Excerpt:

Dr. Langton wiped his arm across his eyes and said, “Just a minute, wait, will you?” He laid the microphone on the ground and disappeared off camera for a moment. When he reappeared he was leading a child by the wrist. He picked up the microphone. “Charlie, can you get a close up please?” The camera zoomed in jerkily on the child and Hunter sucked in a long breath, his body turning both cold and sweaty in an instant. Dr. Langton’s shaking voice could be heard from just off camera. “This is my son, Matthew. Please note the advanced physical effects he is showing.” The boy’s eyes were squinty small, his nose larger than any normal nose, and barrel shaped. There were tufts of hair sprouting from his cheeks and beside his nose. His teeth… Hunter let out a sob of despair. “My son is eight years old. He received his vaccination seven weeks ago. Seven weeks ago my son was a normal, happy little boy.” The doctor began to cry. Through his sobbing, which he now made no effort to restrain, he said, “I wanted you to see my son, see what he has become. I want all of you to know what the danger is. My family were among the first in the country to be vaccinated, and so the effects are as advanced as you’re likely to find. I want to warn you, all of you survivors out there, about what is coming in the next few weeks for the… the…” He didn’t seem to know what to call the people like Marney and Lisa and Tamara, the ones staggering around in Hunter’s house. The doctor cleared his throat and continued in a fierce, hard tone. “The aggressive effects become extremely severe. My son, my… three days ago he attacked and killed his eleven year old sister. And… and then…” the doctor wept harder than Hunter had ever seen any grown man cry, and when he was able to force words out again it was in the tones of a man communicating from beyond the stony walls of death himself. “Then he started to eat her body. He crouched over her, and, he began to tear at her, with his teeth. My little boy, my son did that. And listen to me, every one of you, your own families will do the same. You need to take precautions, and you need to consider… whether it’s… it’s human… to allow your own family members to… to become so animalistic. My son was not a monster. Two months ago he was a cub scout.” The doctor wept with his hand over his face. He then bent down and pulled a syringe from his bag. He showed it to the camera. “I will not allow my child to be a monster any longer.” Hunter’s eyes bulged as he watched the doctor bend forward and kiss his son tenderly on the head, at the same time injecting something into his arm. Hunter fell to his knees in front of the tv, and crawled closer to the screen. “Oh no, oh god no,” he whispered.

The boy shook his head a few times, as if to clear it, as if he had water in his ears, and then put both hands up to his face. A second later he crumpled silently at his father’s feet. The doctor watched and then he let out a howl of such pain that Hunter cringed away from it, shaking his head in mute denial, tears streaming down his cheeks. The camera shook and a man, presumably Charlie, appeared and put his arms around the doctor. In a wildly shaking voice the doctor addressed the camera. “I, Dr. Robert Langton, have just injected my son Matthew with a fatal drug overdose, and I have just watched him… die at my feet. I did this to save him from… and to save others he might have injured… or worse… in the state he… the irreversible state… he was in. For the crime of murder… for the… for what I have… I sentence myself to death.” He pulled out another syringe. Charlie the cameraman knelt beside him with his hands on his knees, making no attempt to interfere. The doctor took a breath and injected himself in the thigh. He took a hitching, gasping breath and flailed out with one hand, and then he toppled over on top of his son’s body. For some time Charlie knelt there. At some point the reporter in the red dress was visible in the background for a minute before she passed out of view. After a while Charlie got to his feet. He looked into the camera briefly and walked away. The corpses of Dr. Langton and his son Matthew remained on the screen undisturbed for a very long time, but Hunter had gone running for the bottle of tequila and was no longer watching.