A hot August afternoon drew Jamie George out of doors. The sun glared. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. …Jamie had chosen Mill Creek Park. Found a secluded spot down October Path, and lay back in the grass. He spread the pages of a book and held it up. His eyes scanned the lines. It was a book of poetry. Classics. He loved the classics. Poetry, music, myths and legends.
The pages turned and turned until the warmth of the day, faint distant voices, and a trickling of water lulled Jamie to sleep. …his fading thoughts were on the last poem he had been reading... A satyr. A faun. A wild spirit of the woods.
Then the slime came to Jamie. Unseen in the graying eve. It had come from a rock that had fallen from the sky but a week before. It was red, glistened in the fading light, and possessed an intelligence. It was a mad intelligence with an ability to transform whomever or whatever it infected into whatever it wished. Jamie George would be the first.
The slime infected Jamie while he slept. It listened to his dreaming thoughts, saw the dreaming images, and read the lines of the last poem Jamie had been reading. Then the change began.
He awoke transformed. Half man, half goat. A faun. His thoughts were clouded with madness, the mind, and intellect of the slime that possessed him. …A bestial roar of pain and madness echoed through the dark,... The faun lumbered through the night, killing anything that crossed its path.
Jamie had been the first infected, and the first victim.
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