Episode 1: PHADEed genes

He had loved her since the first time he'd seen her, in 9th grade. But, in the tradition his life always observed, Sarah Vega had never even cast a look his way. Well, why would she? Christopher Brookes wasn't much to look at, not to mention his utter lack of people skills. To compensate for the fact that he was socially inept, Chris poured his life into learning all he possibly could, in case he should ever need to, oh say, rebuild human civilization. He couldn't explain it, but he just knew, deep down, that he would play a pivotal point in the evolution of his race. He had tried to express the feeling to his parents, but they didn't get it, no one did. The problem was, everyone his age was caught up in the rat race that was high school. Chris could've been on one of the teams, he was athletic enough, he just didn't buy in to all the machismo bullshit. Besides, his mind was always occupied by thoughts of Sarah.
Sarah wasn't exactly the type of girl you'd take home to meet mom. Chris had heard some of the guys refer to her as " a good time" or "a great lay". Pigs. They could never understand her the way he could. Chris wished with all his might that she would stop messing around with those losers and come be with him. He made a vow to himself to stay a virgin until Sarah finally came to her senses and ran into his arms.
Well, the years past and Chris' love for Sarah grew, as did his social skills. He made friends and became a rather well-rounded person, and she ignored him. In their senior year of high school, Chris worked up the courage to introduce himself to her and ask her to be his. He had "bloomed" into a decent-looking guy and his personality had developed as well, so what could possibly go wrong.
In the first week of the new semester, Chris sought out the object of his affection, but she was no where to be found. He asked her ex-boyfriends, her friends, but none of them had seen her. Strangely enough, Sarah's best friend, Tasha Whitmer, was absent that selfsame week. Tasha appeared at school a short time later, and Chris discovered, upon inquiry, that Sarah's "exploits" with the male populace of the school had caught up to her and she had died over the summer.
Chris went into shock, and the next three days were a blur to him. The first thing he remembered after his surprise subsided was the overwhelming emptiness in his heart. Those sick bastards that called themselves men did this to her. It wasn't her fault, she was the victim here. It wasn't too long before Chris' rage consumed and poisoned him. With the help of his flair for computers and his newly acquired charisma, Chris used the people that were close to Sarah and the data banks of all the local STD treatment centers to track down all the infected men she'd slept with.
By then it was all just a game of numbers. Chris stalked them all and... Gave them a more permanent solution to their maladies. He was particularly proud of his first. He'd made such a mess. Chris' parents went out of town for a second honeymoon, and so Chris decided to take a page from Poe. When he brought home his rather inebriated "guest", no one was even near enough to hear if he was blowing the house up, let alone meting out justice. Chris placed the swine in the bathtub and began to go to work. By the time he finished, the bath was half-full and his new "friend" had been an hour gone.
Chris disposed of the carcass at the livestock ranch across town. In his dysfunctional stage, Chris had learned on the Internet that pigs can and will eat anything, even bone. It was ironically fitting to him that swine would devour the swine. The rest of his engagements were shrouded in a blood-red miasma. Soon it was all over and Chris began to detach himself from reality, poring over documents upon documents on the web, trying to find a way to bring back his beloved. He would have her, of that he was sure. That's when he discovered an old set of rituals from the Canary Islands.
Ten months after Sarah was laid to rest, Chris had perfected his ritual and visited her grave in the dead of night. Laying out the goat skull, dagger, and vial of his own blood on the lush grass, Chris drew the prescribed figure on the ground with salt, placed the skull in the center and began to chant. He poured the blood on the skull as he did this, and when the chant was finished, he thrust the dagger into the stained skull.
No sooner had the crunch of bone subsided than an altogether different crunching began. Sarah's newly animate fingers began to writhe their way out of the ground. Chris helped to dig her out, and as soon as she was freed, he couldn't contain himself, he made love to her right there in the cemetery. It was all he had dreamed it would be and more. He climaxed twice from the sheer rapture of his dream coming true. Chris dressed himself and fell asleep with Sarah in his arms. The next morning, his high had worn off and he faced what he'd done, leaving him with the realization that he had a corpse in his arms.
Utterly disgusted with himself, Chris quickly undid the spell, sending Sarah back to rest. Hoping to wash away the shame, Chris decided to make up for lost time by sleeping with any and every young female he could get his hands on, for the next two days, at least. Yes, that was when the PHADE virus took hold and killed him.

*****

The computer screen in front of him went blank as his workstation rebooted itself, completely erasing an all too long day's work.

"Fuck!!" he exclaimed, drawing stares from several of his co-workers. Shrinking as far down into his cubicle as he possibly could, Tom Jennings, 24, tried to think about the story he'd been working on. Tom was a reporter working for the City Voice, a low budget newspaper desperately trying to compete with the Chicago Tribune. Tom was a top notch reporter, and was only working at the Voice for two reasons.

The first and most important was that the Voice only printed real stories and none of that tabloid political garbage. The second was that he'd been fired from the Tribune for sleeping with his boss's wife. Who needed fancy newspapers, anyway. Besides, it was nice being number one for once instead of second best, like he was at the Tribune.

Tom was an investigative reporter, and right now he was looking into the mysterious death of some 17 year old kid from the upper west-side. Weird how it happened, The kid detaches himself from friends and family for eight and a half months, then gets all cheery for two days, does a whole bunch of chicks, then up and dies for no reason. At first, Tom thought the initial blood work-ups had missed an STD he'd died from, but the doctors assured him, no disease that had incubated to a lethal level could have been missed by the most primitive blood test.

Tom's phone rang, he answered it. "Hello, Tom? Yeah, this is John over at the lab, you've gotta' see this...Oh shit!" John hung up.

Tom grabbed his coat and hat, buttoning up on his way out the door. He was at the Coroner's lab within ten minutes, though it should have taken him fifteen. But that wasn't important. Tom flashed his press badge to the secretary and she let him through. Bursting through the double doors, Tom said to the startled John Waverly "What've you got for me, Johnny?"

"Well, check this out," John said, gesturing for Tom to look into the microscope, "they are normal dead blood cells until you do this..." He pricked his finger and placed a drop of blood on the open slide.

When Tom looked through the eyepiece again, the dead cells had reanimated themselves and began to consume John's blood. "What the hell do you make of this?" Tom asked.

"Now come see this," John pointed to a computer screen, "This dead kid's got a micro virus entwined with the blood cell tissue, that's why we didn't catch it before. Look," he brought up another, identical chart on the screen, "the same thing happened to his semen."

"Well I'll be damned," Tom said, "This kid's a Darwinian poster child, isn't he?"