We were told the Vanilla Wafers were safe. Safe for anyone – children, adolescents, and adults. My wife spent hours researching Vanilla Wafers, but what was the point? The recipe had been rushed through and delivered to the masses as the best wafer ever. The President had cleared the way. No need for testing he said along with the experts. My wife was skeptical. She didn’t want foreign nutrients coursing through her blood stream. She asked me what I thought.
I was working all the time. I didn’t give a damn if there were bad carbs or sugar in those cookies. Vanilla Wafers have never bothered me – the few I have eaten. I didn’t like the taste, but it satisfied my sugar craving. They wouldn’t harm her either, I said. Eat the damn wafers and move on. She remained skeptical.
“I think we should wait,” she said. “What is the rush?”
After work last Tuesday I had some free time and stopped by Wal Mart and picked up a box of the new wafers. Hell, they were cheap. When I got home, I showed her my find.
“You got the new wafers?” she asked.
“I did and you should try them.”
“It scares me. I have seen two reports today of people gaining weight over night,” she said. I thought she was going to cry. Now that I had eaten half the box, she knew she would have to.
“I feel fine,” I said. “Go ahead and finish this box off and move on.”
She walked into the bedroom and closed the door. I went to the garage to string up my new bait casting reel.
On Friday my boss told me to take the day off at noon. I wasn’t going to argue. On the way home I called her to see if she might be interested in a matinee and a pizza that afternoon. We like surprising each other on random days off to go to the theater.
“I don’t think I feel like it,” she said. “I ate those wafers this morning and I don’t feel good.”
“You ate them all?”
“Yes, and I am beginning to regret it.”
“Maybe an Ibuprofen will help. Drink some water, too. I am sure you will feel better in the morning. I’ll be home in half an hour.”
“I don’t want to be fat,” she said. “Did you see Molly this morning?”
Molly is a stray dog that wandered to our porch two years ago. We fed her and she stuck around. She fit right in with our 4 other dogs.
“I didn’t notice her,” I said. “I bet she’s is under the house.”
“I looked. She is not here anywhere.”
“She’ll show up. She always does. I’ll see you in twenty.” I hung up the phone.
I had not been honest with my wife. The wafers made me feel like crap and I was getting worse. Over and over I said to myself that I would get over it. Others had reported aches and swelling and weight gain. Some had memory loss. I had both. I didn’t remember if I had seen Molly earlier. Worse still, I couldn’t remember the names of the other dogs. If someone said the names I would remember, but no matter how hard I tried, the names were lost in my mind. Added to that, my teeth ached, like I had somehow developed a gum disease in just a day or two. I must have fallen at some point because my teeth felt jagged to the touch, like I had broken some off. My wife would make a dentist appointment for me. She was good about that.
We live out in the county. My dogs run free. No fences here. They never leave. They know where they are fed. They didn’t greet me when I parked my car. For the first time in years I wasn’t mobbed by dogs when I got home.
At the edge of the woods, I began to call them. They had run off in the woods behind the house. They did this a lot, chasing squirrels and other critters They would come to my call…but they didn’t.
Inside, I called for my wife. She didn’t answer. The bedroom door was closed. She either needed privacy or she was resting from the sugar overload. I left her alone and went back out to look for my dogs.
An hour later, on the bank of a pond a half mile from my house, I caught the odor of decay. After searching through the brush, I found my three of my dogs. Dead and eaten.
I fell to my knees and wanted to gather their bodies in my arms to hold them and grieve, but they were too far gone. I didn’t know which part belonged to which dog. There was a growl behind me. It was Molly. She was alive, but she didn’t know me. Growling at me as if I were a trespasser. I coaxed her with the language I used with her and she became even more enraged – snarling and showing her teeth as if I were the enemy. She turned and ran into the woods – gone in a flash.
Next to the dogs were a pile of clothes I had not noticed. The clothes had not been there long. They looked like my clothes, but why would my clothes be out here in this field? I gathered them up anyway and dropped them in the back of my UTV. Now that the clothes were not contrasted with the grass, I saw they were covered in blood. I left them alone and drove back to the house.
“Hey,” I said through the closed bedroom door. “Are you ok?”
I was glad she didn’t answer. I didn’t know how to tell her the dogs had been killed and that Molly ran away.
She never answered, but the door opened. It was her, but what I saw in front of me made me gag. Her hair was a mess, eyes sunken into their sockets, sharp teeth protruded beyond her lips, and her face, hands, and clothes were covered in blood. She had put on twenty pounds as well. Over night.
Clutching her shoulders, I pushed her back into the room. Had she been attacked? Was someone else there? That was my first instinct. No, she was alone. And on the bed lay our smallest dog, Chester. He was a mutt we adopted from the shelter. Chest looked like the three by the pond. She had killed and partially eaten Chester.
I screamed at her in rage and then threw her on the bed. Before I could launch into my tirade, she pointed at my face through tears and sobs.
“Mirror,” she eeked out. “Look in the mirror.”
Stumbling back to the bathroom, I raised my face to the mirror and slowly opened my eyes. I looked just like her. Tears flowed down my sunken features and dripped onto the vanity. When I turned to approach her, she was gone.
I found her outside leaning into the UTV bed and lifting the clothes I found.
“These are your clothes,” she said. “YOU killed our dogs, too.”
A bark from the other side of the UTV broke the tension. Molly was there in her still defensive disposition – snarling and displaying her fangs.
A primeval craving overtook us both. My wife was the first to leap at Molly. I followed. I couldn’t help myself. A short distance into the woods, my wife, who had never run a day in her life, ran down a mature German Shepherd, and snapped its neck in one motion.
Together we devoured the carcass that was once Molly.
When our appetite was quenched, we returned to the house. I don’t remember the walk back or what I was thinking. I do remember walking into the yard and my wife launching at the men dressed in yellow bio-hazard suits. She was cut down by gunfire. And I remember a dart lodging in the soft tissue of my chest. Why didn’t I feel remorse? Why was I not crying out for losing my wife? I felt nothing but rage. Then blackness.
I woke in a room that resembled a hospital. Strapped to the bed, I could not move a fraction of an inch. The rancid taste of blood still spoiling in my mouth.
A woman in a lab coat stood over me. She cradled an iPad in her left arm. She smiled.
“You ate a box of wafers that were tainted with a drug - a virus. We think a terrorist organization did this. There is no cure for what you have become, I am sorry to say. You will be here for a long time.”
I should have listened to my wife.