Today was the beginning of a dark and haunting time. I
woke up to the sound of the alarms going off, this wasn’t a drill, it was the
real thing. We’d been preparing for this moment for the past two years,
reinforcing the walls of the house with steel plates, buying weapons, jogging –
I hate jogging. We had to build up stamina if we were going to survive. We even
bought equipment for underground gardening, but only finished setting it up
yesterday. The bunker is full of every type of canned food, rice, beans, pasta
and dried produce you can imagine. No one knows how long we’ll last. No one
knows if we will survive. And no one knows if this will ever pass, if we’ll
ever succeed, if we’ll ever find a cure, if we’ll ever stop this madness. The
only thing I know is that we’re ready, the best we can be. How much can you
really prepare for the end of the world anyway?
At least we knew it was coming. At least our city has
been preparing us. A lot of places called it a hoax, refused to prepare. Others
fled, as if leaving this country would protect them. As if there weren’t
similar outbreaks elsewhere. As if the accidental leak of information to the
press was a group of conspiracy nerds who’d watched too many movies and read
too many comic books.
But this wasn’t a joke. I saw it, I saw it with my own
eyes.
My uncle had been taken. He had volunteered for the
vaccine. He was trying to be a hero. My dad told me we don’t need any heroes,
just fighters. He was into that sort of thing, telling me cliché advice. Maybe
he was right though, because my uncle wasn’t a hero – He was dead. They allowed
us to tell him goodbye, through Plexiglas, wearing a hazmat suit. He saw us and
I thought he recognized us and I wanted to cry, tell them they’d made a mistake,
that he was fine, that he just needed time to recover. But then he started walking toward the glass,
staring at us, as if we were animals, prey. He moved quicker than I expected
and when he was right next to the glass I could see the boils forming on his
skin. A few of them had ruptured and the skin was red and raw. His clothes were
bloody. No one bothered to clean him up before we came to visit. He breathed
deeply, wheezing, and put his hand on the glass. Thud. I will never forget that
sound, and when I hear my older brother in the attic above us, and his boots
thud across the floor, I see my uncle’s hand on the Plexiglass. I see his
stare. It was like staring into a void, a void of emotion, a void of life. That
image, that thud, it haunts my dreams. It motivates me. It keeps me jogging.
And today… today it begins.
