It all started suddenly. Strange beastly conditions were taking over select humans in a suburban town.
A 16 year old was sprouting an even spread of coarse brown hair all over her body. Elsewhere, a 45 year old married man with kids alarmed his family sick one night with long, echoing howls interrupting their deep slumber. Not far from them, a newborn baby learnt to reject its own mother when while breastfeeding, she had unknowingly flashed sharp canines and a bovine stare at the poor cub, scarring it for life.
For weeks on end, these witnesses, bearing horrified audience to savagery chose to keep it a secret from the world. While occurring only monthly, the results would last just for one terrorising night and magically disappear by sunrise. The fugly girl assumed it was nothing but her hormones going cray cray on every first night of her period. She simply hid in private till the Sun woke up again. The howler’s wife and kids dismissed his dramatics as an exaggerated sign of impending mid-life crisis and made him sleep on the couch on those unfortunate nights. As for the baby, his was a single mom. Every time she smothered him with kisses, he would shriek with trauma from the memory of her jungli avatar. It wasn’t possible for his tiny brain to rationalise this aberration, nor had he learnt the gift of the gab yet to call for help.
They all suffered in silence.
Until one night, their city’s Mayor infamously succumbed to a heart attack. When the clock struck 12, he had snuck into his grandmother’s room to wish her a happy 100th birthday. What he found was so shocking, that he dropped dead himself! There- sleeping on her bed was the ditto clone of Red Riding Hood’s villainous wolf. It was even uncannily wearing a floral nightgown.
News spread like a rash and outrage went viral. Poor granny couldn’t even mourn for her big boy’s passing in peace without doctors, priests, nosy relatives and dirty journalists paying her multiple curious and armed visits.
“It has come to our attention,” the Health Minister for the Mathrabhoomi Janta Party said at a press conference, “that only on full moon nights does the ‘she-wolf’ make its timely appearance. Medical authorities suspect it’s the result of a contagion passed on from the bite of a feral mutt to a human being, causing this recurring mutation in the RABID-19 virus. While Mrs. Mehra seems to exhibit almost all serious symptoms every full moon night, doctors concur that other victims may be less cursed and only show mild reactions depending on their age and immunity. As for how the virus spreads, experts are yet to find a conclusive answer, though ruling out the usually suspected ways like touch, exchange of fluids or blood transfusion. This is a scientific anomaly, one that will require time to decode and study. We are trying to determine who Patient Zero may be and request that people facing one or more similar symptoms as the late Mayor’s mother please check in to the nearest government hospital and wait for further instructions.”
After news of the Mayor’s grandmother went rogue, the aforementioned three victims dutifully turned themselves in to the All Bharatiya Medical Institute in hopes for a cure. The 3 freaks of nature were promptly admitted to the same quarantine ward in the basement.
And that’s when all hell broke loose…
(Wrote this back in the lockdown. Below is the soundtrack to this post to set the mood)