Wattpad Malaysia proudly presents GregCarrico, a fantastic Horror & Science Fiction writer, a featured author, a Wattpad Star,  a TNT finalist, and he is best known for his novel 'Children of the Plague' which has been published on Amazon. He is going to share a special deleted scene from one of his great stories and don't forget drop a couple of 'Hi' to him.

...

Hi!

 I'm Greg Carrico, Wattpad Star and author of the Wattpad featured story Children of the Plague, which hit #1 on both the Science Fiction & Horror lists. Today, I'd like to share a scene from the first sci-fi story I ever wrote, called Killing Tiffany Hudson. In fact, Killing Tiffany Hudson picks up right where this scene ends, so if you enjoy it, there's plenty more for you to read next. I hope you enjoy!!

...

A special scene from Killing Tiffany Hudson

by Gregory Carrico

We cut school on the last day of our senior year to hang out at Tiffany Hudson's house. We drank her father's beers and talked about the future, promising we'd stay in touch as The Real World tugged us in different directions.

I laughed loud and pure that day, and basked in the warm glow of friendship and expectations. High School was over, and an academic scholarship to a small college would take me across two states lines. I would drive there in my grandfather's pristine 1970 Shelby Mustang, which would be mine by the end of the day. But the best news was that Tiffany and I would be attending schools in the same city. Life smelled as sweet as her fawn colored hair, and I was breathing it all in.

I was the last of our small cadre to leave her house, and the heady emotion of the day swept us into each other's arms. After four years of wanting to, we kissed, and when I reluctantly pulled away and opened my eyes, I was stunned by her perfect grace and beauty. Her eyes opened in slow motion, and her pale pink lips parted in a soul-melting smile.

Xipe ruined our next kiss by stabbing Tiffany's neighbor on the front lawn. She dialed 911, and I, overcome with righteous anger (and stupidity), ran outside to confront him. I don't know what made me do it, but I chased the knife wielding maniac between houses, hopped a chain link fence, and caught up to him by someone's tool shed. His blue knife blade hummed softly as our eyes locked.

He moved with incomprehensible speed. My perception of the world and my purpose in it became crystal clear in the instant his hand fastened onto my arm. The important things I had discussed with my friends were important no longer. A lifetime of images, thoughts, and memories flooded into my mind, blending my reality with his.

His name was Xipe, and his experiences became mine, and mine his. He was here to stop the alien infestation that had ravaged his world and annihilated his species. Now, the aliens were here, poised to infect and corrupt humanity into sterile mutant hosts for their own offspring.

The aliens were microscopic. They infected humans and fed on the electrical impulses in our brains. They very literally ate our memories, our dreams and ideas, and eventually our waking thoughts as they matured and took over our bodies.

I never kissed Tiffany Hudson again. I never went to college, and never got to drive that Shelby. Instead, I became an exterminator, driven to kill by memories of a now-dark world I had never seen. Xipe and I were two beings with a single mind, and a single goal: destroy the alien parasites and their infected hosts before they spread too far to stop.

My entire family had been infected, but Xipe found them first and killed them before coming after me. I had been infected, too, but I was one of the rare humans the invaders couldn't tolerate. He didn't know what it was about me that repelled them, but he said the humans like me smelled different than the rest.

That was how he found me, and together we would sniff out the other humans like me: the ones who had been exposed to the alien nanites, but were no longer infected. If there were enough of us, we could check the infestation, and if we were fast enough, maybe even wipe it out.

The nanites the aliens left in my body changed me on a cellular level. My wounds would heal a hundred times faster, even regenerating lost parts. My brain would be a thousand times more efficient as the tiny particles forged new connections between areas of my mind that other humans couldn't use.

Only hours after Xipe found me, I could move things with my mind, I could listen to other's thoughts, and I could detect which people had been infected. We tested my newly awakened abilities at the shopping mall, where every tenth person we saw was already infected.

One of them was a middle aged man who would soon reach the infectious stage. We followed him around the mall, planning to take him in the parking lot, but when he turned into the restroom at the last second, Xipe gave me his knife and sent me after him.

I pictured Tiffany's smile as I stalked him, but it corrupted into a frown, and then a scowl of revulsion at what I intended to do to this man. I couldn't do it. I followed him back out of the restroom, and bowed my head at Xipe's palpable disapproval.

"Pay attention," he said, tapping his forehead.

He caught up to the man, and without any sign of violence, he stabbed a focused blast of mental energy straight into his brain. All of his thoughts ceased, and he dropped like a sack of pudding with a deeply disturbing slap against the cold tile floor.

Even though I didn't kill him, I considered him my first. In a matter of minutes, I experienced a range of emotions, from guilt to sadness to rage, and finally acceptance. By the end of the day, I had killed three people; two with Xipe's knife, and one as Xipe had done, with a thought.

Everywhere we went, we killed. I couldn't help but wonder what my friends were doing with their last summer before college. I wondered if they would see pictures of Xipe or me on TV in connection with the killings. If we were stopped by the police or failed in our mission, there would be no college for them, or anyone.

We moved constantly. We found others like me, awakened them, as Xipe called it, and sent them out in pairs to find even more, killing hosts as they built an army of awakened minds. We were Exterminators. Xipe intended to call us all together in a week or two; sooner if there were enough of us to carry out his plan.

We even met another of Xipe's people, one of the five who came with him to Earth. She only stayed with us for a few minutes. They talked briefly, he gave her some orders, and she went on her way.

In a single week, our combined efforts had resulted in hundreds of new exterminators. Worldwide, unexplained deaths and murders reached staggering numbers. Still, each host we killed was the equivalent of a single ant in a hive, but we honed our skills and became more efficient with each one.

Two weeks later, our numbers plateaued, but the ratio of infected had gone to three in ten. In that time, I had killed dozens of infected people across six states. With each kill, Tiffany's smile tormented me. It accused me of horrible crimes, but I still embraced it. It had become an icon of the humanity we once shared.

Every so often, a rogue thought or desire would force its way into my consciousness, expressing a wish for things as they might have been. All I could do was suppress such thoughts and pass them off as moments of weak sentimentality.

More weeks passed, and still Xipe hadn't called the exterminators together to execute his plan. He wouldn't talk about it, but I had a feeling that we had taken too long, and our window of opportunity had closed. Fully half of the population was infected, and the number of exterminators wasn't growing to keep pace.

Three months after we met, Xipe and I sat in a hotel room listening to the talking heads on TV. They explained that the world's leaders were devoting unprecedented funds to research scientists and hospitals. They were desperate to find out why over half of the world's unborn children were reaching birth stage in a single month. Children were born as horribly mutated monsters that killed their mothers in birth. They were dangerous as infants, but deadly when they reached maturity in two days. It was the beginning of the end.

I sensed something new that day. I felt it through the hotel room wall. Xipe called it a thinker. He said that if we already reached that stage, it was probably too late. He would call the exterminators for a last stand, and with luck, we might be able to carve out a defensible quarantine zone for the remaining pure humans. Humanity was likely doomed, but what else could we do? We had to try.

The thinker was tough. It could do everything I could, and more. Its powers had developed while the aliens still infected it, making it a formidable foe. Xipe made me listen to his mind, so I could see how to defend against its mental attacks. He made a barrier around himself that deflected mental energy. He called it a block.

I wasn't fast enough, though. After his block went up, I couldn't hear his thoughts. I tried to duplicate it, but the thinker was already in. It planted false thoughts in my head, and suddenly there were two thinkers. One of them had Xipe's knife.

I surprised it with the speed and ferocity of my attack, breaking its arm and catching the knife in midair. Before it could recover, I slashed and stabbed it a dozen times. Xipe's knife was alien tech. It hummed at a very precise frequency that disabled any nanites it touched, preventing the wounded flesh from repairing itself.

The other thinker blasted me with some sort of mental attack, but my block was working by then. It still made my head hurt and my whole body feel tingly, like when your leg goes to sleep, but I was still faster than it expected.

I spun on it with the knife, and in just a couple of seconds, all that remained of the thinkers was two, mostly dissolved corpses. Of course, one of them wasn't a thinker at all. It was just Xipe, made to seem like an enemy by the real thinker. He never got the chance to call the exterminators together, or even explain his plan to me.

After that I didn't think about Tiffany or her smile again. Another month passed, and the world's governments collapsed. The dwindling populations of pure humans hid themselves in quarantine vaults in secluded parts of the world.

I walked across half of North America looking for humans I could rescue and guide to the nearest vault, but when the offspring started getting big, even the vaults couldn't keep them out. Still, I walked, I killed, and I survived.

Life was a restless nightmare of constant vigilance. When I wasn't hiding or fighting offspring, I battled the despair of knowing that my efforts would ultimately be fruitless. One day, I would mess up and they would kill me. They were getting bigger, smarter, and faster.

When I fought them, I used Xipe's knife as much as possible. It drew less attention, and let me conserve energy for defense. Using mental energy against them was effective, but it was like ringing a dinner bell. They sensed it, and would come running from blocks away. That's when it was time to run, so I could keep walking and keep fighting my futile war.

I found other exterminators from time to time, but our numbers were dwindling. Even though we all craved companionship and conversation, we didn't dare stay together for very long. Apparently two awakened minds together were easy for the offspring to sense, whether we used our powers or not.

A few of others I met had been awakened by Xipe's fellow off-worlders. They spoke of Xipe with respect and even reverence. He was apparently a bit of legend, even among his fellows. I never mentioned that I knew him.

I met an exterminator named Richard somewhere near Philadelphia. He told me that there was a safe zone for humans in New York City. It wasn't the typical pipe dream that survivors always fell for in zombie movies, either. He had been there.

Some bespectacled exterminator came up with a way to reactivate and reprogram disabled nanites. He made them produce the frequency that disabled other nanites, and set up a perimeter around an old hospital. As more offspring tried to cross the perimeter and were killed, he used their corpses to enlarge the safe zone until it covered the whole island of Manhattan.

I had become so attuned to my despair that couldn't let myself even hope it was true, but then again, I had always wanted to see the big apple.

It was a long walk, but from an elevated highway in New Jersey, I saw the famous New York skyline for the first time. About a mile away, a burst of movement caught my attention. Several offspring were attacking something, but I couldn't see well enough to count them, or make out what they were killing.

I risked a quick scan with my mind and found that the area was crawling with offspring. I could tell the ones ahead of me were attacking an exterminator because I sensed a block instead of thoughts. I also found four humans. The exterminator must have been leading them to the safe zone.

I ran towards her, waiting until I got close to use any mental energy. The last thing I wanted was to bring more offspring to the fight.

The exterminator was a joy to watch. Her weapon was a long pole with a curved blade on the end, which she used to great effect. She spun and rolled and swept and leapt like a deadly dancer. She was a beautiful blur of acrobatic grace, weaving among slashing claws and tentacles to strike with surgical precision.

But the thing that branded her face in my memory wasn't her martial skill. It was her happiness. Her smile. She was actually smiling and laughing as she killed. How could she possibly be happy in the desolate ruins of our monster-haunted world?

I knew the answer, of course. She had to be insane. I should have stopped and left her to her madness. But I didn't. I guess I had gone a bit crazy, too.

Wow!  That's a very entertaining scene. Thank you so much for sharing that, Greg. 

Enter Greg's giveaway to get a chance to win an autographed copy of Children of the Plague (a book). How amazing is that! 

...

If you have any questions to ask him regarding writing, Jack The Reaper, Tiffany, exterminator,  alien parasites, horror & sci-fi or anything else, write it down in the comment below.