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sending-the-message · 7 years

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I'm Hiding In A Mall Bathroom With A Fire Axe by molotok_c_518

I come out occasionally for food, but otherwise, I have been hiding in there fr several weeks.

The mall has been empty. No customers, no employees... everyone is outside, somewhere else, and that is what is keeping me mostly safe.

...and it's all thanks to some dumbass redneck who stole an experimental technology, and doomed us all.

I'm not sure if it has spread out beyond the city. For all I know, the National Guard has us quarantined to keep the violence contained. All I know is, I am hiding to keep myself alive and sane.

Let's back up, though. It's important that the world understand that I didn't do this to destroy us all. I did this to save lives, which makes this all the more tragic.

About 15 years ago, my sister died. Cancer... more specifically, an inoperable brain. We watched as she wasted away, in agony, while doctors tried first to save her life, then save her self, then "make her comfortable." It was like living in a horror movie.

It killed my father; the stress ruined his health, and he died of a heart attack while eating a bagel in his car. My mother took up drinking to cope with the double tragedy, and to this day she spends every waking moment in an alcoholic stupor.

I decided that I would dedicate my life to making sure this stopped happening.

I wasn't very good at biology, but I got good, and combined it with my abilities as a programmer. I threw myself into studying nanotechnology, and puzzling out how I would program nanobots (robots built on a microscopic scale) for complex surgery. I gathered like-minded individuals, and basically infected them with my vision of a troop of 'bots carrying out the kinds of life-saving surgery that was generally deemed too invasive and destructive to perform.

We set up shop on the campus of our local campus of the state university. After painstakingly applying for grants and donations to fund this research (which was hard, as no one wanted to put "real" surgeons out of work), we managed to get the money and time to begin.

It took 10 years, and numerous dead ends (examples: metal didn't work, and tended to degrade and poison the patient; ceramic was too dense to work properly, or so my materials guys said) to finally strike on the perfect solution:

We took a microorganism, and programmed it at the DNA level (creating a compiler that translated my proprietary language to "the machine language of the cells" took months) to repair damaged and infected tissue. A host of them was injected into the bloodstream, and they sought out tumors, nerve damage, torn intestinal sections, etc. The host would swarm these anomalies, and repair them by "eating" the non-viable tissue, replicating more of itself from the protein contained in it, then stimulating the natural regenerative properties of the body to replace the damaged tissue. If anomalies cropped up again (like cancerous tissue), it would sense them, "eat" a bit deeper until the cancer was gone, and try again. Once it stopped sensing cancer, and the area had healed, it would wait a set period of time (usually 8 hours), then "die" and be flushed from the body.

Testing, failing, recoding the DNA in the "meatbots" (as we affectinately referred to them), testing again... years passed, and we finally got consistent successful trials in rats.

In fact, we got miraculous results from rats: We were literally raising them from the dead.

We discovered it by accident, when we were trying to find the optimal time to inject after subjects were poisoned. Several of our test rats had ingested ricin, as a way of finding if the meatbots would save them (it worked). The ones we injected last had died... but then they popped back to life.

It was scary, actually.

The moral ramifications were immediately obvious to us: a world without death would rapidly become overpopulated, and the means to restrict access (by pricing the treatments higher, by restricting production, etc.) would get decried as unethical, or even tyrannical.

We decided, as a group, never to mention this side effect to anyone outside the organization. We instructed everyone to stay quiet about it, and if it did leak, we would terminate the employee and deny everything.

Since we had successful tests, we chose to move on the primate trials. It required a massive recoding of the meatbot programming, as they were set for rodent physiology and anatomy, and regrowing our stock.

As a result, an error crept in: The "killswitch" that was built into the original 'bots got commented out. They didn't become inert and get flushed; instead, they replicated using the "ambient" protein in the blood, and invaded the rest of the body.

I caught the error after one of our monkeys (test subject P1-1) started eating itself to replenish the protein in its blood stream. The wounds bled meatbots. I deleted that recording after we all agreed that no one should watch the poor thing destroy itself.

As I was frantically restoring the killswitch to the rest of the meatbot stock and making sure there were no repeats, our security chief discovered an anomaly in the security logs.

We had a security guard who was stalking a scientist in another department of the science facilities on campus. Somehow, his key card was still left active, and was used to access the "Lazarus Room" where we kept the meatbots. They were sort of clever, in that they put some protein mix into the storage tank to try and cover the depleted 'bots... but didn't think that we kept track of that protein.

It took us several weeks to find the culprit: A Kentucky-born guard named Bobby called in sick for an entire week, and then just stopped calling.

Our chief got together several of his guys to check up on him. An hour later...

"Hey, Dr. {Smith}, this is Chief Red. We need you here. Now. Something went horribly wrong."

"'Something', Chief?" I asked. "Be specific."

"Not on an open line. And definitely not if you have eaten." With that, he hung up.

The address was 15 minutes away. I took the time to stop at Taco Bell and have a burrito, because there was no way it could be as bad as he said.

It wasn't.

It was much, much worse.

The house itself was a tiny two-bedroom bungalow on the outskirts of the city. It was a bit beaten up around the edges, but you could tell it was well-cared for in better times.

Inside, in the living room, were the guard and his wife. They had been zip-tied back-to-back, with their arms tightly tied to their sides.

Those arms were chewed to shreds. Our meatbots were oozing from the gashes, which were rapidly healing themselves.

The two were struggling to get out of their bonds, and were trying to bite into anyone getting near them. "Hungry," the wife moaned. "We're so hungry..."

There was a spoiled-meat smell permeating the air, the result of hundreds of empty containers and plastic wrappings from grpund beef, fast food, and raw beef, as well as shreds of meat and flesh that were strewn along the floors and stuck to the walls.

One of the guards was limping. Bobby had taken a chunk out of his calf when he wandered too close, and the resulting wound was being bandaged by his buddy.

I really regretted that burrito.

Just when I thought it had gotten as bad as it could possibly get, though... it got worse.

See, they had also tried to eat several local animals. Those that had escaped had picked up meatbots, and had spread them to other animals.

Some of those animals had attacked humans. Those humans had picked up meatbots.

Within a week of discovering Bobby and his wife, we had an entire section of town infected with meatbots, which drove them to try and eat as much meat as they could get to feed the replication.

Within a month, no one in town was left unaffected. People ran through the streets trying to eat each other, or any animal they could get their hands on. Wounds would close immediately as chunks were torn from flesh, or gunshot wounds were inflicted.

Headshots? Healed in hours.

The only thing I saw that stopped them from coming back was full immolation. The poor fucker I saw do this screamed and laughed at the same time as he burned away to ash... and it was a close thing, as he was healing almost as fast as he was burning away.

I tried to cure some of them. I injected Bobby and his wife with the new meatbots, with the killswitch reinstated. The old 'bots ate them.

I ended up burning them both away. It was better than Bobby deserved, in my opinion, and I felt horrible about his wife... but she looked at me and thanked me was I poured kerosene over them both and lit the match.

...and so here I hide. I've seen Dawn of the Dead, and I locked the doors to the mall like the protagonists of every version of the movie did. I hide in the bathrooms, where I can hear the slightest whisper of sound in the doorways and be ready to defend myself.

I have stepped out on the roof, and watched an orgy of self-cannibalism play out in a parking lot before a horde of the infected moved on.

Hunger has overtaken logic and compassion. All that drives human and animal alike is the need to eat, and to feed the dreadful miracles that keep them whole.

People have semi-jokingly feared the Zombie Apocalypse. This is much, much worse.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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