Lin used to be a perfectly normal girl. She was born to a slightly older than usual mother, but with ease and at a very healthy weight. As a child she was subjected to all of the typical vaccinations to guard her from the unseen dangers lurking outside of her body. She had been hospitalized overnight only once, at age eight, for dehydration due to salmonella. The suffering was minor and she had been released after saline drips had replenished her vitality fully. Her resting heart rate was a normal seventy, and she often raised it considerably by participating in peewee team sports.
At age twelve, Lin entered puberty. It too came with no major complications beyond the slight stretch marks on her back from growing close to a foot over a short summer break and the severe monthly cramps that made her learn cursing at far too young an age. She developed mild at most pimples on occasion, but there was a slighter, more peculiar change to her skin that accompanied her entry into womanhood. It obtained a faint, barely perceptible rouge colour from head to toe. She always looked as if she had just come in from a walk through the nipply wind of a restless winter eve. Dermatologists saw it as nothing but an odd natural complexion, and neither Lin nor her mother worried much about it.
As is the case with many teenage girls, Lin often earned some income as a babysitter for her mother’s friends and neighbours. It started with Mark two houses over, age four, who was an easy job. She would let him exhaust his energy by running around, and then he’d sleep like a baby all night. That gave her the opportunity to sift the fridge until all the best items were found and consume them in front of the TV while fluttering between channels every few minutes. The goal, familiar to any teenager, was always the same - find something that felt inappropriate and will make her run for the remote to switch the channel as soon as she hears Mark’s parents returning from their party. After Mark, she sat for the Johnson twins across the street who were twice the hassle for barely more pay. It wasn’t long before Lin started silencing her ringer any time she saw Mrs. Johnson’s name flash on her phone screen.
On one particularly gloomy day, Lin was summoned to perform her specialized duties. Her mother’s friend Janice had to attend an important dinner that would likely not finish until very late, and she would rather do so without her two-year-old son throwing fistfulls of pasta sauce on her boss’ suit. She neatly wrote all necessary contact numbers on a square piece of paper and left it on the dinner table as she departed. Taking care of a young child should have been easy, the mother assured Lin. Just sit together on the couch and watch whatever creepy and colourful children’s TV show the networks run nowadays.
It certainly sounded easy, but as soon as Janice had left, the gloom that had loomed in the sky all day condensed into a charcoal thundercloud above the neighbourhood. Lin loved storms. Ever since she was a kid she would watch them from her window and strike a pose with every flash of lightning, pretending God was taking a photo of her. Two-year-old Kaleb, on the other hand, was clearly not a fan of the sparks and bangs that danced outside the house. He shook visibly as soon as the low rumbling started. In an effort to calm him, Lin made a small fort for the two of them out of thick, heavy blankets draped over the couch, and cuddled the boy inside the fort. Eventually the two drifted off to sleep in their woolly home, with the sound of the storm fading together with their consciousness.
Only one of them awoke to the cacophonous screams of Janice, who had stumbled back home past midnight. She had ripped off the roof of the blanket fort and tried to wake Kaleb, only to find him cold to the touch, covered in bile and vomit which the girl had not felt in her sleep. In a frenzy, the mother picked up her child’s body, which felt heavier than usual with fully relaxed muscles, and ran to her car. The girl followed and got in the passenger seat. The mother placed her limp son on Lin’s lap. She drove toward the hospital at twice the speed limit, the car filling with the smell of the regurgitated food soaked into Kaleb’s previously pristine clothing. Lin sat there bearing the boy’s weight, unable to say anything, like a ventriloquist with a mutinous doll refusing to move on her lap.
The mother’s sobs intensified as she drove, the realization of reality eliminating any shreds of hope left in her mind. By the time the hospital was in sight, her sobs had changed into a gargling, exacerbated sound. Lin could not even bring herself to look at her out of shame. The hospital was barely in front of them now, and they were still flying toward it at great speed with no signs of slowing down. Suddenly, Lin heard the continuous, loud beep of the horn. Looking to her left, she saw Janice’s face laying flat against the wheel, vomit and stomach acid hanging in thin threads from her motionless open mouth. A moment later the white concrete wall of the hospital enveloped the speeding vehicle.
The car crashed through the ER waiting room, adding several more injuries to the already injured. Miraculously, Lin survived despite the breakneck speed with which they had impacted. Kaleb’s body had acted as padding between her and the dashboard; an infant airbag. The screams of the people, both the damaged and the mere spectators, filled the room like a fluid. That fluid darkened and densened as their screams morphed to heaving, and even able bodies started dropping to the ground. Only Lin remained semi-conscious of the sea of vomit about her. All others lay dead in it.
A pair of doctors with surgical masks rushed in, prompted by the commotion. Awestruck by the sight before them, they saw Lin as the most worthwhile focus of their efforts for showing even slight signs of life. They swiftly threw her on a stretcher and wheeled her out of the room. Their masks allowed them to work on her injuries for a minute before they started filling with their discarded bodily fluids. The doctors too dropped dead on either side of the girl. Lin’s exhaustion and injuries caused her body to fall deep into sleep on the stretcher. It lay there in stasis for the next two days, the red colour of her skin temporarily draining into a pale white.
The event came to be known as the First Eruption of Lin. It killed all people within a two mile radius, and rendered the area uninhabitable for years. The CDC only managed to approach her after the discharge had ended; until then even hazmat suits only delayed death by a factor of four. They took the girl to an underground containment facility which was improved daily by thousands of workers. She was cared for as best as possible by machines controlled remotely. She had to live in total isolation as the facility expanded to many miles of solid concrete meant to wall her off from the world. Cameras that were constantly aimed at her body took accurate colour measurements and could predict when eruptions would begin and end with a precision of minutes.
During the peak of each eruption, attending scientists would open a ventilation pipe for a split second. The vent exited above ground, in a restricted area planted with sunflowers. Seen from above, it looked like a crop formation etched into the flora by aliens. All the plants were dead in a perfect circle around the pipe. Rigorous measurements of the expanding radius of dead vegetation clearly alluded to exponential growth in the reach and potency of the effluvium with each new eruption. It didn’t take a scientist to know what this meant for life on Earth as a whole. The obvious thing to do was to kill the girl. Only that could prevent an extinction event of a scale unseen for millions of years.
But no one would agree to do so.
You can’t save humanity by losing it.
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Credits to: horrorinpureform
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