Saving Chloe

Chapter Nine

Three months. It took three months to have every single person over the age of fifty and anybody with a major disability to be eliminated from the Seattle area, or so I've been told. Three months. People came, white suits with face masks and oxygen tanks who believed any one of them could acquire the disease. We were infected to them. They were safe. We could die. They were safe. But no one under fifty without a major disability was cursed with this disease. No one anyone knows of, that is. Everyone with autism, cancer, any other terminal illness, and any other ability which didn't allow people to take care of themselves have all been eliminated.

But why would the Invaders want to kill off all of the Elderly and weak? Wouldn't they target the strong and not the weak? If they wanted power, why'd they take away the ones who wouldn't fight back? Who didn't have the strength? The one closer to death than the young and healthy?

Why?

My nightmares don't explain anything. Martin does. I continue to listen to his madness, knowing full well he was bi-polar. He's calm and collected on air, though. Every single day. He's explaining the White Men, searching for the dead, ready to dispose of their bodies. They don't speak, if people don't comply they will go in by force. And pretty soon, there were no traces of them left. Or so I'd been hearing.

This is when everything started getting weirder... As if it weren't weird already. People were starting to come out, trying to piece everything together and get their lives back to normal, well, as normal as possible. Most cars weren't working. Electricity was starting to flicker and turn off for good. The Crazies were still running rampant, more and more of them die each day from the "sane" ones.

Joshua was planning on returning back to work, to make sure he still had a job to pay rent, because surely there would be rent to pay. Mom was complaining our bills weren't being paid and this is why the electricity was slowly going off. Mom was always going off about how we should be starting school soon, except there had been no notices or messages sent out about school being back in session. Calen didn't go off to college, he wasn't ready to leave. Mom wasn't ready to let him go either. So he stayed, just until everything was back to normal. Calen and I left a few more times, searching different houses and visiting different schools for any kind of information life was returning to normal. Except the schools were all vacant and desolate as nature was starting to take over rapidly.

Mr. President was very repetitive, reiterating the same message over and over for the past month. "... everything is to return to normal. We have begun cleaning up, and we ask you all volunteer your time to help. We want everything to return to normal. We ask you carry out your days like you had in the past. We are working hard, never stopping, to return life as it had been."

But he couldn't keep his promise.

The Invaders wouldn't let him.

My nightmares never fail to keep me awake throughout the night, shivering like mad despite the heat. Sometimes I allow Calen to comfort me, while I fight back the nausea which sweeps through my entire body making me sick all over. I may have thrown up a few times, but I wasn't keeping track. Calen had wondered if it had something to do with being a Revealer and what had happened the day at the park.

His face, Johnny Waters, is the highlight of my nightmares. He's there, every single night, the same boyish look faltering before it's gone altogether. Sometimes I see the fear in his eyes brighter than the sun behind him. I scared him, enough to back away from the fight. But this doesn't exactly explain why Calen's bullets fell to the ground after ricocheting off of the Invader's body. His strange cynical smile as he walks backwards towards the woods, never once taking his eyes off me. Calen who? He didn't care about Calen. Calen wasn't a threat. I was. I was the threat. I scared him. And yet, he didn't want to show it. The fear in his eyes? I could've imagined it, but I know for certain I hadn't. He was petrified of me. I was a Revealer, whatever the hell that meant. Martin didn't elucidate much, except the day after we met he'd given our testimony. Not exactly the truth, yet not exactly false.