Infected

(Earth, New York City, 2001 AD)

A heaving, exhausted avian dinosaur – an awkwardly proportioned creature, a giant bird that had not traded its fingers for feathers, but wicked long claws – blocked the wreaked stairway. It could have been so much taller, but the creature was fit for the dimensions of the townhouse. It brandished its claws fearsomely as it backed up the rubbish-strewn stairs and covered the retreat of a beagle and a woman.

She, the woman, was an uncannily superb humanoid, a bronze-skinned sculpture come to life, or self-created. Tall and symmetrically proportioned, she would have been revered as Helen among hundreds of humanoid species. Her face and body were made-up:
and these marks were a masterpiece of cosmetic art:
attuned to the universal template for the anthropoid mind-body:
drawing the eyes of myriad humanoid species along, directing them so subtly to the most communicative structures of the anthropoid form:
those expressive zones shared by the goddess and all such species:
eyes, mouth, hands, pelvis. Her bosom was swathed in a mat of jewels; two white curtains were hung from her hips and draped over her lap and legs; a golden scorpion-shaped helm protected her crown. She showed concern, but not panic, and not fear. Her presence was such that scene seemed to be oriented around her, and, as she hurriedly tried doors on the structure’s second floor, the townhouse, the stairway, and the moaning horde all seemed to be out of synch with her.

An entire city clawed at the walls of the townhouse. There were metal shutters in the window – apparently its owner had been prepared for the occasion – but, after many nights of sheltering the beagle from the hungry things, they had been loosened. Fists rained against the broad side of the shutter; fingers bent and broke as dead hands pushed through its seams.

The woman burst through a window and took to the air on feathers. A heaving, exhausted dinosaurian bird – a strangely familiar shape, like a hunting dinosaur that had no talons, only exquisite flight feathers – grasped the dog with its feet and flew. “Infected” – the word was a human word, and the humans were all quite dead, so their word was now Taxchan’s word. It echoed in his mind every time he sensed the presence of one of the dead. As they watched their world fall to an unknown pathogen and their kin all turn into monsters, the remaining humans had clung dearly to this word, and to other words that reflected it or were implied by it – “bing-yuan,” “infectado,” “reunion,” “cure,” “mie-jue,” “apocalypse,” “fin de los dias.” But they were all now dead, extinct, replaced by husks driven by an alien pathogen. Humans had been harvested to exhaustion by invisible predators. To escape the unwholesome reverberations of this madly aborted extinction event, Taxchan rose on thermals and called for the woman, now hawk, to follow. They flew to the top of a tall building, where none of the dead could follow.

(images: "Therizinosaurus cheloniformes" from www.dinosaur-world.com; "Egyptian Queen" (date unknown) by Frank Frazetta; photograph from the University of Minnesota's Veterinary School's Raptor Center)