Adventures In A Wasteland

Chapter 4

~This chapter is dedicated to devilsapphire! Love you boo <3

-PREVIOUSLY-

"Reg, Skito. Come here."

I felt them appear beside me and peer over my shoulder. Skito inhaled sharply and his white knuckled hand appeared on the desk, steadying himself. Reg gasped and looked at me with his eyebrows furrowed.

"Holy shit."

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~REG'S POV~

Lola beckoned me towards her, hands quivering. Skito and I quickly congregated on either side of her and looked downwards at the book she was pointing to.

It looked like an antique, some artefact that we should only be allowed to study from behind panes of glass. I've seen pictures of museums before, when we got taught Important Things by the older Sector almost 7 years ago, when we were all 9. I've seen all kinds of photos of mankind's splendour- the pictures were grainy and weatherworn, but behind all the discolouration they were sharp and bright and a spectrum of pigments and hues. I longed to see the colour of the past. Everything here is just orange, brown, and green if you're lucky.

I looked down at the book again, past Lola's hand that was splayed in between the binding. The skin was pale and flaky and her hand was still trembling despite the pressure she put on it. The pages shook slightly with every shiver of her body.

The page was titled "PROTOCOL 003" and was haphazardly circled in a red marker that was still beside the book, though its tip was long dry and caked in dust.

I scanned the page and squinted my eyes in disbelief at the words striped across it. This can't be true. There must have been a mistake.

"In case of dire circumstances in which an airborne disease is spreading, move the people underground. Enforce discipline in cleanliness and restrict physical contact of any kind. Bring down as many sustainable foods as possible and do not venture to the surface for a period of strictly 10 years. Only at the end of this time should you return above ground. Quarantine the ill and, if necessary, dispose of the elderly."

The page continued downwards.

Every inhumane command was sputtered and rasped from the book. Dispose of the elderly? What the hell did they even mean? You can't just kill of an entire generation of people. It can't be done.

And yet somehow, it seemed like it had.

A disease. A disease brought us down, and drove us insane.

With deadly cautiousness, I turned the page. This one had shorter paragraphs with varying subheadings, though the immediate one to catch my eye was titled:

"ACCIDENTAL SPREAD"

It had been attacked with the same haunting red marker that was scrawled in a circle enclosing every pointed letter of the heading. There were feverish arrows pointing to random words around the paragraph and I felt a chill creep delicately up my spine. This person must have lost their mind.

"If the disease was manmade (e.g. POPULATION CONTROL, DRUG, EXPERIMENT) then repeat the steps listed on the previous page. In the case of POPULATION CONTROL or DRUGS, record the components of the drug/disease clearly in a journal and estimate the amount of deaths per day and which gender/age/nationality was most affected."

And that's when I noticed the pattern of the arrows- they all pointed to words associated with population control- and everything began to fit together.