Terror of Rasterflu

One- Chaos in Downtown

Michael pushed aside one of the curtains and looked out into the

street. From here, on the second story of the late George Williamson's house, you could see all of downtown by looking left, and by looking right you

could see Route 66 going out of town. Main Street was utterly deserted. The

shades of the business establishments were drawn. A sick-looking dog sat

in the middle of the road, head down, sides bellowsing, white foam dripping

from its muzzle to the heat-shimmering pavement. In the gutter half a block down, another dog lay dead. The woman behind him moaned in a low, guttural way, but Michael did not hear her. He closed the curtain, rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then went to the woman, who had awakened. Jane Williamson was bundled up with blankets because she had been cold a couple of hours ago. Now sweat was streaming from her face and she had kicked off the blankets—he saw with embarrassment that she had sweated her thin nightgown into transparency

in some places. 

But she was not seeing him, and at this point he doubted her

seminakedness mattered. She was dying.

“Mike, bring the basin. I think I’m going to throw up!” she cried.

He brought the basin out from under the bed and put it beside her, but she

thrashed and knocked it onto the floor with a hollow bonging sound which

he also couldn’t hear. He picked it up and just held it, watching her.

“Mike!” she screamed. “I can’t find my sewing box! It isn’t in the

closet!”

He poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the nightstand and

held it to her lips but she thrashed again and almost knocked it from his

grasp. He set it back down where it would be in reach if she quieted.

He had never been so bitterly aware of his muteness as the last two days

had made him. Her fever had given her a rosy, girlish glow that went jarringly

with her bereavement. 

Perhaps the minister had been afraid she was going to make a pass at him. More likely, though, he had been anxious to gather up his family and melt away over the fields. News travels fast in a small town, and others had already decided to get out of the downtown.

Since the time Braceman had left the Williamson living room some forty-eight hours ago, everything had turned into a waking nightmare. Mrs. Williamson had gotten worse, so much worse that Michael had feared she would die before the

sun went down.

Her flu was not a normal one, it was a nasty one. Which was recently discovered by the researchers of Maine. They call it Rasterflu and no one knows it's outcome.

As Michael stood up from the stool on which he was sitting his toe hit against the sharp edge of the bed. With a small drop of blood falling on the floor.

Mrs. Williamson saw it coming. He face grew pale and colour of her eyes turned to pale green. She glared at him with a hungry look with saliva drooling out of her wrinkled mouth. 

Michael couldn't understood at the moment what the hell was happening with her, but Mrs. Williamson was simply growling at him. She jumped right onto his leg ended up grabbing it with her yellow teeth.

Michael shrieked and struggled for free dom from her fangs. She lost the control over her body and she became a living dead. It was the last stage of Rasterflu, which researchers were afraid of. 

Michael picked up the same stool and without thinking more he bashed that thing over her head several times until she left his foot. 

He ran outside his room with a bite on his leg and slammed the door hardly. 

He hurried downstairs in a disturbed manner and rushed towards his car. There was the same sick dog waiting for his arrival. It's eyes were cold with a litre of foam continued falling on the ground from his mouth. 

It was not rabies but something worse than that. The Rasterflu was also affecting the animals and birds.

There was a large hammer beside the house where he was standing, thinking no more about the situation he lifted the hammer and crushed the skull of that poor animal. 

Michael dumped the hammer in the trunk and the tote-bag in the back

seat. He stood for a moment by the passenger door looking at the bungalow where he had spent the last four years.

When he had moved in, He backed out, the headlights momentarily splashing

across the house. His reflection in the windows looked like the eyes of

some hunted beast.

He was hunched tensely over the steering wheel, his face drawn in the

dim glow of the dashboard instruments. “If the gates are closed, I’m gonna try to crash through the metal.” And he meant it. 

But there was no need for such desperate measures. The gates were

standing open. One guard was nodding over a magazine. 

He looked up and saw the clock had gone red.

"Hey dude be careful, it is finally happening!" He shouted at the guard with a mad grin on his face who was busy reading the magazine.

Two- The Outbreak

Michael lay sleeping but not quiet on the bunk in Sheriff George’s

office. He was naked except for his shorts and his body was lightly oiled

with sweat.

June 28, 2021

To: Government of Maine 

Subject: Rasterflu

My name is Michael Williamson, member of the research team. I was chosen for the research of the stages of this newly discovered virus which was injected inside my mother. 

The results are not good. I request you to hurry and bring this situation under control. Because the virus is spreading rapidly through air. And now my whole colony is a living nightmare. 

I don't know how long I can survive this madness, I got a bite in my leg and I can smell the death. Research papers are with me and I am arriving at the research centre ASAP.

His last thought before sleep had taken him the night before was that he would be dead by morning; the dark man that had consistently haunted his feverish dreams would somehow break through that last thin barrier of sleep and take him away.

It was strange. There was nothing but a gray blur when he looked through that eye now, a gray blur in which

shapes sometimes moved, or seemed to move. But it wasn’t the eye injury

which was killing him; it was the bite down his leg.

He had gone without disinfecting it. The pain in his eye had been so great

that he had barely been aware of it. The bite ran shallowly along his right

thigh and ended at the knee; the next day he had examined the bite hole in

his pants where the slug had exited with some wonder.

As the wound was not a deep one, it took three days for the initial symptoms to show up, but they were also progressing rapidly at the same time. 

And on that next

day, June 30, the wound had been red along the edges and all the muscles of

that leg seemed to ache.

He had limped down to Dr. Steve’s office and had gotten a bottle of

hydrogen peroxide. He had poured the whole bottle of peroxide over the

bite wound, which was about ten inches long. It had been a case of

locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. By that evening his

entire right leg was throbbing like a rotten tooth, and under the skin he 

could see the telltale red lines of blood poisoning radiating out from the

wound, which had only begun to scab over.

On July 1 he had gone down to Steve’s office again and had rummaged

through his drug closet, looking for penicillin. He found some, and after a

moment’s hesitation, he swallowed both of the pills in one of the sample

packets. He was well aware that he would die if his body reacted strongly

against the penicillin, but he thought the alternative might be an even

nastier death. The infection was racing, racing. The penicillin did not kill

him, but there was no noticeable improvement, either.

By yesterday noon he had been running a high fever, and he suspected he had been delirious a great deal of the time. He had plenty of food but didn’t want to eat it; all he seemed to want to do was drink cup after cup of the distilled water in the cooler which stood in Baker’s office. That water had

been almost gone when he fell asleep (or passed out) last night, and Nick

had no idea how he might get more. In his feverish state, he didn’t care

much. He would die soon, and there would be nothing to worry about

anymore. He was not crazy about the idea of dying, but the thought of

having no more pain or worry was a great relief. His leg throbbed and

itched and burned.

His dreams were a flood. It seemed that everyone he had ever known was coming back for a curtain call. They would fade as the pain in his leg brought him close to waking. Then a new scene would appear as he sank down into sleep again. 

There were people he had never

seen in two of the dreams, and these were the dreams he remembered the

most clearly when he woke up.

He was on a high place. The land was spread out below him like a relief

map. It was desert land, and the stars above had the mad clarity of altitude.

There was a man beside him … no, not a man but the shape of a man. As if

the figure had been cut from the fabric of reality and what really stood

beside him was a negative man, a black hole in the shape of a man. And the

voice of this shape whispered: Everything you see will be yours if you fall down on your knees and worship me.

 Michael shook his head, wanting to step away from that awful drop, afraid the shape would stretch out its black arms and push him over the edge.

He could feel that he was loosing control over his body and mind. 

Why don’t you speak? Why do you just shake your head?

In the dream Michael made the gesture he had made so many times in the

waking world: a laying of his finger over his lips, then the flat of his hand

against his throat … and then he heard himself say in a perfectly clear,

rather beautiful voice: “I can’t talk. I am mute.”

But as his hand touched that figure’s shoulder it turned ice cold, so cold it seemed that he had burned it.

He jerked it away with ice crystals forming on the knuckles. The next moment he realised it was another dream within a dream. And it came to

him. He could hear. He was struck mute all over again by the wonder of it. There was a new dimension to the world he had never missed because he had never experienced it, and now it had fallen into place. He was hearing sounds. 

This creature, whatever it was, performed no free miracles.

—if you fall down on your knees and worship me.

And Michael put his hands over his face because he wanted all the things the

black manshape had shown him from this high desert place: cities, women,

treasure, power. But most of all he wanted to hear the entrancing sound his fingernails made on his shirt, the tick of a clock in an empty house after

midnight, and the secret sound of rain .

Three- Escape

Michael pedaled out of town at about quarter past one on the afternoon of

July 3. He packed a knapsack in the morning, putting in some more of the

penicillin pills in case he needed them, and some canned goods. He went

heavy on the Campbell’s tomato soup and the Chef Boyardee momos, two of

his favorites.

He put in several boxes of bullets for the pistol and took a canteen.

He walked up the street, looking in garages until he found what he

wanted: a ten-speed bike that was just about right for his height. He pedaled

carefully down Main Street, in a low gear, his hurt leg slowly warming to

the work. He was moving west and his shadow followed him, riding its own

black bike. He went past the gracious, cool-looking houses on the outskirts

of town, standing in the shade with their curtains drawn for all time.

He could sense that he was no longer the master of his body, he felt he was a prisoner inside his mind and his body was in someone's else control.

He camped that night in a farmhouse ten miles west of Downtown. By

nightfall on July 4 he was nearly to Oklahoma. That evening before he went to sleep he stood in another farmyard, his face turned up to the sky,

watching a meteor shower scratch the night with cold white fire. He thought

he had never seen anything so beautiful. Whatever lay ahead, he was glad to be alive .

But not for long enough, he was turning into a mindless monster.

There was a dead man lying in the middle of Main Street in Portland, Maine, Michael wasn’t surprised. He had seen a lot of corpses since leaving downtown, and he suspected he hadn’t seen a thousandth of all the dead people he must have passed. In places, the rich smell of death on the air was enough to make you feel like swooning. One more dead man, more or less, wasn’t going to make any difference.

But when the dead man sat up, such an explosion of terror rose in him

that he again lost control of his bike. It wavered, then wobbled, then

crashed, spilling Michael violently onto the pavement of Route 63.

“what happened buddy?,” the corpse said, and Michael saw he wasn’t a corpse at all but a young man who was looking happily at him. He had most of a bottle of vodka in one hand, and now Michael understood, he was going completely insane and his body was burning like a piece of coal. 

The main research centre was two hundred miles away from current location.

"Stay away from me, I am not..... A man!", He could barely control his emotions for bloodlust. 

He knew he was going to become a threat to his teammates whenever he arrives at the building. 

Late that afternoon, as Michael biked along a treelined section of Route 63, a

green reflectorized sign loomed ahead and he stopped to read it, slightly amazed. The sign said he was entering MAINE RESEARCH CENTRE. He could

hardly believe it; he must have walked an incredible distance in his

semidaze of fear. Either that or he had lost a couple of days somewhere. He

was about to start riding again when something—a noise in the woods or

perhaps only in his head—made him look sharply back over his shoulder.

He had several times had the strong feeling that he was being

watched and followed. He was hearing things, perhaps even seeing things

out of the corners of his eyes. His powers of observation, just starting to

come fully to life in this strange situation, kept triggering at stimuli so slight as to be subliminal, nagging his nerve-endings with things so small that even in the aggregate they only formed a vague hunch, a feeling of

“watched-ness.” This feeling didn’t frighten him as the others had. 

Now, standing astride, he called out clearly: “If someone’s there, why don’t you come on out? I won’t hurt you.”

There was no answer. He stood on the road by the sign marking the

border, watching and waiting. A bird twittered and then swooped across the sky.