I will be haunted for days, weeks, and months. Seeing the final jolting twitch of his body as the bullet pierces through the skull sends chills down my spine. I close my eyes as nausea hits me like a tidal wave on a calm sandy beach. Blood. Lots of blood. Cold dead eyes wide in anger. I snap my eyes open unable to relive the moment just yet. Blinding white stars begin to fill my vision.
"Jax, we might need to stop for a second." His head turns in confusion. Bile moves up my throat at an alarming rate.
"We're almost there, only one more block. You can do this." He gives my hand a reassuring squeeze. Each step brings it further up my burning throat. Threatening to break the seal my lips have formed to keep it down.
"No Jax, you don't understand. We have to stop now." My stomach does one more flip and that was that. Hitting my lips in my attempt to keep it down. I rip my hand from Jax's to wrap them both around my stomach. I cannot seem to stop the tremble racking my entire body. He holds my hair away from my face and gently rubs my lower back in consolation. "I'm sorry, I am stronger than that." I wipe my mouth off with my dirty blue shirt. Jax stands there looking at me for a moment longer than he should have before pulling me into a tight hug.
"You're the strongest girl I have ever known."
"Thanks," I mumble. Taking a second to gather ourselves, feeling his chiseled muscle he calls arms holding me tight as the warmth of his neck comforts me. Wait. Why am I focusing on his features so much? I pull away from him suddenly. My cheeks burn a little with embarrassment. "They have never shot anyone." I blurt out as I see his eyebrows come together slightly in confusion. "The patrols always threaten, but they never actually follow through in a mass public setting. It has been empty threats up until now. Which makes me wonder, why today? Why was that man cause enough for the first shoot to kill in the public's eye?"
"If they didn't shoot him, Kai," his hand ruffles through his thick black hair, "he would have killed the patrol. You saw the craze in his eyes, there was no other way. Even I, a person who doesn't believe in killing for population control, could see it fit for him to be stopped. They can't have a citizen murdering someone we are supposed to fear. Today just happened to be that day a situation gave them no choice. Realizing they were losing control, and with their desperate need to regain some control before they lost it all, they had to shoot him." His hand slides my untamed hair behind my ears, " you were going to tell me something, right?" I weakly nod. "Ok, then let's keep going. We only have one more block to cover."
"There isn't any point. I can tell you here." Once more his eyebrows scrunch together.
"You can tell me here? In the streets? Why did you wait to tell me then?" Astonishment and anger hint into his voice.
"That's the thing!" Rushing to calm his quickening anger, "I was going to tell you about a robbery earlier today in one of the labs. One like the lab you work in Jax. Four scientists were murdered, I'm not exactly sure how, but it was enough to cause shock amongst the crowds down on Jeffery Avenue. However, that isn't even the worst of it, three vials of an unknown substance were taken." His eyes fade of any residual anger. Replaced with pure fear. "Government officials tried to keep it all from us. Per usual course of action when any significant crime is committed. They haven't been able to identify the guilty party, so they went to the families of those murdered. Trying to pay them off for silence. Of course, they didn't stay quiet. Guilt, pain, and fear must have all added up, pushing them to spill the truth to the general population. Not much information they had was really helpful though. All they knew was the murdered scientists worked with a highly deadly virus with the ability to kill millions, billions, of people fast and undetected. There is one thing I don't seem to quite understand. Why were they experimenting with something that evil to begin with? Why create such a thing?" I can see his vivid facial expressions as his suspicions play across his mind.
"I'm not sure, no one knows why they were experimenting with the virus. Word started to spread amongst the labs earlier today about the break-in. No one knew what was in the vials, and I wanted to believe they could be harmless or mild. Maybe a simple cold virus? My gut told me I would be wrong. The man back there must have been showing symptoms from those missing vials. Either he came into contact with someone we call patient zero, the initial victim exposed to the contents of the vial, or he was the patient zero." He begins to pace back and forth, back and forth, "the lab where the vials were taken tends to create airborne and blood transferable diseases. Meaning it very easily spreads from one person to the next." His face becomes distorted with quick thinking as he continues to wear a path into the pavement, "do you remember years and years ago, when our elders and ancestors had been attacked by a virus called Ebola?" Jax stops dead in his tracks turning to me, a fire burning in his eyes. "Direct contact of blood or bodily fluids would transfer it to another person. Making it one of the deadliest infectious diseases. Mostly attacking West Africa at first. Then a few got a scare here in what used to be called America. Lately, scientists have been focusing on trying to predict what those types of diseases could mature and mutate into if something similar returned to the general population. I can't be sure which one it was they stole, but we can be certain it will be very, very deadly." Jax begins pacing up and down the now empty alleyway once more. Besides the footsteps bouncing off of the adjacent buildings, all you could hear was... nothing? What the Hell? I feel a fresh wave of terror flood back into my veins. Bile returns tickling the back of my throat.
"Jax..." he's too deep in thought to hear me, "Jax!" Still no response. I step in front of him and place my small hands on his broad shoulders. "Jax you need to focus. Look around. Do you see what I am seeing? This alleyway is only filled with the two of us when it should be bustling with tons of people. So, where are they? Jax?" He spins in a large circle finally taking in our surroundings.
"I've never seen anything like this... Kai, we need to get back to your house. Hopefully, your parents will know what to do." Our fingers interlace before we cautiously walk to the end of the alley. Glancing around the corner only eight people aimlessly walk in the street.
"I'm going to ask one of them what they may have seen. I'll be right back." I leave Jax at the wall and briskly walk up to an older woman stumbling down the sidewalk. "Hello, ma'am, may I ask you a-" at the sound of my voice she turns to face me at an achingly slow pace. It was almost comical how slow.
"Help me." It comes out in a cracking croak. Her brown eyes were becoming glossed over, and every blood vessel popped around what had to have been astonishing irises. A red-tinted drool slightly dribbles down her chin onto the collar of her faded green tank top. As the acid-filled drool worked its way down her chin, it was taking her ivory skin with it. Leaving it raw and bleeding. Her walk was hindered by one of her broken black high heels, the actual heel part snapped and dragged as she moved her dead-weight feet.
"I'm- I'm sorry." I stumble a few steps backward in my daze. The woman reaches her hand out to me, and boney fingers just barely graze my arm. I feel my heart shudder with yet another ache. I spin around quickly to get back to Jax in the alley. Leaving the confused and helpless woman to suffer alone. Guilt racks my body as I rush back to the shadows I emerged from moments ago.
"We have to hurry Jax! All of those people out there are infected. Every last one of them." I exclaim wide-eyed and out of breath as I come around the corner. "Jax..." he grips my elbows hard to keep me grounded, to keep me from spiraling out of control.
"All of them?" He steals his own glance, "are you sure? Of course, you are." Taking his hands back, he swipes them along his watch bringing up the holographic GPS. "We need to get back to our homes, pack the essentials, and then find this doctor I know. I have burning questions he should be able to answer. We need to leave the city as well and get somewhere less crowded. One of our houses should be fine for now, but if they've been affected by this virus in any way we won't be able to stay in them. There's this place off the grid, we can hold up there until we have a more solid plan if our homes are compromised. If need be, we can wait until nightfall to start the trek to the alternate safe place I have in mind. That would give us a better chance to get past any patrols remaining on guard of our city's barrier walls. Does that sound like a decent plan for now?" I weakly nod.
"Yeah. Ok." I decided to peek around the corner once more to prepare myself.
A young boy all of fourteen, limping like a character off of the show the walking dead, managed to stay upright in front of the store's sidewalk. The only things that seemed to be missing were wobbly outstretched arms and a deep hungry growl. Not far from him was a young mother holding her swaddled baby, sitting on the curbside and crying out for help as she bleeds profusely. Her scalp leaked maroon-colored blood in spots where her long golden hair was ripped out in chunks. If you looked closer, you would see scuffs along her arms and legs filled with gravel and dirt, an ankle twisted completely broken and useless, and lastly, a large darkening human-sized bite mark standing out against her ashy-toned shoulder. What is left of my aching heart fully shatters as my eyes lock in on her baby. Once a perfect bundle of joy, now cold and blue in her arms. The realization that no one was going to help her finally sets in. Violent sobs wrecked the woman's body as she hunched over burrowing her face into the blanket she wrapped the baby in. My own cheeks become wet with tears watching her.
To the right of the woman, about halfway down the street, stood a man in what appeared to be his mid-thirties. Blood flowed from his crooked beak-shaped nose steadily, and his mouth was foaming similarly to a raccoon infected with rabies. He was making his way slowly towards the woman I spoke with a few minutes ago. A strange smirk pulled and stretched his unhealthy yellowing skin, allowing for the blood the color of nighttime to stain his stark white teeth. Growing closer to her, and myself, I could begin to see red angry sores bubbling and oozing aggressively across his entire body. Giving the appearance his skin could be simply peeled away as if you were peeling the pale paperback of a sticker. One of his eyes torn, or possibly fallen on its own, out of the socket dangled on his cheekbone. Caked in the black blood it bounced into the air with every hard stumble his feet took across the pavement. Coming up to the woman, her back is turned on him, staring into her purse looking for something she can't seem to find. He lets out a grumbled moan just before his fingers land on her shoulders. She stumbles forward out of his poor grasp trying to scream, but it gets trapped in her throat. Drowned out by the black blood rushing out of her mouth.
In her haste to move away from the man, her broken heel causes her ultimately a fatal mistake. No one deserves the amount of pain the man began inflicting on her. As soon as her body hits the pavement, a sickening crunch of her hipbone erupts into the quiet mid-afternoon air. Another gurgled scream soon follows. He latches his left hand around her left arm, twisting and breaking it with more force than I could have expected him to have. White bone sticks prominently out of her forearm contrasting her own sickly yellow skin tone. Almost as if he could be laughing, his mouth opens wide still smirking. Before I could blink his teeth sink into her melting flesh with ease. Tearing her forearm to shreds around the broken bone. Within seconds, she starts to convulse on the ground violently. Slamming her head over and over again, the skin and muscle around her skull don't stay intact. Brain matter splatters across the yellow lines on the road. Stomach bile rages a war in my stomach at the sight.
"STOP!" A patrol loudly yells as he runs up to them from a nearby storefront. Raising an automatic rifle aimed directly at the man still shredding her dead body apart, he tried his hardest to command him to leave her alone. "Stop now. I will have no other choice but to shoot you!" His hand quivers slightly, but his finger was steady on the trigger. "IN TWO SECONDS I WILL SHOOT! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!"
The scene before us resembled a zombie movie, I think was called Warm Bodies from the year 2013. An image of the bone creatures, not the actual zombie, but those creepy creatures running around in the airport towards the end of the movie, or was it the beginning of the movie? Eh, it doesn't matter. Either way, the look the man gave the patrol reminded me of that. Cold, dead, and empty.
"ONE!" The patrol screams at him. I can feel Jax trying to convince me to leave with a firm tug on my wrist, I can't, not yet. I am glued to this spot. The man, crouched over the woman covered in her blood, only stared at the patrol with a certain suicidal eeriness. This time I am certain he has begun to laugh. A laugh that makes the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The patrol flinched in response, or maybe he finally saw the dangling eyeball, but his gloved finger doesn't hesitate any longer to pull the trigger. It felt similar to slow motion as the trigger gets pulled back.
BANG. BANG. Two to the upper chest. BANG. One to his forehead. Mouth still twisted in the haunting smirk he collapses beside his victim.
That same crack of gunpowder being ignited inside the barrel turns my head into a reggae man's concert performing on a pair of bongos. Strong hand curls around my upper arm, frightening me. I hear myself distantly let out a scream before another hand wraps around my gaping mouth.
"Shhh. Kai, it's me." Jax. It's Jax holding me still. I forgot he was standing with me. I fall silent with him still holding me. His eyes filled with sheer panic reflected my own, but somehow he remains calm as he speaks. "We need to get out of the open, start moving. Are you able to do that?" Releasing my arm he takes a step back.
"I think so, but what about them? We have to help them, Jax."
"You can't help anyone until we know what this thing is Kai." I nod my agreement even though all I wanted was to help the young mother all alone on the blood-soaked street. "Let's go."
With slight hesitation, I turn away from the massacre around the corner, and both of us quickly move down the alleyway. Silently I pray, please forgive me for not doing more. Swiping away the last remaining tears I shake off the trauma, for now, I will deal with it later. Running side by side I try to only focus on the route leading home. Please let my family be alright, I can't take any more death today.