mercy complied with her teacher easily, knowing that they’re the ones running the facility, and are not to be prompted with controversy so quick. Mercy’s team found the location, took the first person they saw with the terrorist insignia, and sedated him.

Once Mercy’s team handed the man over to the heads of the facility, they quickly went into a surgery room and locked the doors immediately. While the team found this suspicious, they went along with their usual night run. The team was constantly prompted by the heads to go back and take anyone they saw with an insignia. On their fifth kidnapping run, they all made a pact to ask the heads of their findings, since no information has been disclosed to them so far.

Mercy was the one to ask them. The team was angry and starving; they were growing ill due to first stage malnourishment. They wanted to know if they had any chance of getting the vaccine successfully completed soon, so they could reach out further than their usual radius, and perhaps even look for help outside of the city.

The teacher she was talking to looked surprisingly healthy considering their low ration of food. Mercy’s vision slowly began to falter, and her stomach growled loudly. Then her teacher asked her how she felt about the terrorists.

Mercy clenched her fists slightly and took a deep breath. She began telling her teacher how much she despised them, how much she wanted to kill them for taking away everything from her. Her teacher simply nodded, and led her and her team into the surgery room where they held the interrogations. Mercy and her team were frozen in their tracks out of fear.

On a table laid out in the middle of the large surgery room, there were several plates of meat, all laid out into bite sized pieces. On the left corner of the room, several people crowded over a table with a light overhead, carefully dissecting away at someone’s body, taking what seemed to be ‘decent’ and collecting it into buckets. The buckets were taken away by people who washed them up and boiled the meat just long enough so that it’s suitable to be eaten. In the right corner of the room were cleaned out bones in a crate.

Mercy and her team were overwhelmed at their surroundings. Ambrose was the first one to break. He yelled at the teachers, saying that what they were doing was wrong, but he started to falter and lose his point in his confusion. One of the teachers came up to Ambrose and inform him of the situation.

The information that they received from the interrogation was more than enough. One of them had broken during their interrogation, saying that every person with an insignia meant that they essentially had the vaccine they were trying to create, but it was embedded into their biological system as a whole. They had even gone so much as to tell them that the only way for them to gain the vaccine was to literally consume them. At this point, the heads didn’t even hesitate. They planned on making enough ‘food’ for untested subjects to react to, and then test if the effects were sustainable or not. The teacher told them:

“We’d never planned for you to be the first real subjects. But then everyone would have become one, one way or another.”

The team stood over the table of human meat, assessing the outcome of the situation. They all needed to move further outside of the city, and through this, they may sustain enough immunity to do so. Not to mention they were already ravenous for food, un-empathetic for the terror organization... and delirious out of their minds.

Mercy reached out to grab a small piece of skin, the meat still bearing a fair amount of redness inside of it. She picked it up and a thin streak of blood ran down her fingertip. Her team watched her intently as she ate the thing whole. And they all started reaching for food when her lips peaked upwards into a smeared red smile.