On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 167, of 240 so far.

Too Sweet

Monroe steadied himself for a moment as he prepared to walk into the overly familiar room. Another briefing. Another day. But apparently something different this time. He could do with some good news.

Opening the door, he saw the usual faces, and they all quietened when they caught sight of him. What wasn’t usual, though, was the almost cheerful look that his second-in-command wore.

“Making me nervous already, John,” Monroe said, and the other man, whose last name was Abbott, smiled.

“Sorry about that, sir,” he replied, “but there’s good cause for it today.”

Monroe raised an eyebrow in a silent question, walking to his place at the head of the table. “So what’s changed? Did they leave?”

Everyone knew who he was referring to. It had started a few weeks earlier, with the actual origin location being somewhere around the Horn of Africa. At first, the impact was thought to be a meteor strike, but that quickly changed when the panicked reports came in from aid agencies in the area. It took less than an hour for the first emergency briefings to be given in London and Brussels, Moscow and Washington D.C., Beijing and Canberra and everywhere else.

The facts were thin on the ground, even now, but they were stark and allowed for no misinterpretation. The meteor — if that’s what it was — had been a delivery mechanism, launched and targeted with precision. What it delivered was a pathogen of non-terrestrial origin; an incredibly adaptive organism designed to infect larger animals and take control of their nervous systems. Unfortunately, humans were very compatible with it.

The first shaky videos from regions around the crash site created indelible memories of horror, and Monroe still sometimes woke in the night with those images in his mind. People who had changed into something else, spreading the infection themselves, with an unsettling element of coordination, and unrelenting brutality. The goal was clearly conquest from within, using our own population against us. The projections said that in a year there would probably be only isolated pockets of unchanged humanity left.

For now, there was resistance, but the infection was spreading too quickly, and via other animals too, making it almost impossible to contain without taking the ultimate step of eliminating all life across large areas.

“So give me the good news,” Monroe said. His second in command pushed a file folder across to him, but Monroe didn’t open it, instead just keeping his eyes on the other man.

“They hit a wall,” Abbott replied. “It’s the damnedest thing.”

“A wall,” Monroe replied. “Well, I know you’re being figurative. What stopped them, exactly?”

“You remember that we judged the landing point to be deliberate and calculated, based on their observation of us,” Abbott said, and Monroe just nodded. Ground zero was within the lowest socioeconomic band, extremely low technology level, poor education, and only the most rudimentary infrastructure. It was presumed to be a tactical choice, to ensure they faced no real threat as they began to infect and change people.

“Well, there was a side-effect,” Abbott said. “Putting aside the issue of questionable nutrition levels, the first few waves of hosts were subsisting on local produce, livestock, and so on. But when they spread to more connected places, they started dying.”

“Dying?” Monroe repeated, feeling his heart rate increase. Abbott was smiling now.

“By the thousands,” he replied. “Not the original waves, but their numbers aren’t getting any larger because all the latest waves of infected have died almost immediately after being taken as hosts. We finally managed to get quarantined samples to WHO field stations for analysis a few hours ago.”

This was spectacular news. Even obtaining bio-samples had been impossible, at least until now. It was the first step in creating weapons of eradication. But apparently the invaders — the changed people, with the puppeteers inside them — were dying of their own accord.

“For god’s sakes don’t keep me waiting,” Monroe said, and Abbott nodded.

“It’s food-related,” Abbott said. “The commonalities were clear in the blood panels and tissue samples, and the results were replicated with cell cultures incredibly quickly. What the infection hit up against was our fucked-up diet.”

“Break that down for me,” Monroe said carefully, his eyes drawn to the same word — diet — emblazoned on a soft drink can that sat on the meeting table in front of Abbott, red and white and silver. Monroe never touched the stuff, not because of any principled stance against additives, but rather because he just found it too sweet.

Abbott reached over and pulled the file folder halfway back towards him, flipping it open and then turning several pages to reveal a spread with several graphs that looked medical to Monroe’s untrained eye. There were tables alongside, with chemical symbols and percentages, and the central graph was a low line with a single spike in the middle.

“The infection reached more developed, or at least connected, areas,” he said. “People with access to imported and mass-produced foods, packaged meals and snacks, fast food, and so on.”

Abbott tapped the graph, drawing Monroe’s eye to it. “This,” he said, “shows a runaway cellular degradation response in the infected bodies, which ends all life functions — human and otherwise — in a matter of minutes after the contagion enters the host. It’s triggered by the presence of any of three substances.”

“Substances only found in significant quantities in mass-produced foods,” Monroe said, and Abbott nodded, picking up the soft drink can, which Monroe now noticed hadn’t been opened. Abbott tapped the ingredients list, turning it around so Monroe could see it.

“Aspartame, sorbitol, and caramel food colouring,” he said. “Some nutritionists say that these things will kill you eventually, but for our uninvited guests it happens a lot sooner.”

Monroe shook his head, searching for an appropriate remark but failing to find one. After a moment, he closed the file folder, feeling better than he had in a long time.

Then he reached out and took the can from Abbott, hooked his fingertip under the ring-pull, and opened it.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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