The Apocalypse Monologues: Disease

We were in the subway, which was a terrible idea. My mom’s plan was to get us to City Island. She thought it’d be safe there. It wouldn’t be, but we were just looking for direction. We wanted to be told and we wanted to go. The subway platform was heaving, hemorrhaging sweat and fear. The sound was immense. You couldn’t hear the subway trains over pre-panic noise. Imagine: we all feared the touch of strangers and here were three hundred strangers crammed into a space to get onto an even smaller tube that would already have been full of sweaty, fearful strangers screaming to and failing to avoid one another’s touch. The disease spreads through various bodily contact: blood, vomit, spit, semen, shit like that. Sweat. And it spreads rapidly and horrifically. Loss of bodily control. Bleeding out of orifices. And agonizing screams. Howls, really. It’s animalistic. The disease fucks up your throat and nose, so that your vocals change. You don’t sound human, because you’re deforming. The infected seek people. As the disease starts to fuck them all up, they don’t want to be alone. It’s not malice on their part. It’s loneliness. They’ve got no cognitive capabilities. It’s all instinct. And they don’t want to die alone. They want help. So they go to people. And here we all were. A hateful, convulsing mass all doing the wrong thing. No good would come of this. And then the bad came. One of the infected stumbled down the staircase into the platform. There are supposed to be police officers containing the people who are obviously diseased. But, really, the people do a good job of policing the problem themselves. This guy was a mess. Not just from the bleeding out. Not just from the disease, but from the bludgeoning he received from whatever good Samaritans tried to beat him down. They were right behind him. You could hear the howls. The howls of the now-diseased vigilantes silenced the crowd and lit off a panic. But there was nowhere to go. Violence erupted, and the infected rolled their way toward the crowd, pushing against each other, stampeding on each other, climbing over each other. There was a rush to nowhere. The other end of the platform was locked. Dozens of people fell or jumped into the subway tunnels. Falling over each other, crushing one another, third-rail electrocution. Though the sudden noise was alarming, it was no surprise when shots rang out. People had started to conceal handguns. The distance with the gun seemed safer than beating away any of the diseased, unless the wounds sprayed blood on the shooter or anyone unfortunate enough to be close-by. Then a chain reaction would start. The people on the subway platform were shooting to clear a path for themselves, not at the diseased. At fleeing people. And then the subway train arrived. The conductor didn’t plan on breaking. He just planned on speeding by the platform. But the tunnels were full. Of people, healthy and otherwise. The train plowed through, I don’t know, a mass of, what?, a hundred? It sprayed people all over the train, the tunnels, the platform. Just a wave of blood. A mist of infected blood rained down on the riot of fear. It rained massacre. Fuck, the noise. It was like a God damned choir of howls. The infection was spreading. Every heartbeat spread more disease. My mom was screaming. But there was nowhere to go. I yanked the strings on my hoodie, trying futilely to protect my face from any sick. It was useless. My mother turned around toward me and gasped. My sister was on my shoulders, crying. I looked up to try to calm her, and she was painted with a film of gore. Blood was cascading out of her noise and ears, bubbling out of her mouth. She began to screech. Like a monster in chrysalis. She was six-years old. So small. She weighed, I don’t know, fifty pounds. I don’t know. Her body was so small. So small. So light. So light.
I threw her.
I threw her at the infected.
I threw her at the infected and ran.
I ran to the stalled train. Somehow, infected blood got into the train and I could see the process of fear and disease spread. The uninfected were like a steam of gasoline waiting for the fire to catch up to them. I scaled the train and ran down the length of it toward the end. To jump into the tunnels. To get to the surface. To run. To run. To run.

The last few moments of my mother’s life were unimaginable. I saw it. She saw me. She watched me do it. I destroyed Katie. And fled my family. The last thing I remember on my mother’s face was a look of horror as she starred at me, palpable disappointment, shock at betrayal by blood, confused dissonance at who I am versus what I did, before bloody hands dragged her to the ground.
She was screaming my name, before the screams turned to howls.