Sample Chapter of Shreds of Humanity

Prologue

I was sane once.

Sane?

That single word seems like such a clean and tidy word.  It wraps my whole mind and body in a thick blanket of normalcy which no longer seems possible.

But I was normal once, just as I was once sane.  That sanity is gone now, though.  As gone as my wife and child.  As gone as everything normal.

That word keeps ringing in the emptiness of my skull.  Sane.  Seems to chase my very soul, or what is now left of it, and I have to wonder if I was ever sane.  And if I was sane, then what am I now?

Crazy?

That word was even tidier than the other option, but just as incorrect.  If I was crazy, would I know that I’d driven my mental bus past the right exit?  If I was crazy, would I feel the loss of my sanity just as I felt the loss of my family?

No, I wasn’t crazy any more than I was sane.  My brain bus was just stuck in neutral, unable to shift into drive or reverse—forever stuck on the psychological highway without the ability to simply unbuckle and step away from the bony cage surrounding it.

These wandering thoughts and images were all that was left of my mind now.  They were the wisps of imaginary smoke trailing from the ethereal crack pipe of reality and, no matter how hard I swatted at those hazy tendrils, they simply evaded my mind and left me grasping at the nothingness before me.

Nothingness.  That was a better word for what I was left with—the nothingness of a soul trapped between sanity and insanity.  Like an empty balloon so full of nothingness that it has to burst, I am an empty vessel which could never be filled again.  Everything that I had once known and loved was gone now—my child, wife, job, life, mind—all gone like a screwdriver in the junk drawer.

But that left only me in this great mental wasteland; unable to form complete and rational thoughts, yet just as unable to completely bend to the comforting quilt of insanity.

Chapter One

As lonely as my mind might have been, my body had joined the rank and file of an army so immense that it nearly enveloped everything in the world now surrounding me. 

I hadn’t signed any enlistment papers for this army.  Nobody had ever asked me if I wanted to join, nor had they ever given me a choice.  I had been an unwilling draftee with no options to dodge. 

At first.

The unwillingness had quickly evaporated and this army was now my own.  I had been indoctrinated into it and had eventually become it.  I was a soldier now, though I wasn’t part of any organized army.  This army had no commander to guide us or ranks to manage.  This army had no rules and only one purpose. 

To kill.

And we were good at killing.  We hunted our prey in packs.  We hunted them in large waves.  We even hunted them alone.  We killed our prey for food, yet our bodies no longer needed that food.  We killed them because we had to; because that was what we were now wired to do.  And we did it without thought and without sympathy.  We didn’t fight for our families or our fellow soldiers.  We no longer cared for the soldier beside us or even the families we had once cherished.  We cared for no one—and that was our strength.  The inability to care for others gave us a power that the uninfected could not possess.  The uninfected—the humans—still cared for each other and still died for the ones they loved.  Such a silly concept—love—yet the humans seemed to value it above all else, cherishing the sickening fragrance of devotion enough to lay out their own skin in ridiculously futile attempts to save their families and friends. 

I had once felt that need to protect.  It had flowed through my veins like smooth Kentucky whiskey and the sense of duty to my own family had once been as strong as the pull of gravity upon my tall and mighty body.

But those feelings were gone now.  I no longer suffered from the weaknesses of humanity.  I was no longer one of them, only a mere shade of my former self—I was infected.

Infected was another simple word, but this one did fit me now.  Once, that word had brought visions of simple colds, sneezes, and runny noses.  Yet it meant so much more now—to both sides.  The uninfected feared us, feared becoming one of us.  We, the infected, were driven by some unknown hand to feast upon those still free of this cursed disease which slowly rotted our minds and killed our souls.  The infection had stripped me of everything I once considered strength.  I knew it was tearing me down, possibly even tearing me apart.  But it wasn’t weakening me.  Even as it broke down my muscles and my mind, this disease had also built new muscles above the others and thick rings of semi-consciousness around my psyche. 

This disease had made me strong and made the humans weak.  They were our prey and we were the greatest of predators.  That made us strong; that made us the kings of this new world.

At least at night.

The night belonged to us. 

The days were still the time of the humans.  We couldn’t risk the sun’s touch.  That light, which had once fed our bodies with nourishment and our minds with sanity, now burned through the pale skin stretched across our thinning bodies and drove us even closer to the precipice of total insanity.  Or maybe we had already jumped off that cliff and it only reminded us of our few weaknesses.  Both armies—human and infected—had long adapted to the laws of this new war.  They controlled the days and did whatever they did during those long and hot hours, but we ruled over the nights and did what we did then.

And what we did at night was…

death.

That was the only word that could fully describe what we did, but even that word fell short of capturing the true horror that we inflicted upon our enemy.  It did little to explain how we tracked the humans through the darkness and took their lives without remorse or mercy.  Those were human emotions, built upon the cornerstones of culture—we didn’t suffer from those obstacles, though, and were free to feast upon the humans’ flesh without emotion or conscience.

Imagine what a perfect army I had been dragged into—singular of mind and purpose with no leadership to guide us astray and no emotional baggage to hold us back.  Thousands, millions, maybe even billions of soldiers united by a single disease, a single thought, a single cause, a single appetite. 

We were united against the humans, as we feasted upon their flesh and sought only to extinguish their kind.

We were the perfect soldiers in the perfect army.