Out to Sea
Patient Zero One Sierra
(Los Angeles Proving Ground)

This is my confession. I am hoping that God and whoever finds this can forgive me for what I have done. Let me start by saying that I didn’t know I was infected. I promise. If I had known, I would have killed myself right there and then. I swear to God and Jesus and the saints and all that is holy and right, I would have. But it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not, now, does it? You’re probably dead—or worse. And if you’re not dead, you probably wish you were.

It was supposed to be a test trial of some sort, maybe an infectious disease cure. I don’t know. I didn’t care. Not then. They shot me full of whatever it was they were testing and set me loose. They might have said it was some sort of vaccine, I’m not sure. I wasn’t really paying attention. Maybe some type of cancer treatment. The jerks in white coats never told me what I was volunteering for; I just signed the waivers and took the money. As I rolled down my sleeve and walked out of the testing room, they told me I got the placebo. Turns out I got the panacea.

Twelve hundred dollars. Wow. For me, that was a small fortune. I reported to work the next day on the Caribbean Sea Queen and looked forward to having some fun in the ports all down the Lesser Antilles while catering to rich Americans pretending they all had golden ass cracks and were something special to behold. But boy, did I have a surprise for them!
During the day, I hauled luggage all over the ship, ran food up and down the endless floors of the luxury liner, and washed dishes after the meals were done, saving up my tips for the next port. We passed down the west coast of Mexico and Central America, crossed through the Panama Canal, and hit the Caribbean.

In port, I would cut the fuck loose. And by that, I mean I would snort every ounce of cocaine I could find, drink every drop of liquor I could pour down my throat, and fuck every cheap hooker I could get my dick into. In short, it was a good life that was bound to end quickly, but that didn’t bother me. So I snorted, and drank, and fucked my way to St. John, where things got a little out of hand.

And by a little out of hand, I mean I killed a teenage hooker. I didn’t mean to, I swear. She looked so sweet standing there on the street corner in her little white sundress and white sneakers. Her hair was light brown streaked with blond and her skin was the color of coffee and milk. She asked me if I was looking for a date. I said yes if that date didn’t cost me more than fifty bucks. It didn’t, and we were off to the races. I had her skirt up and panties down as soon as we got to her tiny room. She said she wanted it to be quick. I said I wanted it to be quick.

S he rolled over on her stomach and I bent her over the bed, pounding her for every penny of the fifty bucks it cost me to buy her. I was up to my balls in that sweet young girl, when the urge to bite overwhelmed me. I mean, one minute I am banging her for all she is worth, trying my best to dislocate my ball sack or break off my cock, and the next I had my teeth buried in her shoulder. She tried to scream, but I clamped my hand over her mouth and continued to bite and tear and chew, until I had dug a deep trench into her neck and shoulder, hit a major blood vessel, and ended her life. She bled out as I blew my load deep inside her.

When I was finally done, I looked down at the mess I had made. I was covered in blood, sweat, and cum, and the sweet girl looked like she had been attacked by a pack of wolves. I stumbled back, pulled up my pants, leaned over a chair and puked and puked, looked at what I had done again, and puked some more. I got to my feet and went into her bathroom. When I looked in the mirror…well…I don’t know what I saw. My skin was pale and bruised, my eyes seemed faded and covered by some weird cataracts, and the lower half of my face was covered in gore. What the fuck had I done?

I looked closely at my face and saw the dark circles under my eyes, and I swear to God, my brown eyes had turned pale gray. Not fucking possible, I know, but those are the facts and only the facts. I thought about calling the police. It would have been better for everyone if I had, but my animal survival instinct was kicking in. It might have been too late anyway. Once what I was carrying inside me was loose, there was little hope of getting it back inside. And I didn’t know about the others like me roaming around New York and Los Angeles. And nobody knew about that dumb fucker in New Mexico.

I showered instead, rinsed out my clothes, and collected any evidence that might point to me. Maybe if I could make it back to the ship and get out of town before her body was found, I’d be OK. I’d figure out what had happened to me sometime later, but I’d rather do it on the ship as a free man than in a St. John’s prison cell. Maybe we snorted some bad coke. Maybe I was hallucinating somewhere back in California. I didn’t know and wasn’t going to be put in a cage for thirty years to life to try and figure it out.

As I scoured the prostitute’s room for evidence, my mind was playing tricks on me. Did she move? Twitch a little? No, I was just losing my mind. I checked for a pulse three times on her nearly ruined neck, and there was none.

I stood at the door, my hand on the knob, weeping quietly. Then I heard something rustle behind me. It’s nothing, I told myself, nothing I want to see anyway. I would not look. I would not look. I would not look.

I looked.

The sweet little whore was standing up, facing away from me. Her head weaved back and forth like a dog tracking a scent. Her white dress was now a blood-soaked scarlet covered with streamers of tissue and gunk from her ruined neck. She slowly turned around to look at me.

Her dead gray eyes found me, and for a moment it looked like she was going to speak.
I tried to speak first, to tell her that I was sorry, that everything would be OK. But before I could open my mouth, her head snapped to my right at the sound of people walking past her window. She screamed with such rage and fury that I screamed with her. She lunged toward the window, leapt through the glass pane, and was gone. Somewhere down the street, I heard another scream, and I bolted.

I made it back to the ship, changed into my uniform, and reported for my shift. For the next eight hours, I waited for the police to arrive, to cuff me and haul me off. The police never came, and soon the tourists were piling back onto the ship, the mooring lines were cast off, and we were on our way to St. Croix.

The day it took to get from St. John to St. Croix was just enough time for me to convince myself that it had all been a bad trip. I had fucked the little hooker, given her a good tip, and rolled back to the boat, happy as a clam and ready to do it again in St. Croix.

The next time, though, when things got out of hand, the hooker had been able to shake me off and escape with only a bite to her wrist. When she whipped out a nasty little blade and tried to vivisect me, I was lucky to escape with my balls intact. I scrambled into my pants and nearly tumbled down the stairs fleeing the whorehouse.

I made it back to the ship again without incident and hoped I could sleep off whatever it was I had ingested. But it was not to be. Word slowly began to spread among the crew of a viral outbreak on St. John and then on St. Croix. Meanwhile, I was slowly losing my mind. When people got too close to me, I’d want to bite them. I’m a freak, I admit, a druggie, an alcoholic, a sex addict, but I’ve never been a biter. Never was my style. Until now.

Each time someone passed close to me or brushed up against me, it was all I could do not to spring on him or her and begin to feed. Every single person; it didn’t matter if it was a man, woman, or child. If they got within a few inches of me, all I could think about was sinking my teeth into them. It was only a matter of time before I broke. Twenty-seven hours and sixteen minutes from the time we left St. Croix, to be exact.

I had to deliver a dinner up to one of the executive suites at the top of the ship. All the way there, I could feel the strain of keeping my teeth to myself pulling at me, pushing from within, trying to break free.

When the fucking rich bitch from who-the-fuck-cares opened the door and blasted me for being five minutes late, I smiled and let the door close behind me. She was wearing next to nothing, a tiny bikini that barely held her in. Big tits, big ass, long black hair, sneering and pointing around her like a general leading an army. She kept going on about declining service and having my job. I popped such a serious erection thinking about biting into her skin, I knew at that very moment I was a monster. She walked into the bedroom, telling me to place the tray anywhere and get the fuck out before she had me fired and thrown from the ship. Instead, I followed her into that huge, beautiful, and pristine bedroom, and did what I had to do.

Our activities started in the bedroom, made it out into the living room, then finally back onto the bed, leaving a blood-and-gore-splattered trail in our wake. She never screamed, not once. Maybe she was too damned shocked that she was being eaten alive. Or maybe it was because I had my fist shoved down her throat before she had a chance.

When I was done, I sat on the blood-soaked bed next to her. There would be no getting away this time. They would know it was me. My blood and semen were everywhere. My fingerprints were on the food trays; my boss would know I had been sent up here to deliver the food. The jig was up, and now it was just a matter of someone walking in and seeing us.
So I sat there and waited for nearly an hour. And then, I swear to God, she moved. I jumped off the bed and she moved again. Then she lifted her torn body out of the puddle of her blood and viscera and looked right at me. Her eyes were as pale as mine, her skin a hue that left no doubt in the mind of anyone who saw her next that she was good and dead. I screamed as she began tearing around the room. Someone must have heard me, because a few minutes later, there was a pounding on the door. She locked onto that sound and screamed bloody murder, then bolted directly for the front of the suite.

Whoever it was broke the door down just as she launched herself at him. He didn’t know what hit him. One minute he was breaking in to rescue a damsel in distress, the next he had her teeth tearing large chunks of flesh first from his face, then his neck. The crew members behind him tried to pry her off, but she was having none of it, and finally landed her teeth on one of the young men’s arms. Soon the man who had crashed through the door first was back on his feet and joining in the feeding frenzy. I screamed at them, but neither seemed to notice; they latched on and devoured the two young men who had arrived to help.

More people poured out into the corridor as the screams of the living and dead mixed, drawing more living to the scene. It was a bloodbath. Whatever had infected me had spread to the socialite bitch, then to the unfortunate man who had only wanted to help, then to the two crewmen who were with him, then to the teenage girl who stepped into the hall to see what was going on, then to her parents, and so on, until the Caribbean Sea Queen was a plague ship carrying the first load of newly dead and living dead to the Brazilian coast.

The dead ignored me, so I holed up in a cabin and attempted to drink myself to death. I failed at that, which surprised me so much that when the ship ran aground and the local police came to investigate, and thereby got themselves and the local population infected, I gathered up what food and water I could carry and decided to try to get back home.

On the way, I raced with the ever-growing numbers of walking dead to see who could spread the infection we were carrying faster. I lost all moral bearing as I bit, fucked, drank, and snorted my way north. The chaos spread, law broke down, and I became an animal.
Survivors would invite me in. I’d kill the men, fuck the women, then kill the women. I never fucked so much as I did these last few months. It was glorious. I was a monster that stalked the streets as the dead raced around me in a frenzy to catch the living. I was just like the infected, the dead, except better camouflaged. I made it all the way back to Los Angeles, to Ground Zero, back to the research center where I had been injected with this thing.

Only now, here at the end of this rope, I have strung around my neck, I realize that the fuckers injected me with something that got out of hand. And by “got out of hand,” I mean destroyed the fucking world. I don’t know what they were trying to do. I don’t know if they meant to unleash what they did. So I am making this confession. I am writing it down and putting it in a plastic baggie with these blood samples. I have pulled as much blood as I can and sealed it in these tubes. I’ll put them in the freezer, but the power will go out soon enough. I hope whoever finds it can figure out what was in it, maybe find a cure. I’ll be dead by then, but unlikely to be completely dead. When the rope snaps my neck, I will die. Then I’ll come back and dangle there at its end, where the birds can peck me to pieces for years and years.

Perhaps in this way, I can convince God and the people who find this that it is a fit punishment for all the pain and agony I have caused.

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