Episode 20

Episode 20

By Stephen Johnson

He only felt confusion and an unrelenting ache of an absence, of what, he could not tell. The young man walked apprehensively around the small home in a daze and with a slight headache. He had just awoken from a nap at this foreign kitchen table and stumbled to his feet noticing a paper notebook open on the otherwise clean table with a few pages of writing. The writing seemed to be hurried and frantic but looked strangely familiar to him even though he could not remember ever being in this house before. He looked around the small room rubbing his head looking for clues but found only a small drop of blood coming from his left nostril. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt and wondered where the people who owned the house might be. Curious and a little unnerved at not knowing his surroundings, the young man picked up the paper notebook and began reading the scribbled manuscript that went on for a few pages.

If you are reading this, I am sure you are asking why I chose to write this down instead of telling someone about it. Truthfully, I don’t know if there is anyone left to tell this to, so to the reader of this, I hope you are no the last one left. Mainly, I am writing this because I am not sure of how long I will be able to remember it all. I can feel them crawling around up there, in my head, looking around in my mind. The constant feeling of something searching around your thoughts is the ultimate torture. When it all started they said everything would be all right. You believe them because, well, they are the ones we trust, right? The people on the news and the politicians told us to remain calm. The doctors said they had it all figured out and the cure was on the way. Maybe they knew something we all didn’t. I think people just wanted to believe so badly that we could find a cure that they would believe anything. I guess looking back I couldn’t really blame anyone. The clues were there all along: the violence, the killing, the simple, pure evil, human spirit. We just kept trying to pretend that everything would go away and blindly believed what we were told. After all, it really did seem like all of the people we were listening to actually got it right, at least, for a little while anyway. 

At first there really were no symptoms except for the gradual loss of your short-term memory. There was of course some mild fever and headaches but it was the rapid loss of rational thought and memory that quickly ushered in a panic and caused the large cities to devolve into chaos. It started there first and grew rapidly and the first cases of violence broke out soon after. The experts told us it was just an abnormality but when the first advanced cases came in there was a large wave of paranoia. While some of the infected recovered after a short time from the mild memory loss, it was the few advanced cases that had everyone really, really scared.

There were documented reports of some of the infected experiencing what was described as a comatose state where they wandered around aimlessly momentarily forgetting where they were going or what they were supposed to be doing. The most damning thing though was the effects of the memory loss on society and really the inconvenience of it all. The world was suddenly losing its way because we could not remember what was happening. Some of the conspiracy theorists blamed it on the government and some said there was a secret society who wanted to brain wash us all but in the end, I don’t know, maybe we just all end up getting what we really deserve. The doctors had a long technical name for it but everyone just started calling it, The Episode. After a few months of the sickness, Episode 20 caught on as the popular name since it all started around the end of 2020. 

 The news covered the events every night and before long it consumed every minute of every day of our lives. All around the globe people were literally losing their minds and walking around with no purpose. No one recognized each other and people simply lost their ability to remember anything. It wasn’t anyone’s fault but the disease just robbed us of our ability, I guess. 

Just as it seemed that the world would spin out of control, we got news of the “Great Discovery.” The large pharmaceutical giant, Lexpro, had figured it out and the race was on to distribute the cure to everyone. Maybe it was just the way that it was administered that really turned people off at first. To be frank, for me, it was really about the bugs that were injected through the vaccine into our bodies. Let me be a little more detailed in this description, when I say bug, that was what everyone liked to call it, but it was really a tiny living organic microbial nanobot. An extremely small centrally controlled artificial intelligence technology incorporated into a living membrane that no one really understood. It didn’t matter though because we all just lined up to have it injected into us. Truth be told, I think we would have done just about anything to stop the onslaught of Episode 20. I really was afraid of forgetting who I was, who my mom was, all of the things that happened in my life. It didn’t hurt, although, you might think by injecting hundreds of these things into your blood it should hurt but it didn’t feel any different from any other shot I ever had before. The only side effect we were told about was the possible appearance of small amounts of blood from your nose. I never had that but my little brother, John, had a bloody nose for about a week but it stopped relatively quickly and he felt fine afterward. I have to admit, life really did return back to normal and for a while I guess everyone just stopped thinking about Episode 20. I finished high school and started college about three hours away at Mississippi State and after a while my biggest concern was not the Episode 20 or the bugs floating around in my blood but more so of how I had done on my latest Calculus test.

About six months after the “Great Discovery”, things changed though. The first reports came back about people again losing their memories but this time it was accompanied by really disturbing stories of mindless people killing one another in terrible ways for no reason. The news took to calling the infected by a slang term that caught on and stuck, Buggies, referring to the living vaccine nanobots that came with the Great Discovery. Some people thought it was a conspiracy for the government to control us. Others thought it was an invasion from a foreign army with biological weapons. I guess in the end it was just all of us trying to outthink Mother Nature. 

The Buggies began as a curious item on the news and not many people paid attention or really for that matter even really believed what was going on until it was too late. Buggies started off normal and then just sort of snapped. All of a sudden you could be talking to your best friend, studying for an exam and then a few seconds later he maybe chasing you out of the apartment trying to literally pull your skin off. The weird thing about the Buggies was their eyes. We found out that just as the person “flipped the switch” as we called it, their eyes swelled to double their previous size and the pupils filled to complete blackness. Staring at a Buggie was like staring at a black emptiness with no emotion and no regard for anything in the world. 

The whole thing happened so quickly that compared to the onset of the initial infection, we really had no warning or information about the Buggies. I had come home from college because the universities were shutting down and sending us home. My parents thought we would be safer out of the crowded city and took John and I out to a small trailer we owned about two hours north in Tennessee.  At least they thought, we would be safe from the rest of society and all the Buggies in the city. We had television reception out at the trailer but after a few days at the trailer most of the channels had gone off the air so we were pretty isolated. We spent the majority of our time locked in our trailer and my mom and dad staring anxiously out the windows while we tried to make the best of everything playing games on the small couch. A few days into out trailer experience the power went out and it did not come back. It was at that time that I really became scared, not that I wasn’t before, but when you see and hear your parents whispering frantically and crying, that really got me. 

It was just two days ago now that I recall as I write this down when my dad started to look a little “off”. I know my mom brushed it off and tried to act like nothing was wrong but I could see the fear in her eyes. Dad started just walking out of the trailer and wandering around out front staring blankly at the ground. My mom called to him and after a few shouts he would snap out of whatever trance he was in and finally come back in. This happened a few times over the morning time until late in the afternoon. Instead of coming back to the trailer like usual, he lifted his head up like a hound dog catching a scent and just took off running crazily away from the trailer. Mom burst out of the front door and ran after him screaming for him to stop. John and I watched as our father disappeared over the horizon and we listened for what seemed like forever for our mother calling fearfully out for him to come back. 

We sat patiently but in complete dread and paralyzed in fear waiting for my mother to return but she never came back. John whimpered softly next to me as we sat next to the window and watched as the light sky turned dark and the woods around the trailer echoed their insect chorus littered with the occasional bark of a dog. I put my arm around John and did my best to console him and he started to calm down until we heard another cry from outside our window. It was a strange high-pitched wailing sound that reverberated all around the room and the surrounding area next to our trailer. John began shaking feverishly and curled into a fetal position under the table next to the door and I attempted to lift my head just enough to peak out the window. 

The darkness had overtaken everything but I could just make out an object about thirty yards from our trailer. I dared not stare for long but I could just make out a person straining their neck back eerily and conducting the most hideous screaming fit I had ever heard. I jumped back down hiding below the window and whispered to John to stay quiet out of view when the sound changed, Instead of the desperate wailing, the sound changed to a blood thirsty snarl and I recognized the person as they turned their head. The face I had looked on for comfort for the last 19 years of my life stared back at me with a blank expression. Solid black bulging eyes looked deep into my soul and as it saw me it hung its head back and unleashed a hideous wailing of sadness. I slumped down onto the floor and whispered to John, “we have to go now.” I waited a few seconds for a response and not hearing anything I crawled over to where he had been crying next to the small couch. The moonlight provided the only light in the trailer and I looked down on my little brother and placed a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. He looked up at me with a confused face, “who are you?” Tears flowed down my face as I backed away from him as he looked back at me and back pedaled away toward the wall across the trailer. 

John looked around the trailer desperately pleading with no one, “where am I,” he repeated over and over. I cried even more as my sobs caused me to convulse as I shook from the tension and the despair. John found the corner of the trailer and pushed himself as far away from me as he could. Blood trickled down his nose and he reached up to wipe away small droplets leaving scarlet crimson smears on his index finger. “What is going on? Where am I? Who are you?”” he cried in a utter confusion and fear. “John, it’s me, your brother,” I spoke softly as I moved toward him. “No,” he wailed and jumped from the corner and flew out the door toward the patch of area where where I knew my mother was roaming.

I slammed the door shut with my foot and leaned up against it trying to figure out my next move. I covered my ears with my hands to block out the howling from my mother who by now was joined by a chorus of others wailing in unison outside the trailer doorway in the front yard. I reached my head up above the window and saw at least three others joining her and from the corner of my eye noticed John, standing closely to her, in the same eerie formation screaming along with them. I looked around the inside of the trailer and found the back window of the bedroom and crawled outside on the other side away from the Buggies out front and just began to run. I ran all night and found a main road and stayed alongside it until the sun crept over the horizon directly in front of me. 

I walked for what seemed an eternity on that road, alternating between crying and worrying until my stomach overran both emotions and hunger took over my thoughts. After a long time of walking, I noticed a small house on the side of the road and carefully went up to check inside. I was not sure if there was anyone else around but I was so hungry and tired that I really did not care if I found another bunch of Buggies waiting on me in the living room. I locked the door behind me and scavenged the kitchen to find a can of cold chili and some warm bottled water. There was an empty notebook on the kitchen table and I found a pen and for some reason, I just started writing. I figured I better write down my story and what happened to me, to us over the last few days. I was not sure if anyone else would ever read it because frankly, I was not sure if there was anyone else left in the world to read it beside the Buggies. The words have come pretty easily though and I think I will try to get some rest now that I have written everything I can remember. My head is starting to hurt badly now but I am trying to keep writing as long as I can keep remembering. I am really beginning to be concerned because I am having trouble remembering my name and where I am right now.  I think I started to drift off for a few seconds and I just looked down and saw a notebook full of writing in a house that I did not recognize. My heart is beating frantically as I tried to desperately recall how I got here and what I was doing before that point that caused me to end up here.  The panic overtook me as I felt a pressure in my head and my eyes began to throb. “Where am I? Who am I? What is happening to me?"