Northern Exposure: Episode Three, Page 2

making a joke, I was taking no chances.

  As we walked towards Sharif and Sky I worried about the tall Arab, I wanted to know exactly what was going to happen to him. I never knew how to address the topic, the things I wanted to ask Smith sounded so ridiculous in my head, now imagine how crazy I would sound once I said them out loud. The eagerness to know more about what would happen to the Arab man, who I presumed was now infected pestered me so badly I had to come out and ask Smith.

  ”So what’s going to happen to Sharif, will he...you know” Smith looked at me ever so confused, “No I don’t, will he what?”,

  ’’Well will he turn into one of those things; I mean it bit him quite deep and generally isn’t that how it works?”

  He turned to me and looked me dead in the eyes, his nose was practically touching mine and once again I could feel that rancid warm breath against my face. I was terrified even more so than before, after seeing firsthand what he could do with that machete. Then he burst out into laughter.

  ”HAHAHA turn into them, what you think these things are, Zombies kid?””No you don’t turn into them, if that was the case Id be turned four or five times by now.””Hell I get bitten by those things on a weekly basis.” He pulled back his collar showing me the mark in his neck where one of the creatures snuck in its blunt teeth, then he lifted his left pants leg, exposing another bite in the middle of his calve, and those where only two of the many bites on Smiths body.

  His domineer changed and he became more serious.”Listen to me boy, these things aren’t like any of those science fiction movie type living dead creatures, no these are much freaking worse. Think of them as wild predators that walk upright, have opposable thumbs and have the brain capacity to do only one thing, hunt.” “They don’t bite you and turn you, they rip the flesh from your bones while you still alive.”

  “They hunt in small packs each with a leader, their ways similar to that of wild dogs.””Thankfully all we’ve had to deal with is the occasional stray, like our friend over there.”Smith pointed to the creature in the pin stripe suit that now had a hole in its head as deep as a crater.

  “A whole pack would annihilate us, we’d never stand a chance, their newly developed strength and speed already puts us at a huge disadvantage and a pack would completely tear us to shreds””Truthfully the only weapon we have against them is their degenerated brains, making us the smarter of the two species.” “So don’t think some slow rotting corpse with their arms extended is going to come trotting up to you.” “These things are faster and stronger than they were as humans and a thousand more times tenacious!””You have to be smart kid, work together and learn to think under pressure.””We have been doing this for a while and each time it feels as if it’s my first, trust me we have become monsters in our own right, most of us weren’t hardwired to be killers but we are creatures of evolution and have adapted to become hunters, hunting the same thing which preys on us.