Vector

Content Warnings: extreme gore, illness, mental illness, self-hatred, implied/referenced suicide, major character death, existentialism, mass extinction, repulsive language and imagery

They bring the condemned here sometimes. Or rather they condemn them by bringing them here. It doesn’t matter either way. They come but they’ll never leave. They come and then they’re gone. They come and they’ll never come back.

I don’t think it’s ethical, but then I’ve never thought execution was ethical. Only at least execution tries to be painless. I wish I could try to be painless but it’s out of my control, or maybe it isn’t and I just haven’t figured it out yet. I hope I figure it out soon. I can’t stand their screams. That’s selfish, right? I’m not the one in pain. I’m not the one who writhes for ten hours at least as their insides run outside and their eyeballs putrefy and their flesh sloughs off and across the floor in rivulets. I just sit there and watch. I feel like I should say something sometimes but there’s nothing I can say that will make it better and a million things I could say that would make it worse, and I can’t make things worse. That’s not right, I could make things worse, I could make everything worse very easily, but I won’t, I swear I won’t, I swear it, I promise.

After they all die the sprinklers wash their soft tissue into the drains and I gently pile their skeletons into the chute that sends them to be incinerated. They used to send people in to clean up the bodies, people dressed in hazmat suits, but then the people went home and died and their parents died and their siblings died and their spouses died and their pets died and their little children died and that’s when they sent a man in to install the sprinkler system and then he went home and died.

That’s how they learned that it was only the four walls of the room that could keep the sickness in. Lead lined, six feet thick, airtight. That’s how they learned just how careful they needed to be.

One day I got out of bed and took my gym bag and went to the swimming pool. It was my only regular workout, going to the pool for half an hour twice a week, three times if I could fit it in, and it was the only form of exercise I liked.

I changed into my swimming costume and walked over to the pool, the slow lane end, and I eased myself inside and let the cool water envelope me. Then I started swimming, slowly, back and forth, not caring enough to push myself that day, and I’d been swimming for around ten minutes before I heard the first person vomit.

The room I am in is in a compound and the compound used to be located near a small town. I say used to because then everyone got sick. At first everyone was confused but then it made perfect sense – the people who work here (and there are a lot of people who work here) are only allowed to work one hour shifts before being sent back to their homes far away, but the people who lived here lived here all the time. When all of this was made apparent people complained about being forced to leave the only place they’d ever called home, but in the end they didn’t need to. They were boarded up inside their homes, and those who didn’t die of the sickness starved.

Now even if it weren’t for the sickness no one would want to live here. All of the grass wilted and died, and all of the trees wilted and died, and all of the small animals curled up in their nests and burrows and warrens and died. I’ve never seen it, but I’m told that it looks post apocalyptic. Like something terrible and irreversible has happened, which it has.

I am something terrible. I am something irreversible.

The first time could almost be overlooked. The second time raised eyebrows but not alarm. The third time established a pattern, and that was when the panic set in.

We were all told in no uncertain terms to leave the pool, and by that point no one wanted to be in it anyway, not when strands of vomit floated serenely on its surface, not when it happened a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh time, not when people began to notice their eyes turning yellow and their bladders failing.

I walked home in a daze – I’d taken a bus to get there but decided to forgo it on the way back so it took me over an hour to get back to my shared house and shove myself back into my room, waiting for symptoms to appear.

They never did. Not for me.

Three times a day food is slotted into my room. I used to eat it very slowly, as it was all I had to amuse myself, but lately I’ve been needing to glut it down before it rots in my hands.

So I’ve found other ways to amuse myself. I make shapes out of the mildew that grows on the ceiling. I sing songs to myself to see how many lyrics I can remember. Whenever I fail to eat my food in time, or if I’m just not hungry, I make sculptures out of the sodden mold that remains.

Mostly I wait for the time that I assume is 10am (because I lost track of time who knows how long ago) because that’s when Denise comes on shift. Her shift is 10am-11am and her job is to monitor me. Other people also have this job but she’s the only one that talks to me. She compliments my sculptures and helps me fill in the gaps in the lyrics and she tells me what’s going on outside. It’s never good. It’s always another war, another legislation, another animal we’ll never see again. I hate it but its reality. Its real and it keeps me sane. Its real and I need to hear it. I need to hear it. I need to know. I can’t change it but I need to know.

I started following the news once I got home, because it was all over the local news, and then the national news. They sent people to check the water but they found nothing. Then people who’d been in the building but had never entered the pool got sick and they checked the air and they found nothing. Then people who’d been nowhere near the building got sick, random people, people from all over the city, and then they were truly stumped.

I watched news clips on my laptop, pillow clutched to my chest, stomach empty but too afraid to leave my room to get food. Plus this was when I still thought I might get sick so I thought that I didn’t want to eat anything in case I just brought it back up. People were worried but not despairing because no one had died yet and most of the symptoms were more embarrassing than painful, but they still needed to know what this sickness was, where it came from, how it could be cured.

By now they’ve answered the first two questions. Not the third. Still working on it. Always working on it.

They showed a video of a woman in hospital and I thought she looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place her. Normally I would’ve dismissed it but I had nothing else to do and needed a distraction so I kept replaying the clip trying to figure out who she was. Did I know her from a show? Was she a worker at a store I frequented? A course mate?

I figured it out eventually, when I heard my downstairs housemate start to cough. She was my bus driver.

“It’s not looking good outside,” Denise tells me one day.

“I didn’t want to tell you. I thought there was no point. But you always want to know things, and in the end it didn’t feel fair to keep it from you.

“People are getting sick. All over the world. Animals too. Crops are failing. Trees are rotting where they stand. Everything is dying. Its… well, you know what it is. It’s the sickness. We don’t know how it went worldwide, but it did. Now everyone’s got it. I’ve probably got it too, but they think the people who work here built up a bit of a resistance to it. Not much though. We’ll start showing symptoms any day now.

“But it’s gonna be ok! They’re working on it 24/7, I swear. They’ll find a cure any day now, and you’ll be able to leave, and everyone will be ok. It’s all gonna be ok. It’ll all be ok.”

It wasn’t me she was trying to convince. I am beyond convincing.

“How many dead?” I ask.

She hesitates.

“You don’t need to know,” she says.

“I do,” I say.

She hesitates.

“… half of the population,” she says. “Probably more by now. It’s hard to keep up with the death toll.”

I nod.

I wish I could say I handed myself in once I realised the sickness was in me. I didn’t. They figured out the link eventually and broke down my door right as I was about to kill myself.

That’s not right. I’d told myself I was going to kill myself the moment the news reported the first death, a little five year old who’d been heading to a birthday party on the bus, and I’d meant it at the time. But then I was standing on a chair and staring through noose I’d hastily made using a belt and eternity stretched before me. I’d never hated myself more. I’d killed a child, had probably killed more, would certainly kill more before the day was out, and yet I was scared to die. But I was scared. My body has never been strong, and its not stronger than my fear.

They talked me down by telling me they needed my body alive if they wanted the best chance of singling out the pathogen I was hosting. My knowledge of biology is shaky at best, but I grasped at the opportunity to save my own life unselfishly. I stepped down from the brink of death and came willingly and all the people who took me to the compound they’d built then went home and died.

There’s no way to kill myself here other than starvation and I just keep telling myself that they still need my body so it would be selfish to die though I barely believe it anymore. I always wonder what could have happened if I had died. Maybe everyone would have been saved. Maybe my corpse would’ve leached my sickness into the ground and everyone would die anyway. I don’t know which option scares me more.

I am something terrible.

They only feed me twice a day now. Only once sometimes. Either they’ve noticed my appetite going down or – more likely – they simply don’t have the food anymore.

I don’t care much. I barely eat. I barely sleep. I just think.

Denise asked me very nicely if I could stop singing one day. If I could keep my mouth as shut as possible while eating. If could respond to her with my body language, not my voice.

“Just in case,” she said.

I comply. I keep thinking.

Everyone is dying. Everything is dying. Everything is ending. Everything is sick.

I am sickness.

Denise tells me the scientists are working themselves to the bone. Literally. A top epidemiologist was found slumped over her microscope, her slide grasped by skeletal fingers and marred beyond recognition by congealed flesh and blood. Denise tells me this and her voice shakes. Denise has never told me about her family. Denise does not need to tell me what has become of them.

I keep thinking.

The mattress they gave me is now stained with sweat and in the beginning stages of putrefaction and disgusting but I lie on it anyway. I think I don’t deserve this. I think I should be lying on the cold hard floor instead. I don’t sleep because I’m scared that I’ll die in my sleep, and I hope that I can die in my sleep so I don’t have to do it myself.

Denise tells me that wars have ground to a halt and legislations are no longer being made and animals are no longer being hunted to extinction because the sickness got them first. I am officially all that is wrong with the world.

Denise tells me that it will takes years for humanity to recover from this. Decades. Centuries. If they recover at all. She doesn’t say this, but it’s what I think.

I am something irreversible.

As they led me out of my house I saw the clammy and resentful faces of my housemates watch me go. They knew they were dying. They knew there was no cure. They knew it was because of me.

Even then the street seemed quieter than it usually was. People watched them lead me to the van at a distance, not knowing then that distance wouldn’t save them. Their faces were shocked and scared. Scared because people were dying. Shocked because the perpetrator had been their neighbour all along. Scared because they’d shaken my hand, knocked on my front door and greeted me at the threshold, eaten the pastries I’d made when I’d accidentally doubled the recipe. Scared because their children were standing in their gardens. Scared because the monster that was killing them looked like them.

They sat me down and told me they were taking me to a safe place. Of course it didn’t actually end up being safe – the townspeople told us that, and then the whole world cried it out – but they didn’t know that at the time, and anyway they’d all be dead within 24 hours so they’d never have to think about it again.

I feel jealous of them sometimes, and then I hate myself even more.

After I don’t know how long of silence the speaker crackles to life.

“It’s you,” Denise croaks.

Limply I turn my head from where I lie. I’m weak from hunger and even if I wasn’t there’s no point in moving. I stare at the camera that blinks in the corner of the room.

“They’ve been searching for years,” says Denise. “Scouring every cell we could safely get from you. Dying so that they can find whatever it is that’s wrong with you.”

I blink slowly. My eyelids stick together with sweat and crusted discharge. It’s a humongous effort to pull them apart again.

“They looked for bacteria. And they didn’t find any so they looked for viruses. And they still didn’t find any so they looked for fungi. Nothing. There’s nothing. Nothing’s wrong with you except you.”

She gurgles.

“It’s you,” she says. “It’s you. It’s you.”

She repeats it until her throat collapses and she can breathe no more.

I don’t know how many people are left. I don’t want to think that I’m the last person alive but on the other hand it seems only fitting.

But I know that I’m dying. A part of me wishes I weren’t, that I couldn’t, so I could know I was never human in the first place, but I am a human, and I’m dying, and I am the only thing that’s wrong with me.

I’m scared.

Everything feels so cold and everything is over and I can’t fix it and I never could. Everyone is dead. Everything is dead. Nothing is sick anymore because everything is dead.

I’m so scared.

I’m going to die and no one will be left to mourn me. I’m going to die and there won’t even be maggots to eat my corpse. I’m going to die and then what?

I’m scared.

I’m scared because I’m going to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to live anymore. I want to wake up. I can’t wake up. I want help. There’s no one to help me. I want to be saved. I am beyond saving.

Everyone is dead. Everyone is dead. I’m going to die and everyone is dead and where are we going? Is it a nice place we’re going to? Is it a bad place? Is it nothing? Have I condemned everything to nothing forever?

Please don’t let there be nothing. Please don’t let it end. I’m so scared. Please let them be ok. Please god let them be ok.

Please let it all be ok. Please let it all end up ok.