Annilova

Island of despair

"7000 years ago, Annilova's kings and queens almost ruled the world. They created treasures that never lost, and never will lose, their values. Up till today, people from all over the world...."
Yeah, yeah! People from all over the world come to watch and admire our 7000-year-old treasures.
You see, this will always be our major problem, Annilovians. We are still living in the "7000 years ago" phase, ignoring the fact that now, we are literally doomed.
It was a history class in sixth grade, not a single student listening, yet she kept talking. Impressive!
I heard the bell ring, but I wasn't sure if it announced the end of class, or woke students up. I headed straight to the door, then to my locker, then started my 30-minutes walk home. I didn't talk to anyone before leaving. I was planning something. Planning to WRITE something.

It all started in fifth grade; the whole writing thing. My english teacher admired my articles. And one day, she asked me one single question that got me here today.
"Do you write in your free time?"
I answered "Yes".

But I lied. I didn't. But the idea was so exciting to me that I thought I would look boring if I said No.
Actually, I looked boring anyway. I wasn't the famous girl at school, and not a loved-by-everyone girl either, up till today which is someday in 2016. And I don't care. I've seen enough of human beings already. Enough to inspire me to write this, right here, right now.
Let's just go a little bit back in time...

Annilova; a beautiful island in the Atlantic, where I live. It has always been my definition of paradise; waterfalls, beaches, ocean, trees, flowers, mountains, everything!
But as I grew up, this definition changed. And according to the new definition, Annilova was a living hell haunted by souls of demons. Why? Because it lacked the only thing it needed to be called a Home.
Peace.

It's been four years since I last walked in the streets of Annilova  with certainty that I was going back home safe and sound. In 2011, Annilova was divided into three zones, each of them
surrounded by enormous walls from everywhere, to isolate it from the other two. The biggest of them was The Capital Zone, where I lived
with my family and where the whole catastrophe started. It was exactly in the middle of the island between the other two zones. North, was The Safe Zone, where the authorities, the rulers of the island, some rich business men, and a 0.4% of Annilova's people lived. It was called "safe" because it
was totally out of the catastrophe's reach, that people living there forgot
about the catastrophe's existence. South, was the smallest and worst of them, The Abandoned Zone. It was really abandoned if you didn't count the sick criminals and murderers. Wondering what the catastrophe was, already?

January, 2011
We, the residents of the Capital Zone, stood desperately helpless, as we watched our neighbours and friends die one after the other, infected by that terrible disease that showed up six months before. The first case appeared in a village in western Annilova, which belonged to our zone now after the division.
It was horrible, way horrible that I can never explain it. People who were infected looked rather awful in the news.
They had scars all over their skin and red eyes like those of an eagle. They
talked nonsense and walked like zombies. They looked like monsters we looked for under our beds as kids.
The doctors hadn't yet figured out the
virus by which the infection was caused. Therefore, they couldn't fight the virus by any kind of procedure. The ministers and councilors all escaped to northern Annilova. They moved the whole government there and took the decision to divide Annilova. The main
aim was to keep their own zone infection free. The best they could do was build the ten-thousands-feet-high walls between the zones, but I'm pretty sure they would cut the island into three separate pieces of land if they could.
Rich business men were the only people allowed to enter the Safe Zone, of course because they paid money to the government.
Annilova's  people could do nothing but wait. Wait to get out of the island somehow, or wait to die.
Before the infection, tourism was an essential part of Annilova's economy. But of course no one would ever want
to go on a trip to an island soaked in infection. So, now Annilova was doomed. And it became worse when the governments of the world announced Annilova as a forbidden island. So, even doctors from
other countries who had been planning to try and figure out a cure for the infection, cancelled their plans because after visiting Annilova, they wouldn't
be allowed back into their own countries.

Now, infected people had two ways to go:
Cases who were discovered before the infection could eat them from the inside out, were sent to be treated in specialized hospitals in the same zone of ours. If doctors were successful to cure them, they would move to
the Safe Zone-which never happened at the time. If not, they would stay in
hospitals for years and years, living a laboratory rat's life because doctors used them to try and find out the
virus and its cure. You can say that they were half alive, half dead.

Other cases who were hopeless to be cured, were sent immediately
to the Abandoned Zone so as not to infect others. They stayed there for the
rest of their lives, earning their living by attacking our zone whenever they
could, until they finally rested in peace.

The main reason why the government didn't allow us, the uninfected people, to move to the Safe Zone, was that the disease could never be predicted before any actual symptoms appeared. Doctors couldn't even define an
incubation period. So, they simply couldn't pick out the infected from the uninfected. That's why the infection spread too fast. The infected person infected many others before even knowing he was sick.
As a result, we were forced to stay in
our zone, away from the northerns, away from the southerns. But I'm pretty sure the rulers would have thrown us South if they had had the right. And of course, moving to another country was just a bed-time fairytale.

That's why we lacked peace.
When you wanted some fresh air in our zone, you were either attacked by an Abandoned-Zone resident, or you got home with a virus running through your veins.
The government put laws to reduce interactions between residents of our zone, thinking it would prevent the infection from spreading even more. But no government is capable of stopping what is meant to happen. The disease had already taken down
a 65% of Annilova's population. It was almost over.
Moreover, we suffered a civil war. Daily battles. Daily victims.
The young men of our zone were always trying to break into the Safe Zone, willing to protect themselves and their families from the deadly
infection. All they wanted was to get in, and have a chance to live.
On the other hand, the government gave orders to the army to shoot
down whoever tried to break the law. The law which tacitly stated that we had to stay in our zone till the infection killed us all.

At that time, I , Noelle Gilbert, was 11 going on 12. Too young to handle all the bullshit stated above. In fact, too young to understand all
the bullshit stated above. It was a habit of mine not to fear anything. As a kid, I used to look for monsters under my bed like all the other kids. But not because I feared them, because I'd always fallen in love with what others feared the most.
"Fight fate fail." was a sentence I made up to summarize the belief I lived by. When you try to fight fate, you fail.
If I was meant to be infected, or to die, or to be attacked, staying at home wouldn't prevent it from happening. It was a belief contradicted by most people, I guess. And I.... Well, I was born to contradict contradictions. It's what I do best. And whenever anyone tried to argue with me, or to make me do something I didn't want to do, I became even more stubborn.
Now, let's move forward just some days later...