Abridged! A Short Collection of Short Stories

Seven days, that’s all it ever took…

  On the first day the eyes swell and their blood vessels begin to release making the afflicted effectively weep blood. The constant layer across the iris gives a red tint to the world. On the second and third days tear ducts begin producing a puss which mixes with the congealing blood to create brown mucus that changes an individual’s sight from red to a dark yellow. The third and forth days hold vomiting of thick green bile and the fifth and sixth days result in painful blue bruises around the eyes as the infection spreads back along the optic nerve. Finally on the seventh day: Death.

  They call it the Spectrum virus. Supposedly some mutated hybrid of MRSA with a super strain of one foreign flu or another. No-one seemed to have any idea how it had occurred and no-one really cared after the first million died. In the end the reports told us that the plague had spread all around the globe and none of the outside cities were habitable anymore. Those of us who had not been infected were isolated in specially built complexes; so called ‘Safe Sectors’. The virus was cunning, though, it could lay dormant in a host for months without so much as a sniffle and then before anyone knew what was happening, everything in the entire sector was dead. It happened at over two thirds of the isolated zones but then it just stopped. With the majority of the human race devastated and our species on the brink of extinction, it just stopped. The people rejoiced as hope returned that the safe sectors that remained were, indeed, safe and the virus had died with the last of the infected.

  But it was never about to be that simple. Statistics had always told us that there was at least one last person carrying the virus and as a result Hazard Control Officials roamed the sector complex day and night, watching for any hit of a walking biohazard. It had been years since the last reported case and most people had slipped into happy existences, secure in the belief that the officials were just excuses to create more jobs and that these long years would have been far beyond the longest incubation period the virus had ever displayed.

  I, for one, still accepted that it was out there. Or rather much closer to home as events were to transpire. The virus scared me, it scared everyone. A sense of indescribable terror surges through your veins when everything begins to take on that faint red tint and then the sensation of the first drop of blood trickling from the burst capillaries in the corner of your eye. I slowly placed down the pen on my manuscript as the trickle began to gather on my face. Suddenly it dropped. Dashing a small pool of blood onto my work, rapidly settling into the indentations from the pen. I rose sharply and, cradling my face almost to the point that I couldn’t see, ran to the bathroom.

  I carefully peeled my hands from my face and gradually gazed through a thick red layer at streams of blood running down my face from the base of my eyes. I grabbed a reel of tissue and desperately wiped the blood from my skin, smearing it across the rest of my face as more swelled up from under my eyelids. As I felt it dry into crusty scabs on my eyelashes a fleeting sense of unpermitted hope crossed my mind, that it was not the horror that had plagued my dreams. The hope quickly shattered when I looked down at the soaked and torn tissues in the sink and quickly realised that, ultimately, I was no stronger then those soft rags of fabric quietly disintegrating on the porcelain. Slowly turning, I returned to the lounge and sat heavily back into my chair, no longer caring about the bloodstains forming on my clothing. If not for the streams of blood continuing down my face I would have liked to think I would have wept. Instead I watched the light dim outside, the oncoming night somehow calming in the way it guided me into sleep. Still it was a haunted sleep; even the release of my mind drifting could not escape that as I knew that there was nothing I could do. The only choice left to me being to turn myself into the containment officers before I become contagious and spare the lives of those around me. As I thought, my sticky eyelids weighed heavily and soon fell closed, condemning me to my restless slumber.

  The night rolled on slowly, twisted visions and an intolerable fear haunting my disturbed sleep. Try as I might I could not hold down a length of rest that rescued me from these terrible thoughts. Yet still the floating illusion of sleep seemed to mask the full extent of my terror until, that is, a firm banging raised me from the long dream.

  I looked about as daylight poured through my open drapes, burning my weary eyes. Suddenly everything came back to me and I reached up quickly to my face, praying that it had all been some horrifying nightmare. As I felt the crusted blood about my eyelids I gasped in, fighting for breath as my hopes were shattered and the uncontrollable fear again took its firm hold on me. It squeezed around me, restricting my breath as the banging sounded again. It was coming from the door. I pulled my hand away from my face, a shower of crusty blood falling with it, and rushed to the window. I peered around the nets and caught sight of a Hazard Officer before swinging back against the side wall. How did they know?… Officials occasionally dropped in on people for ‘Random Inspections’ but these days it was more of a social courtesy then anything else. This was different, though, it was no coincidence that much was clear. I considered my options as the officer knocked again, more urgently this time. I knew the right thing to do was to turn myself in before I became contagious and hurt anyone. Instead without thinking I dove across the room as the Officer began hammering constantly on my door. Frantically I clawed the scabs from my face and grabbed a pair of sunglasses to conceal my black eyes. I knew my chances out there were slim. I was going to be dead within a week and I was condemning everyone around me to the same fate. Even as these thoughts were pulsing through my head something continued to defy the nature of my circumstance, telling me not to trust anyone and to run. Looking back at the house I would never see again, I headed for the back door, slipping on the glasses, doing as I had been told.

  I knew I couldn’t stay in the sector; I was only putting its entire population at risk if I did. At this point there was only one choice left. I had to try and make it on the outside. I didn’t know what was out there, no one did but it had to be better then vivisection or the multitude of tortures that I felt may be incurred from capture. To this end I waited. The virus infested the bile duct and so victims didn’t become contagious until the third day when the vomiting began so I had a maximum of two days. Although with the puss already starting to ooze from under my glasses it didn’t seem long at all. I watched a checkpoint at the edge of the sector where vital deliveries from god only knew where came in to support the populous, waiting for my chance.

  I watched the checkpoint for over twelve hours and saw two trucks move in and out of the sector, six hours apart. I had run out of time and, if their schedule held, I had to make a break for one to stow away. As I watched another delivery was perfectly on time. It entered the compound where I hid for several minutes while it was unloaded before turning and heading back out. This is when I struck out and ran as fast I could towards a loose flap in the trailers tarpaulin…I never made it, though. The last I remember is a sharp, stabbing pain in the back of my shoulder and pulling a dart from my skin before falling unconscious.

  Now I am here. I don’t know how long I was drugged for but from the bruising forming around my eyes I can only assume I was out for at least two days. The sterile cell I now reside in is bleak at the best, the single Plexiglas wall on one side forever threatening the approach of a doctor who sees me nothing more the a specimen, the equivalent of an experiment gone wrong. And yet I realise now that none of that really matters any more, for tomorrow I could be dead.

  -Subject 7E-

  -Journal Entry 6-

  Specimen has been under observation for seventy four hours now and appears to be in the final stages of cellular mutation. Infection within the host is accelerating, as is the breakdown of cognitive processing, resulting in the erratic behaviour displayed at the test site. Prognosis of continued lifespan is no more then twenty hours. Subject displays no increased immunity to the virus but on the merit of the condition remerging after this length of time antidote administration is rec
ommend for continued study of a living specimen.

  Additionally the remaining ‘Safe Sector’ test sites may prove to be of continued value if the virus is, as suggested, undergoing a symbiogenesis within its hosts.

  The medical technician placed down her pen and looked to a monitor with the lone subject who was huddled in a corner convulsing gently, his eyes bloody and bruised. She looked away and closed her eyes mournfully before turning and reopening them onto a brightly lit window looking out over a vast sprawling city. The pointed skyscrapers glinted against the cloudless sky, their affluent majesty a far cry from what the medical prisoner thought to be true.

  ‘I never did agree with the process…Yet they insisted it was necessary’ Thought the technician, her mind filled with a sorrow that those involved had tried so hard to forget about. ‘They told us the best would be spared and humanities future would be secured, free from overpopulation, famine and every other terrible thing that had plagued our species from the dawn of our existence’. She hung her head in shame for the price that had been paid by those less fortunate ‘There were no lucky ones in the end. Even those in the target range who had survived were condemned to live a lie. Nothing more than caged lab rats blindly serving the authoritarianism regime, the face in the darkness, for the supposed furthering of the master race”. She looked up again, out at the sprawling megacity. The artificial symbol of what lies and genocide had achieved and finally concluded how monstrous her race had become. "I just hope this finally means we can stop living a tormented lie and at last face up to the terrible deeds we have all become responsible for."

  Claudia