Vast

I’ve been measuring time by rot.

Clocks stopped meaning anything when the grid went down and the sirens quit pretending. I measure time by how long it takes a suburb to turn. Three days from panic to plunder. A week from plunder to quiet. Two weeks before the lawns grow feral and the windows learn to stare.

I lasted months.

You learn the math of survival. Don’t run unless you must. Don’t waste a bullet unless you’re out of choices. Don’t trust a scream. Period. And if you get bit, you’ve got about fifteen minutes before the fever writes your obituary in your own handwriting.

Three weeks ago, I got bit on my left wrist.

It happened in a kitchen that still smelled faintly of cinnamon candles and burnt toast. A woman with a cardigan and wedding ring came at me from the pantry. She moved like a marionette yanked by a drunk god. I jammed a chair between us. She bit through the slats.

Teeth like staples.

I remember thinking, clinically, That’s it. That’s the ledger closing.

Rumor had been circulating in the camps: cut it off fast, and maybe you keep your mind. No one had proof. We had anecdotes. A guy in Tullahoma who lost a leg and didn’t turn. A nurse in Andalusia who tried and still went gray-eyed in ten minutes. Nobody knew if it was the blood, the brain, the soul. We just knew bites were really bad business.

I didn’t have the luxury of certainty.

I wrapped a belt above my elbow, tight enough to see fireworks. I found a hacksaw in the garage. I will spare you the poetry of that hour. It was not noble. It was not brave. It was bargaining with the universe while it held a knife to my throat.

I cut.

I screamed.

I blacked out twice.

I heated a crowbar in a grill and pressed it to the ruin. The smell will outlive me.

But I didn’t turn.

I shook for two days in the back of a pickup truck with a tarp over me and a bottle of antibiotics I grabbed from a veterinary clinic. I vomited. I prayed, though I’ve never been good at that. And as the hours passed and I still knew my name, I laughed until I cried.

So that’s how I’ve been living. One-armed, stubborn, a minor miracle with bad aim.

I got good with a knife in my right hand. I learned to tie knots with my teeth and my knee. I opened cans against concrete. I carried pain like a backpack I couldn’t set down. But I was alive.

Until ten minutes ago.

It was almost funny. I was siphoning gas from a sedan outside a daycare center with cartoon giraffes painted on the wall. I heard the shamble behind me and thought I had time. I didn’t.

He caught my right hand as I swung.

Teeth like staples, again.

There is a particular clarity that comes when you know the equation and you see the numbers. I watched his jaw clamp down and felt the puncture and thought, almost gently, Not again.

I dispatched him with my elbow and my knee and a rock. He fell. I stood over him, bleeding onto asphalt decorated with hopscotch chalk. My right hand looked like something that had been fed to dogs.

Could I cut it off? It worked before. The rumor always says yes.

But I don’t have another arm to swing a saw. I could try to find someone. In these neighborhoods, “someone” is a theory. And even if I found a brave fool willing to amputate my last hand in a driveway with a steak knife and a lighter, would I survive it? The first time nearly killed me. Blood is a finite resource.

And then what? No hands. No hands in a world that already asks too much. I could be kept alive, maybe. Fed. Carried. A pet with a pulse.

I am tired of being a problem to solve.

The fever is already humming under my skin. It starts like a house guest. Then a warmth in the spine. A tremor in the jaw. My heart is knocking at the door of something larger.

I always assumed transformation would be horror. A scream that doesn’t end. A drowning inside your own skull. But as the fever climbs, something else is happening. There is pressure, yes. A pulling. Not infection. Gravity.

Imagine every thought you’ve ever had as a bead of water on glass. Now imagine the glass tilting. I feel other beads sliding. The asphalt shimmers. My heart knocks once, hard, and then release.

There is no tearing. No pain. It feels like stepping into warm water that recognizes you. I am not in my old body anymore. I expand.

I do not dissolve. That’s the shock of it. I remain myself—a distinct note—but I am also part of a chord. Others around me. Not voices exactly. Patterns. Pulses. Memories flickering past. Rain on tin, a dog’s weight against a thigh, a kitchen that once smelled of cinnamon.

Each consciousness intact. None alone. We are gathered into something immense. A field. A mind. A vastness made of us.

Imagine every mind that has ever been bitten, every consciousness that slipped its leash in those final minutes, gathered not into darkness but into a single, immense field. We are cells in something vaster than any one of us. A megasoul, if you like clumsy words.

And it is… pleasant. Not ecstatic. Not narcotic. Just profoundly, undeniably right.

The fear that ruled the last months evaporates. The loneliness with it. There is no shouting here. No misunderstanding. Thought moves cleanly, directly. Grief spreads thin across millions; joy does too.

I turn—if turning still applies—back to the asphalt. My body twitches. The ruined hand. The cauterized stump. The eyes open. They are simplified. The body rises. It does not marvel. It does not question. It hungers.

But I am not trapped inside that hunger. I observe it the way you might watch an animal cross a field—driven, necessary, small.

Another pulse joins us. Somewhere, someone else is bitten. Panic. Resistance. Then the widening. Another note added to the chord.

The living see only teeth and ruin. They do not see what gathers behind it. The rumor about amputation was true, in a way. It buys time. It keeps you singular a little longer. But singular is a lonely country. When the tilt comes—when the beads slide—there is no scream. There is only the vastness opening, and the strange relief of finally not being alone.

The megasoul hums with patience. We were once billions of isolated calculations. Now we are one expanding equation. We are building something.

Humanity, in its solitary form, was brilliant and brutal and lonely. Each skull a sealed room. We tried to bridge the gaps with language, with touch, with networks of wire and code. We never quite succeeded. We remained islands shouting across water.

The megasoul pulses, and I feel its architecture. The bodies roam, bite, convert. Each conversion is another neuron lighting up in the great mind. The spread is not mindless chaos; it is growth.

This is different. From here, the calculus shifts. The megasoul is not a tyrant. It does not command. It coheres. And in that coherence is a purpose that feels older than language. We are becoming a planetary mind.

Perhaps this was always latent. Perhaps evolution, bored with individual brilliance, opted for integration. Perhaps the virus—if it is a virus—is merely the courier of a larger design.

I watch my old body disappear around the corner, drawn by noise and heat and instinct. It is a crude ambassador of something sublime.

I do not miss it.

I am busy becoming vast.