Crucible
By Josh Isaacs
Copyright 2013 Josh Isaacs
Journal Entry: January 12th, 2014
I finally decided to start a journal. Nadia always kept one of her own and asked me to start one, too. She had several unused notepads lying around in case I decided to start one. And here it is. Amidst this plague, the words shall fall on paper instead of ears. It's been a few weeks since all this started, but better late than never to start one. God knows how I miss her, but my longing for her seems to be diminishing day-by-day. That scares me more than death itself. I don't want to lose her. I don't want to forget her or not be lost without her.
It's been about three weeks since the initial outbreak. We were given hope in the beginning, that they were working on a cure. But it spread so fast that they quarantined the entire city before they completed their work. It was supposed to be only two days until the cure was developed. That sense of hope quickly diminished and we knew they had abandoned us, left us to die here. But we do not die. We continue living, just as we did before, only a little differently now.
“Two days,” they said. “Two days,” and they would have solved it all, or so they told us. Either they lied or they were misguided. I tend to lean towards the latter. Two days and she would still be here. Two blasted days! If they had figured it out, Nadia wouldn't have . . . Well, she would still be alive.
They were wrong, wrong, wrong! I trusted them—we trusted them. We were told to stay where we were. That wasn't because the threat was nullified, it was to quarantine us! We were a plague that spread through sores, and this city was the finger in which we festered. That's how they saw it at least. That's how they slept at night, convinced we were monsters, and that this city, this infected finger, needed to have the circulation cut off from it to keep the infection from spreading. Eventually the finger would rot and fall away, much like this city has. What makes them think they wouldn't be better off if they existed as we now do? I'm just fine. We're just fine. We're just different now. We're not evil, we're exactly as we were, just like them, aside from . . .
Rust. It was the key the entire time. If they had found a way to force our bodies to make iron, they'd have found the cure. From a scrape in the paint on a car, perhaps, left to sit with the humidity in the air until it began to oxidize. Perhaps a fish hook used in saltwater? I don't know the specifics of how it all started -and they don't either!- but they left us to rot off like that was the answer. That did nobody any good. Now she's gone. Now everything we've built is gone. A half-million individual lives, each completely unique unto itself, gone. The work of nearly a dozen generations, building this city, untold numbers of memories, hardships, successes and failures; all to nothing as soon as something goes wrong.
I still remember. I will always remember, even if they think I'm just a mindless monstrosity walking aimlessly in search of . . . What? What do they even think I'm in search of? What do they think at all? I'm here, I'm alive, I'm thinking and considering and contemplating. It's they who have stopped thinking. It's they who have become the mindless, the brutes, the evil. Not me—not us. They are the ones who have surrendered their humanity. And for what? Safety? Safety is a lie. Safety is an illusion we convince our children of. “There are no monsters,” we tell them. I guess the definition of a monster is simply relative to how evil the one trying to convince another of safety is. To them, monsters are demented and deformed figures out for blood. Is that really so bad? All we want is blood once more—not theirs but our own. Is that so malevolent? My idea of a monster is the perfectly groomed, perfectly symmetrical, the one who sees anything unlike itself to be a threat not only to its own existence but to the existence of others like themselves. The bigots who pretend they are always in the right, the absolute authority on good and evil. They are human. What do they know of good and evil? They slaughter thousands of their brothers and sisters every day, attack other countries for no reason or for a false ideal, wage wars that kill millions . . . They are the monsters. We simply want to survive, they just want to kill each other off. Truly, we are the peaceful ones. Our plague offers naught but cohesion.
It was not always this way. Two days, that's all it would take. Sit at home, watch your neighbors turn, your family collapse and writhe in their own regurgitated mess on the floor as an iridescent green-tinted black cream oozed from their noses, ears and . . . Oh, God, their eyes become vomitories. It came from their eyes almost as much as the mouth; I suspect this because the eyes have the closest link to the brain of any facial orifice. They said it grew in the brain and spinal column, like meningitis. The end result wasn't so bad, but the transition was worse than any nightmare conceivable. Some didn't survive it at all. Children and the elderly were the most unfortunate victims, and only but a few of them didn't survive the conversion.
Two days was not how long it would take them to solve it—two days was the incubation period. It spread like spores, much in the same way they perceived the city. First came the black gangrene sores and, within hours, they would burst and become as anemochores, spread by the wind. Two days later, the gangrene had flooded the red marrow centers and, ultimately, the spinal cord and brain stewed in the decayed oils until it had incubated long enough and was finally expelled, creating another form of airborne bacteria. It had taken less than a week for the entire population of this town to contract it.
She had not been one of the unfortunates. She had been the victim of televised and printed monsters playing games with our heads. They had many of us convinced that we would cause our friends and families to be destroyed. That the purge needed to be initiated from within. Yes, they truly are the monsters, not we. I remember seeing her in her rocking chair, caressing the thirty-eight I'd bought her before this all started. The look in her eyes . . . The liquid onyx swimming around her silver irises. She looked at me with those eyes. She only said two things when her eyes met mine.
“It's okay.”
That was the last thing she said. They say people who kill themselves hesitate. That's another lie they've fed their mindless masses. In one quick, fluid movement, she pressed the barrel to her temple and . . . It was more than a little ironic that the firearm I'd bought her to protect herself with had been the instrument of her demise. In a way, I guess it brought her absolute security. How her final words haunt me. They no doubt will forever. No man should have to see that. I wanted to wrap my hands around the throat of her killer and spit in their pallid face as they went limp, choking on their own collapsed esophagus. But there was no one. Her killer wasn't corporeal, it was intangible. It was a thought planted in her head to make herself a hero. She was helping kick-start the purge and thus saving humanity. But in her sacrifice for the greater good, she had proved herself the humane and those that asked it of her the inhumane. Martyrs die for a cause, not because someone tells them they're a disease.
So now I'm left to suffer the silence of a thoughtless death, a nightmarish memory, and a hollow heart. I wish we were as they say we are—it would have spared us all a lot of pain, torment and self-loathing. It would spare the few of them that still maintain some lingering thread of their humanity the same torture. Wishful thinking had long-since been a futile effort, though. We are cursed in their eyes; we have an irreversible, incurable disease and we were stuck with that. It was all quite surreal to me at first. How had I been one of the half-million out of the billions now inhabiting this earth to contract this plague? And of the untold number of those who have lived before and will live after, I am of this accursed half-million. What were the odds? It didn't make sense. At times, especially after her passing, it seemed like I was watching everything happen through a spectator's eyes, merely observing and not actually a part of it. It felt as if I could wake up at any moment, relieved that it was
all a dream. But it's not. I've one life to live, and this is what's come of it.
I'm starting to feel hungry again. God, help me, my stomach is churning. I need iron. That one craving that snuffs out all others, that one that is never truly satisfied. I never knew it before. Now I am as the bovine to minerals, craving those that I lack. Perhaps I simply lack that one mineral? Rust, oxidization of metal, it's just . . . Indescribable. The desire—no, the need for it is so overwhelming it gets hard to see straight. It's as crucial to us as water. Is that somehow connected to our skin becoming so pale? This yearning for iron has been the end of all others. No longer do we want companionship,