A New Form of Horror

It may sound odd but when the world ended, we didn't find out at first. We already had shortages in electricity, and the internet lines have been fried for weeks; an attack by the terrorists, according to the government (hint: they were lying, they just wanted to corner us and cut us from the rest of the world and from each other). Riots were a daily occurrence, people stopped going to work. And every small town was its own country, cut from the rest. Deaths weren't rare, and when your country has been in a civil war for years, it's hard to care much about the rest of the world.

It was my turn to get our water rations. I was thinking how much I stunk. Showers were pretty low on our list of priorities. I was trying to hum a tune I used to play on the violin, before I sold it to get us some food.

The drone of the airplanes made everyone in the water lines tense. Everyone knows that if you have time to hear its sound, the plane probably wasn't coming after your town. But we tensed all the same, ready to spring home in case it started firing. I hugged what I already had of water close, chaos always invited thefts. But the airplane passed us and left a cloud in its wake. We kept monitoring the descending cloud, which turned out to be slips of paper. A notice by the government.

I went to pick it up, not much concerned. It was probably a reminder of the curfew or an invitation to turn the terrorists in (another hint: we didn't hide any terrorists, but it was hard to make them believe that). But this paper was different: it described a set of symptoms, the combination was nothing I've seen before, even though I'm the town's helping doctor. A few of them stood out, horrific descriptions of people biting and milky white eyes, the sick moving unnaturally fast, their upper limbs convulsing uselessly by their sides. It told us to hide from whoever showed those symptoms, or shoot them if we had the means to (we also didn't have access to guns, but they didn't believe that either).

I went home, a little concerned but a little unbelieving too. Even though I've seen many things during the past five years, it was still hard for me to wrap my head around the images those descriptions conjured.

It wasn't until a few hours later that the waves began. They came from the fringes of the town, where they weren't supposed to be, where soldiers should've shot them on the spot. We later found out that some of them were soldiers. We holed up in our home. A tiny apartment for about five families. And we saw them convulsing their way, groaning, hitting walls and then walking away as if nothing has happened. Hitting each other, biting each other, but shrieking in what seemed to be disgust at the taste. They seemed to hover around sources of light, so we turned off our candles and waited in the dark. The sounds outside a haunting chorus that fed the horrors we felt. No one cried, we were all past crying over horrors and the possibility of death. This was just a new form of hell that was thrown at us. Tonight I shall sleep restlessly, and tomorrow, we'll find a way to face it and survive. Because really, what else can we do.