A Tragic Decision
A Tragic Decision
By: Lanie Clove
The day started like any other, Ginny was getting ready for school which was always a challenge for her because she had this throbbing ulcer from all the years of bullying she had suffered at the hands of, basically everyone in her school, even the teachers who should have stopped it. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and saw a small, pale face covered in light freckles and large green eyes with dark circles under them, and her crazy red curly hair surrounding her face in a cloud of fluffy, messy, unruly hair. She ended up just throwing on some jeans and a t-shirt, pulled her hair back into a ponytail and left the house with a heavy sigh. Ginny was taking a dark, dank alleyway to school, it was the only way she could avoid people on the way to school, but as it turned out running into the bullies from school might have been better than what happened. Ginny was walking and listening to her iPod, so she didn't even hear the van pull up behind her, didn't even know that there were people who had jumped out of the van and were coming towards her until they grabbed her and shoved a smelly rag against her face, she didn't even have time to scream before she fell into darkness. When she woke up she found herself in a very well lit, almost too much so room, strapped to a gurney with a tube in her arm. She looked around to see if there was anyone around who she could try to convince to let her go, but there was no one, at least not in the room with her, there wasn't really anything in the room except for Ginny and the gurney, but there was a window across the room from her that looked like a mirror, but Ginny was willing to bet was one of those one-way glass like they have in interrogation rooms at the police station. She had a feeling that there was someone or some ones on the other side of the window and although she had no idea why she was here or why she was taken, she didn't want the people who had taken her to know that she was scared, so she was determined to not squirm, struggle, or cry. She took a moment to compose herself, took a deep breath to steady her nerves "So, are you going to come in here or what?" A moment passed but then a man came in and to Ginny's amusement he was wearing a white lab coat like some sort of crazy scientist "So Mr. Scientist, if you could just tell me why I'm here that would be fantastic." The balding scientist man frowned, came closer, and started examining her and mumbled something like "that can't be possible, shouldn't have started working so quickly." Now it was Ginny's turned to frown, "What do you mean, what shouldn't have started working?" the man frowned even harder and wrote something down on the clipboard that Ginny just noticed "Miss, I want you to try and get out of your bonds." Ginny was hopelessly confused by this point "Dude, you are crazy, I barely weight 100 pounds, there is no way I can break out of these things." The man didn't say anything, just stared at her with that annoying frown that never seemed to leave his face, she finally decided to try to get out just to humor this crazy guy and prove to him that whatever he thought she could do, he was clearly wrong. She pushed against the restraints and had used enough force that she fell completely off the gurney and onto the floor and she was beyond freaked out. The scientist dude's eyes bulged "No, you shouldn't be able to do that, not yet!" Ginny snapped from the floor "what are you talking about, what did you do to me?" the scientist raised his hands in an attempted calming motion, but it only really ticked her off. She jumped up and was somehow right in front of the scientist in under a second, he cringed into the door and she managed to grab him "Tell me what you did you monster!" The man started trembled so hard he probably would have fallen if Ginny wasn't still holding onto him, as it was there was a sudden smell of urine and a puddle forming on the floor by his feet. She let go of him in disgust and backed away, he fell into the puddle, he had seemingly fainted, which meant the door was blocked by him and his urine, a sudden thought occurred to Ginny, if she could break through those restraints so easily she could probably break that one-way glass. She walked over and hesitated and said a little silent prayer that she was right and then punched the glass, it shattered completely, stunning Ginny and the five men who had apparently been watching everything in the room behind the window and they weren't like the little nerd who had been sent in with her, they were all large, rough-looking guys, like rich, but very dangerous mobsters. Ginny jumped through even though everything in her was telling her not to get any closer to the men, they all jumped back a little, and then Ginny ran out the door before they could regain their bravery. She was racing down what seemed to be a never-ending hallway and didn't even notice a door open as she passed by until someone grabbed her, covered her mouth, and pulled her inside the room. She was struggling, but it wasn't having any effect on her assailant, finally there was a sigh and a guy's voice whispered "Hey, stop hitting me! I'm not going to hurt you, I'm like you." That stopped Ginny alright, she pulled his hand off her mouth "what? What do you mean you're like me, I don't even know what I am!" the guy sighed "I know you don't understand. You just got here right?" "Yes, but..." "I can just tell okay? You shouldn't be changed yet if they just brought you in. it took me a good month to get changed and I almost died in process to, got a high fever, sweating, vomiting, all that good stuff, but they only brought you in and started administering the formula to you an hour ago. Anyway I guess that doesn't really matter right now, all that matter is that we get out of here before they find you and discover that I'm not in my room anymore, probably think that I'm their perfectly trained pet, idiots. Oh, I'm Tom by the way." "Ginny" Tom grabbed Ginny's hand, pulled her over to the door, opened it a crack "Alright Ginny, I think it's clear. Let's go." They darted down the hallway at what Ginny thought was normal speed, but apparently on the video cameras they were just blurs, backtracked a few times when they heard people coming their way, and eventually made it to an exit. They ran out and were headed for the fence when a man shouted "Stop!" and for some inexplicable reason they did, they turned and saw a large, bald man standing there "Come on Tom, come Ginny, you two don't want to leave here, not the way you two are now. Tom tightened his hand around Ginny and she could have sworn that she had heard all the bones in her hand crunch, but it didn't hurt, so she dismissed it, he then challenged the man "Oh, yeah? Now why do you think that we would want to stay here instead of going back into the real world?" the man stepped a little closer, prompting them to step back to avoid him getting any closer "Once you two leave you'll wish to come back, but we'll have shut down our operations here by that point and you will never be able to find us again. Trust me you will want to come back because the people out there, they'll be afraid of you, they'll hate you, they will hunt you down , and kill you both." "What did you do to us that people would react like that?" Ginny couldn't help it, it had just slipped out. The man grinned "If you want to know that then you need to stay here, if you leave, you'll never know and you'll regret it. There are so many things that you don't know, things that you can do, things you can't do, and some certain...Restrictions." Tom squeezed her hand "Ginny, don't listen to him. We'll figure all of that out on our own, if we stayed here they will never tell us, we will just be their prisoners forever." The man took another step forward "Oh come on. Girly who are you going to believe, me who is an adult who knows a whole lot more than both of you or him, some boy who you just met, who probably has brain damage from one of his self-inflicted injuries?" Ginny pulled Tom with her as she sprinted away and they jumped over the fence together, never breaking their grips on each other. They finally came to a stop who knows how far from where they had just run away from. They found an old abandoned house that had clearly been the home to many rats recently and they found a way in from underneath the house. Ginny went into the bathroom first and ran the water from the sink and splashed it on her face, turned off the faucet and looked at the filthy mirror that was barely hanging on the wall anymore and screamed. Her hair was now lank and dead-looking and her skin was an awful greenish-gray color, her eyes were cloudy-looking, she looked at her hand and that is when she realized that the hand that Tom had squeezed earlier had been broken, all the bones in it completely shattered really, but she couldn't feel it. There was an urgent knock on the door and Tom called in "Ginny are you alright? Why did you scream, can I come in?" Ginny threw the door open, hoping he could explain what was going on and that is Ginny finally noticed what Tom looked like and she started screaming again, it was clear that Tom was shocked by how she looked, apparently he hadn't really looked at her either. His skin was even worse than hers, greenish-gray, but his looked like it was almost completely covered in cracks, his eyes weren't just cloudy, they were gone and yet somehow he was able to see, his hair was falling out in patches, and his teeth were...Awful, so awful. Tom's eyebrows raised "Wait, if you look like that, how bad am I?" Ginny reluctantly grabbed his arm and pulled him in front of the mirror next to her, his shock was so one hundred percent that Ginny almost felt bad for him, almost "You mean you didn't know that we looked like this?" she demanded, Tom shook his head "Ginny, I saw myself in the mirror there, I didn't look like this before. I think this must have happened when we left our room, they must have kept us looking, normal. I guess I look even worse because they did the experiments on me longer ago." Ginny was almost panicked now "That man was right, we should have stayed. What if we just keep falling apart? We are going to die!" Tom swallowed and his adam's apple bobbed grotesquely "We aren't going to die. I told you then that we would figure all of this out on our own and I meant it, we will, we'll be fine." "So, got any ideas?" "Umm, not at the moment, but Ginny don't worry we will figure it out. We haven't slept in a while, we should sleep, and it'll help us come up with ideas. I promise, we'll be fine." They left the bathroom and found a room that had less dead rats in it and laid down next to each other, eventually falling asleep. Ginny had a great dream about the best smelling burger she had ever smelled in her life and when she woke up she still smelled something amazing. She opened her eyes and saw Tom biting a screaming policeman's neck, it horrified her, but another part of her found the smell so wonderful and the blood spurting out a beautiful sight, she wasn't able to restrain herself for long, the next thing she knew she was with Tom, biting the other side of the policeman's neck. They both ate their fill of the man and dropped his torn apart body on the floor, but seconds later it was twitching and the man sat up. He was obviously very confused since the last thing he could remember was coming in to see if there were any people hiding in the house and then being attacked by a hideous boy and then the boy was joined by a slightly less hideous girl. Ginny and Tom were too horrified by what they had done to stay and try to comfort and explain to the man, they got up and raced out together, leaving him there, little did they know that he would soon attack someone, who would then in turn attack someone else. Ginny and Tom just kept moving around, mostly at night to avoid causing a scene, but no matter how hard they tried they couldn't stop themselves from attacking people, innocent people, people who didn't deserve to have that happen to them, being mauled and made into a monster. They always ran away and abandoned those that they changed, but they always remained together, running together, feeding on the same person together, they were like each other's other half. Even though were categorized as being "Dead, evil monsters" or "Flesh-eating zombies" they didn't feel like they were dead, if they weren't eating someone's throat or if they didn't look at their reflections in mirrors or too closely at each other, they could almost forget what had happened to them, what they had done, they could almost pretend to be a normal teenage couple. Ginny and Tom were able to be unnoticed for quite some time, but the numbers of their kind were going up, they went from only running into one of their kind from time to time, to more often, to not being able to go anywhere without seeing a fellow zombie. The problem with that was it appeared that the other zombies could tell that Ginny and Tom were the first of their kind and they would stand around them and just stare, which became really obvious once the numbers went up, and made it a lot easier for the army to take out large numbers of zombies at once, but somehow Ginny and Tom managed to always get away. The changelings seemed to be different than them, they seem to be dumber, have less brain than Ginny and Tom, which could be because they were made by being bitten and also because when they were mauled, most of their brains had been eaten. At some point America had become too paranoid about zombies, no one went out anymore, people would shot anyone who came too close to their houses, so they snuck onto a boat and sailed to Europe where odd or reclusive people didn't stand out as much. They quickly took over the house and its occupants and discovered the great use of cover up makeup, they were able to pose as normal people and they developed an interesting method for hiding the truth about them. Whenever they bit someone, which actually wasn't as often as it had been in America, they would take that new zombie to their home and keep them in the basement, and they had discovered that they could eat the changelings and be sustained for as long as if they ate a normal human, and the changelings didn't put up as much of a fight. Ginny and Tom have been able to rack up quite a fortune and have made many connections and have more power and influence than Vlad the Impaler himself did so long ago. They have managed to get some less damaged changelings into high offices, such as in the military, in the government, into the UN, and everything else, it won't be too long before they become the rulers of the world and then they will not be so discrete about their true natures. The group that created them tried to take them back and force their influence over Ginny and Tom, they weren't able to try for long, and they never were able to come back from what the two did to their whole group.
