Okay, here's something a little different. A segment from the first chapter of a grim little post-apocalyptic story that could very easily become a novel if I let it. The question that I'm putting out before you is this: Is it worth it? Does this story have potential? Or should I just shelve this in the "nice try, but it sucks" file, and only pull it out when I want to be nostalgic about my pre-fanfic days?

Feedback, positive or negative, is welcome! If it sucks, let me know, I can take it.

The Devoured People
by Krista Perry
copyright 1994

Getting on the dilapidated, tank-treaded bus at the Greyhound terminal wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It was just a matter of stepping through the folding door and keeping my eyes lowered as I fumbled for my ticket -- 8 p.m. Departure, Salt Lake City to Livermore -- with the shaking, stainless-steel-encased fingers of my right hand.

The driver noticed. "That tremor isn't normal," he said. His speech was slurred. I looked up apprehensively and saw that half of his upper lip was inflexible metal. The lights of the dashboard reflected from an amoeba-shaped patch of steel that stretched from the bridge of his nose to his left ear. The edges of the surrounding skin underneath his eye and around his jaw were brown and withered.

"You should have that checked," he said, ignoring my stare as he took my ticket. "Could be something wrong with the nerve interface."

I averted my eyes. "Yeah, well, that's why I'm headed for Livermore," I said. The words came out too rushed. The driver scrutinized me for a moment, opened his incongruous mouth as if he wanted to say something... then shrugged and let me pass. I pulled my sagging denim coat closer to my chest with my single fully-fleshed fist, and concentrated on keeping my hands from trembling.

Finding a seat was worse. I told myself to get a grip, and forced myself to take deep breaths. I would be caught for sure if I didn't stop acting like a rat surrounded by starving felines. My eyes flickered up and down the isle for an empty seat.

Tommy told me what to expect. He said the bus ride was the easy part. Everyone ignores everybody. You just get on, sit down, and pretend to sleep through the entire twenty hour trip.

I walked down the crowded isle passing a kid not much older than myself, probably in his late teens, who looked as if someone had splattered quicksilver in his face. Odd splotchy-shaped metal plates, some as big as quarters, covered his face and neck like bad acne. Most of the plates were new, maybe a month or two old, because the skin around the edges was still pale and smooth. A woman in her late thirties, with metal wrists peeking out from her long sleeves, sat behind him. On her lap, a little girl sat patiently. The little girl had dark hair, dark eyes, and a tiny prosthetic metal hand painted a streaky Easter pink. She stuck a pastel finger in her mouth as I hurried by.

There was a seat open, second from the back. I locked my eyes on it and strode forward. The woman sitting at the very back behind the empty seat was hunched over, her long brown hair hanging in limp strands over her face. At my approach, she sat up.

I couldn't read her expression from her face because half of it wasn't there. Flesh had been eaten away, revealing wet muscle and white skull underneath. Tiny metal cauterizers and pain inhibitors, the size of pin heads, dotted the open wound like some strange artificial fungus. She wore a thick metal band around her upper right arm that vibrated with an electronic buzz. Stenciled in red letters across the band were the words "Holy Cross Medical Center."

The woman looked at me, the eyes in her corpse's face expressing mild surprise as if to say, *You dare get so close?*

I lurched to a stop and clamped my mouth shut to prevent a strangled moan from escaping my throat. I'd seen untreated Devoured people on television, but never in person, never up close. Cold sweat broke along my spine and my palms, and I could feel the moisture dissolving the adhesive that glued my phony metal prosthetics to my hand and fingers. I imagined the metal plates dropping away from my flesh at that moment, revealing whole, healthy appendages underneath.

What would the people do? Perhaps nothing. They might let me go and I could run back to the safe, sterile granite tunnels of Sanctuary, back to Mom and Dad and the others and tell them I'm sorry, I couldn't find Tommy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...

... or they might take me right there and sell my immune skin and organs to the highest bidder...

But the adhesive held. I jerked my body back into motion and sat down in the empty seat. The woman didn't say anything, but I could feel her presence behind me. Or perhaps it was simply the static prickling of the Holy Cross Medical Center isolation field that made the hairs from the top of my scalp to the base of my neck stand on end.

"You brave, or you just eager to lose your face?"

Too late, I realized that I hadn't closed my eyes in time to feign sleep. The boy leering at me from over the back of his seat didn't look a day over twelve. His head was shaved, and a chaotic pattern of silver ran from his left eyebrow over the top of his skull to where his right ear should have been. The ear had been replaced with a crude curved piece of metal that looked like some exotic fish fin on the side of his head.

"She's surrounded by a quarantine field," I said, hoping that my irritable response disguised my sudden dread. I closed my eyes, but the kid wouldn't drop it. He reached over and prodded me in the shoulder with a hard metal finger.

"Quarantine don't mean nothin'," he said. "Virus can get out if it wants to. Ain't nothing can stop it except cold steel." He grinned and tapped an implant on the side of his head with a shiny fingertip. "She's not safe to be around till she gets galvanized, know what I mean? Me, I wouldn't be on this bus, but like everybody else I gotta go to Livermore, and when you broke, you gotta take the bus. Besides." His grin widened. "I already lost my beauty. You. You still gotta face and all your hair. All you got is a metal hand with a messed up nerve interface."

So he had seen the exchange between myself and the driver. I looked down and noticed that my hands still trembled. I stuffed them into my pockets before the kid realized that both metal and flesh were shaking. Better for him to think that it was a screwy nerve interface than that it really didn't matter how close I got to the woman, with or without the isolation field.

Tommy would say I was being paranoid. I didn't care. I was playing a dangerous game I'd never played before, and I didn't know all the rules. My best bet was to keep my mouth shut.

So of course I didn't. Fear always dilutes my common sense.

"Look, kid. It's not like there's another seat available on this traveling hot zone, so if you're so concerned about my welfare, why don't you trade seats with me?"

The kid's grin faded. *Good,* I thought. *Maybe now he'll leave me alone.* I closed my eyes.

"Sure, why not?"

My eyes flew open. The grin was back, and there was a strange edge to it.

"What?" I asked.

He slid off his seat. "Yeah, I mean, that's the whole point, ain't it? Not that a couple of feet are gonna make any difference, but they might, you never know. You got more to lose than I do."

This was the last thing I expected. I could only stare at him in disbelief, which seemed to please him to no end. "You gonna move or not? If I was you and still had my face, I'd wanna keep it as long as possible."

Great. How could I let this kid trade seats with me when to do so might mean his contamination? Yet I couldn't do anything that might suggest I was any different from anyone else, especially this close to Sanctuary. Especially with Tommy missing.

Guilt and fear warred with each other. Guilt won, as usual. "Hey," I said, mustering a smile and trying to sound casual. "Don't worry about it. It's got to happen sometime, and I can afford to lose some skin, while you don't look like you've got much to spare." The lie came surprisingly easy. Maybe I had some of Tommy in me after all.

The kid looked skeptical. Then his small shoulders twitched in a kind of half shrug, and he slid back into his seat. Just as he did, the bus started to move with a lurching, grinding of gears. The gray winter buildings of the city began to move outside the tinted windows, and, looking up, I saw the jagged, snow-capped mountains of the Wasatch Front in the east rising above the city like a fortress. I found myself briefly wishing myself inside them, deep into the safe granite womb of Sanctuary.

No. I wasn't a kid anymore. I could handle myself. I could do this, no matter what the others thought.

"The name's Jack." The kid was back, leaning over the edge of his seat and grinning like a maniac.

"Daniel," I replied automatically.

"Hey, that's pretty good." He laughed. "Jack-Daniel."

He obviously thought our combined names were a great joke, but I didn't get it.

"Huh." Jack snorted, seeing my clueless look. "You're Mormon, ain't you."

I shrugged. No surprise, since half the people in the Utah Territory were Mormon. And now I got the joke. "Whiskey," I said, somewhat defensively. "I'm not stupid."

But actually, the only reason I knew that much was because Amar Jensen, who had somehow made his way to Sanctuary from all the way from back east without getting killed, was a big Jack Daniels fan. He often had Tommy pick him up a few bottles when Tommy would go out on his supply runs, much to the annoyance of my mom, who didn't like alcohol around tempting her sons. Nobody else at Sanctuary thought that one single family's ideology was a good enough reason to keep it out, though, so my mom's complaints were overruled. She might have protested more, but Amar was a cheerful and relatively harmless drunk, so she quickly gave up her anti-alcohol crusade, and just focused on keeping the "evil influence" away from her own family.

"You ever try any?" Jack asked.

"No." I'd never been tempted. Tommy had tried some -- of course, Mom didn't know -- and told me that it tasted like liquid fire, so I never really saw the appeal.

"You ought. My mom used to say it was the best medicine against the Devourer. It still ate her in the end, but in the meantime, she was happy." Jack laughed again, loud and short. The laugh seemed to hold more pain than humor in it.

He noticed me staring, and the mask fell back into place, grin intact. "I'm going to Livermore to get my thumb replaced," he said, changing the subject. "The interface has gone dead, and I can't feel a thing with it. Sometimes I drop things. What about you? You going to fix your hand?"

I went along with it. "Yeah." For some reason, I didn't stop. "And I'm looking for my brother."

His face was an immediate mask of sympathy, which was worse than the manic grin. "How long he been gone?"

"About two months."

Jack's single remaining brow crease over the bridge of his nose. "Two months, that's no good. Was he bad off? I'm no doomsayer, but two months... He shoulda been back a while ago."

I didn't answer. He wasn't telling me anything I hadn't thought of a million times already.

"Hey man, I didn't mean to get you all depressed. You never know, he could just be hangin' out. Maybe he got a girl or something."

"Maybe," I said, noncommittally. The fact that this kid could read me so well was starting to get on my nerves -- or, more precisely, starting to make me nervous. Once I got to Livermore, I would have to be very careful if my face could be read so easily.

"It's like acting," Tommy once told me. "You just look around and see what everybody else is doing, and imitate it. If you see some guy scratching at the skin around his implants, you make sure you do it too. It's the little things that will make you credible." Not that I'd ever had any intention of putting his advice to use. *Thanks a lot, Tommy,* I thought with sudden bitterness.

"Is he the last?" Jack asked.

I blinked uncomprehendingly. "The last?"

"Last of your family."

I suddenly realized what he was talking about. I thought of Jack's dead mother, of Jack traveling to Livermore by himself, and was hit by a horrible suspicion. Suddenly, I was ashamed, though I wasn't sure exactly why. Perhaps because I had never lost a family member, except for Tommy, and he wasn't dead, just missing. I had no idea what it was like to lose someone close, and yet I was surrounded by people who had probably watched a parent or sibling or child die a lingering, horrible death without being able to help them. I felt very cold inside.

"No, he's not the last," I said finally. I would have been safer and more convenient to lie, but I felt that it would somehow cheapen the real suffering of those around me. My search for Tommy suddenly seemed trite in comparison.

*So why am I risking my life looking for him?* I thought. For a moment, I couldn't remember. What was I doing here? I looked around at the grotesque half-human bus occupants that surrounded me, and almost felt what remained of my nerve dissolve. Only fear of attracting attention to myself prevented me from getting up, walking to the front of the bus, and asking to be let off.

I closed my eyes, hoping that Jack would take the blatant hint that our conversation was over. As I did, weariness swept over me like a wave. I rested my head against the rattling window, but at that moment, bus's tank treads hit a rather large pot hole in the crumbling road, and my skull bounced painfully on the glass. Jack snickered. I glared at him and slid down until the base of my head rested on the back of my vinyl seat. It was far from comfortable, but at least it was softer than the window.

Outside the window, I could see that we were leaving the Salt Lake Valley behind as we traveled west, towards California Territory. Most of the valley to the south was dark. The endless sprawl of suburbs were long abandoned, run down and overgrown with weeds; the crumbling houses lightless, empty shells. Salt Lake City itself glowed silent and isolated in the curve of the Wasatch mountains. A few tiny headlights traced their way through the growing twilight darkness on a single road that stretched from the southern horizon beyond the point of the mountain, and northward up to the city. Most likely, the cars carried workers coming home from the steel plant in Orem. Orem was the only other living city in the entire territory, and the plant there provided the main means of livelihood for the survivors of the plague in Utah.

Looking out into the darkness, I couldn't help but remember the first time I left the valley.

It was one of my earliest memories. I was with my family, led by my mom who knew the way to Sanctuary, and guarded from the rear by my dad who wielded a shotgun that he had never fired in his whole life. We traveled by foot because the rubber tires on our car were infected and had dissolved away to almost nothing. Tommy carried me on his back when I grew too exhausted to take another step. I remember my family walking through the vacant subdivisions and neighborhoods. I remember clinging to Tommy, my arms wrapped around his neck, my eyes clenched shut, the stench of abandoned bodies filling my head, mingling with the scent of the ever-present smoke from the purification fires. I remember walking all day, and then all night. I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing the valley from the base of the canyon, lit from one end to the other like a sparkling road map, the twinkling lights blotted out by pillars of black smoke. I remember feeling frightened. Frightened, not just because of the death and despair that my four-year-old brain couldn't quite comprehend, but because I understood in my child's mind that among those tiny piercing lights were Devoured people who would take my family and chop them up if they could, just because we didn't get sick like everyone else...

That was thirteen years ago.

And now, as I sat in the back of a rickety old bus filled with half-eaten people who might just love to get their hands on some immune flesh, the most precious commodity in the known world... it was that memory that held me, playing through my head again and again, as I drifted off into an exhausted, restless sleep.

~*~

That's all for now. I've got quite a bit more, but I'm hoping for feedback on this part first before I dust off the rest of this for public viewing. ;) Please leave a note, or email me at . Thanks!

-Krista