Quarantine

Part 1

Quarantine

The air reeked of decay as I stepped out of my humble shack and left my sleeping brother. I looked down the littered street, not a person in sight. The only things moving are scurrying rats and pieces of flittering paper. Starting out onto the street, the air seemed heavier than before as if the air is trying to suffocate the few thousand still living in this dreadful QZ. The Q-Zone is my current home of what used to be Atlanta; which is now a quarantine to keep the infection from getting any further in its genocidal rampage. The government and the military commissioned these after the outbreak, though they couldn’t do it fast enough.

When the outbreak happened people grew terrified, stealing anything they could get their greedy hands on. Gangs were formed, families grouped trying to stick together, doing anything to survive, including my family - me, mom, dad, and Eli my younger brother, only five. My dad boarded our home after gathering a few supplies. He told us everything was going to be OK, that we should hang on till the military arrived and brought order. If only he knew what ¨brought order¨ meant. I first heard about the outbreak at school from students gossiping about a fever that consumed you from the inside. At first I thought it was an exaggerated story of someone with a bad flu, never thinking it would become this serious. People from the inner city flocked to the hospitals and stayed there until they died, bodies turned to ash. The numbers increased as news spread around; the mayor had to shut down all the schools within the city radius within the first five days. Atlanta was the first city to become infected but wasn’t the only city. It was reported other major cities were becoming infected as well - New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle - all over the United States. People panicked, there was no known cure and no way of stopping the infection from spreading. Just in a matter of weeks, almost one-fourth of the population was wiped out; it appeared the government was on cleanup duty instead of immediate action. The infection consumed people like wildfire - literally. It started with a fever that never cooled down. The victims’ skin turned black like a burn, the hair smoked until none was left. The skin too hot to touch and nothing cooled the flame that licked inside them. The death was agonizingly slow, waiting was all you can do before the fire ate you from the inside. It burned off the skin till all that was left was bone - crisp and charred until it is crushed to ashes. The internal inferno can last for days, sometimes weeks; but it always ended in death.

I picked my way through the piles of trash and broken glass. In the distance I could see the towering skyscrapers barely visible through the thick air that blocked any light that shined down. The eerie silence drifted down the street, as I sidestepped into an alley that led to the Hub. The Hub is where the Rations building is located and the base of operations for the sector’s soldiers. Each of the four sectors has a Hub, Sector One being the Main HQ - hosting the entire city’s military, distribution of commodities and the CDC - Center of Disease Control, who supposedly is working on a cure. But I have heard a different rumor. The Rations building used to be a bank with a large vault. The building is probably filled with food, and anything that is rationed - blankets, clothes, gas, candles - the list goes on. The government took over factories and businesses, trying to gain control of the general commodities before scavengers could steal it.

Entering from the alley, the smell of decay dissipated and the silence erupted into voices of local commotion. The Hub was slightly packed with brave survivors who dared venture out of their homes; but who could blame them, they have to eat, right. The gray-clad soldiers were stationed here and there, watching for disorder with their guns a shadow on their hips. Heading to the food line, I could hear nervous whispers of not enough food or the infection killing another family, or worse, the Beetles visiting to give a house check and finding out you’re infected.

Beetles, thats what Eli calls them - their faces masked with circular dark eyes, two tubes sticking out the sides. In charge of seeking out the infected, they carried a device to wield over you; if it flashed green you’re fine but if it flashed red, you're infected. That’s what happened when the Beetles pressed the device to my parents foreheads. I remember the screams from my parents as they cried and told them the device is wrong, that they weren’t sick, their skin cool to the touch. The last I heard of them before I was shoved into a Jeep and taken to my new home was the abrupt stop of their pleas and the sounds of a gun. I see a few of them now, yanking and dragging people from their homes, pushing them to the dirt and jamming the device to their heads.

The rumor I heard spreading through the cracks in the walls of rotting homes, the rumor that could send the Beetles coming with the dreadful device that started it all. The government didn’t create the QZ to protect the citizens from the disastrous infection that swept the nation, that started from Atlanta and spread to major cities. They didn’t save the helpless and terrified citizens from the rural and suburban areas and place them in protected quarantine zones. The Q-Zones aren’t keeping the infection out, like the government said. Quarantine isn’t established to keep diseases out, it’s to keep them in. Like the inferno that consumes the body from the inside, the Q-Zones infect and consume those living inside it.

Authors note

The first thing that popped into my head when I heard the topic was on control was quarantine and with quarantine, an apocalyptic story. I have been playing this apocalyptic video game where a society was disastrously changed when an infection broke out and how the government and the military  handled the situation. They built quarantine zones in the major cities to stop this outbreak. Though this outbreak turned people into deadly fungal killing machines, mine killed off people like a wildfire. The control aspect of my story comes from the quarantine zones - which are protected areas to stop infection from spreading, controlled by the government and the military. The rations of food and other general commodities - clothing, gasoline, electricity, water, etc. At the end of my story you learn that the disease itself is control, also known as population control. Starting from the CDC in Atlanta and moving outward, killing off the people in the cities and then gathering more people to infect and kill off, leaving children for new generation. The devices used by the Beetles is how the government controls the disease to prevent it from becoming uncontrollable. But we all know that never happens!