Finally mercy through death. Her body was tattered and her mind was at rest. Yet, she was thinking, and she somehow felt that the ability to think when you were dead was wrong. Slowly she moved each finger, and felt the table below her. She grasped the edge of the table and waited for her memory of what had happened to return. Upon just more blackness, she opened her eyes. Tears filled them, though she could not remember crying. She tried to sit up, and felt an excruciating pain shutter through her abdomen.

    Suddenly a scream tore through her throat, and pain and terror, of the likes she had never felt prior, rippled through her being. Another scream clawed its way from her throat as the knuckles in her hands cracked and extended. The ends of her fingers hardening in steel sharp talon-like claws, and her fingers growing another set of knuckles. She had never been able to fight back before, and now her hands were meant to be weapons. The tears in her stomach began to mend as the skin stretched tight over her exposed bone structure. Her clothes had been shredded when she was attacked and she felt no need now to be presentable to the greater public. She felt only the need to feed, or to be left alone.

    Her attacker had fled long ago, thinking her to be dead, or feeling the need to feed on someone or something close by. She had become one of the infected, the previously promised quarantined infected. Now she was loose, with no bounds, and no one to stop her from letting the pain and anger of a former life lead her in her actions. Anger bubbled in her being, her soul burned with a powerful inferno as she felt the last of her humanity seep through her now reformed fingers. The tears she could not stop would be a lure if nothing else, and so she found a dark place to hunker down into and wait until more came her way. No one would hurt her again, not without killing her, and she had every plan to take them down with her.

    Raely had become a witch, one of the most powerful strains of the infection had been passed on to her mutilated body. Her pain and her anger attracted the common strain and it had mutated in her body with the incubation of her fury to fuel it. Every survivor that came into contact with her was either killed, or infected with the new, stronger strain. And the infection spread. Now Echo Ridge, next, who knows.