TURNING

It is a near-perfect Wednesday, anyway, as the clouds start rolling in. Katie closed the curtains as she stepped away from the window in the living room and began to look at baby Jace on the play mat, ready to be changed. From the staircase comes Jace’s father, Ryan, still very tired and groggy from a late shift last night, but as his day off work is a Saturday, he walks over and kisses Katie and Jace on the forehead before getting some breakfast from the kitchen. He picks the remote up and turns on the TV to have the first channel be the news; after a few seconds, he pieces together that it is some bad news or violence and immediately stops paying attention and continues to put together a meal.

Katie brings Jace into the kitchen.

“Would you mind holding him while I go get changed?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Ryan takes Jace, sits with him while he eats, and turns the channel into a cartoon for Jace to watch. After Katie had finished getting dressed for the day, she returned to the kitchen to take Jace back and start planning her day. After Ryan finishes eating, he puts his dish in the sink and goes to the lounge room, opening the blinds to let the sun in. The moment he flings the fabric to each side, a man comes crashing through the window and collapses on Ryan, knocking him to the ground. During the scramble, the man makes strange sounds and bites Ryan on the forearm, causing Ryan to react and launch him off his body. Ryan rises to his feet and yells at the man.

“What the fuck!? Get out of our house!”

Ryan gestures to get out before telling Katie to call 911. The man wobbles to his feet and makes another advance towards Ryan, who is groaning as he takes his steps. Ryan makes the first move and grabs him by the shoulders before pushing him out the front door, continuing to the driveway, and throwing him off to the ground, not noticing that the man's head hits the stone mailbox on the way down and goes limp. His head starts spilling blood all over the ground and down to the gutter.

Ryan takes a moment to process what happened and goes inside to tell Katie. He enters the room to see Katie on the phone with the police while Jace is crying in her arms. He takes Jace to begin calming him down and tells Katie:

“The guy outside is dead; tell them to hurry!”

Katie gasps at the news and relays it to the authorities before hanging up the phone and turning to look at Ryan, who has noticed that he has been injured. who has noticed

“Babe, your arm!”

“It’s nothing; it might have been the glass as we fell.”

The only reason he withheld the facts was not to alarm her. Being bitten would cause her to panic about infections and such.

Ryan finished bandaging his arm and then began sweeping up the glass around the lounge room. Katie eagerly looked out the front door, waiting for the police, but there was still no sign of them.

“Where are they?”

“Don’t worry; they will come. Just try and take your mind off it while we wait; otherwise, you will drive yourself crazy, OK?”

Ryan cuddled her before taking her to the dining table to watch Jace and take a few breaths. Ryan was beginning to feel a bit worried about the police himself. It wasn’t like them to take this long in their neighbourhood. Katie grabbed the remote and looked at the Television to switch it off. However, as her finger hovered over the button, the news was still showing areas around the city saying there was widespread violence all over town, and no one knew why. There were streets and buildings on TV only a few blocks from where they lived. Katie turned to call for Ryan, but he was already in the doorway watching the broadcast, trying to make sense of it all. Ryan flexed his arm as it began to become more and more uncomfortable, and he started to feel queasy.

As time passed, Katie became more concerned about the police and their whereabouts. Ryan had been periodically looking out the front door at the body, still shaken by what happened. He wanted to go outside and do something, but he was concerned if the police saw he had moved anything to do with the crime scene, he would get in trouble. During this thought process, he paused for a moment and looked around. It had been a few hours since the incident, and not a single person had walked by, taken photos, or even screamed at the body.

“Hey, babe? Have you noticed any traffic? Like at all?”

Katie appeared in the living room and walked to the window to see for herself. Not only were there no cars in sight, but the neighbours had also parked all over the road, and some had left their car doors open. Katie and Ryan began to feel uncomfortable about going outside until they could figure out what was happening. Ryan had moved on to the lounge to get some rest as he was beginning to feel worse and worse as the day went on; Katie had brought him some water and painkillers to help and kissed him on the forehead, telling him to try and sleep as maybe that might help.

As the sun had just gone down over the horizon and the police seemed like they wouldn’t show up, Ryan started to feel strange… His body was beginning to change, and he could feel everything intensely. The veins all through his body began to start searing with pain like a burning sensation, his vision started warping and fading in and out, his craving for food started climbing, and his mind started throbbing. Katie noticed his movements and walked over to calm him, but he had fallen asleep, and it appeared it was just his body reacting to a dream. Still a bit unsure, Katie walked into the kitchen to find something to give him, but right as she rounded the corner, Ryan woke up screaming in terror and agony, thrashing about on the lounge, calling for help!

Katie panicked and ran back to him, trying to calm him down. Tears ran down her face, and she did not know what was happening.

“Ryan, What’s wrong!”

Ryan was completely unresponsive in his state and was scaring Katie so much that she backed off and tried to gather her thoughts, but the site of Ryan almost put her in shock as she had never seen anything like this. Kaite remembered something in the first aid bag that might help and immediately ran upstairs. While she was rummaging through the pack, she noticed something… The house was silent all of a sudden. Katie was puzzled for a moment before a sense of dread swam over her body, and she realised she hadn’t thought about the baby.

“Jace!”

Katie sprinted out of the bathroom towards the stairs, where she accidentally slipped just enough to fall to her knees on the stairs, but as she looked up through the railing, her heart sank. The only light in the house now that it was dark was the moonlight from the kitchen window and a crack in the loungeroom curtains, but that was more than enough light to see Ryan standing up facing away from her with Jace lying on his forearm while his head was cradled in his palm.

There was a moment of silence and stillness that made Katie uneasy. She noticed Ryan subtly twitching and shaking his head from left to right, but Katie spoke as her fear got the best of her.

“Rya—”

The moment she made noise, Ryan snapped his eyes down towards Jace and, in a flash, closed his fist, collapsing the baby's head before he pulled the baby up to his face and began to rip flesh from all over its body. Shock hit Katie, and as she watched the man who used to be her husband begin to devour chunks of her son aggressively, tears started streaming down her face. After a few seconds, Katie jumped into action and began to run down the stairs toward him, but her feet stopped next to him as he turned around. His attention swapped to Katie as he launched her son across the room, splattering parts of him through the archway all over the kitchen. His face was different, almost not alive even; blood was dripping down the front of him as his eyes began widening to attack, making Katie start moving backward and stumbling before making a break for the bathroom.

Ryan perused her up the stairs, grabbing at her feet clumsily, causing him to fall forward just enough to have his teeth graze her leg as she launched herself into the bathroom. Her shoulder crashed into the toilet, stopping her momentum, allowing her to turn and slam the door shut and lock it. Katie’s heart was pounding with fear; panic was setting in; the man who was her husband was bashing on the door, screaming incoherent noises. Katie wiped her tears and tried to take a few deep breaths.

“Think, Katie, think!”

Trying to think of a way out of this, her mind glanced at the window behind her, but she was on the second story. Not only was it high, but the bathroom window was small, too small to jump out of, as she would be jumping face first. Suddenly, she remembered the water pipe running alongside the bathroom and immediately jumped into action. As the bathroom window slides open, the door starts to crack and break, allowing Ryan's hands to reach inches away from Katie’s feet. Wasting no time, Katie pushed her top half through the window and began reaching for the pipe; the pipe was a bit further away than she remembered, but as her hands grabbed the pipe, Ryan came crashing through the bathroom door, falling over and crashing into the cupboards he then stood up and grabbed her legs. Katie screamed and kicked at him until he finally let go and fell back into the bathtub.

Katie clung to the pipe for her life as she shimmied her way down just far enough to drop to the ground, but her landing was off, and she twisted her ankle. Kaite looked up to see Ryan causing chaos in the bathroom until he left. Now terrified that he might be coming outside to get at her again, she looked around and began shouting for help.

“HELP, PLEASE!”

Across the neighbour’s yard, Katie noticed two men running toward her. Pulling herself along the ground in their direction, she started to shout out her situation.

“My ankle is hurt! There is a guy inside trying to hurt me, and he killed my baby!”

As Katie talked, she got quieter and quieter, beginning to notice that the men weren’t responding. The closer they came to her, the more the details on their faces started showing. They looked just like Ryan…

The two men pounced on Katie and ravenously butchered her body as she screamed in pain, her voice stopped as she took her last breath, Ryan burst out the flyscreen door and joined the others.; her voice stopped as she took her last breath; Ryan

Beyond their front yard, the city stood ablaze, its skyscrapers engulfed in flames and shadows. The distant wails of other victims reached a haunting crescendo, a symphony of a world unravelling. As the men finished their attack, they bellowed off into the distance, leaving the house silent and empty.