run

day oo4

I used to think having to write that 4,000 word essay on a subject I didn't like and submitting a crappy copy of it that I'd rushed through the night before the deadline would be the end of me, but it wasn't.

I used to think that if I didn't get into an Ivy League college like my brother did, it would be the end of the world. It wasn't.

I used to think the end of the world would be the global collapse of wi-fi. No more social media. No more email, no more opportunities to search up videos of cat failures on YouTube. No more chatting anonymously with that one cute girl in my science class via my friend's Facebook account to see whether she liked me back.

I was almost right. Almost.

The end of the world began when the people around me began to die. My world ended when the virus took my mom, and it ended again when I was separated from the rest of my family.

And now I'm wandering along the shore of what used to be the Hudson River, now so clogged up with debris that half the water's overflown and it's just a disgusting, muddy mess that stinks of salt and rotting fish. I remember watching the suspension bridge come tumbling down into the river, the screaming of the people on it, The way the concrete moved, in waves, the way the suspension cables snapped like rubber bands when you pull them too hard. The way the cars were flung off the side.

I remember a dog paddling its way to the shore, its fur a silky golden, a long gash down the side of its face, blinded by the incident. Now its corpse lies but a few meters away from me, hollowed out by infestation, disease. The crows have already taken both its eyes.

It paints a sad picture, but it's a sad one for all of us.

All of us not yet enslaved by the virus, those of us who live in hell, gripping onto our humanity before it melts and runs out through the gaps between our fingers, whilst the demons slander about the streets, encircling us, outnumbering us, hunting us down in lust, in greed, in the need to exterminate the good and leave disease, carrion, destruction to plague the world.

The muddy banks of the Hudson River squelch unflatteringly underneath my sneakers as I walk, my eyes on the sediment below as I scavenge for something that might be of use to me. All I've found so far are severed limbs and faces staring blankly up at me, startlingly pale with death against the black mud. Entire skyscrapers lie across the Hudson where they've collapsed. Some of them have shed their concrete walls like a snake sheds skin, and all that's left is the metal scaffolding, a rusting skeleton, a vision of frailty rather than support.

There are some things I would give the world to see right now.

My family.

Some living person, some human being.

Hell, even my plants. I used to keep three cacti on my desk, and whenever I got bored, or sad, I'd pick one up and just look at it. Maybe talk to it, but that depended on how sad I felt. I named them after scientists. Isaac, Albert, and Thomas.

Something red in the mud catches my attention. Is it a knife handle? Something useful? A pack of unopened, uncontaminated food? I bend down to pull it out of the sediment, and drop it instantly, reeling. It's a bloody- ugh. I feel like retching as I stare at the red, plastic bracelet, still clinging on to its owner's severed hand. It was a child, I judge, as I look at it again, stare at the chubbiness of the fingers, the blunt, cracked fingernails, the dimples at the swollen, blue knuckles.

Despite its morbidity, I continue staring at it until it becomes too much and the urge to throw up returns. I kick some mud over it in an attempt to conceal it, and turn to the city.

New York towers over me, a smouldering mess of fires stamped out in a hurry, a city littered with fragments of buildings, with body parts, splintered furniture, broken glass. It's hauntingly beautiful, and yet ugly, all at once. Some parts of the concrete are already being smothered with moss and weeds, the roads are all cracked.

I start making my way towards the city, squelching myself a path out of the muddy Hudson, away from the severed hand and the dead dog.

The small sounds I hear everywhere, the breath of wind akin to rustling fabric, the screech of a crow, akin to the sound of metal against stone- all of them no longer send shudders up my spine. I have learned not to be too paranoid, or else I will get nowhere.

As I walk, one crow hops into my path and lets out a horrendous cry, approaching me, turning its head to regard me with one beaded, black eye. It's a fat, ugly thing on two scaly legs, and it ruffles up its feathers- and that's when I see it- that patch of rotting flesh, that sign that it's infected, that the virus is eating it out from the inside. It gives a gargling croak and something red and lumpy lands in front of it; a slimy mess. I realise it's its intestines.

I step away from the animal, and watch it die in misery, croaking on a few more times, hopping around, before its body shuts down and it falls over, landing in a heap. The wind ruffles its way over the black feathers, the corpse, carrying with it the stench of carrion.

That's what we've become.

And what are we fighting? We're fighting ourselves, a modified version, stripped of our humanity, stripped of our fundamental morality, left to cave in to animal instincts, to rot away under the mindset of brutality, to let ourselves be overpowered by the gross psychology of nature.

We're puppets in God's little stage show, and the play has barely started.