Adventures In A Wasteland

Chapter 5

~SKITOS POV~

                The simple, unglorified truth of the situation is that Lola’s dying.  A dead-girl-walking, as Reg so poetically put it.

                3 hours after our supermarket escapades, we arrived at camp. We were prepared for Gauss’s hot-headed hollering, and had a killer argument in response. All those kids that had disappeared? Murdered, at Gauss’s hands, to prevent the spread of a deadly disease, and the lies that were brought with it.

                The fact is that Miss Elma Gauss, our trusted leader, has been keeping things from us, for God knows how long. And if it weren’t for us, Lola could have died because of this Plague, and we would have been none the wiser.

                So yeah, anyway- we were a bit delayed by Reg’s glamorous meltdown at the store but he recovered relatively fast, so by the time we set off again we were only roughly an hour behind schedule. The night, however, was turning cold fast, and the sky was littered with diamonds by the time we arrived back at camp. As anticipated, Gauss stood at her office door with eyes like barbed wire, arms crossed and feet tapping. I couldn’t say how long she’d been standing like that, waiting for us to return, but knowing her it could have been hours. Gesturing us into her office with a brisk sweep of her hand, she slammed the door with a stinging fury and stood glaringly above us like some snide hawk assessing its prey. The foot tapping resumed, and Lola opened her mouth before I could kick things off.

                “Say what you will, ma’am, but we were only an hour out of curfew. In our case, nobody’s hurt. Not too sure you could say the same for yourself.”

                “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Parks?” Gauss spat at Lola

                “We know about your hidden disease, ma’am.” I interrupted “All the people who you’ve taken away so the infection doesn’t spread. All the people you lied to that elected you as Captain, all the people who trusted you, believed you. How long has this been going on, Gauss?”

                “Pipe down, Sinclair!” She rasped at me. Although her anger was unmistakeable, she was clearly flustered. We had the upper hand.

                “May I add, ma’am.” Reg chorused, quotation marks around the last word. “That now we know, we could easily tell the rest of the camp. Wouldn’t be so popular at the next election, would you? Maybe you’ll be killed, like all those innocent people you murdered to keep the disease quiet?”

                Gauss sighed theatrically, and pressed long fingers to the bridge of her slim nose.

                “Sit down, you assholes.” She murmured.

                Regretfully obliging, Gauss proceeded to explain in excruciating detail what this Plague did to a person, how it burned them from the inside out, and how they would slowly flake away, and how one kiss on the cheek could literally be the death of you.

                “My brother was diagnosed when he was 21, as was his sweetheart. Out of impulse they married the next day, much to my mother’s displeasure. They were found dead two weeks after, in each other’s arms, but not before his love gave birth to a perfectly healthy boy. She named him Kit on the eve of her demise, and I swore to take care of him, but these medical officials came along and took him away. They said they were only doing check-up’s, but I never saw that boy again.”

“Oh my…” Whispered Lola.

“I never told anyone because, truth be told, we were supposed to wait ten years until we re-surfaced so we could be sure that the disease would have died out. But we were running dangerously low on food, and-”