NOVEL WEB Rot
What a curious feeling, your body rotting away.
The first day of infection was efficient. It robbed me of my hearing so that, by day three, my eardrums could not even sense the vibrations of my fingers snapping right next to them. My sense of taste and smell shut down on the fifth day.
Day ten, I grab an empty notebook and start writing this crap down. Day eleven sees my skin turning green and gray, my tongue almost black. The tip of my nose falls off by day eleven.
Day fifteen and I can no longer walk, dragging bottles of water and food next to my couch to either miraculously survive this or die trying. I still write in my diary, which it now was, cursing myself for not going to the hospital sooner. My journal entry for that day reads, “I’m such a moron. I should’ve gotten help sooner, back when I still had legs worth a shit. Never… I could’ve never guessed that I’d fear the world so much… I’d just let myself die like this.”
Day twenty and bits of my arms fall off, and I can tell the rot is going to spread to my chest and neck soon. Everything else will follow. Day twenty-one and I stop writing in my diary and just stay in my head a lot. I can’t move my arms anymore without crying dry tears.
On the twenty-fifth day, I shrug off my clothing, too hot, too cold, and too sensitive to bear the fabric against my peeling skin. I thought there would be more blood, but there really isn’t. Just pus and brown gunk that used to be blood. Now it sticks to my body and mixes with the yellow pus like acrylic paint. If I could, I’d gag.
Day thirty sees me staring at the ceiling, wondering what horrible sin I committed to deserve to die like this. With half my body dead, somehow still alive. Then I get all philosophical and think ‘The bell tolls for all.’
I stopped feeling pain yesterday, yet that only makes me feel worse. It means my body’s given up on trying to keep me alive. I should cry, offer my soul to any god who grants me life, but I can’t muster the energy to care about the inevitable.
I want to see the outside world one last time, though. Smiling faces. The trees. The sun. Life before death takes me. Pain is no longer an obstacle, so I reach for the remote with my arm. The white of my dainty wrist bones shows through the blackened flesh.
I turn on the TV. The black screen comes to life with a horror movie, bodies littering the street like trash, clothes billowing. It focuses on two fathers, wrapped in each other’s embrace, parts of their skulls exposed as they rest in front of their daughter. The little girl holds her bear tight to her chest, her dirtied pale pink dress covered in sunflowers. She is more decomposed than her fathers, more black meat and bone than red flesh and unmarred skin. I chuckle internally at the irony of this being what pops up.
Coughing up another blob of bloody spit, I wipe it away and switch the channel. My eyes squint when the same image comes up. I switch to another channel again. The same image. Now it flicks back to the barren street, zeroing in on the bloated corpse of an old woman, her eyes popping out of her head from the pressure of unreleased gases.
Spit pools in my mouth as adrenaline shoots through me, dribbling out of the rotten holes in my lips. My sluggish heart picks up speed and stutters. My vision distorts. I switch the channel again.
Again. Again. Again.
The fathers. The child. The street. The old woman.
My hand shakes and drops the remote. I notice the moving broadcast underneath, red and white, flashing with the words, “STAY INDOORS. DO NOT MAKE CONTACT WITH ANYONE. KEEP ALL INFECTED QUARANTINED. BURN ALL DEAD, INCLUDING CHILDREN. WAIT FOR RESCUE. GOD HELP US ALL.”
The broadcast switches to a news reporter. She’s older, and the circles under her eyes are as dark as the necrotic flesh running up my arm.
Megan reporting in. Subtitles pop up across the screen, miraculously keeping up with her hurried speech. Her Adam’s apple bobs as she visibly fights against the tears pooling in her eyes. I am so used to news reporters being cool in the most extreme of scenarios that her viciousness shocks me. I cannot hear her, but her venom burns with every word that pops up.
“—this bastard to hell. He goes by the name Day Ender, but his real name is Maxwell Day. A virologist, he worked at the Broken Hearts Clinic in Houston. He is the man who created this nightmare and holds the only available vaccine. He destroyed his research so experts could not recreate it. Not in time. He has demanded no ransom for it, and I believe he only told authorities of its existence to give us false hope.
“Governments all over the world are searching for him, tearing up every safe house and bunker on the map, but still no sign of ‘Day Ender.’ No doubt he is in some cozy bunker, vaccine in hand, happily watching the world burn.”
A photo pops up of him then, covering Megan’s face. He looks… young. Either the same age or younger than me. He doesn’t look like someone capable of ending the world, with his kind eyes and soft features, but he did. He unleashed this on everyone, and for what?
As I stand up, rage overcoming common sense and the burning grip of death, a single thought repeats in my head over and over: This monster fucked us all over for nothing.
I lunge at the screen, and that burst of energy seems to pop every internal organ, threads of rotting tissue snapping. Blood spews from my mouth and covers the TV from corner to corner. It runs down the glass and LEDs. I slump to the ground.
Right before I can claw Maxwell Day’s eyes out, my heart stops.
