I published this earlier under a different name. If you know me better with that name, howdy.
(Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)
I don't know how it started, or where. There's no way this is natural, though.
We suspected there was something wrong when we were seeing more rats than usual, you know - a grey tide rising out of the storm drains and sewer vents. People thought it might be a flood. People thought it might be an earthquake. Hah! Some people thought it was a sign of the end times, and... well, we'll see.
People were falling ill with terrible fevers, their flesh decaying over a matter of hours - you could get sick at sunrise and be dead by nightfall. It was that bad. But what made it worse was that the bloodied, slimy ruins of human bodies were crawling with creatures - sick, pathetic rats, choking on the slime, their fur matted, their beady little eyes rolling in panic as they died where they were born. Sometimes, a few would manage to pull free and run. Those attending the sick sometimes tried to stamp on them, sometimes stood numb with horror, as they saw it. They didn't catch all the rats, and... well, our best guess is that the plague itself is spread by rats.
At first, the news media tried to tell us it was mass hysteria. But that didn't last, when cameramen and reporters got footage from the scenes: streets deserted. Morgues overflowing. Some people were rioting, others were praying, and others were dying.
The National Guard? It was the whole Army. They rolled them back out of Germany, out of the Middle East and Asia, to come back here. Chicago became a fortress, quickly. Anyone trying to enter the city was arrested. Anyone trying to leave was shot, and his body burned - the reporters said you could see the smoke from the pyres from miles away, and when you reached the checkpoint the air was sickening. Of course, the soldiers were wearing protective gear. Ah, checkpoint? Maybe siege line would be a better word.
Then all hell broke loose.
We saw it on TV. A man, clearly in some distress from the way he was shambling along, approached the siege line. Soldiers shot at him. And it wasn't like the bullets didn't hit, or bounced. They went through - sometimes there were chunks that fell off him. But he kept coming.
Then a few of the soldiers dropped their weapons and ran.
Then more of them broke and fled. A few fell, curling up on the ground, clutching their heads. Some screamed, but the runners were silent - saving their breath, I suppose. And this strange-looking and obviously sick man came well within view of the cameras, and we saw what it really was. It might once have been a human body, but now it was just... rats. A conglomeration of rats, crawling over one another, stuck together by the same sticky crimson filth that the plague rot produced, inhabiting the husk of a human body. Dripping with slime, spreading it all over the wretched man's clothing, they scrambled and fought and chittered, and the effect was really very creepy. The reporter was babbling hysterically, about the emptiness and the endless dark, the eyes, the anger... we didn't get anything sensible from him, he was clearly shocked out of his mind. But we saw one soldier stand his ground, empty a SAW into the thing at point-blank range, and then charge at it with a long knife in his hand.
The thing enveloped him. Rats poured out of the wrecked body and covered the soldier, too, in an obscene embrace. They stayed that way for a minute or two, slimy rodents rushing back and forth - more rats than could possibly have fit into the body of the first. And then the second humanoid tower of rats shrank rapidly, the creatures running back into the body that had spawned them. There was nothing left of that brave soldier but his tattered, slime-covered gear.
After that, they didn't let reporters anywhere near the siege lines.
I say "lines", but they weren't really lines so much as mobile suppression teams. That rat-king got away. Lord knows where it went, but the plague spread. The military was mounting giant flamethrowers on trucks at one point, and they were seen in several cities. There were bombing raids, too. That was about when we learned about what the rat-kings really were. They had an aura of unholy terror about them. The morale of even the most disciplined troops would crack in a wide area around them, and soldiers who weren't driven to flee or to collapse would typically perform insane, suicidal and generally fruitless acts of heroism. That was all except the troops who went berserk and started targeting their own, anyway. The military tried to suppress the news, but... that kind of thing gets out.
At some point, the folks in Washington, DC decided that enough was enough. They had to... aha, the clinical, emotionless language. They had to cauterize the wounds. I was back in my hometown the evening they took New York City. I saw the flash over the northeastern horizon. Ten million men, women and children... gone in a single, agonizing instant of flame and noise. They said we had to destroy the city in order to save it.
Life is getting harder. The smaller towns, like this place where I was born, have stayed free of infection. We're not sure why, but we can't find out because our electricity is gone. We have a few hand-cranked generators to run radios for a few minutes an hour. That's about it. We've heard that the plague is active overseas. Sometimes I think I hear thunder, and look up to see a cloudless sky, and every time that happens I think another city's gone.
I don't know if anyone's going to read this but I want to leave something behind. I want to say we were good and righteous people, but that's not true. We were far from perfect. All we can say is that we tried. We strove, and then we were gone.
We're still here, now. That's the truth.
But it's only a matter of time.
Merry Christmas.