Dust

Twenty: Sinner

A/N: So I completely redid this chapter because I wasn't happy with the other one. From now on, italics mean it's directly out of Gwen's journal, while normal type is Ariadne. Sorry for the confusion :(

Maybe I should back up a little bit.

My name is Gwen Stevens. I was a Senior at Roswell High in Georgia when the Incident occurred, and I recently turned ninteen near the point in time at which this is being written. The purpose of this journal is to recount the day that the virus known to many of us as the Sear spread through the earth.

As I write this, asleep in the hospital bed beside me is Emma Thorne, the one girl whom I promised myself I would never befriend. She used to be the Regina George of Roswell High, but surviving the end of the apocalypse tends to fix your life up a bit.

On the gurney opposite to me, the body of her brother, Evan, is being carted away. Evan Thorne was the one boy in school I thought I'd never get involved with, the kind who didn't pay attention in class and had probably been hooked onto drugs at some point before. Yet as I sit here, barely able to see through watery eyes, there's no one I could long for more.

I'm not much of a journalist, so I'll recount the last few days in an outline form, as that's all I can bear to do right now.

Day 1 of the epidemic; June 7, 2138

We've all kind of grown accustomed to water shortages being a problem; limited drinking water, timed showers, water reprocessing plants everywhere... you get the idea. Anyway. Headlines a few days back were crazy about the CDC releasing a new vaccine to help the human body retain hydration for extended periods of time, mostly to lower the death count in poorer countries that couldn't afford the water processors. None of us really cared; it wasn't our problem.

Until today, when a crazy disease started to break out somewhere near Burundi. It takes over the victim's body with burn-like boils, soon chewing up almost all of their skin. The people affected so far are quarantined, and the researchers soon realize that the vaccine meant to save these people is riddling their bodies with some unknown disease that no one knows anything about. Headlines call it the Sear, after the burn-like effects of the pestilence.

They don't think to cancel school.

The books starts off with these words, a candid perspective of a teenage girl and her friends following the days where the earth died. I get through the first two pages or so, perplexed more by the date on the entries than anything else. In school back home, they used to tell us that the day the "radiation" took over the earth was too long ago to place a specific date on it. The fact that this journal is intact and has such specific information is insanity, to put it lightly.

Someone knocks on the door, and with a jerk of movement, I slam the book shut and toss it under the mattress.

"Come in!" I say, trying to sound as convincing as possible. It doesn't really work, because Callie stands by the door with eyebrows raised.

"If I didn't know you better, I'd say you were hiding a boy in here somewhere. 'Course, it is you, so that'll never happen," she grins, and I throw a pillow at her face despite the slight laughter than quickly runs through my bloodstream.

"So. What's up?" I ask her, as she flops onto my bed and drapes her outstretched legs over my crossed ones.

"Not much. How'd your talk with Titus go?" she asks, and I bite my lips in hesitation.

"It went well, I think. Well, I mean. He's talking to me again," I say with a nervous chuckle, and Callie nods absentmindedly.

"Good, good. And Mikhail?" she asks, and I feel myself tense. Yeah, good question. How are things with Mikhail?