Ending

A Story by Zoe

It's all changed now. New world order - its them or you.

"Do you love me?" I breathed, caught in the moment, and the shock that sent her flying backwards, wrenching her hand out of my grasp, was as great as the need to hit myself for messing up once again. Damn it all to hell.

She gathered herself, gulping for air, or at least that's what it looked like, as her shoulders heaved and her head bowed. Her cheeks were the prettiest, yet sharpest, shade of pink I had ever seen. Maybe she was having a panic attack. Wouldn't be the first time, but last time it had almost got us all torn to shreds. After all, you can't be a good leader if you're falling apart.

"Don't ask," she said shakily, only for her voice to grow in strength as she continued, the tone of her words eventually reaching the same iciness as the meaning of them. "Don't you dare ask. Not in this world. You demand, or you solicit, but you never ask questions in this world, you hear me? It'll get you killed."

Screw her and her out of the blue survival lessons, serving only to divert the topic, because I couldn't, I could never. I couldn't just grab her by the forearm and yell at her for answers until she gave me them, accompanied with a solid right hook, in furious tears, nor could I tease it out of her when she was most vulnerable, with her arms slung around my neck and her lips on mine.

I wanted the utmost truth, spoken willingly from her lips. I didn't want to constantly be observing this conflict between herself and the other herself. The one where she was all emotions and broken and so /human/, and the one where she shut me out and did whatever she could to survive in a world such as the one we lived in.

And sometimes that latter side meant doing really awful things, like tying my big sister to a pole for the rats to eat alive, all for the sake of letting at least three of us get out of there alive, one of them being her, another being her boyfriend/best friend/enemy/right hand man/whatever and the final being a mere toddler, too young and sweet to ever sacrifice without another sacrifice, one of what was left of her soul.

I looked at him then, and a smile crossed my lips even though she had just delivered such a brutal line. Tucked away in his cozy cocoon of blankets and teddies, he looked the age that he was, with a little pout adorning his face and his curly, red hair going every which direction. I liked him better when he was like that, innocent and without anything to trouble him. because it was such a nice contrast to how he was in the day, skipping around the perimeter with a loaded rifle in one chubby, little hand.

I reached out and stroked his hair, gentle as not to startle him when he had only just settled down, and wondered what he would be like if the world was normal.

You know, if my mum had smiled lovingly with tears in her eyes as the midwife carefully passed her newborn to her to hold, rather than the terrifying reality of her snarling and sinking her teeth deep into his left knee as we desperately tried to pull him away from her.

He still had a scar there, but that ended up being all that came out of it, thank God. Really, it was kind of a miracle that the disease wasn't infectious by bite, or we would all have died and turned at least a few dozen times by then.

"Sam." I looked at her, and I was quiet. After all, she didn't call my name, she said it. It wasn't a question that I could respond with 'yup?' or 'yeah, what is it?'. It was just a demand for my immediate attention, so I gave it with no reply.

You see, I was learning.

"It's my shift," she murmured. "Get to sleep. We have a long day tomorrow."

I rolled over onto my side, and did just as she told me to.

***

It infected the water supply, and not just the stuff in dams and rivers. Nope, the whole damn sea. If you drank even a drop of it, boom, you had twenty minutes of your life left.

Going outside when it was raining, snowing or anything else that fell under the category of precipitation was a bad idea too, unless you were covered head to toe, or suicidal, which a lot of people were.

There was nothing anyone could have done. The government could have wiped out the virus in weeks, days, still could, probably, but it spread too fast, and the warnings too slow.

And even if you were warned, it wasn't as if you could casually just go without water for a few weeks or so. It makes up 80% of your own damn body mass. You need it to live. So there were some that just took no notice of the whole business and settled on making themselves a nice cup of tea with two sugars, milk and a biscuit, only to trap their own children in the living room not long after and tear their flesh apart until the onslaught of blood covered more than just their black, scaly lips.

We listened, we survived. All of us. My family and Beth, my best friend who was staying with us while she visited from Australia. My uncle, we stayed with him on his farm, and drank milk and ate meals of porridge, eggs, fried or scrambled, and bacon every damn day for a few weeks or so. But then the virus mutated, and affected the livestock, and we began dropping off like flies.

My dad died first. He went to go milk the goat, Annie, and came back three hours later, scratching and hammering at the door. My uncle shot him in the heart, then the head, and when he was still moving, shot all of his limbs off until he was just a pile of spasming body parts caked in blood and the dark, clear vomit that always came after a nice, satisfying meal.

We guessed he had a one on one match with Annie, and won. Eventually.

Then my uncle decided to off himself, and we did the exact same thing to him. More or less, I'm a crappy shot.

We got out of there, but we didn't know what to do. At first, we turned to my mum for guidance, but she was heavily pregnant, weak, and in deep mourning for my father and his brother. So the responsibility fell on Michelle, my sister, who found us a place, a good place, which had cupboards stuffed to full capacity with food, canned, and a fridge filled with juice boxes and iced tea.

But then my brother came into the world, and we had to leave it, and my poor mother still writhing in a pool of her own blood, all behind us.

That was just the way the world became. You were constantly on the move, dead or not, all in the name of survival, or ravenous bloodlust.

***

"Are you okay?" she whispers, her hands gripping both of my arms, and I know that the tears misting her eyes reflect mine.

I turn away from her to stare down at my little brother's mangled, half devoured corpse, and all the blood surrounding it. There's just so much of it, everywhere…

It's still wet. We could've saved him.

"Don't ask," I whisper back, and we smile and hold each other as we cry.

© 2016 Zoe

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Reviews

Sanhorsey

In the first sentence the word 'back' is not really needed.
Otherwise it is quite a good read. It is not exactly a story, but it gives a feel into how life would be if the world would be infected by a deadly virus.