Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24101790-20160210235212/@comment-26326346-20160210235522

Bob Robinson took his nose out of the newspaper and glanced over at the turning door knob from his recliner. The door opened before he could get out of his chair, so he did the next best thing and set the newspaper aside as he watched his girlfriend, Tracey Plinket, enter the room.

“Hey, hon! How was the pool?” he offered as his eyes trailed from her dark-haired head and down to her blue floral-pattern decorated swimsuit.

“The locker area smelled awful, but overall it was fun. I really wish I could have stayed longer, but work...” she let her words trail off before letting out a sigh. “You spend so much time in the water that I'm surprised you haven't turned into a lily pad.”

“Oh, now I'm a plant? Speaking of water, I need to shower and get ready for work.”

“Nah, you're a flower.” Bob teased to Tracey as she left the room.

A decent-sized portion of time had passed before -a fully-clothed with the exception of socks- Tracey re-entered the front room causing Bob to look up from the western he was watching.

“Bob, my feet,” Tracey stated in a melancholy voice as she sat next to him and placed her left foot on the recliner.

Bob lifted the foot up and examined it, a white callus had formed on the heel of it. Although a bit grossed out, Bob ran his left hand across the callus in an effort to let Tracey know that it didn't change his opinion of her in the slightest.

“It's just athlete's foot, hon. Probably a little fungus that you picked up at the pool grounds. There are a ton of anti-biotics that can clear that up,” he said as he gently set her foot back down and reassuringly placed both of his hands atop hers.

“Thanks. I'll see you tonight!” She exclaimed with a smile and gave Bob a peck on the cheek before quickly ascending the stairs to retrieve her socks and shoes.

With a quick descention from the stairs and a wave goodbye, she was out the front door. After a lengthy walk to the bus stop and a twenty minute bus ride, Tracey had arrived at work. Miss Plinkit worked as a cook at a famous all-you-can-eat buffet chain, 'Clanking Plates' (an aptly named buffet chain if there ever was one. The joke was that people would be clanking their plates against the table in a hurry to get more). The young lady hustled to the kitchen and began her eight hour shift in earnest. She handled everything from lettuce to steak, she truly was a busy-body.

As her shift progressed, she began to notice a white substance that was hardening on the top of her hands. Despite her best effort, the bathroom sink water, soap, and sanitizer had no effect on it. She thought back to earlier in the day and realized that it looked like her freshly acquired athlete's foot. She went in a stall, sat down, and lifted up her left pant leg, so as to undo a shoe and to examine her foot for comparison, when she spotted that her leg was crusting with white. She poked it with her left index finger to discover that the crust was as hard as a shell.

A flurry of tears left her eyes as she worried about her beauty being permanently ruined. Tracey's depression session was interrupted by screaming from the restaurant dining room. After she had properly re-aligned her clothes, she cautiously exited the bathroom only to see people screaming, families crying, and a host of deceased people with the same white leaking out from their mouths as was crusted on her body. As her eyes scanned further with great hesitance and terror, she saw that a large portion of the food on the people's plates and the buffet had turned white and was coated with the same callused shell that she and the deceased customers had. After a few moments of shock, Tracey brought her eyes back down to her right hand and realized that the unwelcome anomaly had begun to spread up her arm. Try as she might, she was unable to peel off the shell with her fingernails.

Whether out of hysterics or a fear-driven sense of logic, one cannot say, but Tracey headed to the kitchen, grabbed a steak knife, stabbed it into the barrier that was forming around her arm and began to scrape; not much leeway was made, but it did slow its advance.

It was night when two men in yellow hazmat suits entered the 'Clanking Plates'.

“Woah,” was all that the first man to observe the aftermath could manage.

“I-I don't even-” the second man stammered as he saw the cascade of white shells with human outlines that littered the restaurant.

The first man to speak and the less stunned of the two men approached the nearest cocoon-covered human and cut into it with a laser. “Holy...” he trailed off as he saw the inside.

“What is it?” Asked the second as he approached.

“This gunk completely cannibalized the host. There's no skin or muscle-tissue left, it's all bone and even that's mushy,” he replied as he prodded it with a metallic stick.

The second gulped in preparation of asking the question in which he feared asking more than any other question he had asked in his life, “How far has this spread?”

“Luckily for us, not very. Heat seems to accelerate the rate of infection. Someone must have brought it into the kitchen, likely unknowingly, and from there it infected everyone.”

“How do you know that?”

“The heat from the laser caused some of the white crust to quickly spread up the skeleton. This stuff didn't latch onto the baton, so it doesn't seem interested in non-organic material.”

“Geez. This'd make for one hell of a weapon. I bet our troops could use this against one of them terrorist groups.”

“Dan, I'm not too sure that this wasn't used as a weapon, against us.”

“Hopefully we managed to contain it all and this was just some fluke.”

“Yeah. From what I understand, command is going to send hazmat teams to the homes of everyone that they can trace having been here in the last forty eight hours.”

Meanwhile, Bob Robinson stood in the local supermarket feeling the different fruits and vegetables for ripeness with his freshly callused left hand, cheerfully whistling all the while.