Enthusiasm is Contagious

I was eating cherry pie the day the grass turned red.

Sitting on a white blanket covered in daises, I enjoyed a picnic lunch with Darren. We had just pulled out the star of the meal; my blue ribbon award winning cherry pie. It had a golden, crisp, light as air crust with a rich and gooey fruit center.

Everyone said baking was science, and yet I didn't know any true scientists that used their gift to create edible paradise. I supposed they were all working on their real projects; too busy to bring their expertise into the kitchen. But a previous misfortune led me down an alternative path. What's a chemist to do when she blows up her career?

I loved my students, but I was meant for more than drawing on blackboards, instilling rudimentary scientific knowledge into mediocre teenagers. When I realized baking was woefully unappreciated at a molecular scale, the zest for a specific aim in life boiled over in me. The kitchen became my new home, and I spent every spare moment turning a culinary art into science.

This particular delicacy in front of me was the culmination of months' worth of work. Calculations included the exact time and temperature the Maillard reaction occurred and how to match that reaction to the moment the luscious center teetered from plasma to solid.

Darren was a good sport about everything. So far, anyways. It was hard to find a partner that could handle me disappearing for days to weeks at a time. Every new bake was an experiment, and once I started, I could not stop.

He'd stuck it out for a year. Maybe he wouldn't leave like the others had.

I lifted an entire slice by hand, admiring how the gel center held in place. Not one drop of red goo threatened to leave its triangle home. The crust held fast, delicate and stable at the same time.

As I brought the crimson delight to my mouth, the change that spread around us didn't quite register in my brain. I knew something was different in my peripheral vision, but I thought my hyperfocus on the scarlet deliciousness must have been playing tricks on me.

The look on Darren's face informed me it was not the pie.

The reactions to the phenomenon were as varied as people themselves. Some froze, some ran, some cried out in terror. Darren scrambled to the middle of the blanket, petrified of touching it.

But me? I was curious. More than curious, I was enthralled. What had happened? What was still happening?

People were yelling, "Blood, it's blood!"

What an odd thing to say. Then it hit me. The smell. That viscous metallic smell everyone recognized. The smell of blood.

"There's iron in this. A lot of it."

Darren looked at me with desperation, "What should we do?"

He didn't like my suggestions. Aghast at how enthusiastic I appeared over such a frightening occurrence, he decided his own path. He used cloth napkins to wrap his ankles, covering any exposed skin. Gaping eyes poured into me as he gave one last incredulous look before sprinting off toward the car.

Nothing like a world-altering occurrence to let you know someone's not the one. A momentary smile crossed my lips when I remembered we drove separately.

I crawled to the edge of the blanket, then held my hand out. The grass fanned out as my hand drew close. Interesting. The grass acted as though it had gained intelligence.

What was this? What sort of occurrence would cause grass to fill with iron? And there was more to this than just a chemical change. The grass now reacted to stimuli.

Deep in thought, a piercing scream jolted me forward and I faceplanted into the red sea. I scrambled back onto the blanket, rubbing my body all over. Everything seemed okay. The scream shattered my eardrums as the source stumbled in front of me. A young woman, blonde hair whipping across her face, floundered around, digging at her arm.

A wave of grass grew up from the ground right below the arm, following it everywhere like a shadow.

"Miss, are you okay? Come over here; maybe I can help."

The lady tripped and fell backwards into the grass. An indescribable sound erupted from her lips, then she went silent. I watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as a scarlet wave first wrapped around the arm she had held, then slowly covered the rest of her.

The people who had remained in the area now panicked and ran. Most appeared fine and successfully reached the concrete lot, but two others were taken down by the grass.

What was different? There had to be a reason most were okay when touching the grass, but some were not. I had touched it and I was still fine.

I should've been running to the parking lot. A blanket was nowhere near impenetrable. But there were a thousand questions to be answered, and being surrounded by the phenomena was intoxicating.

It was my doctoral research project all over again. Evidence indicated danger. I should reign in my fascination and get to safety as fast as possible. But the fire in me could not be quelled. At least this time I'd be risking my own life.

Subject one; me. I would step onto the grass and move at varying speeds until I reached the concrete. Or until I was taken. Maybe speed affected the vegetation's reaction.

1 year later

I had survived that first field test. Within a day, I discovered, ironically, what the odorous grass had reacted to. It was our blood. An open wound of any kind on your body meant you were toast. The iron phenomena smelled its own and attacked, absorbing the nutrient from the body.

The world ended that day. Grass was the first thing to change. At least to my knowledge. Shrubbery and trees soon joined.

I had imagined algae to be the first, but living in pasture-laden Iowa, I hadn't seen a large body of water since the day I was thrown out of the University of California in Santa Barbara. I had sat on the beach, watching the waves crash into the sand, knowing just one wave had ended. There would be so many others.

But no one could have ever predicted the red wave that would take over the world.

At some point, it gained the knowledge that we all contained iron, whether it could initially detect it or not. And the earth's animal and human population disappeared. That was my observation anyway. But my sample size was so small. Iowa barely had any people to begin with.

So, I had decided to travel to Boston. There had to be people solving this crisis. This couldn't be the end of mankind.

BRRRIIIINNNNNGGGGGG

Time to cream up.

I pulled the egg timer out of my pocket and reset it. Then I sat my backpack down and opened it, revealing a large container inside. When I unscrewed the lid, I started to gag. I would never get over that smell. And I refused to think about the ingredients it took to make. But it's the only reason I was still alive.

Hopefully someone here had created a more pleasant compound to hide their existence from the scarlet entity.

The city looked empty, just like every other one I had traveled through. It didn't make sense. Surely, a large military presence would guard the remaining souls capable of solving this crisis.

Vasser Street. I made it. The MIT campus stood eerily quiet. Daylight was dwindling away, and yet there wasn't a single light source coming from inside.

Maybe the group was small. Maybe they're all in one building. MIT was huge. I'd find them.

Passing through a hall, I stepped on shattered glass.

The sickening crunch made the same squelching sound the grass had made the day it took my mother. Two months in, and it had only taken those who actively bled. If you had any blood coming from your body, as long as you stayed in the inner part of your home, away from any doors and windows, you'd be okay.

It was hard to exist like that in my tiny town. I imagined those in the large cities, surrounded by concrete, were fairing pretty well. We planned to travel to a city, but I needed to learn more about the phenomena. The journey would be difficult by foot, and cars were out of the question. I hadn't figured out why, but it took all of two days after the change occurred for anyone in a vehicle to be taken. Watching red vines stop an F350 that was flooring it at 80mph in less than five seconds, and wrap the entire thing in less than ten, was haunting.

We needed camouflage. I was working on my mixture, but it had to be tested. The few friends I had, had flocked to my family home. Knowing I was the only thing close to a real scientist around, they all looked to me for answers. I had been enamored by the attention and captivated by the scientist's playground I existed in.

But when the first two batches failed, and we witnessed those gruesome deaths, everyone left. Except my mother. She kept believing in me.

She stepped into our front yard, slathered in a noxious substance. The knife blade drug lightly across the back of her hand. From inside the house, I couldn't tell if it had even broken the skin. But before the knife had a chance to drop, a mountain of grass rose up and pummeled her.

I had begun to run to her when the sounds of the entity feeding threatened my empty stomach to lose its lining. It had sucked and slithered and produced a gelatinous mass that had once been the only person who truly loved me.

My motive for answers had changed that day.

A sliver of light slid across the ground. I followed it to a laboratory door. I knew it.

I pushed open the door to find one man. He had a unkept beard and his hair protruded in all directions. The lab coat he wore was wrinkled and dirty.

His eyes darted up at me. A series of strange expressions crossed his face. He looked like a mad man. This wasn't what I was hoping for.

"Carla Stevens, is that you?"

The question took me aback. How did he know my name?

"Yeaaahhh…"

"It's me, Matty Walker, from Parker Elementary. I was in your second-grade class with Mrs. Montgomery." He paused, "You did your science fair project on why blood is red."

"My project… yes, I remember."

That project had made me want to be a scientist. But why did that matter? The world was dying.

"I, um, I'm sorry, I don't remember you."

I was uncertain of what to do. This place was what I'd staked all my hope in, and I couldn't even wrap my mind around what I'd found instead.

"That's okay you don't remember me. My family moved a lot so I was only there a few months." His eyes widened as he stared at me, "Oh, wow."

He whipped around and started writing furiously on a dry erase board. Complex chemical equations filled the white space.

"What are you doing?"

"Your energy, I can feel it."

"Excuse me?"

"It's just like before. The day you presented your project has been melded in my mind, playing on a loop for years. You were just this tiny, quiet girl, and then you started talking about red blood cells and your eyes lit up. I'd never seen that before. Everyone in my life was dull, lifeless. Including all my teachers. But you, you had a passion that could barely be contained inside your small frame. Your words and vigor washed over me and I suddenly had a purpose."

He left the board and began to furiously dig through notebooks on a table, knocking a beaker to the floor. The broken glass had no sway over his attention, as he feverishly searched through the materials.

What was happening? The man appeared to be a lunatic, and yet his formulas on the white board indicated he probably did belong at MIT. But his raving over my second-grade person made me ill. All I did was give a presentation, just like everyone else in class. He acted as though I'd discovered a new element.

"I don't understand."

"It went wrong. It went terribly, terribly wrong…"

His frantic excitement mixed with incomplete thoughts. Was this what I had looked like knee-deep in my projects? The tragic end to my research career followed by the devastating end to my mother made me realize it wasn't too far off.

"It was us that were supposed to turn red, not the land. I made an error, I know that, and I haven't been able to fix it. But now, you're here. Together, we can make it work. I'm sure of it."

Clinks echoed through the room. I looked around, my heart starting to race. Then I realized it was emanating from my pants. I looked down to see my legs shaking with such force that the egg timer's mechanical core created sound.

For the entire year I'd wondered, but thought would never know. What was the source of the phenomena? I wanted to believe it was an alien lifeform that made its way to earth and took over. Because as horrifying as it was to think aliens existed and we had become their food, one thought was even worse. That we had done this to ourselves. That someone else with my hunger for scientific knowledge had pursued something better left untouched. When I permanently disabled a grad student, I learned how to funnel my enthusiasm into smaller pursuits. But what if that accident had never happened? What if I had driven to the ends of what we knew, daring to jump off the edge?

But I guess it didn't matter. How I would have ended up made no difference, because my beginning end us all.