Gerald looked at the body. It had been ripped open, partially eaten, and spit aside. He made a note.
He was standing in Rocky's Bar, or, at least, what had been until six hours ago. It was a nice bar, especially for a bar these days. Until, well, a Corrupted individual had run in here, slaughtered the  bartender and the late-night drunkards, and then proceeded to splatter the blood of the dead across the wall. It was disturbing, to say in the least, but Gerald had seen worse things involving Corrupteds. This was one of the cases where the Corrupted individual hadn't slaughtered the entire block.
Corrupteds were the current cause of the Earth's state of disrepair. Nobody knew where the hell they had came from, not even the scientists, who had reportedly stayed in a lab for six weeks dissecting the hell out of a Corrupted. All that humans knew where that there were six types of Corrupted- ones with arms as sharp as cheese wire, mouths of foaming black acid, necks full of eardrum-piercing screams, or legs with the capability to run faster than a Ferrari GX6 and jump higher than a man on the springiest springs on the planet. If someone was infected, then where the infection site was would affect the type the damned man or woman would become. Oh, and they hated anything that emitted the sound of a beating heart.
"What do you think?" his partner, Chano, said. By now, they had seen so many crimes commited by Corrupteds, it had turned into a running joke to say "What do you think?" to each other. It had long ago turned into a routine.
Gerald replied, "A Corrupted ran in here, killed everyone, tried to eat one of the corpses, didn't like it, and ran out. That's what I think." That was usually the pattern for any Corrupted attack.
Chano started to respond (probably with his trademark sarcasm) but was interrupted by an sub-detective walking over. "Mr. Lloresky and Mr. Kang," the sub-detective said respectfully, "the department wants your official opinion immediately."
Gerald looked at Chano, who answered, "Tell them that we say that" and making quotation marks in the air, "' A Corrupted ran in here, killed everyone, tried to eat one of the corpses, didn't like it, and ran out.' That is our official opinion."
The sub-detective bowed, and walked away. Gerald glared at Chano, and asked, just a little annoyed, "Seriously?"
Chano smiled, and said, "That was your official opinion, remember? And now, if you excuse me, I have to go see my girlfriend." And he promptly walked away before Gerald could say another word.
Gerald muttered, "Smartass," after the retreating figure of his friend. Chano was a good friend, but he was a smartass. At least Chano still had a life. All Gerald had was his job and his drink, with no loving wife or son. As he began to dial a cab to take him to Rum Tum Tum Bar, his phone rang. He looked down at it. It was his son.
*Breaking News: Corruption Cases more numerous with each passing day...* LTNS (Lude Trion News Station) Entry, day before Corrupted attack
Gerald and his son were sitting in a nice Italian restaurant. They were eating chicken parmigiana. It wasn't the best he had, but it was still good. He wondered why his son had called him. He hoped to God that it wasn't about Melinda. Thankfully, his son saved him from that.
"So..." David said. Gerald could see that he was choosing his words carefully. "How's work?"
Gerald replied, "Good. How about you and Me-your mom?"
"Good," David said. (Still careful, Gerald thought. What does he want?)  I got a job at NecroCorp as an executive. It pays good money."
Out of words, father and son stared at each other. David said nothing about Melinda. Slowly, Gerald's little worrying fairy at the back of his cigar-rotten brain started to whisper. Finally, Gerald gave in to the whispers.
"What happened, David?" Gerald asked."For the last minute, you have been avoiding anything about Me-your mom. What has happened to her?"
David stared directly into Gerald's eyes, and said, "She- she's Corrupted."
Gerald froze. His life crashed down around him. "What?" he said, unable to process the information. "How?"
David closed his eyes. He was crying. "I don't know," he said. "She's never seen a Corrupted in her life, never touched any residue, never eaten anything infected. We followed all the safeguards. But they failed, and now she's infected."
Gerald stood up. "Let me see her," he said to David. David paid the bill, and they went outside.
A gray corvette was waiting for them. Gerald didn't want to ask how David had gotten it, so he silently climbed inside. David got in the driver's seat, and the corvette thrummed to life, the sound of a purring cat, and sliced through the air.
Ten minutes later, they got out in front of a hospital.
It was a nice hospital, with all of the current anti-Corrupted defenses, and guards visibly patrolling the walls. Gerald had no idea why they would bring a Corrupted here. He went in, and immediately got a needle in his shoulder. The hospital staff, clever little bastards, had placed a blood extraction machine just inside, presumably to test for Corrupted blood. Gerald cursed at it while it analyzed the blood, and when it finished, it turned green. The guards aiming their acid throwers at him immediately disarmed their weapons, and continued on their way. Normal slug-throwing guns didn't work on Corrupteds for some reason. The bullet would just make a whole in the body, and the Corrupted would continue on its way of making a bloody pulp out of the shooter. The only thing that would work were acid sprayers or throwers, either respectively spraying a constant stream of hydrochloric acid on the target, or launching capsules of highly concentrated acid at the target.
Gerald walked through, and an elevator delivered him downstairs to a room called "The Lock." He immediately got another needle in his shoulder (as if he had gotten Corrupted between here and there). Cursing, he looked and saw his wife.
She was standing in some kind of cage. It was a laser cage, comprising hundreds of small squares so that she wouldn't get through. A woman in a lab coat was fiddling with some kind of control panel connected to the cage.
It broke his heart to see Melinda. She was haggard, and her clothes were spattered with black flecks. She was bleeding profusely from multiple places
"Oh Melinda," Gerald said. "What happened to you?"
And then she smiled, and spoke.
"My, my, my," she crooned. "Gerald in person?"
Gerald started. Corrupteds weren't supposed to speak. Was Melinda truly corrupted?
"She's still Corrupted, if you're going to ask," the doctor said, jerking Gerald out of his thoughts. "She's just has a different form of Corruption."
When an individual was infected, he or she would have an infection site that would be black. As time went on, the infection site would grow, until it cover the infected body part. As for Melinda, nothing seem to be out of plac- oh god. Her eyes.
Melinda's eyes were black, shot through with lines of red (blood, he presumed), and as he watched, they pulsated.
"What type is it?" Gerald asked as he turned back around to the doctor, who was intently studying something on her phone.
The doctor looked up, and grimly said, "We don't know."
"What?" Gerald asked in disbelief.
"We actually don't know what it is," the doctor said, looking back at her phone. "It's apparently a new form of Corruption that enters through the eyes. It exchanges immense power and feral intelligence for simply enhanced power and retained, even increased intelligence."
It sparked hope in him.
"Does it mean," Gerald asked, turning slowly to the doctor, "that there is a hope for her?"
The doctor firmly shook her head in an absolute no. "Absolute infection rate of 100%. The only reason she's still alive is that I need to catalogue her type."
Melinda hissed, her eyes still pulsating. "That hurt my feelings, and I don't like your tone," she whispered. "I doubt you'll keep it when I rip your throat out and feed it to my dogs."
Gerald and the doctor looked at each other. "Dogs? What dogs?" Gerald asked. Was her mental stability decreasing? "We never bought any dogs-"
The alarms started blaring. Attention, it shrieked. Class 5 Containment Breach. Ten Corrupted have breached the building. Location: Laser Cell.
Melinda seemed to have appeared to summon other Corrupted, an ability only theorized about in the agent community.
"S***," the doctor said in monotone hitting the emergency button on the panel, deploying several blue security turrets that all simultaneous swiveled in the direction of the stairwell, from which came shrieks, screams, and splatters as the Corrupted fought their way down. Gerald pulled his pistol and aimed it at the door of the stairwell. The pistol would certainly do almost nothing, but why not? The doctor hit another button, and even more turrets popped out of the ground, all of which were blue. These ones were acid sprayers, the only thing capable of stopping Corrupted.
The doctor screamed at him, "This way!" She ran toward a previously unseen hatch that presumably became visible as soon as she had hit the red button. She opened the hatch, revealing a metal ladder that led down into the deep black darkness. As he ran, he looked one last time back at his ex-wife. She was smiling, and never looked at him as he plunged into the blackness with an aching heart.
*Biggest Hospital Attacked by Corrupted... Estimated 1,000 people dead and 3,000 people infected...*LTNS entry after prelude to the Corrupted attack
"Ladies & gentleman, we are faced with the largest calamity we have ever known," the government official on the screen said. Chano yawned. Gerald slapped his wrist.
They were sitting in a small auditorium full of hundreds of other detectives, sub-detectives,  police, SWAT teams, and every other government operative the city of Lude Trion had at its disposal. After the Corrupted had attacked the hospital, somebody up in the brass had sent a collective message to every operative it had, on duty or not. Hell, the message had even been sent to the retired operatives, which told everyone exactly how serious the situation was.
The government official on the screen took a deep breath, as if preparing himself, and said, "A new type of Corrupted has been confirmed. This Corrupted has the outward appearance of a normal human, but in fact is still infected. This new Corrupted also retains the intelligence of a normal human being." His face was replaced with several surveillance photos of the intelligent Corrupted, who were all normal human beings, such as an operative, an McDonalds employee, and, of course, Gerald's ex-wife, in the middle of other Corrupteds, seemingly unharmed. Chano nudged Gerald.
Chano said, solemn for once, "I'm so sorry about your ex-wife. I didn't know that she was one of the new ones."
Gerald replied, "Yeah." He wondered about her all the times these days. He had nightmares about him having to kill his wife. Sometimes he won, and put her down. He woke up in a sweat on those days. He would never kill his wife, even if she would kill him. On other days he had nightmares about him missing his shot. Melinda would then proceed to rip him in half, and, while he slowly died, would slowly rip a screaming David apart. He usually fell off the bed on those days.
While the government official spouted propaganda about how they would get past this crisis like always, Chano quietly asked, "She was the one to attack the hospital, wasn't she?"
Gerald wondered whether or not he was allowed to answer the question, and whether he wanted to answer, but finally answered in a whisper, "Yes, she was. I was there when she attacked."
After Gerald and the doctor had entered the escape tunnel, they had run until they reached another metal door, this one with restraints all over it.  The doctor had entered the code and stepped outside, but when she did, she was immediately killed as nearby Corrupted had swarmed her. Luckily, they didn't notice Gerald, who quietly closed the door of the tunnel, threw up his breakfast and lunch, and waited there until they finally moved away. Then he ran as if hell were on his heels (which, technically, it was) to his car, and radioed in for backup. The entire cleanup process of the entire hospital took 12 hours, not to mention hunting down the Corrupted stupid enough to stay in the hospital, finding the survivors, bagging all of the corpses, and putting down anybody unlucky enough to be infected. As it turns out, one never got used to death, but he could bear it.
Chano was about to ask another question when the government official paused in his ranting of propaganda, looked at someone off-screen, went pale, and then turned back to the camera. "As it appears," he said, "there's a new development. Not only can these new Corrupted retain intelligence, they can also coordinate other Corrupteds into armies." The screen then cut to a live feed of Corrupted groups attacking random places, and one was heading for the Government Operations office.
Chano said, "S***," and then the ceiling collapsed on them.
*Breaking News: Corrupted groups are attacking multiple locations all over Lude Trion... Government Operations destroyed...* LTNS entry during the Corrupted attack
Gerald woke up. He was buried under a bunch of rocks, and as he sat up, they fell off.
He was somewhere in the Government Operations building (he thought) What was the last thing he remembered... oh right it was the ceiling falling on them and Chano falling with a piece of rebar embedded in his face. He looked to the side, but where Chano had sat was a giant piece of rubble with a pool of blood seeping from under it. Numb, he retched up the little breakfast he had that morning, stood up, and looked around.
The auditorium was covered with dust, and as he watched, more dust fell from the gaping hole in the ceiling. He had no idea exactly how the Corrupted had blown a hole in the ceiling, but whatever they did, it was only partially effective, as other dust-covered silhouettes sat up and looked around.
The surviving agents all gathered at the edge of the auditorium, acid sprayers and knives out of their holsters and sheaths. All in all, 359 out of the original 420 operatives had survived, albeit scratched, injured but still standing, or disabled. Somehow the retired operatives had all survived the collapse, but they were already at the edge of the auditorium anyway. Everybody whispered, as if in fear of the Corrupted that may be still lurking around.
Pablo, a SWAT officer with a Heckler & Koch acid sprayer in his hand, whispered to them, "Our mission is this- kill all of the Corrupted running around, and get back our building. Kapeesh?"
They all agreed, as this building was sacred to them, their workplaces and homes for the last 20 years. Additionally, if they couldn't restore order for this building, how would they restore order for the rest of Lude Trion?
On the count of three, Vlad, a subdetective with a silenced antique Beretta, blew open the doors. They charged out silently, every single operative trained in the art of killing silently. They ripped and dissolved their way past the Corrupteds in the hallway, the air filled with the quiet hiss of acid dissolving Corrupted flesh, the thump of Corrupteds falling, and enraged roars cut off as knives ripped out their vocal cords. When they regrouped at the edge of the hallway, every Corrupted had been killed. The group of silent, deadly operatives separated into pairs, and methodically combed every hallway, every room, every closet for Corrupteds, for if one were missed, it could start the invasion all over again. And so it went, as the silent army went to reclaim the city.
*o god hel me godammit you fuccoejir3mfni2ojj009j90900jn0ncnnvnnvn  nn23rn3gnjf0j05ji3krjvj3i5i0votojoq;lkel;;jkJ;lj;lj;lgj;sljbm;kn;nklvnk;lnn;klf;l* Last entry of LTNS, when Corrupteds attack and massacre the news company's employees
Gerald was following his Corrupted wife in the middle of the woods. When he thought about it, it sounded... ominous to him.
Due to the unfortunate lack of detectives and sub-detectives (most had been sitting in the center, where the main chunk of ceiling had fallen) he had been assigned to follow any intelligent Corrupted. According to a scientist in the main city, Gravity Falls (nobody had any idea why it was named that), every intelligent Corrupted would disappear from the range of the main cities for a while, and when they came back, they would come back stronger, faster, and smarter, but more inhuman. This led the scientist to believe that the intelligent Corrupteds were making "pilgrimages" to the core of the virus.
As all of the other detectives were dead, that left Gerald to follow his wife... somewhere.  He was wearing an active camo suit, which made him blend in, dampen his footsteps, and in general let him focus on tracking his wife.
This was his last chance to take her in,  while the scientists worked on her cure. Beyond this point, there was no chance... and the only alternative was something he didn't want to consider. It's not as he had anything left, though. David had died during the battle in the city, falling victim to a glob of black acid melting a hole in his face. He had grieved then, but now, he had something in his pocket to avenge that.
He had found her walking out of the city, when all of the other Corrupted were in the middle of a skirmish. She had been charging toward the gates, when she randomly turned around and started walking. Gerald had been watching the fight from above, and when seeing the opportunity rise, donned his suit and dropped down. He had been carrying a half-full thermos of water and a power bar, and for the last three days, had been rationing them. He had one-fourth of the water left, and half of the power bar left. But it would all pay off, as Melinda approached a cave.
This cave didn't scream of strangeness, nor did it shout "full of insane monsters who hate sound". It looked like a cave a spelunker would poke his head in, catalog, and walk out. But Melinda walked right in. He turned on radar and night vision, and snuck in, hardly breathing.
The cave was small. In the center of it was a rock with a fungus on it. Gerald bet if he shot it, it would die, killing every Corrupted on the planet. He took a deep breath, and spoke.
"Melinda..."
His wife spun around, and Gerald nearly cried. Melinda's corruption had spread over her entire face, making a mask. Blood lines streaked over the entire thing, pulsating as blood circulated within her head. Her body was shriveled, the blood drained to the head. He could see the bones piercing the skin of her body in some places. She looked terrible.
She shrieked at him. He swallowed. There really was no hope at all for her. All he could do for her now was end her misery. As he cried, he lifted his revolver.
She lunged for the fungus. He fired at her head.
Bang.
Fin.
 

Just kidding.
The bullet entered Melinda's skull... and stopped when she grabbed it with her bare hands, and pulled it out and dropped it on the ground. She smiled. He was too late. Melinda had touched the fungus.
The mask covering her head dissolved as her infection was renewed. She looked like she did when she was 22.
She cooed, "Did you really think that was the end? Poor little man. You thought that normal bullets could kill me?" With every word, Gerald's heart got stabbed in the chest. Her tone turned dark and black. "You idiot. Acid can kill me. NOT bullets. And for your utter stupidity, I will-"
The bullet started to hum, and she looked down  at it. It was glowing brightly and radiating waves of heat. As she looked up at him, he smiled.
There was an alternative if the bullet failed. Explosions would vaporize the Corruption just fine. If the bullet didn't connect, he had a detonator in his pocket that would turn the bullet into a bomb. He threw the detonator to the ground and smashed it.
If he couldn't heal Melinda, he resolved to take her with him. He considered Melinda to be dead and done. He just wanted, at this point, to put her body to rest. He was at peace.
Melinda lunged at him. Gerald said three words.
"Rest in peace."
BOOM.