Touched by Fire (Atlantis Unearthed Series) by C.N. Lary Page B

mixing with the smoke and smell of decay. Death and destruction was everywhere. There was an undercurrent that I couldn’t understand at first, beneath the fear, grief and desolation, murmurings here and there that the death was not the worst part of the virus. That the life it brought was. I still didn’t fully understand until my dream lead me to an open grave filled with dead bodies. Hundreds of them in a horrific scene of death piled on top of each other however they fell. It looked like the pictures of concentration camps back in Nazi Germany that I had seen in history class. Men, women, children, babies, all thrown into this mass grave, even in my dream it was enough to make me sick. That’s when I saw it.
    I started screaming, there was a live child in the grave, I had seen it move. I kept screaming for someone to save it, it was just a child, I tried to make my way toward the little girl. She was under a couple of other bodies, maybe she had been thrown in by accident. I saw her big brown eyes begging me to come closer but somehow I couldn’t get near the grave. Tears streamed down my face as I realized I was unable to help this little girl. I just wanted to save this once innocent life within all this hellish turmoil.
    Then something began to make me look closer at the little girl, to take in t he details. That’s when notice something that even to this day haunts me, her neck was broken in such a way she couldn’t possibly be alive, and her eyes were changing, taking on a luminescent quality I didn’t understand. As I watched the child’s neck began to heal, to pop back into place with sickening cracks of bone.  When she once again looked my way there was no trace of innocence left her expression or eyes, just a rabid wolf in human form. 
    That’s when the others around the pit noticed the girl, they started yelling and pointing at her. Abruptly she jumped out of the pit straight onto a passing man neatly ripping out his neck as she did so. She proceeded to drink the blood from the man’s gushing jugular as if it were the finest wine.  Her face covered in blood, those unnerving eyes glowing like a cats, she turned, looked straight at me and laughed. Her child’s laugh contrasted against the pure evil radiating from her eyes. Hell had found a new home.
    My dream took me across the world to view similar situations. No place was safe. Destruction, death, and despair everywhere one looked, the dead coming back to life in such a manner that they could only be called vampires.  Paris, London, Madrid, New York, L.A., all the biggest cities were hit first. Then the Atlantis Virus, as they called it in my dream, spread into the heartland of the United States. It spread by coming to each person who came into contact with any blood from the infected. It didn’t have to be a bite or even get into your eyes or mouth. Just a single drop of blood on your arm and you were infected.  At first the newly infected would show flu like symptoms, but they would be dead within twenty four hours.  That is when the real trouble began, upon coming back from the dead; they were stronger and faster than we were. The world was in anarchy, there was no hope.
    Then my dream changed once again. It showed a group of people fighting back forming a resistance lead by people with a mark on their forehead I couldn’t make out.  They too were faster and stronger than normal, but distinctly still human. I saw one of these fighters, a female; behead a vampire, the blood spraying all over her. I cried out in alarm thinking that we lost one of our few soldiers good enough to kill these things, that she would now become one of them. As I waited for her to feel the effects of being contaminated she continued to fight, laughing at the vampires as they attacked her, bit her, doing everything to infect her. That’s when I realized all of these warriors were acting the same way, killing the vampires with no sense of avoiding contamination.