There’s a sharp pinch along my arm and I struggle to draw a breath, fighting the lump of sour-smelling clothes twisting on top of me.

“Stop!” I shout, feeling blood from my shredded cheek leak from my lips and down along my jaw. The person on top of me becomes frantic, elbows punching my chest as he lifts his head from my arm and lunges toward my face, desperate for something he must think I have.

My mind’s a moment behind. As his teeth veer toward my cheek I’m belatedly aware of two things. First, the man is Unconsecrated, and second, he just bit me. That’s what the pinch on my arm was.

Horror floods me. It incites a panic I’ve never felt before. I lash out, retribution in the face of death, punching at his face and kicking at his torso.

Even so, he’s heavier than I am, and gravity pulls him closer. I twist my head away, trying to scramble from underneath him. “Catcher!” I scream, desperate for help. The frozen ground numbs the back of my arms. It’s impossible to find traction. I can’t dig my feet in, I can’t buck the plague rat off.

I push my fingers into his eyes, trying to keep his lips from my flesh, but nothing stops him.

My arm throbs where he’s already attacked me and useless grunts slip from my mouth. I’m choking. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to die. I’ve fought too hard. I’ve resisted the Unconsecrated for too long for this to happen now.

I growl and sob as his mouth brushes my ear, tongue trying to fold me between his teeth. To bite. To infect. That is all that matters to this monster. I’m nothing to him but the absence of infection—something clean that must be sullied.

His teeth scrape my skin, once more and then again.

I twine my fingers through the Unconsecrated man’s hair, trying to pull him away, but it’s too short and I can’t get a decent grip. Just then, his head shudders in my grasp and he collapses on top of me, immobile.

For one moment I wonder if this absence of feeling is what it means to be Unconsecrated. If this is death. And then the body on top of me shudders again and I scramble from underneath him, pushing myself as far away as possible across the ice-slicked ground.

My back hits a wall and I shove myself standing. The storming wind pauses and its absence is filled with moaning everywhere at once, ripped from mouths and carried away as the howling wind rises again. Bodies and bodies and bodies stumble down the street, a trickle around me, a river several blocks away and a flood in the distance. They push against rotted doors and crumbling walls that keep the living sequestered, and start to pile beneath windows, fingers reaching up and up.

At first it doesn’t make sense—I can’t comprehend it. I’ve seen outbreaks before but nothing like this. There are too many of them.