The Silent War

Chapter 1: The Drowning Warrior

The time before Elina’s fever began felt like a distant memory, undiscernible between the cold-sweat nightmares that had her waking up hours before dawn in a fit of breathless wheezing, and one or two whines of self-pity. The gripping feeling of fatigue had pressed Elina down against that same pure-white bed of unrest by heaving the blanket, burdening her chest with bricks, and burying her in a pit of quicksand without a single bubble of fresh air. Only an earthquake of dried coughing had woken Elina up from that entrancing state of lethargy. The spasms from Elina’s lungs had reverberated throughout her fragile body, and they had left her trembling like a browned leaf hanging by a loose thread, waving at the mercy of an unpredictable breeze that threatened to blow a final push into a darkened, downward spiral. Having remained bed-bound for days had left Elina’s limbs sore, and the coughing had only increased the aching further. She yearned for human contact, but the only she had these days were brief encounters with monotone doctors clad in plastic suits and the groans of those dying all around her. She knew her body was a battlefield, and there was nothing that could save her from the pending wave if the tides were to shift against her.

Chapter 2: The Unexpected Hero

Clarisse had never felt such dragging exhaustion. Her bones were crumbling from her 12-hour shift of pacing from one end of the hospital to another, a fate that had been bestowed upon all health workers across the globe. She had entered an automatic state of mind that left no space for personal thought; there were only work and her patients and death. Death was a constant companion these days, pocking its head out of every room, waiting and looming and taking. Her emotions were in turmoil, as there is only so much suffering a human can witness before crumbling to madness. Still, she glided like an angel with the unstoppable light force of ventilators that shielded her patients from certain death. She knew very well she wasn’t invincible, and those who had perished weighted heavily on her. She saw them all the time, in her wake and in her sleep, those who died alone and isolated. She heard their screams of agony, but she drowned them out with a loud ringing in her ears of an eery silence. Hers had always been a quiet resilience, powered by a determination to do good on other. She had never expected a letter of appreciation, much less a hero's praise, and yet the world lately seemed to be treating her as such. It gave her strength to think that the world has holding her hand while she held her patient’s gloved hands.

Chapter 3: The New Alliance

She came to Elina with food, water and comfort; the only light of hope in a dim world of despair. Whether Clarisse believed in it or not, she gave Elina hope with news about an upcoming cure and a beautiful world out there. She made Elina believe in her inner strength to defeat the creeping enemy and to vanquish the looming figure of grim Death. Together, Clarisse and Elina made a bond strong enough to defeat even the harshest of enemies. Elina left the hospital as a person made anew, with antibodies that probably made her immune from getting sick again, but Clarisse stayed, as for every Elina, there were twenty others, and for them, the outcome of their battle against Covid-19 was an uncertain probability.

Chapter 4: The Tidy Battlefield

Mother nature breathed in the joyful morning air and exhaled a sigh of relief at finding less smog from the day before. Her lunged tingled with the foreign sensation of fresh air, unpolluted now that the battle between her and humans had taken a break. Mother nature was reclaiming her territory, re-growing her lost forests and re-rooting her jungles. Her children, exited at this unexpected turn of events, hurriedly asked her for permission to play outside, and excitably leaped when she had granted it. Humans were taken aback with awe at them; Dolphins in Italy’s channels, Jaguars in Mexico’s luxury resorts, Elk strolling through Canada’s malls, as if the imponent human structured were mere ruins of an ancient past that had terrorized the creatures, but no more. Her body had been mistreated for so long, she almost couldn’t remember what it felt like to be free from her abusers, but—not yet. She had almost broken the chains but there was still healing to be done. After all, she knew very well humans hardly learned from their mistakes.

Chapter 5: The Undead Enemy

It stared at the warrior and the hero that had defeated it in battle, but It knew they hadn’t yet won the war. It felt no frustration, no glory, as it felt nothing. It hadn’t a bit of consciousness, but what it had was a bundle of information in the form of RNA that It wanted to spread to every reach of the world. It wasn’t even alive, but It had killed its way to all the continents—starting with China—when It wasn’t even aware of the existence of continents. All It knew was how to replicate swiftly and decimate stealthily. It had used its abilities to turn, divide, and insolate people against each other without a whisper or a rumor. It had managed to cause chaos in the perfectly structured human world without a riot. It had driven countries across the globe to the brink of an economic collapse and done so without effort. If It had a mind of its own, it would have thought what an irony it was for such an advanced and globalized civilization—the race that had conquered the wild and dominated the earth—to be fearful of the most primitive form of an organism. All the technology in the world hadn’t been enough to beat It yet, and humanity was a long way from seeing It no more.