#decaying pages

The first thing they teach you is this: never, under any circumstances, remove your mask. It’s not a big deal if you take off your gloves, although it isn’t really encouraged. Inklish can still get under your fingernails.

And if you know anything about inklish, you understand how hard it is to wash off.

But if you inhale it? Forget about your future. Make peace with your loved ones. It’ll cluster within seconds of entering your lungs.

You won’t be able to breathe. The corrupted flesh will be shredded by every panicked gasp. You’ll exhale the pieces through your nose and mouth, along with an ocean’s worth of blood. It’s very painful.

People have gone crazy from the suffering. They’d killed themselves.

I know what you must be thinking, dear reader. How horrible! Why don’t they just burn the stuff, and prevent anyone from being exposed to such a dangerous biohazard?!

Well, they tried that.

When the inklish first started to appear, the CDC was given full authority of affected sites. Nobody knew what was happening. Officials thought it appropriate to treat the phenomenon as a virus. The agency proceeded to quarantine libraries that were suffering from shedding and decided, in its infinite wisdom, that clean-up crews could use flamethrowers. A lapse in judgement. Maybe.

It didn’t work out. The inklish was burned, don’t get me wrong. The strips and flaps were destroyed. Shelves were cleaned, their edges smoothed.

But the material itself wasn’t gone. It’d been reduced. Made smaller. Now, instead of being in piles large enough to see and contain, it’d been transformed into a fine powder. In this state, it could easily pass through the air ventilation system in their suits.

And the walls. And the floor.

The disaster that followed would lead to a change in how the government would handle future shredding. Everyone was so mad that protests lasted for weeks. The CDC found itself in quite the legal trouble.

It hadn’t been prepared. It didn’t know how to proceed. Someone had to be trained to deal with this emergency.

The MCRD was founded in the resulting fallout.

Nobody knows why. Or how. Or even what.

They have theories, of course, but none of them makes any sense to me. It is hard enough for someone to wrap their head around the concept of metastatic infection and literabiological shedding.

I still can’t believe it. Books are just books. Stories are just stories, text inked into paper, fake. Not portals to infinite realities.

Fiction is fiction.

Reality is reality.

We exist. Characters don’t exist.

But that doesn’t matter. Books can shed dead letters and those dead letters can form piles, and those piles can spew stillborn characters into our world. Nothing can change that.

And something is creating those characters, and that something is not God. It can not be God. God is supposed to be good. All loving. He’s supposed to be merciful.

He isn’t supposed to torture His creations by throwing them into a hellish otherworldly mess, where they cannot hope to survive.

He isn’t supposed to create worthless things. Things that He can just toss aside like trash. Things just born.

Infants.