-Chapter 19: Fear The Red Mist-

I was drifting.

It felt like I was dreaming – floating under the ocean. I couldn't see anything, but I could hear the far-away murmurs of voices 'wah-wah'ing incoherently. I sucked in a breath.

I wished I hadn't.

My insides were on fire!

The voices got louder, roaring too mutedly to understand as I thrashed about in whatever circle of hell I had fallen into. Another sound, like a gunshot, thudded out and the air around me got hotter.

"Help!" I screamed, but only felt the vibrations of my voice reverberate inside my head. "Please!"

The fire I was sitting in got hotter – it got closer – and I could feel it crawl inside my body. I was being roasted alive. And then…

And then suddenly I wasn't. I couldn't feel anything at all.

The relief was fleeting, flowing into dread and panic as I tried to find my arms and legs but could not. I couldn't even tell if I was lying down or what direction I was facing; it wasn't hot or cold here.

Was I dead? I wasn't quite sure. I could think – I could remember what had happened. I had gone into that facility disguised as a sniper and… And what? The last thing I remembered was toppling over and coughing up blood.

But that couldn't be right. I didn't get sick – I was a damn virus. I didn't sleep or dream, either. I flexed my phantom limbs in another surge of panic and frustration, but nothing came of it. I was still here, trapped in the dark and unable to move.

I floated there in oblivion for an eternity, thinking about what had happened and imagining where I was – if I was anywhere at all. I thought back to my dad, Charlie, who was lucky to be alive. And I thought of the Cullens, who were locked in their house, riding out the outbreak away from the eyes of the troops and government scientists. And Alice.

Alice.

I didn't know how I hadn't remembered her sooner. What she must have thought when I didn't come back out of the building. Was she still waiting for me? Did they get her too?

I panicked.

My mental thrashing multiplied and I screamed a silent wail, beating against the void with everything I had. And at first, nothing came of it; it was the same as always – like trying to touch a shadow.

But my efforts were not in vain, because I began to feel something again. It was a warm feeling, like a camp fire or space heater. It flowed up my limbs, revealing their existence to me again, and took root in my chest. The heat spread.

It got hotter as it crisscrossed through my veins and sizzled on the surface of my skin. I breathed in and opened my eyes to a bright, white light that seemed to encompass everything.

I could feel the floor below me now as I remained on my back, peeking through the cracks of my eyelids as the unnatural light beat down on me. My body was still a livewire of pain, but I could feel it waning and flowing back out. My breath stuttered out as I sighed, subconsciously deciding it would be a good idea to just lie here for a bit – wherever here was.

"I see you're awake," a loud voice crackled through the air. I flinched and cried out from the spasm my sudden movement caused, burning my retinas as my eyes wheeled about, searching for whoever had spoken.

"Who-" I groaned, slowly propping myself up on my elbows to see.

At first glance it appeared to be some sort of empty office space. The room was square and stark, without a single shred of furniture, and had a small door along one side. On a second look, though, it was more of a prison.

The room wasn't made of drywall – or even concrete – it seemed to be a dull metal. The floor was made of it as well, and the sturdy feeling of it beneath me did not comfort me. The lights overhead – once my eyes adjusted – were much too bright for any office setting, and the spots not covered with light strips were dotted with tiny, millimeter-wide holes. But it was the wall in front of me that cemented the idea of a jail cell.

Instead of the metallic surface, the entire wall had been replaced with a thick glass cover. I could catch the lush green luminescence as the light bounced off the surface of what must have been the step above missile-proof. The damn thing had to be at least three inches thick.

Standing on the other side of the glass was a middle-aged man in a white lab coat with olive eyes and a nearly-bald head. The stripe of black, straight hair behind his ears made him look older than he probably was. He glanced at a clipboard that he held in his hand before leaning toward a microphone that was jutting out from the side of my cage. He cleared his throat and rubbed his lips together before opening his mouth.

"A man with long hair and a bow-tie asks you what a boat sails on," the voice spoke through the speakers somewhere above me. "Your response?" He bowed his head and hovered his other hand – which held a pen – over the clipboard as he held in place, not saying anything else.

"Where am I?" I croaked, moaning as my throat burned. I swallowed reflexively, but it didn't seem to help. The man frowned and leaned into the microphone again.

"Please answer the question. A man with long hair and a bow-tie asks you what a boat sails on. Your response?"

"What is this, some sort of Jeopardy screening room?" I mumbled.

"Acceptable response…and popular culture reference noted," the man wrote something on the clipboard and folded it underneath his arm, giving me a steady look through the glass. I took the opportunity to look down at myself, but I wished I hadn't.

It was like something out of a Tarantino movie. The more healthy looking parts of my body were an angry red color, spotted with boils and curling skin like I had bathed in hot grease.

The more graphic bits were spread out across my body almost evenly, featuring spongy holes of blackened tissue and white puss that took more than a couple inches of flesh off of each area. Surprisingly, I could see the sheen of bone through the bloody mess of one of my arms. I wasn't positive I had them at all, since my shape shifting afforded me such a liquid-like range of motion and form.

I gritted my teeth as I willed my body to heal itself – to collapse and reform like play dough – but it was all for naught. A flicker of a red and black tendril caught my eye near the very visible radius of my left arm, but it withered as it spread across my skin and promptly died.

"What is this?" I groaned as I tried to stand, rolling back onto my knees as my legs failed to cooperate. "What happened to me?"

"It's quite remarkable," the man said, completely ignoring me. "We've collected data on you since the initial outbreak in Arizona. You took the same form as you have now, though you are obviously not limited to a single state of being like others of your particular family.

"So I pray you can understand my confusion and my intrigue in seeing you here, weak as you are, still struggling to hold onto your human façade," he paused and moved closer to the glass. "And in answer to your question: we have been able to synthesize an…antivirus to your virus, for all intents and purposes. The inner workings are a bit detailed and the proper name for the compound is quite long, but some of the less-evolved, gun-toting members involved in this mess took to calling it Blood Tox. I'm sure you can see why the name stuck.

"You will find yourself unable to move much at all as long as the compound is being delivered into your cell, and the debilitating effects tend to linger even after the Blood Tox has dissipated. So please: sit back and relax, because you aren't going anywhere for quite some time."

I said nothing as my eyes roamed the room, only now noticing the light-red tint to the air within my cell – like misted blood. The Blood Tox particles swirled through the air currents in the room, slowly drifting toward the floor. My eyes blurred momentarily as I focused, but the microscopic buildup of the compound was obvious on the sleek metal floor, like a macabre dusting of red snow. I coughed and forced myself to stop breathing – the severe chemical burns on the surface of my body were bad enough without adding to the damage on the inside.

My chest rumbled as anger flooded through me. I felt my insides slosh as I trembled under the strain of the Blood Tox that ate away at me and held me down. It was only worse that the man was so calm and matter-of-fact about all of this.

I watched the way he looked at me, his olive eyes sliding over me through the thick glass. He looked at me as though I were nothing more than a Chea Pet – not an ounce of empathy at all.

My insides writhed as I placed my disfigured fingers on the floor. It felt like I was caressing a white-hot piece of metal, but I pushed myself up nonetheless and staggered to shaking feet as I bared my teeth at the unimpressed man. I took a step forward and groaned, hissing as a concentrated mote of the red mist collided with my face.

My vision swam as inky tears washed over my eyes and dripped down my face. I could make out the blurry form of the man moving and doing…something on the other side of the glass. I took another step. Then another.

There was a dull, clanking sound from overhead, followed by the whirring of a motor or fan starting up. I was nearly to the glass when I caught the cascade of red falling down from the ceiling out of the corner of my eyes. My skeletal fingers scraped against the glass, leaving shallow, superficial scrapes where they dragged.

Then the pain hit, a thousand times more intense, and I was unable to fight against my body as it shut down again.

The first thing that came back to me was an unsteady chinking sound, like a faraway clanging of beer bottles or maybe even a prospectors chisel colliding with rocks. I could only just begin to feel the floor under my stomach and against the side of my face.

Chink. Clank. Chink.

Bella.

Air whistled down my throat as sensation crept back to me, and I braced myself for the fiery inferno that should have accompanied the breath, but nothing came. I was sore, to be sure, and my skin felt like it had been flayed, but there was nothing raw. I took in another breath.

"Bella!" Alice's voice shouted, but it seemed far-away.

Clank.

My body bucked and my eyes rolled open, desperate to see. When I was finally able to focus, I moaned in both pain and relief.

Alice's face was bent toward mine and her cool fingers caressed my cheek. Her teeth gleamed as she smiled, the benevolence flooding through her golden eyes, and I felt myself relax an integer. The change in air pressure and the scraping of the cold floor under my legs as it moved beneath me drew my attention away from Alice and allowed me to focus on what was going on around me.

Her face changed – dissolved – and morphed seamlessly into the gaunt face of the young infected girl we had encountered with the mass of hunters and zombies. Alice's alive golden eyes melted into the wide, empty black holes I remembered all too well. The girl's hands weren't gentle as they dug under the skin of my jaw and the reality around me certainly wasn't as pleasant as I had originally perceived.

I was being dragged by my face through a hallway by a soulless monster-girl.

My arms twitched instinctually, ready to defend, but I was still too weak to move much at all. My dragging legs hit a lump in the floor and I stretched my eyes to catch the half-eaten corpse that had been tossed haphazardly onto the once-pristine floor.

The clanking sound grew louder and louder as we moved on and across more bodies and more gore. The girl slammed her hand into a side door of the building I had been staying in and the bright burn of artificial light overwhelmed my vision for a split second while my eyes adjusted. It was night time, though the spotlights that were erected high in the air illuminated enough of the area to make a convincing day time.

A snarling, hissing sound reverberated out of the hunter that moved into my line of vision. My throat gurgled as I tried to scream and prepare for the inevitable attack, but the creature merely bared its teeth at me and moved closer. Another hunter followed closely behind, and it hissed as a loud cracking sound snapped through the air and something impacted its tough flesh.

Yells from somewhere below and away and more cracks were heard, and I knew now what those clanging noises were.

Gunfire.

I was so…confused – where was I? Just how long had I been unconscious?

The voices around me ebbed and flowed as more pings came out from the many, many rifles somewhere around me. Loud crashes and thunderous, inhuman roars accompanied the gunfire, but I was unable to really focus on that as I was lifted like a rag doll by my neck. The girl's eyes darted back and forth as she focused on something behind me, the black pools narrowing and crinkling as though her attention was elsewhere.

"What…" I gasped as thick, uneven arms curled around my torso. I felt the claws of whatever had grabbed me from behind. The snarl that trembled through my bones from beneath the skin that was pressed against mine revealed that I was practically hugging a hunter, but I couldn't do a thing about it. There was a rush of air and I lost track of the ground for a moment before my skeleton jarred from the impact of the creature landing.

Other impacts followed behind, landing somewhere near us, and I felt a sudden jolt as the hunter that held me staggered. Bullets rained down from somewhere above us, two of them slicing cleanly through my shoulder and left side, and the roars and snarls retaliated with vigor.

My hands clenched and I contracted my stomach muscles, trying to force my body into a ball and break out of the iron hold I was in. The hunter only tightened its arm and dug its claws in deeper, leaping and running through some space I was unable to keep track of.

There were moments of darkness and those with bright lights, and the breeze shifted as we moved, but steadily, the sound of the fighting began to fade from my ears.

It was permanently dark once the wind stopped blowing by, and the nauseating smell of human excrement wafted by. The hunter's feet splashed and I cringed as I felt a spatter of something slightly too warm hit my ankle. There were other splashes behind us, too, and a steady, gentle flowing of liquid waste somewhere in the distance that reverberated off the obviously narrow corridor we were crammed in. Something like a whining scream broke through from somewhere behind us.

A latch was pulled by someone or something and we were moving through a darker, less smelly area. It was cooler and drier wherever we were, but it was still enclosed – somewhere underground. My body suddenly jarred like the hunter had jumped, and I craned my head to look as well as I could where we were going.

The hunter had leaped up toward the ceiling of the tunnel we were in and grasped hold of a metal pipe sticking out of the wall, which ran a ways parallel and eventually disappeared back into oblivion. The infected beast gripped me tighter and squeezed through what must have been a hole or a crack in the wall. My shoulder scraped harshly against the rough surface and I hissed. The hunter growled back, but did nothing else as it continued forward and dropped back to the ground.

Light began to shimmer up ahead gradually, and a thrill jolted up my spine. It felt like…excitement and also of a sort of longing contentment. It was a strange feeling – one I hadn't experienced before – and my head began to pound with an invisible pressure, like I was suddenly changing altitudes in an airplane.

And it smelled good in here. Home certainly wasn't a smell I could name before, but it was now. It smelt like my domain – like my territory. I gritted my teeth and cringed again in the hunter's hold, rebelling against the alien sensations.

A claw sliced through my shoulder blade and pulled me off the hunter. My body was flung through the air and I collided with something squishy, though not soft. Air whooshed out of my lungs and I rolled onto my stomach, straining to right myself.

My hands dug into the squishy floor I had landed on, and the lubricated surface gave with little resistance. My vision strained and blurred, but as I reoriented myself I was able to recognize just what it was I was thrown against.

The room, from the limited portion I could see, was large for something that was obviously underground – maybe a storage area or a basement. There were a few crates in one corner of the room, which was also cluttered with wooden pallets and a lone, rusted toolbox. Along the wall to one side was a small window and a rusted door, which held a smaller room behind them.

These details were not significant – they were the variables. The familiar constant was the sickening, slimy, intestine-like coating that was plastered on the floor and crept up the walls and ceiling like a sentient fungus. I could feel the slick organic carpet pulse underneath me, humming in sync with my own body.

This was a hive.

I had been in one before back in Phoenix, though I tended to avoid them when I could. They were the mothership of the infection – the home base – that the zombies, hunters, and the other creepy-crawly nightmares called home. They could be crammed into any sort of building or cave, really, but they always carried the raw, pulsing biomass inside.

Even being an infected, myself, I wasn't exactly sure how or why they worked; I just knew that the final boss type of monsters tended to hang around them. What I couldn't understand is why I was brought to one.

The slurping thud of something else landing in the hive came from my left, and I glanced over to see another hunter drop something else beside the first form on the ground. I swallowed and groaned as I tried to move closer to see, but my body wouldn't move. The autonomic part of my physiology had apparently discovered that the hive was edible, and fragile, root-like tendrils had planted my body in place as I sucked up the biomass like a shallow milkshake.

The first shape groaned and rolled over, revealing an armor-clad woman who looked to be about twenty-five. Her hand patted around blindly as she blinked and stared at nothing, and her pupils were fully dilated. It was much too dark in here for a human to see anything but the very dimmest of outlines. She was unarmed, though, so she didn't pose a threat to the hunters or me.

The second shape was more frantic than the first. He was older than the woman, though not by much, and wore a dirty, stereotypical white lab jacket over his khaki pants. He breathed hard, each exhale nearly a scream, and he shook as he crawled about in a direction that would lead him straight into the pallet pile in the corner.

And the hunters…they weren't moving. They stood hunched over near the entrance to the hive, breathing heavily and watching the three of us on the floor. I turned away from them and numbed my mind as well as I could as my body continued to slurp up whatever nutrition it could from the infected pustules of the hive floor. There wasn't any use trying to fight off two hunters as weak as I was.

Alice's face appeared at the front of my mind, and I couldn't help but be thankful she had actually listened to me and didn't try to help. I knew she would be worrying now that I hadn't come back, but I was comforted that she couldn't find me in this place. Hunters were stronger than vampires, and there were more of them here, I feared, than there were members of the Cullen family.

"…and she's gone and you're gone and I'm just…" a sudden, grainy, familiar voice crackled out from behind me and I flinched hard, the feeding tendrils snapping back into my body as I fought to curl into a crouch. My head turned to the other side and I maneuvered onto my back, gaping at the all-too-familiar man holding the small, silver cell phone that had been the unnoticed light source since I had arrived.

He sat with a regal poise on the curved, blue bus-stop bench that stood out of the hive-pus like a throne. He was dressed casually in a purple and white button-down shirt and jeans, and the light from the cell phone reflected harshly off his bald head, giving him an even more ominous look – almost like the Wizard of Oz.

His blue eyes cut through mine as my mother's voice continued to play out of the cell phone.

"…I don't know what to do anymore. I can't listen to your voicemail again. It doesn't help and I cry every time I call your damn phone. If you get this…just please…please call me back! I need you…"

"No," I breathed, looking at the man my mother had said was dead. "You can't be… Phil?"

End notes: Oh, hi. So, how are you holding up? Because I'm a potato.

So I guess it's been a while since we last spoke. 2013, in fact. Sorry about that. I could tell you I was super busy building websites and stuff and being productive, but mostly I was just getting reacquainted with the daily grind of classes and couldn't find it in me to do much of anything but watch movies and read stories on this damn time-vampire of a site.

But I finally finished this chapter after over two months of nothing and there's a pretty big plot twist. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

And I know it must read something like a broken record when I tell you that this story won't revolve around romance, but this story won't revolve around romance. The 'loving' is sort of an afterthought; it takes the backseat to plot.

But hey, I don't blame you for asking. Most of the Twilight fanfictions I read (nearly all of them) have the plot firmly cemented in the whole 'romance' thing. Many, many of those have some damn-graphic sex scenes. So I get that it's expected.

But just...don't expect that level of focus on that stuff? I guess that's what I'm trying to say.