Alicia's research decimated the world's population and now it has come back for her.
A splitting headache forced Alicia from her restless dreams. Her throat was dry and she swallowed, painfully. I’m still sick…she swallowed again, testing the pain; it was still there…and still alive. But, I think today is the day.
Three months ago, she received a shipment of African fruit bats from Uganda for research purposes. Commissioned from the university, she was delighted to work with the little mammals and dove vigorously into her work. Not long after, her husband became ill, and three days later he was dead; his guts turned to mush. The loss was still painful, frighteningly so, and the current situation made it even worse. She’d heard time heals all wounds and knew that was a luxury she would not have. She turned her head to look out the window and pain lanced behind her eyes. She squinted against the daylight, her eyes adjusting, and gazed through the wooden slats at the street beyond.
Her husband worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles and shared the same air with approximately 1500 people that day. They were all dead now too, at least 94 percent of them. With the highest mortality rate of any contagion in history, this mutant strain of the Marburg virus had decimated the population of Bossier City in only a few short months. Not all of the infected were dead. With a five day incubation period, it was possible, though not likely, to stay sick for weeks afterwards while the filo virus slowly devoured your internal organs. Death usually resulted from massive hemorrhaging. Of course, some people died within hours, it seemed the virus affected people differently.
A man stumbled by on the sidewalk just outside the window. He was close enough for her to see the snot and blood dripping from his nostrils. The consistency of tapioca pudding, each belabored breath misted it into the air. She wondered how it could have come to this in such a short amount of time. He passed from view, staring at the cement and she heard the sudden squeal of tires on the road. A loud “thump” reverberated through the wall as the man was hit by the car…or truck…she couldn’t see outside to tell, but she knew what had happened all the same.
She tried to care, tried to conjure up a tear for the fallen man, but she didn’t have it in her. She’d witnesses so much death she’d become numb to it. Muffled voices floated to her as someone asked the man if he was okay. Not from close up, she would have bet a million dollars on that one, people didn’t get close to other people any more.
She could see the scene unfolding in her mind’s eye. The man getting out of his car, unable to see from the gore covering his windshield, running towards the fallen man. Not too close, just enough to make himself feel better, as if he was really trying to help this diseased scourge. He may have done it out of pity, or to make sure the man was sick. If the man was truly sick, then the driver would reason it was okay, the man was going to die anyway and he probably did him a favor by making it quicker. If he wasn’t sick, it really didn’t matter much more anyway. But it wasn’t okay, nothing was anymore. Millions of people were dying and the immune didn’t know how to handle it. They were the blessed, yet felt the most lost in this new emerging world; a chrysalis birthing death, disease and sorrow.
She squeezed her eyes tighter, trying to dispel the mental pictures playing in her head. It didn’t work…she imagined the driver discovering the remnants of the man in the ditch, dismembered and as his bloated body sloughed apart from the impact. She knew he would feel a sense of relief that he’d not killed one of the few uninfected, they were the only people worth saving, they were the only ones that mattered anymore. The rest were doomed to die, percentages be damned, it was how the infected were seen. In this case, it was obvious the man was not going to make it.
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” the man outside said before slamming his car door and tearing off down the street, windshield wipers trying to erase the evidence of the chance encounter.
It was a scene that was common nowadays. People didn’t really walk anymore, they stumbled, like the zombies in those George Romero films. That’s what the world looked like now, a zombie apocalypse, but these zombies were very much alive, waiting for a cure that would never come; there was no one left with the skill set to make it. These zombies would not walk the streets for ages, trying to satiate some unexplainable hunger for human flesh, most would not last the week. They were the real walking dead and they knew it.
Alicia opened her eyes and coughed up a wad of phlegm, thick and bloody, and her throat painfully objected. She was severely dehydrated and needed water. She eased to the side of the bed, trying not to make any sudden movements, and put her feet on the floor…so far, so good. She braced herself and stood up, slowly, like in a slow motion replay, and a wave of dizziness threatened to topple her from her newfound heights. She closed her eyes, fighting the feeling, trying to regain composure and sighed in relief when it came. She opened her eyes and began the slow walk to the kitchen. It was just around the corner, but it seemed like miles as she concentrated on putting one foot in front of another, marching to the beat of the drum in her head. For some reason, having something to focus on helped, even if it was the pain her heartbeat caused.
She opened the cabinet and pulled a glass from the shelf. It slipped from her weak grasp and shattered on the tile floor; a homemade claymore mine sending tiny shards of glass flying through the air, embe dding in the white pasty flesh of her legs. There were only a few, but they hurt and she cursed herself for her clumsiness. Too weak to care, she pulled another glass from the shelf, this one safely tucked inside both clenched hands. She placed it in the sink and turned the faucet handles on, nothing happened. She twisted them further and still no water.
“Damn,” she croaked, her vocal chords rusty from disuse. “I’m so thirsty.”
Realizing there would be no water from any of the faucets, she reached up to the shelf above the glasses. That was where the magic potions rested and she perused the labels, Ibuprofen, Acetaminophen, Nyquil…yeah, Nyquil, that helped everything. She pulled the bottle from the shelf and twisted the lid off, anxious for some sort of relief. She grabbed the Ibuprofen and spilled a few tablets on the counter. She picked up four of them, popped them in her mouth and tipped the Nyquil bottle back. It was half full and she drank all of it down, knowing it would only be a little while before it took effect, and she hoped it would be enough to make her feel a little better.
She knew what she had done was dangerous, at least it would be normally. She was infected now and it didn’t really matter if she abused her kidneys anymore, they would be a bloody mass of useless tissue before long anyway. She didn’t know how she had contracted the disease, for the last two months, she’d been immune, but she knew nature had a way of getting around immunization by the process of mutation. The virus had mutated, she didn’t need a medical specialist to tell her that, she knew it because she was now coughing up blood from her lungs. It had come around for revenge…for bringing it here, killing off everyone she knew before killing her too. It had made her watch first.
She knew she was dying and in a way, she was relieved. People always think they want to be the ones to live through Armageddon. To have the world to themselves and reset the laws of the land. She’d once been a staunch believer of that herself. But now that it was a reality, she was tired of seeing everyone around her die. Tired of stepping over dead bodies while people in white suits, coughing under their plastic bubble helmets, drug them into piles and pretended not to be sick. They would be next, white suits couldn’t protect you from The Bossier Strain, nothing could.
That’s what the news had come to calling it, The Bossier Strain, like some demented tribute to a bestselling novel. She shortened it and called it BS, but it wasn’t an acronym for Bossier Strain. The media always had a flair for the dramatic, but in the end, they faded into black like the rest of humanity. People were too sick to go to work, there was no more news. What information there was came from the radio, from people hiding from society, claiming victory over The Bossier Strain, some claiming a government conspiracy had this coming a long time ago and it was a plan to wipe out 6 billion people and leave the world to the rich and famous. She though it ludicrous, but what did she know, she studied bats. She was sure there was a joke in there somewhere, but she couldn’t grasp it right now. What she did know is that the Bossier Strain mutated, and if it did it once, it can do it again. She wasn’t convinced the people on the other side of the radio were free and clear of anything, she’d thought so herself once.
She had learned this was not a local outbreak, it spread across the world like wildfire, destroying life by the billions, and she was the reason it happened. At first, she blamed herself, but soon she realized that nature had this bomb waiting the whole time, hiding out in the jungles, patient, the ultimate killer. If she wouldn’t have unleashed hell on earth, someone else would have. Either way, it was inevitable and the world was destined to wind up in this state. Humans, the poster children for natural selection, who’d have thought?
The overdose of medicine began to calm her, numbing her senses, giving her the illusion of feeling better. It didn’t matter, illusion or not, if it helped her get through the next few hours, she was happy with it. She looked out the kitchen window, hands braced on either side of the sink. A series of coughs racked her body and she spattered blood on the window, staining her view with crimson spots. She didn’t want to die inside, it was a beautiful day beyond the glass. If she was going to go, she would do it as much on her terms as she could.
She turned and walked to the front door, noticing it was open and only the screen stood between her and the last few moments of her life. Pain ripped through her abdomen as something gave way inside her and she dropped to her knees. She gasped and gripped her stomach with both hands, her breath coming in short bursts, like a mother performing Lamaze for a grizzly birth. Warmth radiated from her crotch. Hunched over, she saw the blood seep from underneath her night shirt. She reached down, grabbed the hem and pulled it up, revealing her red panties. She didn’t have any red panties, only white cotton, the sensible, comfortable ones. The front of her underwear bulged and she pushed on the puffy fabric. Blood seeped out, and ran down her legs, staining the floor with the remnants of her life. Her vagina and rectum were bleeding, something inside was terribly wrong and she was turning inside out.
Summoning her courage and will, she stood and stumbled outside. She turned her face to the sun, trying to ignore the intense pain. It seemed to emanate from everywhere in her body at once and she cried out, weak and ineffectual. Eyes closed and sobbing quietly, she raised her hands to the sky, crying bloody tears and letting the sun warm her. Blood left on her hands from touching her soaked panties ran down her arms, into her armpits and came to rest on her nipples, staining the front of her nightshirt. She shuffled towards the back of the house, pure will putting one foot in front of the other. She was death in comfortable clothes, the barely undead, lactating blood, beckoning you to drink from her swollen breasts. There was a bayou behind the house and she wanted to be in it when she passed.
Alligators lived in the bayou, as they did in almost every body of water in Louisiana, and this had kept her from swimming in the beautiful water for the entire time they lived on its tranquil banks. More pain, this time so intense she could not stay standing. She fell, clutching her abdomen again as vital organs ripped from their moorings, dissolving and flowing towards her body’s orifices. She was a bag of blood, barely alive and not for long. She crawled towards the shore, out of reach but only a few feet away. Somehow she reached it and rolled into the brown stagnant water, dragging a crimson puddle with her.
Floating seemed to ease the pain, but it was still excruciating, overloading her senses, filling her with the desire to die and to die quickly. Why was it taking so long? She prayed for death to take her and somewhere, where prayers are usually heard and dismissed, never to be answered, this one was heard. A splash to her right drew her attention and she turned her head. Two eyes protruded above the water and a rough, scaly tail moved back and forth, propelling the alligator towards her in eerie silence. She’d never been so close to one and she thought it beautiful, an enduring example of nature’s creation.
The alligator nosed close and in a flash, sprang into action. It opened its toothy maw and bit her abdomen, puncturing her skin and releasing the pool of blood that so recently had been formed into the shape of kidneys, lungs, a stomach, and many other organs. She didn’t feel it, her pain sensors were already at maximum and could process no more, she was grateful and watched disconnected, as if viewing a film.
The alligator began its death roll, protective lenses covering its eyes as it twisted its body violently, finishing off its prey. Alicia’s body thrashed and came apart at the seams, limbs flailing until coming free from the body. Other alligators rushed in from the banks to get their share of the diseased corpse, eager to feed on a fresh kill. The blood began to fade, mixing with the bayou water and was gone within a few moments. All traces of Alicia’s existence were erased.
Weeks later, an alligator crawled up on shore, a dark red trail marking its passage. Blood flowed from its eyes and its body was swollen. It convulsed, throwing up a large swamp rat and some fish as it died. Behind it, several fish floated to the top of the water, shaking, splashing drops of water in small arcs that fell back to the swampy water, staining it red. The new apex predator was here to stay.
Did you ever wonder what happened after the Archangel Michael through the demons out of heaven? Let one of them guide you through the origin of evil in the world.
A splitting headache forced Alicia from her restless dreams. Her throat was dry and she swallowed, painfully. I’m still sick…she swallowed again, testing the pain; it was still there…and still alive. But, I think today is the day.
