| courier |
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| there must have been a point when you realized - maybe not at first. you probably thought it was just a bad cough, but you'd had them before. soon enough, like all colds, it went away, and you thought nothing more of it until people around you started to die. maybe it was only people you had casual contact with in the beginning: the mailman, the clerk at the convenience store, the ticket taker at the movie theater but soon enough a pattern emerged, and when your coworkers and friends started to call off sick, and when they didn't return in a week, a month, ever - surely it must have struck you as odd. maybe you lied to yourself to avoid the guilt you told yourself the illness was becoming an epidemic that it must be happening everywhere, that surely you weren't to blame. the wheels of bureaucracy began to turn as the list of the dead grew and grew, and one day when you were relaxing at home, the men in hazmat suits arrived and asked you to join them - but it wasn't a request. you protested, you said surely there was a mistake. you believed it was a conspiracy, that they needed a scapegoat but you had no choice, and you were taken to a small cell where you had no phone, no computer, no contact with anyone aside from the staff in protective gear who gave you your medication. your every breath was filtered and filtered and filtered again. you could not even shower for fear of contaminating the water with your tainted cells and now, you are a secret, a number, forgotten because all those who could remember you no longer exist. even your house was destroyed. welcome to the rest of your life. |
