We start above a city. Any city will do, but its gotta be near the woods. Big woods. Woods that stretch for days and days.
The kids come over the ridge. They've been tryin to reach it for over an hour, and the rest is taken with total abandon. Packs are dropped to the ground, with a grown from some quarters, and they sit. The four have been friends for ever to them, bout 4 years to the rest of us of any seasoning. They bask in the sun, filtered through the large pines that dot the landscape, and close their eyes.
Thoughts begin to drift.
The first one to truly start the epidemic begins to see the patterns. He's slightly surprised, but allows himself to succumb to the quartered glyphs and basic geometric shapes.
At this point in our story, dear reader, the game is lost, the towel has been thrown in. The children are lost.
The first, eldest by 22 minutes, opens his eyes. He sees before them, on the trail to where they are, a bush of berries. They look somewhat like holly berries, but larger. The leaf structure is more succulent, as if in times of need the plant can survive on limited water and percevire.
He sits staring at the plant for quite some time, the others are still daydreaming. They rock to the patterns behind their eyes. Some hum while they rock.
The eldest, Mr. 22, stands up and stretches, in constant view to the plant. He watches it with a singular intensity, an intensity that is all consuming.
As he watches, the berries begin to scintalate. They through off sparks like a strange ornament lit from behind on a christmas tree. It begins to rotate slowly, first left, then right. It does'nt seem to follow the arc of the sun, doesn't respond to the wind. Its stock still.
He's now in front of the plant. If he had wanted to confront the lapse of time felt while gazing at the plant he would find he has no recollection of the time between rising and the walk to the plant, a mere ten to fifteen feet away. But he doesn't. The plant is his all.
A couple of others have began to come around to his movement and the source of it. They become enthralled.
The first is one again first in things of the mountain this day. He bends over and ever so tenderly, plucks a berry. In his hand it shines like a light, but in broad daylight. This is in no way unusual to the youth, and the others are now there. Bending. Picking. He, the first, the eldest, is barely ahead of the others as they eat the singular berry that they each have now in their hand.
After they got home, trying to suspend the monumentous thing they had done, they fell asleep. The sleep was deep and total. As their breathing slowed, and the changes began, they felt no pain as the bones shifted, and the change overcame them.
As one, almost with an instinctual need they arise. As their heightened senses take in their surroundings they sense others with those environments. The others are perceived, to those poor youths, as older, frailer, weaker.
It doesn't start as a hunter prey scenario, thats not the driving force of these feral creatures. They need no sustenance. Their only drive, the drive given to them not mere hours before, is the drive to mark, maim, and immerse themselves in the older blood. To impregnate them.
Hours later the paramedics called to the first scene that will soon become a well known facet of a crumbling society, the precursor of the epidemic, are the strange succulents growing from the victims. The children of these people are never found, but at all the sites other children from the neighborhoods, where the original mountain walkers lived, where all found roaming about the site.
And every single other child was eating some sort of berries.
