Plagues

Chapter 25

The schools took us back after a little while of anxious wonder. Any culminatings that were assigned at any point this semester were rendered null and void; we were to only have exams which were to be our midterms we never had.

School officially resumed on April 30th, 2047 and from then to May 10th it was all exam review. Everyone that walked in the building did so on eggshells. All eyes, upon entrance, went straight to the south doors. Kali, like many others, avoided staying too long in the open on the first floor, and focused on hurrying from room to room. Going upstairs, which was just as unpopular as the main floor, was done two steps at a time. I couldn’t help standing and staring at where Mikaela’s body once lay.

Between classes, I looked for Darwin, but I never saw him anywhere at school, which lead me to believe that he bailed on coming back for exams. I guess he figured we were all in too deep for it to matter.

My first class of the day was Afro-American Studies. For our exam, since we’d had a unit test or two here and there, we were responsible for the civil rights movement of the mid twentieth century, up to the Zimmerman v. Martin case early in this century. In English and Social Sciences we were prepping to write respective in-class essays for our exam period. With all this studying I had to do, my parents had a hawk’s eye on me again. This made it difficult to keep track of events related to vamp activity.

What I could gather was that nothing much at all had been heard from Marcus and there were no vamp attacks needing to be noted of. That was a personal assumption since the news, probably at discretion of the government, would normally, and ambiguously report all attacks by maniacs, mutts, and vamps as “infected attacks”. Usually the selective witness reports helped to distinguish what kind of an infected it was. Most of the infected attacks were violent, brutal, and messy which meant maniacs or mutts.

In the wake of the lock-down, there had been protests of the hunting down of all vamps. Those very few, viewed already as being on the fringes of society, who knew about the vamps, although unaware they were referred to by some as such, compared it to how Hitler hunted down the Jews, gays, crippled, gyspies, etc. That small group marched on Queen’s Park up Spadina Street, but before the news could swoop in the police quickly pounced, apprehending and arresting the protesters, and then cleared out, the remaining scene looking as if nothing had happened. Cell phone video from bystanders caught the action and that video made it to media outlets. What made people, including me, so uneasy was that despite the media hounding the mayor and respective chiefs of police and BIOTRANS about the events on Spadina, there was no level of government at all demanding transparency. This lead to small protests and demonstrations at Yonge-Dundas Square, Nathan Phillip’s Square, and Queen’s Park. Again, because these were the same sorts of people others described as being like those in the Occupy protests about thirty years ago, neo-hippies as many called them now, or the truthers obsessed with conspiracy theories, the police and BIOTRANS just monitored the demonstrations rather than making any more arrests.

Juggling studying with acquiring this information proved more difficult than I thought with my parents constantly checking up on me. I used to have Darwin on this with his leak site, but I couldn’t get a hold of him. I assumed he already knew whatever I had found out. I shared my information with Kali and asked her to also be vigilant. She agreed she would.

“Did the virus actually mutate?” I overheard students in the lounge discussing before class, part way through the last week before exams, exam period beginning on Monday the 13th.

“That’s what everyone’s been saying,” a second student said, sitting on the floor, leaning against the legs of the first.

“They say it was infected that blew up that bank by Sneaky Dee’s,” a third said, on the first student’s right.