agentblack

It's funny how things work out.

When this whole thing started, I remember people thought it was some sort of plague.

Some of the papers, you can guess which ones, shrieked in big black headline letters about biological weapons, islamic terrorists.

A couple of mosques got burnt down, A few poor bastards got kicked to death. It's what happens, when people panic. I remember reading a book by a German soldier who fought in World War Two. He tried to explain why the German people had voted for the Nazis, way back when. He said that if people are emotional enough, they'll do anything.

Some far out religious sect had holed up on an island out in the Hebrides. They saw the end times in the all the changes. They had pulled back and hunkered down away from the New Babylon they could see around them.

I guess that with the End Of The World coming, they didn't feel the need to bring that much food and water with them, out to the lonely tuft of cold rock and weak grass where they made their last stand.

The story splashed all over the news when a local fisherman fished a body out of the water along with the rest of his catch. The camera crews landed on the island with the police.

We all saw the footage, live action. The last congregation huddled on the beach, face down in the sand, waiting for the end of the world. Pray as hard as you like, and faith won't fill your belly.

I watched it all, numb to it all, until they found a kid, tiny in a thin muddy anorak, hunched under a gorse bush, mouth still full of the grass she'd been chewing on when either the hunger or the cold took her.

That broke me. I spent the rest of day crying, on and off, thinking about how terrible her hunger must have been for her to tear up tiny mouthfulls of grass with her skinny little fists to try and keep her going, whilst down all the beach everone else sang hopeless hymns at the cold coast wind and waited for the Thrones and Dominions of Heaven to Descend to Earth to deliver their judgement.

It was one more note in all the strangeness and panic.

Conspiracy theories took off. Riots outside Downing street. People where convinced the government had the cure, stockpiles of magic pills or vaccines. The rumours kept spreading and growing until every last member of the cabinet started showing symptons.

It started small. It was a funny patch of skin on your elbow, or knee maybe. A scratchy bit just between your shoulder blades.
Sometimes it was a bit more involved than that, but generally, it started with just a patch of skin. Maybe the size of a fifty pence piece, at most.

You started thinking maybe it was excema. But sometimes it wasn't dry and scratchy. Sometimes it was a little damp.

One boy in Norwich started with a patch of white downy feathers on the side of his ribs.

That patch spread. Faster than you would expect. Then came other changes. Doctors called them 'secondary characteristics'. Before long, everyone was an expert in the different stages, the progressions. People could size you up with a glance. Could offer a fair guess of when you'd be a full blown category four.

But no one knew what, or how, or why.

Somedays, I could understand why the religious nuts went off to that lonely island, even if the idea of them gathered on the beach slowly dying of exposure or starvation and mumbling their empty prayers made me shiver.
It felt like the world was ending.

I'd walk down the street and see a gang of Frogs lurking by the canal, new instincts making them unwilling to stray too far from water. Tracksuits fitted on them uncomfortably, and they handled their mobiles clumsily, still getting used to the cool slipperiness of their newly webbed hands.
They would burb and croak menacingly if they caught you looking, flapping towards me on ungainly legs. They were still uneasy with the new jointing in thier limbs, the altered working of their hips.

Waiting at the bus stop, a mother, her head a thick alligator log of armoured skin and heavy bone, pleads with her children to behave. They ignore her, the boy lashing out with cat paws at his sister, who yaps and barks at him.

In Norwich, that boy grey a full set of feathers, Kestrel coloured, his head a pale violet gray of soft feather, his arms fringed with thick fingers of brown and black dappled airlerion feathers. He grew a beak. He boasted of being able to read traffic signs from over two miles away.

Scientests tried to find some sort of pattern to why people changed. They looked for correlations with age, diet, history of illness, racial background, even intelligence or blood group. No pattern emerged.

Everyone generally agreed that Mammals had the best deal. People turned into walking cats or Dogs, they had kind of a Egyptian theme going on. It could work. Obviously, being a rat was unfortunately, but it beat being an amphibian.

You saw them hanging around by fountains or lakes. They didn't like going far from water. it freaked them out. They worried about drying out.

Some kid in Glasgow was supposed to have turned into a giant housefly. He was found at the bottom of a skyscraper, a sad smashed mass. People assumed it was suicide, but there was an investigation all the same. Some people had seen him being chased by a gang of kids (A toad, two starlings I think, and either an otter or a ferret, officer) a couple of hours previous.

Nothing ever came of it. It was just one more sad event, to go with that girl under the gorse bush, mouth full fo grass.

The Boy from Norwich ended up in hospital as well, two broken legs, jumping off the multistorey car park. Not suicide this time, just trying to fly.

People started to adjust, slowly. People started going back to work, when hey realised that they couldn't sit this out and hope it didn't happen to them. There was no cure, and no one knew how it was spread. People started to adjust.

There's a limit to how elastic the human mind is though. Marriages broke up. The divorce rate shot up. It's all well and good promising for richer or poorer, but when your better half turns newt, and you're a pretty kitty cat, it changes things.

Reptiles and Amphibians got along all right, and mammals tended to stick together. The birds could mix fairly well with everyone.
The doctor who sees' me each morning is a Rook. He tips his head to one side when he examines me, and I can't help cringing inside, imagine myself a worm on a plate.

There's a bit of tension between Predator and Prey as well. You'll hear the mice or voles or rats say, in some corner of the pub,

"Look, I know it's stupid, but it bothers me you know? It's not like anything's going to happen..."

But they'll still catch the Cat's watching them. And those rats and shrews and voles stare back into their drinks, and try not to walk back on their own that night.

And I suppose that lead to me here I suppose, locked up in the secure wing of the hospital.

It's not too bad. I get lots of books to read, and the companies good, even if they do test me a lot. Dr Maugham came round this morning, told me I was scheduled for another cat scan this morning.

I doubt they'll see anything new this week that they didn't see before, but I imagine they feel the need for something to do. Just like the Changes, I'm something of a mystery.

I stayed the same. No whiskers or claws or scales, no vestigal tales or retractable claws. No fur, and no membranes. I should feel lucky, especially when I think of fly boy, but really, I've never felt so left out. I'd ever settle on being a salamander.

But just as no one can tell me why The Changes happened, or what caused it, neither can they tell me why I stayed the same. Dr Maugham find it amusing, and tells me in his scratchy rook voice. "Healthy is whatever the rest of Society is."