Necrocide

Chapter 68

The recording clicked off. Aaron silently placed the recorder back in the suitcase. He felt paralyzed, as if his feet were fused to the floor. His friends found the cause of his frozen status once they spotted a dark green vein ascending his neck.

"Uh, Aaron," Jade said. "You don't look so good."

The dark green vein trailed up his face and stopped at his left eye, completely draining it of color. Multiple purple veins sprouted out on his head, around his neck, and even his arms. His fingers dug into the table like drills, and his breathing grew increasingly heavy.

"You can take it out on the table if you'd like," Harry said as he scooted the suitcase away from Aaron. "Careful with the evidence, though."

Aaron slammed his hands down on the table and smashed the entire edge into small wooden fragments, emitting a beastly screech as he obliterated the furniture. However, once his hands were bloodied and riddled with splinters, he abruptly paused in the middle of his carnage and stumbled backward before ultimately collapsing to the floor.

"Shit!" Kyle exclaimed as he and the other two jumped from their chairs to help their friend.

Aaron remained motionless on the floor. The color in his left eye flickered between brown and milky white, like a light switching on and off. The sinister-looking vein slowly vanished back into his skin along with the other veins scattered all over his body, but he stayed in his catatonic state, staring at the ceiling as if it were miles away.

"Should I tap his face?" Jade asked.

Aaron jerked up with a gasp. The three of them weren't startled this time, as they were now used to him.

"I need to get this evidence to someone quick," Aaron declared between his breaths. "I'm not sure how much longer I have until it takes over."

"Then where are we headed, mate?" Harry asked.

Aaron stepped back to his feet and returned to the partially destroyed table. "What happened here?" he asked.

"You happened," Kyle replied.

Aaron then looked down at his bloody hands and watched as the cuts and lacerations healed in the blink of an eye. "Well, that explains."

"I'm a little disturbed by how calmly you said that," Harry chimed in.

Aaron snapped his fingers. "Damn it!" he said. "I left my notebook at home. And there's no way in hell I'm taking that whiteboard with me."

"Check the binder," Jade replied. "Maybe there's some spare pages to write on."

Aaron pulled the binder out and did as she suggested, flipping through each document before finding a few pages at the back of the book. Just like the other pages, they had a faint yellow tint and were torn around the edges, but all that mattered was that they were still legible. He took quick glances at the information he wrote down on the whiteboard and began jumbling all of it down as fast and accurate as he could.

The undead trio studied what Aaron left behind on the board while waiting for him. "So did you figure out why that bot came back to life?" Kyle asked.

"I don't have a definite answer," Aaron replied, still scribbling down in the binder, "but I have a couple of theories. Ambrosia is more advanced than any other form of nanotechnology, unsurprisingly. According to the blueprints and some of the documents in this binder, not only can it manipulate dead organic material to reconstruct itself and even reanimate it back to a half-living state, it can also grant sentience to electric-based lifeforms and feed off their energy source to sustain itself as it uses the host's body to find other organisms to leech off of."