The Reincarnation

Grey and his Army were growing restless. The signal the tracker was picking up was growing stronger. Tonight might be the showdown. The man they were following, the cadaver that walked out on them, had stopped at a gun shop and then went to a motel. It wasn’t even morning yet. They figured he must be waiting for the shop to open. Then they would be chasing an armed man. A bit more dangerous, but they were used to that. If a gun got the guy going again, so be it.

Grey ran over the last few days’ events in his mind. He realized this wasn’t a typical chase. This was something new. For one, the guy never stopped for food. It was like he was running on pure energy. Energy that come morning sapped him so much that he lay down dead all day.

And the smell. Grey couldn’t understand what could be afflicting the man they started calling Johnny Rotten. Johnny for John Springer, the name in his wallet. Rotten because of the smell – like he was putrefying. One of his men had actually started singing “God Save The Queen” by The Sex Pistols. Grey put an end to that quickly. His men could act like real punks some times.

What kind of disease did the man carry that shut him down like death during the day? Grey wondered. He knew a lot about diseases. More than he really wanted to know. He had worked in the Church’s Pathology Lab years ago, before their fateful accident. What he had seen there had frightened him more than Johnny Rotten ever could. The Church was engineering diseases that could wipe out half the planet’s population if they escaped. It sickened even him. They used the technology like children, calling the diseases they made “gadgets” – this gadget will do this, that other one will do that. They were addicted to them. The diseases they made gave them a sense of great power. Grey thought they were like a spellbound cult, fascinated by abstract violence on a huge scale. All in the name of God. They tinkered with diseases, claiming that if the lifeform was to be found on Earth, it was therefore sanctioned by God. Grey got out of pathology and into manhunting. Technology, in many ways, frightened him. But he needed to rely on it now.

Which reminded him that this chase was also different because they had two beacons. One was Johnny Rotten – a man that was unlike any man Grey had seen before. The other was a tracking device that he became surer and surer would lead them to the Golden Child who escaped the Lab. After all, Grey deduced, that was how Johnny must have found him. It was the cat. The same one that Dr. Persey had gone on and on about.

Grey hoped it wouldn’t come down to deciding between the two beacons. Hoping they led to the same place, he was already worried about the decision if it had to be made; rely on the technology or the man? With only one van chasing their quarry, that decision might become very important if the paths diverged.

His Army was also getting paranoid. None of them wanted what Johnny Rotten had. They insisted on wearing protective suits whenever they had to go where Johnny had been. None of them wanted to catch a disease this monstrous.

They all hoped it would be over soon.