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Superheros Versus Zombies

3/1/2014 05:21PM

This is a short story I came up with just for the hell of it. It was designed to stop here, just as an intro to something bigger, that was just hinted at. I suppose if people really liked the idea, I could come up with more, but it wouldn't be from this perspective, and probably not this character.


Warning: Lots and lots of f-bombs, and other swearing.


I know a lot of people blame the Kaltheren for the virus, but I’ve always said that no matter what, the most innocent of mistakes can cause the mother of all fuck ups. I know they hadn’t been around us that long, but they have scholars; they couldn’t tell that betting on human greed, stupidity and willful malice was the smart bet?


It started out just fine. Everything like this always does… They meet us after traveling, say we have some stuff they want, they have some stuff we want. Everything goes smoothly for thirty years. They’ve been helping us come closer to curing diseases; cancer, aids, all that kind of shit. We’ve been teaching them stuff too; so it’s not like they’re some great cosmic gods brought to lead us into a brighter future. Just more advanced than we are in some ways, and not in others. Travel and medicine, really… not agriculture, or energy… once they figured out how to move between planets, supposedly it all stagnated.


But that’s beside the point. The point is that yeah, they should have known better. But I’m not saying it’s their fault. They were trying to help us out. Not their fault that people are stupid, greedy assholes.


The virus wasn’t even supposed to be a virus. It was supposed to be a way to enhance the genes of humans, helping them to live longer, and removing the negative parts, like propensity towards obesity or mental issues. It wouldn’t work on everyone, but it was supposed to help. And it sure as shit did, better than anyone’s expectations. The few live tests the government decided to show the media sure as hell made an impression. They decided to call it ‘the superhero cure’. Hell of a name. Everyone on both sides should have known better.


The Kaltheren did something smart; limited their test facilities, access to the gene-altering virus, and so on and so forth. Any human wanting access to it had to pass their tests, both physical and mental. Be able to handle it, and help mankind. Only about one in two hundred ever passed the physical test, but they were hoping that eventually they could pass their genes on, so all of humanity could have it. Nice idea… But they didn’t think to figure out how all the assholes and the evil part of society would react… and that was the first major fuck up they had.


Now, if it was me, being a cynical asshole, I would have pulled all the civilian Kaltheren all the way to safety zones. Or, had the governments show the mistakes on the test subjects; what would happen if the virus didn’t take to your system properly. Hell, I’d probably have done both, and screw the repercussions. At least then all this might not have happened.


So this terrorist group manages to round up a huge number of the Kaltheren. They tended to live in the same area in cities anyways, so it’s not like it was hard for them to do a strike on each major city they were in and come out with a few thousand. They demanded that the virus be released to everyone in twenty four hours, or they would kill all the hostages. And they meant everyone on the planet, not just them. Like that would be so fucking easy, but hey, no one ever said terrorists were smart people. People say they shouldn’t have given into the demands… but when several hundred thousand of your kind are on the line, enough to make their own damned city… when they do videos and you can see friends, family, neighbors, co-workers screaming and crying not to die… what the fuck would you do?


They were holed in pretty damn good; there wasn’t any way to get them out without having a hell of a lot of them killed… so the Kaltheren released the virus into the atmosphere, which was the only way they could have gotten it to EVERYONE in time. I always figured they could help with the clean up. And they probably could have, except that no one had thought to check what would happen when it got released into such a non-sterile environment.


They say it was the sunlight that caused it to mutate. Or maybe all the pollution we have. For all the fuck we know, it could have been the simple fact of how much nitrogen to oxygen there is. It doesn’t really matter anymore. What matters is what happened afterward doesn’t it?


People started getting enhanced all right. Powers popping out like some kind of comic book. Lasers, wings, jumping, flying, you name it. But that was for the lucky people, the people that would have passed the physical tests of the Kaltheren in the first place. The rest of humanity? They got COMPLETELY fucked over.


Which brings us around to the present state of what’s left. It turns out that the part of the virus that got mutated was the part that altered people that wouldn’t pass the test. Supposedly, it just wasn’t supposed to do anything at all to them, except make them immune to more of the virus. Kind of like chicken pox, once you got it, you can’t get it again. Which would have been a better fucking solution, but like I said, no one knew it was going to mutate like that. Anyone who didn’t pass the test… and got dosed with the mutated drug… well… they died. Really fucking painfully, from what the videos showed. Which wasn’t the bad news.


The bad fucking news was then they got back up again… We’re living in a fucking comic book now, I swear. Ninety nine point five percent of humanity is turned into these rotting flesh bags... and the rest of us have fancy new powers to fight them off. It’s fucking superheroes versus zombies.


Of course, a lot of people refuse to call them zombies on general principles, but they’re fucking corpses that walk around and try to eat us! Turns out the healing properties of the virus keeps them going, and the stuff that helps against mental diseases? That’s why their brain is so fucked up, and they want to eat people. Oh, and since the virus is mutated more in them than us, that’s also why if you get bit and die from them, their immunity to the virus overrides yours, so you get to become one too, isn’t that just fucking great? At least, that’s what our government says. The Kaltheren say they have no fucking clue… which is why I tend to believe them more than our own people. At least they admit when they don’t have any fucking idea of what to do next…


Shit, if I didn’t know any better, and liked being a paranoid who didn’t get any fucking sleep, I would think the Kaltheren planned this whole thing just to see what would happen to humans. But I don’t think so. They lost a lot of people too, when this happened, and now we’re relying on them for survival more than before. Human zombies don’t seem to care about them, so they’re the ones that can work on fields, and keep the power systems going, relay messages and shit. As long as no humans go too near them, the zombies won’t either. They say they’re not leaving until humanity is safe again, and I believe them. Of course, it could be a huge game to them. But thinking like that doesn’t help us right now with what we need to do.


So now we pool our resources. Work in groups and teams, trying to take down as many as we can. Clear out cities, build defenses to live in. We’re taking it back, slowly. It’s not been an easy fight, but what war is ever fucking easy? So now you know what your parents brought you into. What we’re asking you to help doing. Why humanity managed to get completely fucked by ourselves. And why people always say that the road to hell is paved with good fucking intentions.