Seed of Horror: Chapter 5 by Sage_of_the_Forlorn_Path

Chapter FiveJason paced back and forth in his tiny cell, pulling back his hair over and over again and trying to not to throw up for the umpteenth time. He had been told about what Colleen had suffered, how she had been raped for hours on end in her high school by three of her classmates. He had heard about the injuries she had sustained, their severity, and the psychological trauma it had left her with. He wanted so badly to get out of this prison and see her, to comfort her, his little sister. How could this happen? He was supposed to protect her, to watch over her! While he had been locked up in this dingy cell, quarantined like a rabid animal, his baby sister had been brutalized and tortured! He had actually punched Professor Nelson in the face when he admitted that he should have seen the effects of the Black Stigmata in Colleen.

The only silver linings to this were the fact that the nail had been taken from Colleen and was now in possession of the BSC, and that it had not made her a Host, so her mind would not be contaminated like Jason’s. But to be treated so horribly, to suffer so much at the hands of three of her classmates… he couldn’t imagine Colleen ever being able to trust anyone ever again. It would have been bad enough if she had been gang-raped by three men, as horrible as it sounded, it was almost expected in men. But there was supposed to be some kind of protection and understanding between women, some sort of unity that would prevent them from selling each other out to such a fate. Or least, that’s what Jason had hoped, that there was some kind of sisterhood that girls had that would protect them from sexual assault. If it was the girls on her sports team that had done it, would Colleen ever be able to place trust in anyone ever again, man or woman? He just had to wait for her to heal and for the influence of the Black Stigmata to fully leave him.

Christi stood outside Colleen’s hospital room with a look of pained uncertainty on her face. She and Colleen had been good friends since she started dating Jason, and Christi had always been there for her and even once tried to hook her up with her younger brother. Now that friendship was struggling to hold itself together, as for every time she tried to go in and comfort her friend, Colleen would freak out and become hysterical. The psychological trauma she had suffered was fully manifesting itself, costing her the ability to recognize Christi and inducing horrendous flashbacks. After all, Christi did resemble Anna, the blonde she-beast and one of the heartless trio that had brutalized her.

Jason was in jail and Colleen had suffered a fate that Christi couldn’t imagine enduring without praying for death. She wished there was something she could do, some way she could help the two of them. It seemed like everything was spiraling out of control and there was nothing she could do to protect the people she cared about.

Professor Nelson took a long drag from his cigarette, accelerating the ember tip to the point where ash was falling off the end like rain. He was standing in the woman’s bathroom at the bus station in the middle of Portland, facing a corpse strung up from the ceiling. Using this corpse, the ritual for the creation of new nails had been completed, and the Black Stigmata were long gone from the pulverized eyeballs. The Homunculus—man or woman, he couldn’t tell—was dangled from a 2×4 in the ceiling by a noose made from the victim’s intestines, painstakingly braded for strength. All the joints in the body were broken, twisted near to the point of tearing open the flesh.

Even to the trained eye, there was no way to tell if the victim was a man or woman. Homunculi were immune to fire or decay and remained eternally like radioactive waste, yet the corpses would show signs of grotesque post-mortem changes. These changes caused the remaining subtle hints of the gender to completely disappear, from the length of the fingers to the size of the pelvis. As for the twisted joints, every Homunculus had some form of unique torture, something to distinguish them from the others as per the nails’ instructions. But with the Black Stigmata not wanting to waste valuable canvas or cause the early death of their victims, Hosts were kept on a short leash and their work often repeated.

A very select few of forensic investigators were examining the scene, one of them a member of the BSC and the other two sworn to secrecy, even against the higher-ups in their departments. The station had been cordoned off and the Homunculus was going to removed and placed in BSC storage. Since Homunculi neither decayed nor burned, destroying them was next to impossible. Even throwing them into a wood chipped just made the toxic influence more spreadable. Like Black Stigmata, Homunculi had to be locked deep underground in vaults built to hold radioactive waste, until the day came when it would be feasible to begin shooting them off into the sun.

Staring at the corpse, Nelson felt a familiar shiver crawl up his spine. The Black Stigmata were growing more powerful, their influence acting with greater speed than before. Barely a week and a half had passed by and more than a dozen bodies had been found. This had reached epidemic levels and now the BSC was sealing off the city of Portland. Under the guise of both a terrorist warning and the arrival of a new virus, public notices were being put out for all citizens to keep alert for suspicious activities. Anyone showing signs of heightened violence or hallucinogenic influence was to be reported.

The time it took for Black Stigmata to multiply always varied, their strength waxing and waning over the course of decades like the economy. Sometimes nails would remain stagnant for months or even years, sometimes they would cling to one host for an extended period and take their time in implanting the directions for the ritual, or sometimes they could incite mass violence in anyone within a kilometer range, but nowhere in his records had Nelson found any sign that this speed had been witnessed before.

Were the Black Stigmata truly growing more powerful? Was their endlessly increasing numbers strengthening their hold on the minds of humans? As this thought passed through Nelson’s mind, the room around him vanished with a splash of black, as if he had been transported to the darkest recesses of space.

‘Great, a hallucination. This ought to be fun,’ he thought to himself as he put out his cigarette.

As he mentally braced himself for the horrors he would likely experience, the darkness was replaced, this time with a scene from a barren wasteland. The sky overhead was as red as blood and the surrounding landscape was the city of Portland, or what remained of it. Every building had been smashed to pieces or stood like skeletons, cars rusted and curled like chips of paint, and a powerful wind blew across the landscape, kicking up razor-sharp dust and smelling like blood. Bodies lay strewn about for as far as the eye could see, immune to the effects of time. They hung from crooked street lamps, were nailed to crumbling brick walls, and lay in twisted heaps in random spots. The blood in their veins had turned to dust ages ago, but not a single body had even been touched by a carrion bird. The bacteria that would have assailed the dead flesh the moment life abandoned them no longer existed, for this Hell was incapable of supporting life of any kind.

Professor Nelson could not look directly head, for a bright light obscured his view like a curtain hanging in front of his face. He could not even tell how large the apparition was; it was like staring straight into a colossal smelting oven. The deathly serenity of the post-apocalyptic world was at last broken, as with a crash that sounded like the breaking of a billion skeletons, the bright light in front of Nelson vanished, revealing a towering tree made of iron, as dark as volcanic obsidian. Barren of even a single leaf, the branches stretched out like sharpened pikes. Like the foes of Vlad the Impaler, a body hung skewered on the tip of every branch, dangling in the burning wind. The size of the tree was truly unmatched, with the trunk’s diameter equal to a mountain, its highest branches reaching into the vacuum of space, and the branches themselves numbering in the millions, if not billions.

Nelson stared at the tree quizzically, having never witnessed a hallucination like this, nor in any of the reported hallucinations by any Black Stigmata hosts.

“Achieve death…” Nelson muttered without ever knowing why.

“Sir?”

The voice of one of the forensic investigators shook him from his delusion, bringing him back to the bus station bathroom. “Sorry, my mind wandered off there for a little while. How is everything coming along?”

“We’ve found several latent prints on the body and the rope used to hang it. We’ll start checking the database immediately. As for the body itself, the BSC is already sending a containment chamber.”

“Damn it, we’re going to need a new salt mine to dump these things in…” Nelson said to himself as his hand instinctively began grabbing at the pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket.

“ACHIEVE DEATH!”

The people hanging in the air around Jason all screamed this line in unison over and over, forcing him to cover his ears and think of anything that could distract him from their bloodcurdling voices. It was another hallucination, one that was very different from anything he had yet experienced. As always, he was set in a black backdrop, but while there was no actual source of light, he was able to see himself and all the screaming humans clearly. They all looked like they had been nailed to an invisible wall or were dangling from nooses made of rope, barbed wire, and even intestines. Blood gushed from their wounds like popped zits, raining gore down upon Jason and leaving him wanting to throw up.