Apocalyptic

The end is here. Stay indoors. Schooling and social functions have been cancelled. Office related businesses will now work remotely, and on and on the news went. The Mortem Virus had sprung on the world like a sudden swarm of murder hornets, plunging their stingers into anyone within reach. Everyone was susceptible, none more so than the other, and everyone had a reason to fear for their lives. We believed death was the worst of it. We were wrong.

When the breaking news of animated corpses filled our screens, the carnage that followed was unprecedented. The dead were walking, walking and preying on the healthy and the living. Groups began to form in the Commonwealth, designed by those who had been entirely convinced that our government had hid the extent of the disease from the general populace, and had operated quietly underground to protect themselves, and leave the rest of us damned to the virus’ rampage.

The unhinged of us convinced that the world was coming to the end the news so often proclaimed, had declared a purge of our own, where the rules didn’t apply, and the law was now totally extinct. Armed forces of a different caliber attempted to reel us in, the Street Sweepers we called them, as they too failed to eradicate the troubled through lawful means, using force that would have, at one time, be deemed tyrannical. We fought back, listening to those on the other side of our screens, their words of assurance like gospel. We fought for them, for the people.

Only, it had all been a lie.

There was no virus. There never has been.

The dead never walked among us. But we, in some sickened twist of irony, had carried on with our destruction and devotion to the media’s agenda like zombies ourselves, so convinced we were of an upcoming redemptive age that would never come. In our panic, we decimated astronomical numbers of people struck “ill,” believing their transformation into a walking plague was imminent.

Lies. All lies.

“But why?” I asked Raheem, my dying best friend lying beside me, after our narrow escape from the Street Sweepers. “Why would they do this to us?”

“Because they knew they could, Emy. Because they’ve been doing it for decades, and no one’s ever said a word against them.”

“Don’t believe everything you see on TV,” my mother’s voice chided me from beyond the grave, a distant memory from my childhood. I had only rolled my eyes at her back then, so sure I’d been that this was only another meager thing every parent had to tell their kid at least once. Her warning had been almost laughable.

But God, it was never supposed to be like this! Reputable news organizations, magazine outlets, reporter after reporter, had been telling us for months that the end was near. They showed us graphs of rising cases of the Mortem Virus, laid out live video feeds of the dead being wheeled to be burned, their ashes buried like fertilizer into the ground. They told us to prepare ourselves for an upcoming pandemic. And when it hit us, it wasn’t long before the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warned us that surgical masks would no longer be enough. The essentials in the stores disappeared, and then gas mask prices skyrocketed, those with high-quality respirators gone in a matter of hours.

“Raheem, we need to get out of here, we need to get you some help.” I reached for his shoulder when he didn’t respond, and shook him until the tear on his sleeve unveiled his dimmed skin, cold and rigid under my touch.

My chest expanded with the air wheezing through my mask, and I reached up to tear it off my face, expelling a scream that threatened to split my throat in half. I didn’t stop screaming until my voice nearly left me, and my eyes burned against the first rush of fresh air I’d had in days.

Be warned. Be safe. The end is here. That was what they had said. For months and months, our televisions screamed at us, berated us, threatened us, and for what? What had all of this been for? They promised us a better tomorrow.

Lies. All of them lies.

I reached a bloodied hand for my neck, unlatching my sister, Emily’s, heart-shaped locket from where I’d kept it close, and snapped it gently open to unsheathe the smiling faces of my family, the image from a time when we were permitted to live like blissfully unaware fools under the media’s watch. In the faux pandemic’s wake, an act of arson from a crazed neighbor took out our house, and my parents, in one sweep, leaving my younger sister under my care, her treasured locket gripped tightly in her tiny hand.

“If we just do what they say, and follow their rules, we’ll be okay!” she had said to me, her eyes dripping against her pale cheeks.

Lies. My family died still believing those lies.

But the truth eventually got out. Someone unnamed, with enough mercy and a strong enough moral code, had informed the world of the lies, of what they’d done, leaving us with our faith in tatters. We trusted them, but they lied.

And now, what was next? I took a crowbar to the common area’s television set, ripped the wiring infusing the radio to the intercom, and waited for my sanity to return. Had I ever had it? Had I ever really thought for myself? I then moved Raheem’s body to his cot out in the garden, swearing an oath to my friend, the one I swore to Emily before Street Sweepers gunned her down just a month before.

Redemption would come. Be it by bared arms or by blood. It would come. And I would either join our people’s ranks into an avenging battleground against Big Brother, or I would lead those ranks myself into a better tomorrow.