My name is Michael. I used to have another name, but that was long ago before the Change.
I had never believed in werewolves, witches, vampires and such. There were enough real life monsters on TV and walking the streets. There was no need of anything more to scare a sensible person.
I was a loner after I left the Army, never quite fitting in with civilian society. I had my pickup and my travel trailer, and that was more than enough for me. I could pick up my home and travel from town to town and from job to job whenever I took the notion. And I took the notion about every 3 or 4 months.
I had joined the Army at age 17 to avoid going to jail. The recruiter had promised me that the Army would teach me a trade. I did learn a trade in the Army and they taught me all too well. When I left the army 20 years later, the one thing I could do better than almost anyone else was kill people. Point me at a target, and the target dies.
There is the regular Army. Then there are the Special Forces. Then you have guys like me.
Ever wonder who gets the jobs that are too disgusting or "sensitive" for even Delta Force or the Navy SEALS? We did. They called us. "The Ghosts."
Because we weren't on any military payroll, we never lived on any known military base. Officially, we didn't exist. Did someone want to make an example out of someone and their whole family? Send in the Ghosts.
20 years of killing men, women and children. 2 decades of putting my soul in a box and forgetting it existed. Over half of my life being one of the most evil fuckers ever to walk the planet. Then the day when they decide that it's no longer "politically expedient" to keep us around.
"Thank you, have a nice life, and please try not to kill anyone. And by the way, since you were never on any military records, you won't be getting any retirement check or VA benefits."
Thanks a fucking lot.
Those of us with any sense had accumulated a tidy bankroll stashed away somewhere. A lot of the others suicided.
I bought myself a camper and a truck and started drifting. I had to. Too long in one place and everybody starts looking like a target.
3 years of being a loner. Avoiding making friends. Finding a hooker when I needed to have that need met. And then traveling on again.
I wasn't worried about my ex-employers sending out someone to get rid of me. They knew better. If the hit team missed, I would go after the ones who gave the orders. And there wasn't a single person in the country that any of the Ghosts couldn't get to eventually. Not even the president.
Then some idiot managed to release the Hellbug. I still don't know who or why, or even what the Hellbug is exactly. But I damn sure know what it does. When people get infected with the Hellbug, they either die horribly, or they Change. The ones who die are the lucky ones.
I was up in Montana, way the hell up in the mountains when the Hellbug plague hit. In less than a month, 80% of the world's population died. Most of the rest Changed, becoming something less than human.
But at the time it all started, I had no idea that anything unusual had happened. I was too busy enjoying the solitude of my mountain cabin. No TV, no radio, no mail, and nobody else within 30 miles.
I had just come down from the mountains to get some supplies. I had noticed the lack of traffic on the way into Billings, but didn't give it much thought at the time. Billings itself was like a ghost town. I pulled my truck into a Wal-Mart parking lot and sat there a moment to take stock. There should have been people moving in and out of the store, to and from their cars. There were vehicles in the parking lot, but there was an eerie stillness to the scene.
I reached under the seat and hauled out my gun belt and strapped it on. As I got out of the truck, I finally heard something. A woman screaming in terror. I am real familiar with that sound, having been the cause of it myself so many times. I drew my .45 and checked the load, then headed toward the noise.
As I rounded the side of the building, I saw that there was not one, but two women there. And what was attacking them was straight out of a nightmare. I had been isolated in the mountains, and I hadn't heard a thing about the Hellbug plague. But I knew that what had just now ripped the throat out of one of the women wasn't something that I wanted to get any closer to. While it was feeding on the still quivering corpse of the first woman, I put 2 230-grain hollowpoints into its head.
The second woman looked up at me when she heard the gunshots and scrambled to her feet. She looked at the dead bodies for a moment, then came running over toward me.
"Come on!" she said as she passed me. "Where there's one of them there's more."
After what I had just seen, I figured that the best place to be was elsewhere, so I turned and followed her.
"The blue truck with the trailer!" I called out to her. She altered her course towards my truck. By the time I got there, she was trying to open the locked doors to get inside. I used my remote to unlock the doors, and she scooted inside and shut the door as fast and she could move.
Once I was inside the truck, I turned to the woman, the gun in my hand now pointed at her, and asked.
"OK, you want to tell me what the fuck is going on around here? Where IS everybody?"
She looked at the .45 and went very still.
"My name is Melissa Carter. And that was a Changeling that you shot back there."
"What the hell is a Changeling?"
Melissa brought me up to date on the whole Hellbug plague. "A Changeling looks like a stereotypical Hollywood werewolf. You saw the damn thing, and like a werewolf from the movies, they can transmit the virus or whatever the hell it is, through a bite or a scratch. If the person bitten or scratched survives the attack, within days, they either die, or Change. Thank God the Changelings don't have the intelligence to use weapons or vehicles."
"So you mean to tell me that that creature used to be human?" I asked incredulously.
