I winced as I heard the crowd scream. My eyes saw that the signs were in the air, handles slick with blood and pus from the welts and blisters on my fellow student’s hands. There were a steady thousand of us, and about a hundred or so of them. Of course, those bastards were heavily armed and not half-dead from the fucking plague like we were….
___
It had all started around two and a half weeks ago, according to the Port Pale news. Some stupid asshole of a country (I’m pretty sure it was Russia, but my memory hasn’t been that great recently, and who the fuck can blame me?) bombed Los Angles with some kind of germ and nerve gas. The thing that fucked you over was that symptoms didn’t show up for a week, and it took another three weeks to die. By then, you’d infected everyone else you’d come into contact with by even goddamn BREATHING on them. World’s a screwed up place when being breathed on is a death sentence, right?
It had hit the collage about two weeks after the bombing, with the first reports of people becoming seriously ill, and the oh-shit factor of everyone realizing that this wasn’t another cold. Another two days after that, and the reports of people dropping dead in the streets of big cities (with footage at eleven!)began to be reported, and that scared the shit out of everyone, because we all were having some odd fucking cold. The first casualty was Julia West. She just dropped dead in Physics, blood gushing out of her nose, mouth, ears, and a few other places blood shouldn’t come gushing out of. I liked Julia, I had known her quite well (went out with her in Grade 7), and to have her drop dead was a bitch of a shock.
The day after was the day I found my first blister, in my goddamn armpit. It scared the shit out of me, so I asked around. Turned out, everyone else had them (Tom had his in a place blister’s should never be), too. The next day, I found six more blisters, and woke up to cries of dismay and rage from Bryan and Patrick. I got up, my first blister bleeding and hurting like a bitch, and looked out the window.
The main entrance to the campus was blocked off by two large green tanks, with soldiers with what looked like gas masks and flamethrowers on sealing the place off with trucks and Jeeps. As it turned out, we weren’t allowed to leave and as Josh found out, trying to leave got you lit on fire and killed from a distance of twenty feet. That was the day we started making signs and scrounging for weapons….
___
We managed to get outside safely, thank God. We started charging, and I guess Santy and a few of his dealer buddies had guns or something, because I heard the bang! of gunfire coming from our crowd. I couldn’t see that well, but I think a few soldiers went down before an Uzi from our side cranked in. The last thing you could hear for the next several minutes was the roar of massive mounted machineguns as the Army began to fire back. I managed to curl up into a ball beneath the stampede of screaming students. About three minutes later, the machine guns stopped. The silence had seemed ominous. A loudspeaker droned out in a heavily filtered voice: “RETURN TO YOUR CAMPUS! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE! RETURN TO YOUR CAMPUS! STAND WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
I stood up, hands on my head, shifting because I found I was uncomfortable. I was dismayed to find out I had wet myself. I heard the moaning of the wounded, and looked around. There were bodies littering the lawn, blood smeared on the ground. I recognized a few of the dead. My eyes started to blur with tears, which obscured exactly what happened next. All I managed to see was a huge flash of flame, and I fell to the ground, swearing because the flash hurt my eyes and blinded me. I heard someone scream, in a high pitched, cracking voice: “Holy shit, Santy, what did you eat?”
I began to laugh, tears streaming down my face.
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Topic: Writing Stories (Read 10577 times)