FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The shots will just attract more zombies, but I don't really have much of a choice.

I'm treed: second floor of a four-story former-library. There's an open floor plan, so I've got clear lines of sight to all the entrances, even down to the first floor: there's a canyon through the center of the place, bridges across, open sight lines to everywhere. Doesn't change a thing; the only stairs up or down are just above the crowd and the only exits have the crowd between me and them.

To be brief: one exit, blocked. Going up, roof access, might help, but just as likely it's the same thing as now. That's what it comes down to in the end. Just chokepoints and zombies. Plenty of bullets, at least -- this was America, and people owned a shitload of guns before zombies killed all of them -- but it wouldn't matter if I had a fucking stockpile of artillery shells; I can't kill all of them.

The library was pretty picked-over when I got here, books all evacced to the living sector who-knows-when, corpses all devoured, leaving just the stench of rot and gore stains all across the carpet and walls. Dust and ash.

The zombies are already starting to frenzy, blood up, the further-transformed ones -- a chitin-coated arm here, a pulsing, eight-eyed head there -- tearing through their neighbors, ripping chunks of flesh and rot, and then turning on each other in the melee. The slow ones, the ones that are still just corpses, aren't smart enough to tell what's going on, and they go down fast.

The problem with a frenzy is after it's done, all you're left with is the strongest, fastest ones, the ones who're gonna be smart enough to track a human down. The ones guns don't do a thing against.

I reload my pistol. There're still zombies clambering up over the mounded corpses on the stairs, even if more are just tearing into the flesh there, ripping chunks of muscle and organ off the heap. The crowd is packed tight, churning up and down, a sea of heads and hands, with purple-green rocks of chitin, gore splashing from them like spray.

It's an evocative picture.

Then there's a roar from outside and something dark and huge tears through the glass entryway, sheets exploding out in dagger-like shards.

When I got here, I thought, "It's amazing that almost all the glass exterior is intact." It's very modern architecture, in surprisingly good shape. Was. In surprisingly good shape.

I'm thinking that as I'm running away, sneakers pounding on the concrete of the stacks. If I'm lucky, the crowd below will be enough to distract it. If it's not, well...

Well, finishing the thought that I don't want to, then I get to stop living. It's been a nice run, but it's gotta end sometime.

The stacks are desolate, dim even in midday. Not even any bloodstains, just must and dust. If it wasn't for the crashing mayhem downstairs, I could pretend it was before the end of the world. Noise_resonates_ up, wet tearing noises, inhuman yowls, crunching. It might be coming closer; who can say. I can't see if there are run-of-the-mill zombies tucked away in a corner. It's just me, a sprawling dark room, and a doorway. The kind of situation people die in all the time in horror movies: something lurches out of the dark and kills the helpless victim onscreen. I stop thinking about that.

I sit there in the dark, hands sweaty against the butt of my pistol, aiming at the doorway, and I hope for a miracle.

Time passes. The noise doesn't stop.

The doorway explodes inwards, a massive silhouette outlined against the light. I unload the whole clip into its center of mass, and it doesn't even stagger. It laughs. It's asymmetrical, lopsided, one arm gargantuan, almost the size of the entire rest of its body, glossy with purple-green chitin, spreading down in spikes and ridges over its chest. The other arm is broken, shattered, elbow joint destroyed, forearm hanging from rotting sinews, with green rot ringing in ripples up from its death-locked fingers, bloated with dead blood. Its legs are thick and squat, low to the ground, almost gorilla-like in posture, chitin-reinforced, with bloated corpulent flesh, black and rotting, bubbling up around the chitin plates, all crazed and irregular.

"Live one!" The noise is growling and cracking, its throat twisting and bulging, rotten flesh splitting at the effort of speech. It's hardly language. It shambles for me. I don't think; just turn and run, deeper into the stacks. It moves faster than me. Shelves crash to the side, and right as it catches me, I find myself thinking ludicrously that the next person to come across this place is gonna wonder about the solitary blood splatter all up one wall.

It slams me against the wall, face-first, and so hard it caves in. Shitty drywall crashes down to the floor in chunks, plaster dust in my mouth. My jaw closes with a clack, almost biting my tongue. I don't think any teeth are loose.

Its huge hand spans across my back, its stubby fingers digging into the wall on either side of my chest. The stench of rotting meat and ichor radiates off it in waves, overpowering. Just the smell alone makes my eyes water, my throat spasm and gag. The bullet holes bleed against my back, soaking through my army jacket in dark, hot patches, the ichor thick and slimy against my skin underneath.

Its... head, maybe, drags up my back, something large and soft and oozing, until its pressed against the nape of my neck, against the bare skin there. Its tongue spills bubbling and slimy from its mouth, curling like a heavy necklace around my throat, ichor steaming off it. I kick it, but it doesn't help, arms and legs not pinned so much as completely useless against its bulk. Not that I'm even thinking, it's just sheer automatic action, trying to get away from something gross and disgusting and fatal.

"Be. Still." it says, and pins me motionless with just the slightest shift of its immense hand. Some of its too-many fingers bracket my upper arms, my thighs.

Even without the rotting reek I might still be crying: it's better for them to kill you fast. The grown ones can get... curious. Like kids with ants. See how you react to getting a limb pulled off, slowly; see how long it takes for rot to set in. See what human intestines look like on the inside. See how well you can heal as the infection eats you alive. Some combination of that train of thought and the god-awful reek of the thing has me gagging, twisting my head to vomit onto the floor. It drops me, and I just curl up, shuddering on the ground, heaving, face stained with snot and vomit. It's just bile; I haven't eaten anything for a day or two.

"Fragile." There's movement in the corner of my eye: regular zombies, dragging themselves forward, over the wreckage of the doorway. The thing turns and rips them apart. It's just about that simple: it reaches out and crushes one's chest, leaning in to bite down on its shoulder, gulping down the head and an arm in a single swallow, and then it hammers what's left of the corpse down onto the other zombie, mashing them both into a pulp. Its jaw unhinges, what little human structure remaining lost as it swallows down the zombie head whole. It takes overall about a second, maybe two.

Its arm is dripping rotten gore as it turns back to me. I should be trying to get away, but the stacks only has the one exit, and it's in front of it. Stupid to go this way in the first place. I just lie there: it has me trapped. I know it, and it knows it.

The thing is, it's not that they're humans who lived through the change, or any romanticized junk like that. They're not people. They're the infection grown wild, grown fat and rich on brains -- human, zombie, it doesn't matter. Enough, and it starts to grow, the infection forming new structures, new organs inside the rot-hollowed corpse they walk around in. They get a brain, or something like it, but not anything like a human brain, just something alert, something smart and alien and malicious.

"Thanks," it says, breath fetid as it wafts over me, followed by the wet slither of its whip-tongue, coiling around my neck, squirming at my cheek. "for the." and it inhales, breath rattling through the wreck of its throat. "Feast."

I try not to breathe, the stench is so bad. I can taste it, the reek of rotting meat and sewage rolling over my tongue. "Thankful enough to let me go?" I finally manage to croak out, false bravado falling particularly flat.

It hums deep in its chest, the vibrations rattling the bulbous organs it has growing from its abdominal cavity. It inhales again, through its nose. What's left of it, at least; a pallid yellow-white patch of dimpled skin. "Smell. Fresh." it says, tongue still stroking across my cheek, leaving a filthy trail of slime dripping down in its wake. "Want. To taste. Your memories."

I push away, frantic, and it lets me go, still grinning down -- baring its teeth, more like it, and its teeth are all calcinous excretions, red and black and off-white, ichor dripping from oozing gums, wrinkled and shattered and twisted -- at me as I crawl backward across the floor, until I'm pressed against the wall.

"No need." it says with something like a laugh. It jerks its head to the side, in the direction of the lobby. "Eat them. Instead."

"So, what?" I feel dizzy. My head hurts.

"So," it says, stepping closer again, lungs heaving with each slow step. "Wanted. to see. You. Never seen. Live one. Close."

"Now you've seen one," I say.

It hums again, torn-open throat flapping. It wheezes after each word, voice wet and clotted. "Yes. I. Could change. You."

"Don't," I say, even though it's more than useless.

It cocks its head, like a confused dog. "You. re. Weak. No food. No shelter. Starve."

"I'll manage," I say.

It shrugs. "Serve. Yourself," it says, with an almost human petulance, and turns away.

It's anticlimactic as it leaves, body swaying jerkily from its lopsided gait.

I wait a long moment, staring silently at the place where it was, feeling its drool cool and harden against my skin. Then I get up, find my gun. Wipe the worst of the slime from my skin with my coat; wipe the worst of the slime from the coat onto the carpet. I head out.

The lobby is a nightmare. It's still there, jaw cracked open, stomach bulging out in a grotesque swell, chasing slowly after the few remaining zombies still capable of running. Toying with them. The place is coated in gore, red and black splashed up to the walls, and I swallow, bile acrid in my throat. It grins at me as I move across the lobby. I move slow, like running will trigger its chase reflex. It's not smart, but I just-- I just couldn't sit up there, in the dark and the silence, waiting for it to leave.

I see it again not even a day later.

I'm in what used to be a store, in the back, looking for cans someone else might've overlooked. I found a tin of beans under a cabinet, label ripped off, can dented but not broken, and I ate it. It was cold and slimy, but palatable after three days of nothing, and then I went looking for more.

I'm beneath a shelf in what used to be inventory when I hear an approach, something huge. It's perverse how I relax when I recognize it.

It's... changed. It's growing fast. As far as I know, no one's ever seen the full change, if there even is one. Maybe they just keep going.

The growth has spread: jaw split open, new mandibles like tusks jutting through rotten muscle; dull eyes now gleaming red, clustered across its face like a spider. Red eyes visible under its skull, the flesh of its cheek torn open, eyes looking back at me from inside its mouth. The growth has started to overcome the decay, or reach some new symbiosis: its stomach is a mess of blobby organs and oozing tendrils of some alien tissue, spilling out from its chest cavity, green-black and wetly moist. It's constantly sloughing away from some lower substrate, in a state of perpetual decay, oozing strips of flesh and filmy rot. It smells like rot and chemical burn, like the over-fertilized sludge that would wash up in nutrient pools. It's cloying, a sugar-sweetness in the back of my throat somehow the worst note.

"You'll die soon," it says as a greeting. It's got a new throat, a mound of green-purple flesh like a dewlap, expanding like a frog's throat, but its voice is still a jarring, groaning roar, mixed with a gulping, slurping hiccup when its throat sac bulges. Things inside its throat grind.

I'm marginally less terrified of it. That or I realized I'm utterly at its mercy and don't even bother being afraid. Adrenaline runs out after a while in the wastes. There's nothing I could do to stop it if it wanted anything with me.

My "Hello to you too," is said through grit teeth, reflexively cringing away from it, but it's not a shriek of terror; my palms are a little less slick with sweat as I grip my entirely useless pistol.

"The walled lands are just a half-day travel in the direction of the falling sun," it says. I know, though for me it'd be closer to two days. The zombies -- the big ones -- travel fast.

"I know," I say.

"You can't go to them?" it asks.

"We're not fond of each other," I say. I don't go into how I was kicked out into the wilds to die, fast or slow, months and months ago now. "You zombies eat each other alive; we're not much different." Unbidden, a reedy thread of laughter forces its way up my throat; I swallow it down like so much bile.

It steps closer. The inventory shelves are narrow; it completely fills the space from top to bottom. It sniffs me again. Its jaw cracks open. Its tongue has changed too: It bifurcates, once and then again, into a branching tree, all corded, thrashing muscle, black-green. They lick across my neck. Absent the mortal terror -- some of it -- it's, well, I've had worse.

Maybe it can hear my heartbeat kick up, or smell the nervous sweat across my body. It steps closer. My gut churns, its stench still god-awful, weeks-old decay. I don't want to throw up on a day when I've actually had something to eat.

"What do you want?" I ask.

"What do you want?" it echoes. "Live another day? You're weak, fragile. One day someone else will catch you, bite you or kill you, and then you'll just be gone."

"And you've got something better?"

"Yes," it says, and it's drawn out into a long hiss, or maybe a moan. It exhales, rotten breath billowing over me. My nose has thankfully started to cut out the worst of it, acclimate. It just smells like metal, sour and sweet in my throat.

"I'm better. Stronger. I could... tailor the infection. If you care about your brain, your memories, your sense of self, you could keep that." Its voice rasps. There's the sense it doesn't understand why anyone would want any of those things, but it's willing to offer the indulgence. I might be projecting. "I'd love to see you screaming and dying. That's what we are. It's written into us."

It takes a deep, rattling breath, throat-sec bulging into a single enormous pustule, moist and shiny. "I want to see you change," it says on its exhale, mandibles clacking, jaw convulsing, speech a slurred roar.

"And I want to see what our bodies can do together, before that." It's panting, drooling clots of slime, tongues lashing at the air, curling in loops and branches, like some undersea coral. "Call it perverse, if you want."

I'd definitely call it perverse. I look it over: some alien heart pumping inside its rotten chest, pumping dark ichor through the tangles of not-veins across its body, spasming and swelling; its organs juddering, swelling against its exposed bone; dark and phallic somethings pushing out from its gaping chest cavity, like stingers, drooling thick green-brown slime. "I've fucked uglier guys," I say, voice hollow, and I'm not even sure if I'm joking.

I've been standing there, next to it, for minutes. I'm thankful my nose is editing it out, getting acclimated. It's the flat nothing-smell, the nothing-taste heavy on my tongue, just sour-sweet heavy and vile on the back of my throat.

It reaches out with its club-like arm, joints cracking in unnatural directions, fingers squirming like boneless tentacles as it undoes my coat. I try not to flinch back. There's a strange wildness growing, hot and ashamed but on some level exhilirated, like I always knew it was going to come to this. I push it back, not a sharp shove but guiding, and my hands are instantly clotted and slimy, sinking right into the mess of bloated tissue. It's soft and spongy, with brittle structures rupturing under my touch. It shifts back, and back, and back, until I'm out of the aisle.

I straddle it, flesh compressing and tearing, rot and lymph seeping into my soon-to-be-ruined jeans as I settle on top of its trunk-like legs. The triad of stinger-things bobs in front of me, pushing out just below the center of its ribcage. They're spined, bloated, pustulous, with a spiraled groove linking each organic blob of chambers, all the way up to the apex where the tips gape open and spew out rotting slime, in green-brown chunks, frothy and soap-smelling. Rendered fats.

It pushes my coat to my shoulders. I shrug it off, reach for the hem of my shirt. It stares, all of its beady spider eyes focused right on me as I strip. It's been a long time since I was naked; since I was anywhere close to naked. I'm sallow-pale, bones sharply visible, not that far from a corpse myself. Dirt streaks my skin dark across my hands and face.

Its hand touches across my face, down my chest, exploring my body. Its fingers are boneless, just pulsing cords of muscle, and they track dark slime across my collarbone. Down to a nipple, and then lower, across my thin stomach. The slime is chill in the cool air, clotting and coagulating in thick cords and lumps.

It reaches between my legs, finger-tentacles curling and stroking, feathering light against my inner thighs as it cords in a messy circle, getting better traction as it squirms and glides against me. I decide to return the favor. Its stingers are bubbling, the frothing soap-smell penetrating through the rotten reek, wafting in hints of that overpowering stench on the edges. They all shudder as I wrap my hands around them, and it makes a noise like a sigh, mandibles clacking through its shattered jaw.

I lick the lower one, and then immediately regret it. Frothy soap and sour-slimy rot, burning metallic aftertaste, sweet and bitter, acidic. I gag, eyes and nose watering, but I swallow the mouthful of slime, and breathe harshly as I try to keep it down. Its fingers keep coiling against me, probing at sensitive flesh, crackling with slime, burning in an entirely different way. It's a quick learner; it's not long before I'm arching into its touch, breath coming fast.

I try again: it's still god-awful, but it's better. I swallow, thickly, and swallow again, nose running until -- thankfully -- it's blocked, and then things are better. Nothing but sweet and bitter and sour and heat, a dimly metallic aftertaste. I try not to think about what I'm drinking, soap-frothy gummy slime, oozing from god-knows-what kind of organ.

It splurts heavier gushes into my mouth, my cheeks bulging, and it's chunky in my throat as I swallow. The excess spills from my mouth in bubbling clusters, staining my hands a dark green-brown, the froth slowly bleeds off color until the bubbles are a flat, glistening white.

It's hunching its hips, some primitive motion in some half-working human hindbrain, grinding my crotch -- and its fingers -- against the bare bone of its pelvis, dead skin and muscle sloughing off in chunks under the wash of its ichor.

It comes with a bellowing roar, the kind of thing that someone could hear for miles around. Its stingers pulse, spreading wide as they spray substance, opaque yellow-green strands. I gag, slime bursting from my mouth, drooling from my nose, and I try to swallow the discharge in my mouth. It's painfully sweet-bitter, and thick like sheets of rubber, teeth chewing it into chunks. The rest of its stingers just spray all over, coating my face in clotted, disgusting piles, slowly seeping in a solid coating down my back, over my chest. It pushes deeper inside me, stinger pulsing in the back of my throat, and then I'm just swallowing, neck bulging from the sheer volume of its issue.

At some point I come, just from grinding against its fingers, lost under the swampy deluge of its orgasm.

I pull back, breath ragged and almost impossible. I cough wildly, stomach churning, nausea rolling through my body, gasping harshly between wracking coughs. The rest of its load spills out across my back, in heated, squirming lumps, trailing slug-like down my body.

Even it looks dazed afterwards, beady eyes unfocused staring at the ceiling, stingers twitching and oozing some final dregs, the slime almost black as it slithers down their lengths. I cough more. I can't really taste -- or smell -- anything, thank god, just sour metal. Its slime is cooling, practically radiating heat in waves, and it's solidifying into a chunky husk, one I can already peel off in layers.

"So that's that, then," I say, voice strange in my ears. "That's the infection."

"No," it says, voice equally strange, in some new way. "That was for fun. I can infect you later, if you want." It does something I'm gonna have to parse as leering at me. "Before that, you have all kinds of orifices I want to try out."

I sit back on its lap, rotten jizz squelching against my ass. Yeah, I think. I can handle that.