His tan sweating face cracked into a smile revealing his slowly
yellowing teeth. Looking at himself in the mirror, his grin widens and he
remarks in his mind, It happens to everyone these days,
even to a sixteen year old.
His thoughts ebb and swell lazily like
ocean waves in the burning sunlight.
To think that I can even remember the days back at
school when my friends sat writing hurriedly over frustrated garbles of
carbon and wood. What would they have done if they had known of the
sickness?
Very few people knew of it now, but then again, there were
only a very few people left alive through this devastation. His smile
turns to a grimace as he looks out the window at the charred ruins of his
neighbors' houses and the dry sun beaten dirt that once held lush fertile
lawns. It's odd to think that something so destructive
has a cure...
His mind drifts to pictures of desperate merchants pleading on TV to get viewers to buy their false cures in a vain hope to raise enough money to buy themselves one of the illegal blackmarket cures that worked. Most people escaped their greedy clutches, because they knew only the government had the cure, and it was unwilling to part with even a drop of it for 'security reasons' without tremendous bribes.
Only the rich survive this,
he thinks bitterly,
remembering his friends' and neighbors' cries of agony. Most had screamed
for days before a rebel militiaman had gotten the courage to shoot them
and put them out of their misery.
I even burned their houses to prevent the
spread.
He remembers the hope that the dancing flames had given him as
they licked the walls. It hadn't worked. He knew the signs; he knew that
he had it; he knew he wouldn't be able to move because of the pain in less
then a week. After that he would have weeks more before he disintigrated
so far that his lungs collapsed and he died.
He retrieves the bottle he had carefully prepared and hidden months ago, just for this possibility.
I won't die that way. Never! Better by my own hand
than that....
He lifts the lethally laced bottle to his parched lips, savoring the cool drink before his vision darkens and he slumps lifeless to the cluttered floor.