The Phoenix

PROLOGUE

It was nine o’ clock in the evening. The buildings surrounding 56th street, Forumville, were closed up and dark. The only lights to be seen were the yellow streetlights—and the gleaming windows of the local chapel.

A woman staggered along the silent street, clutching her tattered clothes to her. She drunkenly walked to the doors of the chapel.

“Ma’am!” Came a voice, and a security guard stepped out of the shadows. “Ma’am, you can't be here.”

The woman frowned, weakly beating the doors with her fists. She was pale in the light flooding from the windows. Almost corpse-pale. Her eyes, sunken and dark, were rimmed with bruised circles. Her skin was waxy and bloated.

“Ma’am, this wedding is invitation only, and the doors are closed. Have you been drinking?” The guard reached for his baton.

The woman opened her mouth, but nothing came out but a slight gagging sound.

“Are you okay?” The poor man asked, walking over nervously. “We can get you somewhere safe.” He reached for his radio, momentarily looking away from the woman.

When he looked back up, she was gone.

“What the—” a stone gargoyle dropped on him from above, cracking both his skull in two and its body in two, as the woman scrambled frantically higher up the roof of the chapel.

The guard lay there, eyes open and staring blankly up at the dark sky. A puddle of blood and brain matter spread around him on the pavement.

The woman staggered to the top of the church steeple and clung to it, wrapping her arms over the splintery wood. Her bare arms and feet were scraped and bleeding. She couldn't tell.

As she hung there, the wedding ended in the building below and the guests flooded out. Screams filled the once-peaceful street below.

And as the ambulances and police and forensic scientists and other officials swarmed over the crime scene, nobody ever noticed the woman clinging to the steeple, her eyes hollow and dead. As the street grew quiet again, she was still there.

And as the sun rose above the rooftops, it revealed a mutated monster, fused to the wood by huge growths of fungi. Her skin was split and warped by the tendrils that reached for the sky. She had become no more than a farm for the fungus that controlled her.

And as it spread and grew, splitting her corpse into sections as it feasted, spores floated out on the wind.

They were looking for their next hosts.