The sickness and the cure.

The heat was stifling, even in the abandoned concrete sarcophagus that was once a thriving supermarket. Sophie hadn’t been here for long, but long enough to realise that something didn’t feel quite right about the place. It felt like the walls had a story, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. The afternoon sun beams filtered through the dusty air, casting shadows onto the smooth marble-look tiles, as Sophie took another step into one of the aisles. The dust crunched under her size 5 runners and for a moment she glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye. The Supermarket aisle was mostly empty shelving, some intact on the racking, and some strewn across the dirty floor. Broken potato-chip packets, miscellaneous liquid stains and dispersed flour framed boot prints fleeing the scene, now ghost-like in the absence of a body. She slowly crept deeper into the isle in the hope of finding some sort of food. Supplies were scarce in this world since the cataclysm, and there was always someone, or something searching for the same things she was.

Beads of sweat began to form on her dirty forehead as she approached one of the racks. Sophie spotted a few cans of corn on a shelf, left by the looters for better selections she assumed, and she eagerly took them and shoved them deep within her canvas backpack. As she did, her foot touched something small and hard. She peered down to see what looked like a small heart-shaped locket. She hesitated for a moment, then scooped it up and plunged it down into her pack with the corn. The pack was getting full, but she knew everything that was in it, and it all had a purpose. Spare clothing, rope, knives and forks, 2 plastic bottles, tape, a pack of 6 face masks…. Just then in the distance behind her she heard a ‘crunch’. Sophie spun and froze, instantly pulled from the thoughts of her backpack. She tilted her head and listened. Silence. Quiet as a mouse, Sophie slowly adjusted her pack with her new found cans and locket inside. ‘Crunch’, there it was again. It sounded like a footstep, a big one. The sound echoed through the empty corridors of the abandoned Supermarket like a bell. She didn’t want to wait around to find out who or what was making the noise, and began to edge her way towards the doors. ‘crunch-crunch-crunch’, the footsteps were getting faster. She sped up. A deathly scream pierced the hot, stale air. It knew she was there, and it was coming towards her. She was running now past the empty racks and broken cereal advertisements. Sophie rounded the corner as fast as her little legs would take her. There was the door. ‘Aaaaahhhhhhh’ another sickly scream came forth, reverberating through her bones. She swung her head back as she ran, and then she saw it. It was a Berserker. Once a man, but now something else. Changed by the world, the sickness and humanity’s hopeful cures gone wrong. It ran with a trance-like fury, overcome by pure rage. It had traits of a man; skull, bones, muscle and skin, but grotesquely distorted from the mutations caused by the cure, and it’s constant exposure to conflict. It had sinuous, vascular muscles, sunken valleys on it’s flesh from gouges and tears, unnaturally healed but still present. It had the remnants of clothing, dirty and shit stained, bloody and broken. It was running straight towards her with manic, hungry eyes. Her heart was pounding as she scrambled for the seized double supermarket doors. ‘Aaaaahhhhhhhh!’, it screamed again, lustfully angry for death, reaching with it’s bloody fingers. Sophie threw herself through the slightly open door and sprinted over the road.

Her lungs burned as she ran, too terrified to look back. ‘Bang!’ it must have hit the door. She rounded the street corner as she heard the glass break behind her, and she hoped to hell it didn’t see which way she went. She looked down as she ran, one foot in-front of the next. Sophie was a good runner, and had done a lot of it since the world was lost. “One foot in-front of the next”, she told herself as the screams of the thing grew distant behind her. She stayed in the shadows cast by the derelict buildings of the little seaside town, and ran past the once grassy and well-manicured round-about, now overgrown by weeds. She was surprised by the beautiful purple weed flowers, and thought for a moment how beauty can come from things we least expect.

After a good 15 minutes she slowed down. She was alone again. Sophie perched herself on a small brick fence of a terrace-style house casting shadows from the waning afternoon sun. It would be dark soon, and she had to get back home. She took off her backpack and untied the straps. Pulling the plastic water bottle from within, she took a deep drink of clean, cold water. The bottle clicked as her hands gripped the thin plastic shell. She checked herself for a moment, aware of the noises she was making and admonishing herself for not keeping quiet. She was good at going unnoticed, being quiet. Her old friends would call her ‘Mouse’ from time to time because of how small and quiet she was. Who would have thought that her flaws from the past could be her saviours in the future? In this world you have to be quiet you see. Those ‘things’ were good at hearing and they were relentless. The only way you could stay alive was to be good at being quiet, and to be good at running. She learned early on that they had developed an aptitude for anaerobic exertion, and although they were fast at sprinting, they were no good at long distance. Her eyes wandered as she caught her breath. Sophie was in Allcott, it was a once upper-class part of town. The houses were big and boasted long drive-ways and double stories. She used to help her dad deliver packages not far from here. He was a delivery driver, amongst other things before the cataclysm, and she would love joining him in his big white van after school for the afternoon deliveries. Dad was dead now. She returned the cap to the mouth of the bottle and screwed it back on. Careful not to make any unnecessary noise, she returned the bottle to her backpack and stood up. As she put her arms through the khaki straps of the canvas bag, she gave one final look at the empty houses and began the slow walk back to her home.

It was dusk when Sophie opened the door to her little home. It was nothing more than an old maintenance room next to the Blackcliffe cellular tower, forgotten by the hordes and survivors of the town. She remembers the night she stumbled across it, crying in the darkness and walking nowhere along the service road on the outskirts of town. Her Dad had been torn apart trying to save her from the Berserkers and she was left with nothing, running through the streets with tears streaming down her face. She was lost and alone, stumbling in the dark, one foot in-front of the next. She remembers seeing the tower after what must have been hours of walking in the pitch black. It’s silhouette subtle and equally black against the starless night sky. It had a single dirt track winding up to the small besser block building, and was surrounded by dry bushland for miles. As she walked in, she lit the make-shift lantern by the door, hung her backpack on the hook and flopped herself down on her old arm chair in the centre of the room. She scanned her little home, and as she did she felt a sense of pride over the place that she had made for herself. In the midst of all of what was wrong in this world, she loved her little sanctuary. She was a creator, and an introvert, and at times she mused how well suited she was for a life like this. Resourcefulness was life, and she was always good at being resourceful. From an empty brick room, she had built her home from scavenging throughout the small town, from a galvanized bucket shower, to a haybale bed, everything was made with her small tired hands, one piece at a time.

The town of Blackcliffe wasn’t extraordinary, it was perched by the coast and before the cataclysm was predominantly home to retirees and young families looking for a sea-change. It began in Blackcliffe like it did everywhere. The sickness started off overseas, sometimes fatal and sometimes not. It spread here in time, and in their haste the governments of the world developed a cure. Over the years, the sickness evolved, and so did the cure with it. Once the flood gates were open, DNA manipulation was inevitable. The world conquered the sickness, but at what cost? The majority of the population had the cure before we knew what it was, and like the sickness, it mutated. After a few years people began to have mental breakdowns, border-line psychosis and dramatic violent displays. They discovered that the body was consumed by the sickness, but the cure rebuilt the body until the mind fell apart. The result was the birth of the end. The population consumed itself within weeks. The streets ran red with the blood of the Berserker fights. Some of us survived by fleeing the cities and towns, unsubscribing to the hopeful promises of the cure. People changed. The world changed. It became like the movies we hoped it wouldn’t, desolate and gruesome. Sophie didn’t weep anymore though; she’d cried a pool for days and drowned in her misery already. She rose from it a new disciple of life and loneliness. She knew she had to push on, if not for herself then for some distant legacy of life forgotten. One foot in-front of the next.

Sophie peeled herself from her chair, and walked over to her backpack. She opened the straps economically, found the cans of corn, and went to pull them out. As she did, her fingers brushed something cold and hard inside. She jumped for a moment, unsure of what it could be, then realised it must have been the small heart-shaped locket she found on the supermarket floor. She slowly pulled it out, along with the cans of corn. She rubbed it gently between her fingers, and noticed three letters engraved on the back. ‘JKW’ it said. She bent down and placed the cans on the hard concrete floor as she held the locket in her dirty hands. It was small and shabby, but somehow beautiful in it’s own way, reflecting the light in a dull but somewhat hypnotic glow. “I wander who’s this was”, she thought to herself. She passed the thin gold-look chain around her neck and gave it one last rub before standing up with the cans. Holding the corn in the flickering lantern light she marvelled apathetically at the images of juicy golden kernels on their hard exterior. ‘Hmph’, she huffed and took them over to her make-shift kitchen near the window. Pulling a knife from the bench, she began the process of stabbing little holes in the lid until she could pry it open. She found a spoon on the bench, and flopped again on her chair with the corn in one hand, and the metal spoon in the other.