Mutagen

3:57 PM – City Mall Bacoor West Wing, TechZone

Mark sighed in relief as he finally finished adding most of the things he wanted to download in the queue. He could now get on the other business.

It was to gather information about the outbreak.

Actually, he already opened a separate browser and searched for some information before he started downloading all those things. He just had not started checking his search results.

He switched into the tab where a video sharing site was displayed. Of course, the current trending videos were about the outbreak. But there was a video that took his interest. The video was titled "The Sight on Doomsday" and the thumbnail of the video was a skyline view of a certain metropolitan city. He checked the comments and found out that it was a certain area in New York.

He then decided to watch the video.

***

The quality of the video was not high but it was not bad either, it seemed that a smartphone was used in recording it.

The video panned across the orange colored sky, it was almost sun down.

A group of teenagers were on the rooftop of a certain tall building. They seemed to be recording for fun as they were laughing and shouting at the camera. They were also pointing at the amazing sight of the city skyline.

Then, a bright light enveloped the area. The teenagers had a look of surprise and amazement on their faces as they looked at the sky. The camera then was shifted towards the sky and several circular bright masses of light flashed.

The flashes of light were similar to something that happened in Russia years ago.

Everyone in the know would realize that the flashes of light were actually meteoroids exploding after entering the earth's atmosphere.

A single meteoroid exploding was already a spectacular sight but the sight in the video was several times more remarkable. The video focused on the sky until the flashes of light disappeared. It was then that they started screaming.

After the explosions, the shockwaves followed.

The teenagers were knocked back as they were high from the ground and received the brunt of the shockwaves. Even the video rotated several times. It seemed that the person taking the video also fell and rolled on the floor.

Sounds of glass breaking and alarms of parked cars filled the background.

The shockwave passed and the situation seemed to calm down. Even the teenagers who were screaming just a few seconds ago were now laughing at their antics.

It was then that one of the teenagers pointed somewhere behind the person holding the camera. The video turned around and followed what that guy was pointing at. What they saw shocked them. Along the outline of the city, a passenger airplane was flying at a dangerous angle. The airplane was still high in the sky but it was no doubt that it would crash if it continued flying like that.

Then, a zooming sound echoed from the background. The camera turned again and the backs of the teenagers who were looking at what the sound was coming from could be seen.

The video panned above the teenagers and there was another passenger airplane flying over them at a very low height. The camera followed the airplane as it flew over their heads and headed towards the city.

The airplane flew lower and lower, until they saw the wings of the airplane crash unto the high rise buildings in the area. In the background, the first plane could be seen already falling on a nosedive.

After several seconds within the video, a large orange mushroom rose into the sky as the first plane crashed into the middle of the city.

The second plane did not explode like the first one but it demolished several buildings before crashing onto the highway.

Multitudes of screams and shouting could be heard in the background.

The video suddenly panned across the horizon. Several planes could be seen at the same situation as the two passenger airplanes just now.

The teenagers started to panic. They all entered a door on the rooftop and the last scene from the video was the teenagers running down the stairs.

***

Seeing the video, it gave Mark several theories and started searching using some keywords and clues. His hands danced on the keyboard as he typed several words and clicked several links.

He opened the website of national astronomical space administration and looked for the astronomical events that happened lately. He then saw the newly discovered meteor shower that happened around five in the morning. It should be the same time as the flashes of light in the video happened in the New York time zone.

Then, he searched for the local news and accidents that happened after the meteor shower and found out that many planes crashed at several places in the country. Then searching the net further, the same thing happened around the world. Any kind of aircraft that was in the airspace during the time the meteor shower happened crashed.

During his search, he stumbled into a video of a passenger airplane that crashed while being almost intact in the middle of a city. The only damages the plane had was being split in the middle and its detached wings.

He played the video and found something wrong. It was not ambulances and rescue workers that were surrounding the plane but military soldiers.

Then, zombies came out of the broken airplane inciting the start of the attack from the soldiers. The soldiers had the upper hand in the first half of the video until something smashed its way out of the closed baggage compartment of the airplane.

Mark frowned as he saw the thing that came out.

It was a cat. The breed of the cat should be a ragdoll. The problem was that it had a reddish black fur covering its body and was standing about three meters tall and about seven meters in length.

The large ragdoll started attacking both zombies and the military. The soldiers did their best to take down the beast and even deployed RPGs and machine guns but the beast was very agile and they failed to kill it. Many of the soldiers and zombies were dismembered by its claws as it ran around the vicinity of the crashed airplane.

The ragdoll stopped for a bit and looked at the pilot's cockpit on the plane. It then turned around and escaped the encirclement of the soldiers. Many of the soldiers went to chase the escaped beast but then…

The pilot's cockpit exploded startling everyone. Smoke filled the area but there was no fire. In the middle of the smoke, a silhouette of a humanoid could be seen.

When the silhouette stepped out of the smoke, gasps could be heard in the background.

The humanoid had an elongated and hunched body, an even more elongated limbs and its body was so thin that it could be described that it just had bones and skin. It stood about eight feet and on the end of its fingers on its hands were not nails but feet long claws.

It then dashed towards the nearest soldier. It was fast, even faster than the ragdoll that escaped.

The humanoid stood there where the soldier stood before. Now, the soldier dangled dead in front of the humanoid with the claws protruding on the back of the dead soldier despite the fact that the soldier was wearing a bulletproof vest.

The person who was recording the video along with the spectators started running away and the video ended.

Mark decided to download the video and then closed the browser tab it was in. He then moved to the last tab of the browser. The tab contained a government website where the evacuation plans and sites were posted.

Browsing through the website, he found the nearest government managed evacuation center and it was surprisingly at the Bay City.

If he remembered it correctly, it was just thirteen kilometers away from this mall.

Clicking on a link within the page of the Bay City Evacuation Shelter, he accessed a chat interface. Here, people could ask help and rescue.

He looked at Mei who was sleeping on the folding bed beside him. Mark decided to contact the military for rescue.