Exposure

The Beginning

The symptoms are much like the flu: fever, cough, nausea, vomiting, congestion, etc. That's what the symptoms are when you first start getting sick. You can go to the doctors and they'll just recommend sleep, water, and some medication that "Will decrease the severity of the symptoms." They don't help, the symptoms continue to get worse. The infected individual stays in this "stage" for anywhere between two days to a week.

Then they begin to get worse. You cough to a point where your throat is raw, the nausea gets to a point in which you can't move, the vomiting starts becoming more fierce, and worst of all, the feeling that you can't breathe. It's as if you are trying to breathe the air out of an empty balloon. When the symptoms get to this point you are considered to be at the second stage of the illness. You take medicine of all different kinds but it never helps. This stage lasts about two weeks.

After which the virus spreads throughout your body. You can barely breath, you begin to vomit blood and your fever is about 103 degrees. A new symptom arises at this point. You begin to develop memory loss. You start by simply forgetting the day of the week, then you forget more important things like your children's names or where you are. This is the third stage. This is the stage in which most of the infected die but a few are "lucky enough to survive."

The fourth, if you survive the third, is when you lose all motor function. You can no longer move at all and you begin to bleed out. The blood comes from everywhere, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, even your pores. You never truly realize how much blood there is in the human body until you have seen it outside of the human body. It's a sight that you never get used to no matter how many times you have seen it.

The illness had begun to spread faster than lightening. "This new illness is now reaching epidemic proportions in the United States. The president has declared the country on lockdown and no one is allowed to exit or enter in the hopes to stop the spread of this disease," the news broadcaster had said. It didn't work, though. Cases began to show up in all around the world. No one truly knew anything about the illness other than the fact that it was deadly and that it was extremely contagious. The survival rate is less than three percent. That means that out of all the people that become infected, less than only three percent of them won't die from it.

I was twelve when they first discovered the disease and that was over four years ago. My brother and I have an immunity from the disease but that doesn't mean that we aren't in danger. There are others that haven't been eradicated by the disease whether it be because of their immunity, or they just got lucky doesn't truly matter. They want to survive and are willing to do anything to do so, even if that involves killing innocent people. The illness has turned the world into an arena and the only rule is to kill or to be killed.

My mother and father decided that it wasn't safe where we were living anymore, so they decided that we were going to leave. I remember my father coming, and waking us up at late in the night, and telling us to get our shoes on. My brother was young at that point, only being a year old, so he doesn't really remember much about it. We gathered only the essentials and got in the car and left. We barely made it out of our neighborhood alive. We drove for days until we got to somewhere that was rural, and consisted of mostly forested areas. We found an old abandoned cabin to stay in and tried to make into something that resembled our old home.

It was going great for weeks until my mother began to get sick. I remember hearing her in the bathroom retching and crying. We wanted to comfort her but she wouldn't let us near her. She pretty much lived in that bathroom for the next few months. She began showing signs of the different stages and I knew that it was time for me to prepare myself. I knew that there was no chance that she was surviving this. I remember the day that she died I had woken up to the sound of my father crying in the next room ever. I silently climbed out of the bed that my brother and I had been sleeping in and went to the doorway.

The room was messy and there was blood everywhere. My mother was still laying on the bed and my father was sitting in the rocking chair next to her. He shook something fierce and I knew gathered what happened. He noticed me standing there and came over to me. He told me to get my brother up and then he sat us down and told what had happened. "Your mother was very sick for a very long time and was suffering horribly. She died early this morning while you guys were still asleep," my father said in a comforting tone.

We decided to bury her at the foot of the big oak tree that loomed over the backyard. She used to sit under and read with us and we knew that that was where she would want to be. My father dug a pit and placed her body into it. We all said our goodbyes and then left that house. My father said it was because it wasn't safe there anymore but I think it was more because he couldn't stand being there anymore because it hurt too much. We gathered the few belongings that we had left and then left.

I remember that we ran out of gasoline and had to leave the car behind. We continued on foot for a while until we came to a tiny town with plenty of places to stay and get food from. We found an empty building and settled in. My father had told us that he was going to look for food and that he'd be back. He never did come back. I waited a few days and decided that we should go look for him. It took us almost a full day to find him. His body was laying in the canned food aisle of the nearby grocery store in a pool of his own blood. I told my brother not to look and covered him with a tarp I found in the next aisle. We said our goodbyes and left the store and never looked back. I knew I couldn't because if I did I would never be able to leave.

My brother and I wondered aimlessly only stopping to rest and eat. I had no idea what to do or where to go so I just walked. We discovered an old apartment building and I decided that we were going to stay there. We boarded up the windows like my father had shown me how to back at the old cabin and locked the door. We settled in well enough and have stayed there since. I go and search for food and supplies a few days a week but otherwise, we don't really leave the room. I tell my brother it is because it isn't safe outside, which it isn't, but it's also because I am too terrified what I might find. It still hurts sometimes when I think about my mother and father but I knew I had to keep. I couldn't give up because that would mean that I was giving up on my mother and my father and all of those other people that had died in the grasp of this illness. My giving up would mean that I was allowing the illness to win.