Humanity [4]

Prologue

She woke to fire in her veins. She gasped for air as though she'd never breathed before. There was a kind of blissful pain inside her. She felt alive.

She was supposed to be dead.

It took her a moment to sit up. The world seemed clearer now than it had only hours before. Or maybe only minutes had passed since she felt life slipping through her fingers. Had it been a dream? Had she imagined that she was about to die?

No. She could still feel the raw pain in her shoulder where she'd been bitten by the rotter. A whole chunk of flesh was missing and the virus was inside her, but she hadn't turned. She was as much a human as she had been before. Maybe even more human, somehow. Everything felt amplified as though someone had changed her body's settings to full blast.

When she turned her head, she saw her boyfriend in the place where he'd collapsed, his hand still clenched around the knife he'd driven through the rotter's eye. They were both dead on the kitchen floor.

She should be dead too. But she wasn't.

She stared at her hands. They were clammy with sweat and speckled with blood, but she felt at that moment that they were capable of anything. She could use those hands to squeeze the life from someone. She could use them to gently touch a person and know that she'd experience it on a whole new level. She could be anything she wanted to be.

She rose to her feet. The pain in her shoulder was enough to bring her to her knees, but she remained steady. Nothing would knock her down now. She would make sure of that.

And so The Survivor was born.