Persecution

We have no idea what they want, but they'll do terrible things to get it.

They first came trickling in, a couple at a time, strange behavior and aggressive eyes, an overall eerie phenomenon. The news reports shared disturbing events of family violence and mysterious disappearances, but after a while, the newscasters started vanishing one by one, and then the sponsors and the camera crews, and then nobody got the news anymore. Everybody began to disappear, and when they reappeared, they weren't the same.

The first one of us to get infected was my younger sister. She was sixteen - an already volatile age - and was known around the neighborhood watch for how loud and pointlessly she could scream. She didn't have a chance. It wasn't when she started having night terrors, nor when she started having blackouts and memory loss, but when she fell into a perfect and complacent silence that my parents questioned the falsity of her condition. They took her to a doctor, but by then it was too late. Her eyes had glazed over with rage, and then my parents got it too.

You might ask how I managed to escape, and I would answer that because, despite my age of nineteen, maybe twenty now, and despite my sex, invariably female, I am known to be what normality used to call a "gamer", though only partially, as I have not been thoroughly educated in this area of entertainment. However, I do enjoy video games, with a preference for those of thrilling and high-anxiety situations, and some of my favorites consisted of a zombie apocalypse. Though what happened to the world was different, I saw the signs before most others. I made ready for the worst.

When my sister ceased to be her belligerent self and when the news got peculiar, I made hasty preparations. I still don't know what they are, but if I hadn't treated them as I had the thousands of mindless CPUs that often occupied my free time, I'd be one of them by now. This much I know.