The Virus

(A short story about a dystopian future.)

We call it ‘the Virus’. It was a virus made by another country. Nobody survived it. It attacked everyone and anyone, young, old, middle-aged... Nobody is safe.

In the beginning, it was just something that was passed on through blood. Then, it passed through water and spread through touch. Now it spreads through the air.

There’s no cure. It killed off the other scientists that studied it.

Now there’s the ones who left Earth to preserve themselves and hopefully not die, and us left to die.

We’re all infected. I’m infected. I know there’s no hope for a cure.

Us left on Earth kept living despite the hopeless-looking situation. It spread, though, no matter what. Some days are good for some people, other times the bodies pile up. There’s still some healthy people, but they avoid going into non-purified areas and basically quarantined themselves so as not to get sick.

I’m the 435 person to get named at my particular clinic as a carrier of the Virus. If it were before, it would have been dormant. But nope, I’m just as miserable as the rest of them, maybe even more so.

The disease attacks your body in various ways. Me, it attacked my lungs first, so I’m coughing up blood as well as getting more and more weaker as the days go by. I was one of the few that studied it when it first came out, but everyone was getting tested. I got pulled out because I was a carrier.

My colleagues carried the Virus, too. One of them passed it onto one of the doctors at the clinic.

The few who didn’t carry the Virus (and were rich non-Virus carriers) left in a rocket. I’m not sure if they lived or died - nobody really thinks about them. We can’t work. Not unless we wanted to die faster, and some of those health nuts had just spread the disease faster with their sweat and heavy breathing to sweat off what was at first thought a cold.

The Earth, too, was dying. Healthy foods went first. Then the non-healthy foods stopped being edible.

The only edible food on this Earth was cocoa. And that, too was dying. Everyone was sick of it now - it used to just be a delicacy that made stuff like hot chocolate.

Most of the trees were gone, meaning that suffocation was actually quite possible. Or we’d all get baked by a solar flare, first.

I had studied the Virus, and I knew it worked on living things and nonliving. Plastic and glass were the next thing to go after it killed the plants. Now it eats away at everything - except pure metals. The water had long been poisoned, but since it was a necessity we tried to boil it, then drink it. Not like we could just make sure we starved, suffocated, and die of dehydration.

Nobody wanted to die. Well, they hadn’t when the Virus had first appeared. Now it’s just moaning in the houses.

It’s out of pity that the lights and water are on anymore. They can’t turn it off. They need the light, and the only ones brave enough to say different take one look at us who have the Virus and skedaddle. They’re disgusted by what we are now. Reduced to this.

Traveling is free since we’re all dying, too. Virus-filled pilots fly their planes if they’re in the early stages - if not, they go by engine-propelled boats. No passport, just a destination with other sickly passengers. Photographs are taken, but mostly to preserve what has been lost already.

I haven’t left, though. I’m no longer trying to find a cure, either. I just try to help ease what pain I can. I’m a scientist and a doctor, after all, no matter how incomplete my college education was.

I only didn’t graduate because of the threat of the Virus when it first appeared. It was scary, thinking about it. Now it’s just old news.

It’s a sad world, yes. But it’s one we have to live in. They wouldn’t try to stop the pathogen, those that left, so it was up to us to struggle on.

I know I’ll be dying soon. I can feel the weakness in my bones. Whenever I fall asleep, I’m not quite sure I’ll wake up again.

(copyright@angelslaugh)