When the loud, rumbling thud came just a while away from the house where ten-year-old Ted lived on his parents’ farm, he shook even more than the ground did. He turned off the TV, rose from the living room sofa, and ran out the front door to see where the thud had come from.
He ran across a field of wheat, a rolling hill just by the house. At the far end of the field he saw a huge rock that hadn’t been there before.
That must’ve been what made that shaking, and that noise, he thought as he kept running towards it.
When he finally reached the rock, he tumbled and fell right on it, smacking his hands and knees against it. He looked down at his knees, which hurt; his jeans were cut there, with bloody cuts on both knees.
“Ow!” he grunted. “Mom and Dad are gonna kill me when they see these holes in my pants.”
Suddenly, he felt a stinging burn on his left hand, making him wince and pull his arm off the rock. It felt like a spark that had flown out of a campfire and hit him on the hand; but he looked at his hand and saw no mark. Whatever it was, it had to have been too small to be visible, or it had left as quickly as it got there.
He looked back at the rock. His eyes could barely make out something on it, thousands of things that, each taken individually, would have been as invisible as whatever had come onto his hand, but all together, looked like a kind of mist, or many wisps of hair. They seemed to be making a buzzing sound, as if they were insects.
He found the sound disturbing, and he began to worry that he might have caught germs and would get sick from the rock, so he let himself fall back onto the grass to distance himself from the rock, then he got up and ran back in the direction of the house.
He saw his mom’s and dad’s pickup truck coming in on the driveway. They’d just come back from shopping in town.
They got out of the truck and saw him running across the field, stomping on the wheat.
“Look at that dumb kid!” his dad shouted. “He’s running on my wheat again! Get outta there!“
He turned to his left and ran off the field to the gravel road and went along that to get to the house. “Mom! Dad!” he shouted in excitement. “Did you see the big rock in the field?”
“What nonsense are you blabbering about now?” his mom said while taking two bags of groceries out of the truck. Then she and his dad took a look far out across the field. Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God. What do you think that is, John?”
“A meteor?” John said. “Fell from out in space, do you think, Jean?”
“Looks that way,” Jean said. “You didn’t go up and touch it, did you, Ted?”
He looked down at his feet. “Yes, I did.”
“You stupid kid,” she said. “And look at what you did to your jeans! And those cuts on your knees! You’re all filthy dirty. You’re gonna need a bath. Oh, you’ve always gotta find more work for me to do, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said softly.
“Get in the house, boy,” John said.
Ted went with his mother straight to the bathroom. She got his bath ready as he got out of his clothes. Both of them were frowning the whole time.
With the bathtub full of sudsy water and Ted naked and ready to go in, she turned around to look at him. “OK, Ted, get in the w…oh, my God!”
His skin was all a yellowish-green.
His eyeballs were yellow.
His blond hair had all turned grey.
“What the hell did you do, boy, getting so close to that meteor?” she shouted. “Such a stupid kid, always doing the wrong thing! What the hell is wrong with you?”
His father heard his mom’s shouting, then he ran from the living room and over to the bathroom. He saw his immobile, naked son…with that yellowish-green skin.
His eyes widened, and his jaw dropped.
“Oh, my God!” John said. “You stupid kid!”
“Normally, I’d beat your ass for doing such a stupid thing, but I’m afraid I’ll catch whatever disease you’ve got,” she said. “I’m scared to bathe you, as you are. I’m afraid to be near you. We’ve got to get you to a hospital. Get your clothes back on. There you go again, boy, giving me more work to do!”
Ted just stood there, still and morose.
“Well, hurry up, boy!” John shouted. “You heard her.”
He walked around to look his son in the face.
He saw that sullen expression on the boy, his eyes looking up at his father as if he’d like to kill him.
“Don’t you be lookin’ at me like that, boy!” his father shouted. “I got a good mind to smack you!”
“Don’t touch him, John,” Jean said. “You might catch whatever he got from that meteor.”
Then Ted looked at her in the same, threatening way.
“Hey, don’t you be looking at your mother that way,” she said. “You’re lucky I don’t smack you.”
He continued looking at both of them hatefully.
“I told you to stop it, boy!” she shouted.
“Stop looking at us that way, you little brat!” John said.
Ted kept the scowl on his face. It was even meaner now.
“Stop it!” his parents shouted.
“NO, YOU STOP IT!” he screamed. “YOU TWO ARE ALWAYS MEAN TO ME! YELLING AT ME, CALLING ME STUPID, SAYING I MAKE MORE WORK FOR YOU! YOU DON’T LOVE ME! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUUUUUUU!!!“
As he was screaming, a kind of toxic energy was emanating from his body and penetrating theirs. They couldn’t react in any way except to shake and tilt back with their eyes wide open and their jaws dropped in horror.
Ted kept screaming, but with no more words. He was just letting out unmitigated rage and pain.
John’s and Jean’s bodies were changing now, hardening. They were both petrified as physically as they were emotionally. They soon stood as still as glass statues.
Ted looked at them and smiled.
He let out one last, long scream.
Those statues fragmented and crumbled to the floor in two piles of rock-like pieces.
He smiled an even wider smile.
Then he got in the tub of water and bathed himself. After finishing his bath and drying himself off with a large towel, he left the bathroom, went into his bedroom, and put on a clean set of clothes.
He made himself a sandwich and ate it while watching the TV in peace. When the sun went down, he went to bed, thinking about how he could use his new power on the bullies at school.
He slept like a baby.
When he left for school the next morning after fixing himself a bowl of cereal, he’d never once looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t care how he looked.
Walking on the gravel road all the way to school, he didn’t care how tired he was or how sore his legs were. He didn’t miss getting a ride to school in his parents’ truck at all. His eyes were looking around everywhere on that road, watching out for bullies. This wasn’t out of fear, of course; on the contrary, he couldn’t wait to run into some of them.
About two-thirds of the way there, and having walked for about twenty tiring minutes, Ted saw two bigger boys, Rod and Barry, walking on the road on the way to his school. He smiled at the sight of them, but not because he considered them friends.
The two boys look one look at Ted and froze.
“Holy shit!” Rod said. “What the fuck happened to you, Ted?”
“What a freak!” Barry said. Both of them started laughing at Ted.
Smiling, Ted walked closer to them.
“Hey, stay away from us, you freak!” Rod said. “We don’t want your germs.”
Ted kept coming closer, the smile never leaving his yellow-green face.
“I mean it, you frog-boy, stay away!” Rod said. Both boys picked up rocks.
Ted kept coming at them.
“Stay the fuck away!” Barry said, and both of them started throwing the rocks at Ted.
Barry’s rock hit Ted on the shoulder, and Rod’s hit him on the forehead. Ted’s smile turned into a frown.
“Aww, look,” Barry said. “He lost his smart-ass smirk. I’ll bet he’s gonna start cryin’ for his mommy.”
The boys picked up some more rocks, choosing bigger ones.
Ted stayed where he was, only a few feet away from the boys.
“You’d better start runnin’, freak,” Rod said. Both boys, with rocks in their hands, raised their arms up, ready to throw.
As soon as their arms were backed up to throw the rocks at Ted, he opened his mouth wide.
“AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!” he screamed.
The boys dropped their rocks and plugged their fingers in their ears, though it did them little good. They were shaking all over. Who would have thought that the little twerp could have been so terrifying all of a sudden?
“WHY DON’T YOU PICK ON SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE, YOU BULLYING BASTAAAARDS!!!“
The two boys looked down at themselves in horror and disbelief as they saw their bodies hardening. The screaming was so ear-splitting that their whole heads were stinging with the sharpest pain, yet they had no hope of going deaf.
“YOU THINK YOU’RE SO TOUGH, YOU ASSHOLES?!” Ted continued. “YOU’RE A COUPLE O’ COWARDS, PICKING ON LITTLE KIDS! I HATE YOUUUUUU!!!“
The statues that the two boys had become now shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces that scattered all along the road. With a little wind blowing them about, they’d become indistinguishable from the rest of the gravel. The boys’ clothes and schoolbags fell to the ground.
Ted looked at their remains and grinned.
“I’m so powerful,” he said, then continued toward school.
When he got to the gate surrounding the play area beside the small, one-storey school, where all the kids were out playing, some of them noticed him, shuddered, and pointed him out to their friends. Within a few seconds, all the kids started screaming.
“TED’S A MONSTER!!!”
“HE’S SO UGLY!!! DISGUSTING!!!”
“HELP US, SOMEBODY!!!”
Since Ted had never bothered to get a good look at himself in a mirror at home, he didn’t understand why everyone was calling him ‘freak’ and ‘ugly.’ All he knew was that those words hurt.
So he decided to do some screaming of his own.
“WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO BE SO MEAN TO ME? WHY CAN’T I HAVE ANY FRIENDS? NO ONE LOVES ME! NO ONE ACCEPTS ME AS I AM, AND I’M SICK AND TIRED OF IT!!!“
Every child in that playing area, and every teacher there or coming out there to hear what all the screaming was about, froze in his or her tracks, trembled at the deafening noise and the toxic energy radiating from the boy, and became emotionally and physically petrified.
He let out one more scream, and all those glass-like statues shattered all over the grass.
Ted himself was shaking with rage and poisonous hatred. He walked with stomping feet into the school. The remaining staff of the school, who were still alive but terrified by the superhuman volume of Ted’s screaming outside, just stood still where they were, shaking as they heard his approaching, stomping feet.
A few of them in the main hall saw him and gasped at how inhumanly green he looked.
He looked in their horrified eyes with a scowl.
“SO, YOU ALL HATE ME TOO, EEEEEEHHHHH!!!“
With that long scream, they all froze and hardened.
He took a deep breath, then, “AAAAHHHH!!!”
Their bodies all blew up, the pieces spread all over the floor.
Now burning with hate, he went through room after room, checking to see if anyone at all was still alive. All he saw of humanity were scattered fragments of petrified pieces of former people.
“Good,” he grunted. “They’re all dead.”
Then he walked by a mirror and saw himself.
Not only did he have that yellow-green skin, the yellow eyes, and the greyed hair; his teeth, bared in his rage, were blood red, as if he’d just eaten an animal. He had green, wart-like spots all over his skin. Worst of all, he knew why he looked this way.
It wasn’t so much his exposure to the meteor.
It was all of his built-up rage and hate.
He couldn’t stand to see how he looked.
He hated all the more the person he’d become.
No better than John or Jean.
No better than the school bullies.
Much worse, in fact.
“AAAAAHHHH!!! I’M A MONSTER!!!”
He froze into a statue.
Ten minutes later, a six-year-old girl walked into the hallway, crying.
“Everybody’s dead,” she sobbed. “My teachers, my friends, all my classmates. They’re all just…broken little pieces. Why?”
Then she saw Ted’s green, deformed statue. She got up close to it. She saw his agape, red mouth and widened, yellow eyes. Her own mouth and eyes widened.
“AAAAAHHHH!!!” she screamed.
His statue shattered.
She trembled at the reaction, but stayed where she was.
“Oww!” she yelped at a slight burning feeling on her arm.
Infinite Ocean 