Till Noon

Prologue

The heat was a normal thing. The smoke in the sky, the ashes on the asphalt, the blaring sun and the shortage of rain. We grew used to sweating through our clothes and we grew accustomed to the fact that this would never change. But our curiosity never faltered.

We never received answers as to why the smoke came or why it never left. It appeared, the normality of the days before disappearing as it took its spot. After many dead ends and slammed doors in our faces, we acquiesced to the blunt answers and ceased asking.

I remember when the sun was first covered. I was young, unsure if it was a storm or the end of the world as we knew it. The calming words of the teachers, the reassuring voices of my parents and the frightened tones of the government only made me believe it was the halt of life itself.

After three days of darkness, the ashes began to rain down. It was odd for me, like snow in the middle of September. I first saw the white and dusty flakes as inviting, but I soon realized the troubles they would bring. The couching, the chest pains, the layer of film over people's eyes. Suddenly, the early winter wasn't too appealing to me.

I became used to the ash and the smoke, and it was normal for everyone to wear a damp towel over their mouth and nose. Darkness came in periods of days, sometimes even weeks. Crops began to die and the livestock seemed to slip between the dead fields. Three weeks after the smoke, new rules were enforced, showing us that the smoke wasn't moving on.

The police enforced curfews, even started to shut down major highways once and awhile. When they realized crops began to dwindle away, they started to ration out food. Three meals a day, no more for anyone under any circumstance. Water was an issue after a month, so they began rationing that too.

People stopped working away from home. The ash was a hazard on the roads and no one wanted to work far away. Energy plants had barely any workers by the third month, leaving us with the least amount of electricity and with no defense against the boiling heat.

Fourteen weeks into the smoke and they began rationing power. Everyday at noon, power would be shut down until midnight. The water was turned off in our homes, only available from nine am to ten am for showers. Gas was expensive, the refineries all around us shut down.

By the sixteenth week, people began getting ill. Not just a cough or blisters from the heat, but an ash-borne disease unknown to us at the time. The elderly got sick first, their lungs turning coal black as their heart stopped beating. The infants got it next, their tiny bodies unable to adapt to the heat and smoke that lied around them.

After researchers searched for a name that didn't exist, they settled with the name P45, a name sought only for the devil itself. It's when enough of the tiniest of ashes are inhaled, sticking the the linings of your lungs like the crystals in fiberglass.

The first sign is a cough that echoes your lungs, followed by a high fever and rashes on your chest. Usually you can hide it, but when the shaking starts and the muscles begin to weaken, there's no covering P45 up with white lies. You only live a few months after contracting it.

To top it off, the cure is almost impossible to get. You have to be important or rich to even be in the same room as the elements that make it up. Due to the rarity and high demand, the cure has been respectfully dubbed as "nero," Greek for something as rare as life itself; water.

Most think they're safe from P45, but no one is. Here, in what used to be known as Asheville, North Carolina, we think we're protected. Here, in Sector 18NC, we thought that maybe we could keep everyone healthy. But here, there's no such thing as healthy anymore.