He was reading a book.
Well, actually, he wasn’t reading a book anymore, not a real one. He hadn’t read a real physical book that he could touch in months. His eyesight was too bad and the eReaders had bigger font and carried a lot of book. It was win win, really. As long as he could read, he was happy. He found his joy there.
He had stopped by the bookstore and gotten a book he wanted to get. He had the eBook, but he got the print books anyway, too. He was like that. He didn’t read them, but they could still be around him-his favourites anyways. If he kept all the books he read, his apartment would be filled to the brim with them. He had gotten on the bus after going to the bookstore. He wanted to go home and see if the print was big enough for him to read it, to actually read a book.
He hoped that, when he tried, he would be successful. He tried each time, with the book he most wanted and found that he could not stand reading for very long. Life was not lived unless he had a book in his hand, or rather something to read. So the switch to eReading as an alternative came easy to him. But sometimes you just missed the feel of a book, the smell of the paper and ink in your hand.
It was the small things, you know?
Which is why, when he looked up, He was able to catch sight of something that disturbed him. A man, down the car from him, was ripping the skin off of his bare arm. A part of the torn flesh had part of a tattoo etched upon it. He could see letters that said: other.
Looking at the blood that dripped from the wound and the teeth of the man, he wondered if this was something he should be seeing. He wondered if he could unsee this, if he it in fact be unseen. Or if the world he had known it was gone.
The man saw him looking. But it wasn’t a man, not really. This was something else that looked at him with eyes that were clouded over in white. They were like twin crystal balls that tracked him in the darkness.
He wondered how long the man had been sick, why he hadn’t noticed anything odd when he got on. He was like that. He did that when he rode the train, if the car had an odd vibe, he didn’t get on it.
He was getting a whole lot of the shit vibe now. Something was about to go down and he didn’t know what, but it would most certainly not be him. As the sick man approached him (a man that had been fine ten minutes ago), he wondered:
How long does it really take to spread?