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Title: The If
The If and its characters, settings, and plot are all mine. Please do not take, alter, distribute or archive without my permission.
I was seventeen when the first meteorite hit; the little blue-black piece of rock left a crater a mile wide in the center of downtown New York. No one really knew what to think. I suppose someone, somewhere had seen it coming, had seen the pink and blue streak it made across the night sky as it plummeted down to the planet’s surface. Maybe no one thought it would hit or maybe everyone thought it would be harmless if it did- after all, Earth’s atmosphere had protected it from meteorites for so many years, burning them up before they ever touched ground.
So why then?
Why did it let that piece through undamaged?
Back then, no one knew. Back then, it was too hard for them to comprehend that there really was something beyond themselves. They didn’t want to - or perhaps they couldn’t - believe that there was anything beyond their planet. In all the vast reaches of outer space, surely there was nothing alive and if there was, of course there was no way for any of it to be more intelligent than humans, right?
Humans are such vain, arrogant creatures that I sometimes wonder how they ever managed to survive on such a dangerous planet.
The meteorite… wasn’t natural. It looked it, sure enough, but anyone with half a brain could have seen that it was just a little too… perfect. The melted metal on the outside was just a little too pure to be natural and the shape was just a little too manufactured. The inside was too smooth, too artificial. They were all small details, but it was the small things that scientists overlooked in their excitement that would eventually destroy them.
What could possibly have sent a wholly level-headed group of people into such a tizzy?
Life.
When they managed to cut into the meteorite what they found inside was something they had never expected- a dozen tiny, sleeping creatures. Pictures flashed through the media faster than any scandal ever had. The sightless worms were only an inch or two long with vibrant fins in all manner of colors and long, curved beaks. Recordings were made of every second of the creatures’ lives from the moment the rock was opened to the moment the last of the dozen breathed Earth’s toxic air and shivered into a painful death.
Sure it was a breakthrough, but it was more than that. Those twelve little worm-like creatures spelt the ruin of Earth to those who knew what they were looking at that day. The worms carried a disease, a parasite; Earth was completely unaware that they had just opened their own fabled Pandora’s Box. The aliens had released an airborne, microscopic organism into our air; an organism that adapted to Earth a thousand times better than their carriers. The life of this world seemed to make perfect, discreet breeding grounds where they could spread undetected. When the evil that the worms had unleashed finally began to manifest almost a year later, the humans had no idea what hit them.
The world was still uneasy with wonder at the discovery of the worms when the second and third meteorites hit. I was eighteen then, just getting out of my senior year of high school. This time the capsules hit on the opposite side of the world, in Italy and China, but the result was the same. Twelve tiny worms and an unseen world of disasters unknowingly displayed for the public to see at all the large museums.
When the first human fell, four weeks after the third meteorite had been removed from the ground, people finally began to panic. I remember the day quite clearly. I was over at a friend’s house watching a movie when her father came in and turned on the news. We protested, of course, but after only a few seconds all words were forgotten.
Italy had been lost to total chaos.
Two days prior, a man had been hospitalized after having been in a fight with someone that had tried to mug him. The mugger ended up dead and his prey was not much better. No one had thought much of it until the man in the hospital began to change. His skin turned hard and grey, splitting and cracking outwards until it had formed a sort of living armor. Doctors, baffled, tried to arrest the changes but to no avail. Two days after the man had been checked in he finally opened his eyes.
There was no more human left in him.
He moved like a ghost, killing everyone that came into his path. His vocal cords sounded split, ripped beyond having the ability to make any sort of human noise. The guttural shrieks emanating from the beast were unlike anything anyone had ever heard- my blood ran cold just listening to the recording. When they finally brought him to the ground it was a literal bloodbath- those managing to walk away from the scene left coated in blue-black and red blood.
That wasn’t the end of it, said the reporter. Some of the people involved in the fight began to change, their skin greying and raising up like that of the monster they had killed. They attacked strangers and loved ones alike until they themselves were destroyed. The sickness, whatever it was, spread like wildfire afterwards. Being filmed behind the anxious news reporter was a dead city, red and orange with the fires that were still burning. Walking amongst the rubble of the town were the blackened shapes of the beasts that had only so recently been the city’s own inhabitants.
It was the parasite, they learned. The beautiful little worms they had discovered within the meteorites had left behind a plague unlike anything the Earth had ever seen. No one knew how the disease spread or why it only chose to manifest in some. It seemed like chance that your neighbor or your best friend would be the next to drop. It was a matter of “if,” which I suppose is how the infection gained its name.
If you were infected.
If the infection took you.
If you could stay safe… escape…
The truth was… there was no escape. Everyone had already been infected. It wasn’t until too late that people began to realize it was the first meteorite that had brought the disease. It had lain dormant for a year, incubating and spreading under humanity’s nose without them being any the wiser. It was everywhere by the time the second and third meteorites arrived and catalyzed the effects of the first. What had happened in Italy was happening the world over while people watched helplessly, baffled at how far the disease had spread before anyone knew to try and stop it. No one knew how to get rid of the infection or stop its effects from manifesting.
No one knew how to protect themselves.
Humans are resilient if nothing else. They tried so hard to continue with their lives. That fall I moved into college with my friend, the same one with which I’d first seen the results of the infection. I wanted to scream- the entire world was trying to ignore the threat that was knocking at their front door. No one wanted to believe it was happening until it happened to them. Until one of the creatures – the If – showed up on their street. In their home.
Truthfully… I didn’t want to believe either but I wasn’t given a choice.
I was nineteen when my room-mate, my best friend, turned up dead on the front steps of our dorm building and the If became real to me.
