By Caroline Ashley
Most people don’t believe me when I say it was the influencers who started the pandemic. No, not the Covid pandemic, the one with the flesh-eating monsters. Sorry, “sufferers of Nilcaro Syndrome”.
But it was that American drug, wasn’t it? Yon pill to make you hate meat so we could cut down on animal farming. They said it made you more attractive due to beta-keratine and such and suddenly people were lining up in their thousands, a heaving mass of self-obsessed peacocks. Gotta pull in the likes on your Tiktoks somehow.
I remember when the whole thing started. We were all in the living room but Mum had on a documentary about melting ice caps, so me and my brother were slouched like sloths on the leather sofa, watching our phones instead. I was scrolling the news app and one of the stories read “Cattle mauled by human…” I elbowed my brother.
“Says here some wacko stabbed a cow and tried to eat it last night.”
Paul was sixteen at the time, two years older than me. He was going through an emo phase – black hair falling into his eyes, skin white as ice-cream, body encased in a shadow made of cotton. He looked up from his own phone, lip curled upward and nose wrinkled. “You what?”
“Yeah, it was missing half its insides and they found human teeth marks.”
Mum and Dad were on the other sofa with our pig-tailed twelve year old sister between them. Mum turned a judgemental glare our way. “Johnny! Not in front of Freya.”
The man on the TV was showing polar bears chowing down their young to survive, but, yeah, _my_ story would traumatise her.
It all went downhill from there though, didn’t it? Those first stories were in America but it hit us soon enough. We lived in the middle of Glasgow, so not many cows to snack on, but plenty of pets. There weren’t many Nilkies where we lived at first and they were smart enough to hide the bodies.
*
“Nilcaro Syndrome caused by contaminated supplements,” the local news said.
No need to worry unless you’d taken them and if you had there was a friendly science lab with your name on it. I’ve always said it was that research drug, but they’re not going to admit it and bankrupt themselves, are they? I bet someone put it in the supplements on purpose.
One day in school, the playground went mental. Some kids were running away but others seemed frozen, like rabbits about to become roadkill. I would have stayed out of it, but it was in the patch where the younger ones hung out. Freya might be a pain in the arse, but she was still my sister. I pushed past a crowd of yammering monkeys, nearly all holding their phones up, filming everything as if they weren’t really part of it.
There was a several metre gap and then, a monster in a white shirt and cheap school tie. He was hunched over, muscles trembling, fingers outstretched like he was about to grow talons and turn into a werewolf. He hadn’t gone the way of a proper Nilkie, not yet. His skin was wet with beaded sweat and his eyes were homicidally wide. He stretched his lips back over his teeth and the sound that came out of his mouth nearly made me wet myself. It echoed down into a part of my brain that remembered what it was like to be eyed up by a predator. The undertones promised pain and death in a way that Sparky, our pampered Yorkie, could only dream of.
He lunged toward a group of girls, including my sister, and bit down on the arm of her friend. Ruby blood splattered across his face while the girls screamed. Freya caught my eye and ran to me, a blonde-haired bullet thudding against my chest. I watched as the boy gazed in wide-mouthed horror at the bite he’d taken. He ran off soon after, but I could see the primitive hunger hidden under the surface.
Back home, Mum and Dad were overflowing with righteous anger about their baby girl being endangered.
“That boy needs to be expelled after what he did.” Dad ranted, round face turning puce as he paced the kitchen.
“Everyone with this ‘syndrome’ –” That last word from Mum, spoken as she pulled chips from the freezer, dripped with disdain and was punctuated with air quotes. “Should be put in quarantine, why are they letting them just walk around?”
From what I could see on my phone, people thought the attacks were getting more violent. There were videos of people with compo faces, telling the news how the supplements had ruined their lives. One vegan was all teary-eyed talking about how she’d eaten her cat without meaning to. No one talked then about killing people but that Nilkie boy took a pretty good chunk out of Freya’s friend.
“I can’t be having with more quarantine,” Dad said. “I missed enough work with Covid.”
“Can you get better from a syndrome?” Mum asked with a frown. “Sounds like something more…permanent… than Covid.”
“So we’re just stuck with people wandering around who might decide we look better than the food from the local chippy?”
“To be fair, the local chippy’s pretty crap,” I butted in.
They both levelled that patented glare that parents seem to develop from when their firstborn’s about two. “That’s not the point, Johnny. You need to take this more seriously.”
*
“Nilcaro Syndrome can be contracted through saliva.” That’s what we found out after they started trying to eat us.
The prime minister came on the news a couple nights later to declare a curfew. Nothing as bad as the Covid lockdown – perhaps he thought we’d rebel more over that than eating our pets. And they kept the schools open: the supplements were for adults, so as long as their parents didn’t go drooling on them, kids’d probably be ok.
Half the parents at our school staged a protest about the Nilkie boy. PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. NILCARO MUST GO. My mum led the charge, demanding testing at the door, Police on call for if anyone looked sick, a ban for any children whose parents tested positive. On the first day alone, they saw ten kids being hauled off to the labs – the ones I knew, I never saw again. Protests started up at other schools and people refused to go in to work, scared their colleagues would see them as a delicacy.
Paul started acting a bit funny. To be fair, he was always a bit funny but he was hiding more in his room, looking kind of red around the eyes. Couple of times, I looked for him at school and he wasn’t there. He still ate his dinner, still spoke a bit when he came home, but he was definitely more distant. One night I asked him if he had seen Sparky and he just stared back at me, tears welling as his features crumpled, then slammed the bedroom door in my face.
That was around about when the kill squads started, though they didn’t call ‘em that, for obvious reasons. Dad was in the kitchen, in his big puffer jacket and steel-toed boots, pulling a knife from the block.
“What are you doing with that?” Mum asked.
“Me and some of the boys are going to patrol the streets. Keep our neighbourhood safe.”
“Not with my good kitchen knives you’re not!”
“It’s just for defence. Likely won’t use it.”
So Mum relented and off he went. When he came home, there was a fleck of blood on his face and a vague frown lining his brow. The knife was gone and they bought a brand new set a few days later. He went out most nights after that – still does – says you can’t trust the police to give a damn about you and yours.
*
“Locals take safety into their own hands,” said the headlines.
In the videos online, the ones they killed trembled with hunger, their skin gaunt, wide-eyed and desperate. The smart ones found ways to eat and keep themselves scarce – usually with help – _always_ with help once they became proper Nilkies.
Despite the curfew and the vigilantes, the syndrome spread further. The government kept saying it was under control, while scientists talked about how life, even zombie-making virus life, always finds a way. Nothing we did stopped Covid in the end, did it?
Anyway, I guess it’s here to stay now. They say they might have a drug soon that stops them feasting on people, but they can’t have already tried to though. Once you go human, you never go back, right?
Taking the rubbish out to the wheelie bin was always my job. But one night I went out and noticed something lying on the ground. I turned on my phone’s torch and it cast a spotlight on a human head lying on the grass, spinal cord flopping out from dripping vermilion flesh. One of the eyeballs had been dragged out of its socket and hung there, a gelatinous ball.
I stumbled back to the kitchen door, shouting for Mum. My voice shook with a panic that triggered an immediate maternal response. She barrelled past me, body shielding my own, then covered her mouth with her hand, skin turning sallow, when she saw the exhibit lit up on the grass. There was movement in the shadows by the bins. Hand quivering, I turned my phone toward it and the light illuminated my brother – he had added splashes of scarlet to his usual ebony appearance. Paul took a step forward, opened his mouth to talk – but there was flesh still trapped in his teeth and I nearly gagged at the sight. Mum’s face contorted as she tried to process her new reality.
“Get inside and clean yourself up,” she said, finally, wrapping her cardigan about herself. “Before your dad gets home.”
“Mum…” I started, not even sure how I wanted to finish. Bitter vomit burned the back of my throat, threatening to force its way further up.
“You go get me some bin bags, Johnny.” Her tone said not to argue.
So my blood soaked brother kicked off his shoes at the door and ran up the stairs to shower away the evidence, while I helped Mum stuff someone’s head in the bin. I tried not to breathe the putrid, copper-tinged scent and I walked on legs of quivering gelatine, held upright through sheer will. These days general waste gets burnt for energy, so ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I guess.
*
“Are Nilkies still people?”
All the news places raised that question to their readership at some point. The answers were divided – with some pretty extreme views either way – they still are.
Paul’s still living with us. I sleep with a knife under my pillow and worms burrow around in my stomach at the thought of lying defenceless in bed at night. Dad says we should take him out to the countryside to join one of the packs that are forming. The Nilkies who’re less far gone are building a political group and saying the packs are now part of the ecosystem, same as any other predator. You know, that old ecosystem that our fight and flight instinct was designed for. Except these predators used to be our family, our friends, our neighbours.
But hey, so many of the farmers were bankrupted by the initial attacks that we’re probably farming less animals now, so the pill did its job. In decades to come maybe they’ll admit it and be lauded environmental heroes.
Mum’s worried if Paul left she’d never see him again.
Last night, he snapped his teeth at Freya though, so who knows what they’ll decide in the end.
About the Author
Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She primarily writes fantasy with the occasional foray into sci-fi and horror. Her favourite authors will always be JRR Tolkien and Terry Pratchett but she also has a soft spot for Neil Gaiman. If she had any spare time around raising her two young children, she would spend it playing board games.
Caroline Ashley 