We All Drank Tea While the Cannibals Came

I didn't scream when it bit me. That's important.

Screaming is the beginning of the end. A scream is the part of the ritual where the body decides to surrender. I didn't. I just looked down at the half-circle of teeth still hooked in my forearm, and I thought: Oh. I guess this is how I find out what kind of story I'm in.

It happened in a stairwell, two floors below my sister's apartment. I was coming to visit with a loaf of banana bread and the kind of hope people hold like an umbrella in a hurricane.

The girl who bit me was wearing a Girl Scout vest and no shoes. Her eyes were wrong. Not scary wrong. Empty wrong. Like someone had scraped out the soul with a grapefruit spoon.

She was fast. Faster than I thought small bones could move. She latched on and didn't growl or scream. She clung. Like hunger had rules and I was the page they were written on.

I beat her off with the bread. Banana walnut. It didn't help.

I didn't tell my sister.

I didn't knock.

I just walked away.

Because what else do you do when your blood is full of question marks?

They say you get fever first. Then confusion. Then pain.

I got something else.

I got clarity.

The world slowed down. My vision sharpened like a camera finally deciding to focus. I could hear the ants in the walls. I could taste copper in the wind.

I could smell my neighbor's dog from the eighth floor.

And that's when I knew something was wrong.

Not turning-wrong. Not decay-wrong.

Mutation.

The third day, I stopped eating.

Not because I wasn't hungry.

Because everything tasted dead.

Bread. Meat. Water. Even the memory of coffee. All of it tasted like the inside of a coffin left in the sun. The only thing I could stomach was the air in a hospital parking lot. Sharp. Metal. Alive in a way that things shouldn't be.

I went to the emergency room.

They turned me away.

Triage is for the dying, not the different.

The dreams came next.

I dreamed of bone. Of marrow being spooned out and replaced with electricity. I dreamed of a mouth full of new teeth — not sharper, just more — and a tongue that could taste fear on breath before it formed a word.

I woke up sweating.

Except it wasn't sweat.

It was clear, and it evaporated before I could wipe it off.

A week in, my fingernails fell off.

Three days later, they came back, glassy and dark and curved like question marks.

I broke my phone by touching it. Not by smashing it — by holding it. It hissed and died in my hand like it knew what I was becoming.

My reflection started blinking when I wasn't.

That was the last day I looked in the mirror.

I didn't tell anyone because what do you say?

"Hi, I got bit and didn't die and now I can hear you thinking about the color of your socks"?

I started avoiding people.

They smelled like fear. Like rot under perfume. Like food I didn't want but couldn't stop sniffing.

But I wasn't hungry.

Not for flesh.

I was hungry for something else.

Connection.

Or maybe recognition.

Someone else like me.

I went to the hospital again. Not to check in.

To watch.

I sat in the waiting room beside a man with a bite mark on his neck and a baby in his lap. The baby was crying. The man wasn't. His leg bounced like he was trying to shake the infection out.

I leaned close.

"You won't make it," I said.

He didn't answer.

He knew.

Some of us know before it happens.

Some of us — don't.

I tried to tell the news. The CDC. The government. Even a podcaster with three thousand subscribers and a cat named Hades.

No one believed me.

So I walked out of the world.

Like a door shutting in reverse.

Now I walk at night.

I don't sleep.

Sleep is a thing for those who trust the darkness.

I don't.

I walk behind the infected. I follow them like a scent. I watch what they become, what they do, how they move when no one's watching.

I understand them.

I think they understand me too.

Because they never bite me again.

They look at me and pause, the way wolves pause at the edge of the firelight when they see something in the shadows they don't recognize — or do.

And then they move on.

Because I'm not food.

I'm something else.

The first draft of a new species.

I don't know what I am.

Not yet.

But I'm not Larry.