Chapter 3

Three scabs chased me through the maze of fallen trees, branches, and mossy rock. I adjusted the scanner to the night-vision setting, which allowed me to move through the forest, but it didn’t give me the advantage I hoped for.

Scabs had no problem traveling in the dark and had no issues traversing the destruction left behind from the beast hordes. I slipped on a patch of dry leaves and landed in a mud-walled gully. The quickest of them reached me. Too deep to pull myself over and too wet to run through, our fight turned into a pit match.

I wrapped the loop on the club around my wrist and swung at the lunging scab. Despite crushing his scarred shoulder, he wrapped his thin arms around my waist and dug his cat-like claws into my legs. Almost as if we were at cheer practice, he threw me into the air behind him, tearing my pants and slicing my legs.

My freshly healed arm cushioned my fall somewhat, but I still landed hard on the crown of my head. The crash jammed my neck and tingled my spine. After a stomp on my helmet and stomach, the bald scab grabbed my ankle and dragged me through the soaked leaves and soft clay.

I twisted my body and clawed for anything to hold. His grip was firm, and my kicks to his hand did nothing. Finally, after being towed 30 feet, my left arm hooked around a tree root. He yanked several times, but I wouldn’t budge, so he turned around, and I pulled my knee towards my chest.

The scab snarled like a rabid dog and fell forward with a wild swing. Once he was within reach, I slammed the club hard on his head. His body dropped between me and the gully wall, and it twitched for several minutes before going still.

I caught my breath and pulled my mud-caked body over the edge.

I wasn’t sure if its dying groans or its bloody scent would attract an essence beast. Most hibernated once they ran out of weaker creatures to feed on. But the thought of dealing with one made my hair stand on end and my stomach drop.

Not all animals turned. Some remained the same or grew larger and turned aggressive, but the animals that turned fed solely on essence. Once human numbers dwindled, they turned on each other until the weaker beast’s population became too small, then they hibernated. Scabs had essence, and so did I.

After heaving myself out, I zigzagged my way through a patch of pine trees along the edge of a marsh. At one time, I would have begged my grandfather to stop and take a picture of Lia and me with the dead trees in the wetland. The place didn’t hold the same eeriness of beaver slaps and herons anymore. Now, the drowned trees blended in with most of the dying forest. There was nothing special about them.

My legs burned from the constant running and deep cuts, so I found a flat rock and sat for a moment. The marsh coated everything in a hazy rotten egg fog, which I hoped would mask my scent and provide some cover. I didn’t know how scabs tracked. Sight, smell, sound, it was probably all our senses combined. Sitting next to a marsh covered most of them.

The night was windless and dark. How long had it been since I saw the stars? How long since I saw the moon? By the time the third breach opened, enough particles filled the air to cloud the skies. Only the sun could breakthrough.

Scientists said the breaches were portals to other universes, universes with different laws and particles. There was no way to tell if that was true, and I didn’t care either way. But I missed the blue sky. And I missed the stars. Under a blue sky, even the marsh would look good. And the moonlight shining down would make the scab sniffing the air 100 feet away less disgusting.

Reflective skin, black holes for eyes, and gray splotches where the skin had fallen off; scabs were hideous in the light, and even more so under night vision. Its jaw opened and snapped shut, creating a clicking noise, as if it tried to scare me out of hiding or locate me like a bat. When it came close enough, I jumped.

I swung the club down with every bit of strength I could muster, landing a substantial blow to its neck. An easy kill, until it wasn’t. As the scab fell, it reached with its left arm and pulled me to the ground.

The scab twisted its head beyond a natural range of motion and clamped onto my forearm like a pitbull. I screamed, ripped the club free, and used the sharp flanges like a saw until I reached the bones in the scab’s neck and killed him. The priest didn’t have any protection for his arms or legs, not that I saw. A lot of the frontliners said arm and leg guards restricted movement. Mike was the same. He wouldn’t need protection. His particle manipulation would harden his skin, so a bite from scabs or weak beasts did nothing to him.

I wasn’t so lucky, and my embarrassing cry gave away my position.

The injuries wouldn’t kill me, but they’d take hours to heal and slow me considerably. Warm liquid dripped from my fingers and oozed down my legs. After I stopped the bleeding, I hobbled into the thick pine trees. A large scab, perhaps an athlete at one time, or a weightlifter trailed behind.

Whether souls collapsed or corrupted from essence had nothing to do with size or physical strength. There was no correlation. Just like animals, people reacted differently. A mouse might remain unaffected while a bear transformed into a nightmare larger than a dump truck. The scab creeping through the dense copse proved that. I was tiny compared to him, yet I hadn’t turned.

Both thick and tall, the scab’s arms hung close to his knees. More beast than man, his head swayed side to side like a lizard. However, he acted with caution. Unlike the two before him, he was smart enough not to barrel in.

From what I could tell, he was at least three times as strong as me.

Once again, I waited. Despite his size, the scab avoided branches like an expert and circled my position, slowly spiraling in and confirming there’d be no traps or obstacles. I could no longer run and was too tired to try.

The scab stopped 20 feet from where I stood, seven feet tall with shoulders twice as broad as my waist.

It opened its mouth and roared so deep the vibrations flowed through the ground into the soles of my feet. A skin flap held one side of his jaw together with shark-like teeth layering the bottom. Blisters covered his face, pulsating and discharging fluids that flowed through the air and punched my nose like a bloated corpse.

If the sun were up, I’d expect vultures to circle above.

I steadied my trembling legs on the carpet of pine needles and raised the club in a loose grip. The scab charged, quicker than I expected, and smashed me into a tree, knocking my head back then forward like a car accident. I brought the club down and cut deep into its back.

It growled like a wounded animal caught in a trap and threw me to the ground. The club’s flanges ripped a sizeable chunk of flesh when I landed, but before I could stand, the scab stomped on my knee, bending it beyond its limits, and crashed onto my stomach.

Using his massive arms, he rained punches down on my head. I kicked and flailed, trying to get the enormous scab from my body, but he didn’t move.

My strikes were too weak to affect it, and my club was too long to land a solid blow. The scab slipped its hands between my helmet and vest, wrapped them around my neck, and squeezed.

I channeled the particles to my arms, but I couldn’t push him off. My vision narrowed, my back arched, and my body shook against my will. His grip tightened further as if he had strangled someone to death before, and the skin on his face drew back like he was grinning.

The scab raised my head from the ground and licked my visor with its rotten tongue. Slowly, it pulled back to his mouth, then slithered up my vest, under my helmet, and onto my face. The tongue’s barbs scraped across my cheek and dug into my flesh as it moved towards my lips. There was no way to defeat him physically, so I attacked with the only other method I had.

I strained with every bit of energy I had left to push a sliver of my soul through my arm. I had no time to rid myself of the cavern scabs corruption, and it burned through my arm like a stream of slow-moving acid. My soul tunneled into the scabs arm like a parasite and fought through the rot to progress. Before the scab traumatized me with a kiss, I reached his collapsed soul’s outer layer. I had no strength to break the shell, but I didn't need to.

The scab pulled away, desperate to avoid my attack, but I squeezed his arm and refused to let go.

Air rushed into my lungs, then escaped in a fit of coughs as he pummeled my helmet and bit into my vest and exposed shoulder. His sharp teeth buried deep, and he thrashed, trying to rip it apart. My body coiled into a ball, but before he could tear my left arm off, I pulled the six-inch knife from the priest’s waistband and slid it under his ribs.

He released my arm and roared in pain before I bashed the club into his face and knocked his jaw off. I pulled my soul back, and it coursed through like molten iron. I screamed with my mouth shut until my head felt like it would pop, and the burning sensation spread throughout my body.

The scab pulled the knife out, but before he used it on me, I struck his ear with the club and didn’t stop swinging until his head fell to the dirt. I checked my soul’s status, and it told me it had become corrupted by 37 percent. Days, if not weeks, would pass before I rid myself of his rot.

I twisted my body and settled on my good knee to finish catching my breath, then jammed the end of the club into the back of the scab's neck for good measure. Every part of my body hurt. A deep throb coated with flames.

After leaving the patch of pines, I limped my way to a ravine and removed my helmet. The crisp mountain air washed over my body like an icy waterfall, and I found a hole under a fallen tree to hide. I poured water from the canteen over my face to wash the scab's sticky saliva free, then rinsed my mouth until I felt clean.

Within my soul, I fought the seeping corruption and pressed it outwards. Some of it would leak through my pores, some I would spit up, and even more would leave through my urine. But I wasn’t able to press on.

Once I set the alert on the helmet, I covered myself with fallen branches and leaves. The last two days had been long, my left arm had been through hell, and I needed sleep before doing anything else. I planned to heal and rest for as long as possible, then track down the scabs' handler and kill them.