The Keeper and the Plague

The Keeper and the Plague

“I didn’t have a choice,” my wife said, my knife inches away from her face. She had so many excuses, so many alibis for everything she did. Nothing she did was ever wrong. Why would they be? She was one of the smartest people in her department. That’s why she lead her team to find ‘the cure.’

In my other hand, I gripped onto her shoulder, plastic of the PPE rustling. My body leaned over hers on the railing in this dark laboratory. She struggled, all her strength trying to push me away but I kept the knife in its place. Any wrong move and she would get a very bad cut.

Below us, they moaned and cried, hands reaching up the heavens to pluck the wings off of angels. There had to have been at least a few dozen bodies below, perhaps close to fifty. ‘The Plague,’ was their collective title. Faces I once saw at the grocery stores, parks, work, now barely hung onto bone and flesh. Pus and blood clots dribbled out of orifices. Even with the proper protective equipment, I could smell their putrid stench irritate my nostrils.

My sweet wife. She did this to all of us, she and all the companies and scientists and engineers. They were devils in pristine uniforms and lab coats, holding onto big computers and fancy degrees. Just like cancers, they hid and grew, taking over the systems we used for survival.

First came the famine. Crops nationwide died, followed by mass starvation across the country. Our healthcare shrunk. Sickness became prevalent. Then came the plagues. I saw them squirming against each other down in the pit. No amount of vaccines or antibiotics or hospitals could suppress the spread. Transmissions quickly evolved. Nowhere was safe. Cases in each major city grew exponentially over the next few years, until it spread all over.

As flesh rotted away so did the minds. They were plagues on humanity. What did the authorities do in response?

They were corralled into prisons.

“They aren’t human anymore, don’t get let your bleeding hearts tell you otherwise,” the chief warden said on my first day. Reports said the cases of outbreaks started to stagnate. I didn’t believe them. It was all false hope.

People like me became their keeper. What was once a prison for dangerous criminals now became a prison for the plague. Additional testing labs and rooms were built in just before the first set of shipment came in. We couldn’t risk another outbreak when numbers were just starting to descend, so the radio reports said. It was hard to tell who was telling the truth when most transmissions went down. I took everything with a grain of salt.

These bodies should have been incinerated to begin with, that would have been the proper thing to do to contain the plague; a final humanitarian act for them.

But people like my wife became their doctors. They prided over their vials and computers, as if hope was in a bottle and all would be well one day. Just one more successful experiment, or two and we’ll all be free, she would say.

In these prisons, they sprayed and shot things into the plagues’ bodies. Sometimes they were individually placed on tables, dissected on. I watched my dear wife lead such atrocities and I turned away. She knew best, after all.

Maybe they had the beginnings to a real cure, or something else to reverse the plagues’ cannibalism and rotting skin. I learned to control and numb my feelings.

When one group no longer served her or the team, they were finally sent off into the field to be burnt down. Soon after, a replacement of new, rotting bodies came in. I always did my best not to look into their faces. The chief warden made sure to hammer that into us.

But one day, I recognized someone in the new shipment. Her brown hair with the dyed tips of green at the ends, freckles, and bird tattoos. Someone was impersonating my younger sister. I knew it couldn’t have been her. The last time I saw her, she didn’t have milky white eyes, bruises around her torso, or dried blood clots on the corner of her mouth. She was one of the lucky ones to escape before the famine hit.

A transporter in heavy uniform nudged her and several other plagues down the hallway into the next room. A yelp escaped her as he used a taser on her back to get her to move. I felt myself swallowing air watching the imposter struggle to go inside the prison. That’s all she was. An imposter.

Each and every shipment of plagues was accounted for, for the last 5 years. Their age, gender, race, occupation. Data just in case they found a cure. In the future, a memorial will be built with all their names. A commemoration to the sacrifices made for the cure. Prison guards had access but it was the scientists who overlooked the data.

But to my wife, they weren’t people, anymore. They were rats.

Down below, looking at the new shipment, my wife stood on a walkway high above in the room. The obnoxious blue PPE rustled whenever she adjusted her stance. I walked to her. She didn’t notice me, just yet. I looked over her shoulder.

She was flipping through a file. A familiar face popped up, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on where I’ve seen them. Then several others. I saw on a separate piece of paper the name of my hometown and state popped up, followed by CONTAGION ADMINISTERED: SUCCESSFUL. Friends. Former coworkers. Then she came up - my younger sister. A picture sometime right before the first waves of famine hit. Her hair was still short, all dyed neon green. Her skin was still intact and bright, as were her crisp tattoos. Not a trace of the plague on her.

The files scattered all over the floor, some floating down into the room below, after she dropped them.I had her against the railing with my knife near her throat. I didn’t notice right away, but I felt a tear go down my cheek. “Why?” Was all I could stammer out.

“It was them, or us,” she spat out, pressure from my arm stifling her voice. “I promise you. I love you. I would never do anything to hurt you or us.” I felt her legs kick my shins but I swallowed the pain. Nothing could surmount the hurt of seeing my dear sister in the pit below us.

“They were our friends, our neighbors. Our family. You know what they are now?”

I looked into her piercing blue eyes, eyelids wide enough that they would have fallen out any moment. They contrasted with her flushed, red face, puffy from me suffocating her.

“Now, they are starving.”

With all my strength, I pushed my wife down over the ledge. She belted out screams but they were muffled by the moans of the plague. I looked away, tucking the knife away into my holster. Sounds of crunches and torn fabric below made me cringe. I walked away towards the nearest exit of the room. I was unsure of what to do, next, but I knew my feet had to keep walking, somewhere, anywhere.

War and death should arrive, soon.