He hobbled over to the smoking gazebo and lowered himself into the seat. He buttoned up his coat, hesitated, halfway unbuttoned it, then buttoned it up again. Grimacing, Gabriel turned away from the open bedroom window, which was his lens to Glenda’s decline. The rain had stopped, but the moonlit ground was still covered in a glimmering sheen of moisture. And somehow… somehow, Gabriel Schist was supposed to stop it.
She had all the symptoms of the toxicity passing through humanity, turning live bodies into black-eyed corpses.
She was just another unlucky victim of a plague that took no prisoners. Just last week, she’d had her hair permed and her nails manicured. Glenda Alvarez was sixty-three years old, young compared to the other residents. Her bedridden form emitted the stench of necrotic flesh. Her mouth hung open, and a pockmarked grey tongue dangled uselessly over her lower lip.
Dark veins crawled over her body like wriggling snakes, pulsing with every unsteady heartbeat. Her skin possessed a sickly white pallor, as if it had been sucked dry of all its nutrients and hung up on a clothesline. The patient had charcoal-black eyes, hard and cold, as if rounded chunks of volcanic rock had been shoved inside her eye sockets.
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