Plague #OpenNovellaContest 2019

Chapter 1

These days, I can't leave the palace grounds without dead-eyed pedestrians crowding me. And I can't enter the gardens without a thousand eyes peering at me through the front gate.

Sometimes they ask me why the Queen won't show her face, why she's gone silent. Sometimes they beg and cry for the royal family won't give their family back. Knives come out. Fights get underway; there are death threats. You get the idea.

I've stopped leaving the building.

Most of the time, I'm afraid. For myself; for the world; for the friends that I made as a schoolgirl that must still be out there, somewhere.

But then sometimes I get so worked up I can't think straight, because what right do they have to be angry? What right do they have to be so mad at something that they don't understand? At something like a sixteen-year-old girl who can't work up the courage to tell the world that her mother - the Queen - is dead?

And I know that my mother's laws weren't perfect, but what was she to do? The red plague was spreading fast, it wasn't going to stop until it took the whole world. The best decision was to quarantine the sick. By force, if needed.

And the people were fine with these laws. Happy, even. Until she killed herself and the sick weren't treated anymore. Since I still haven't told a soul what happened, the world has no clue why the country fell so hard. And since I don't bother to check the news anymore - I know it'll all be bad things about my mother and me - I don't know what people are thinking. But I'm sure that, by now, someone out there has figured out the truth.

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It happened three years ago. My mother started to get distant. She stopped listening to complaints. Stopped hearing requests. Stopped collecting the sick for quarantine.

As the heir to the throne and the girl who had trained herself for years on this very subject, the first stages of the red plague should have been clear to me. But I guess I thought of my mother as invincible. She was the one who dealt with the sick. It never occurred to me that she might catch the plague herself. I should've seen the signs. I should've brought her to help and seen to it that they treated her. Instead, I hoped that it was a phase. A problem that would float away if I only waited. I didn't do anything about it.

About a month in, I found the first body.

It was a maid. Lying on her front with a knife jutted in her back. There was a pool of blood around her.

I had known her. That terrified me. I remembered her and only a few months ago, she'd been alive. Bustling around the palace, cleaning floors and doing my hair in extravagant braids. It horrified me that that could happen. That someone could just vanish.

There and then gone.

When I came staggering into my mother's room, seeking comfort and answers, she told me it was an accident. She held me and told me that it was fine, I was all right.

In that moment, I was more frightened of her then I'd ever been because I could still see the blood on her hands and shirt. She hadn't bothered to wipe it off. By then the plague must have consumed her so much that she couldn't understand why I cried so hard that night. I doubt she even understood that it was wrong to have dried blood covering you from head to toe.

It was then that I knew. I knew that the plague had somehow escaped the quarantine and made its way into my mother. She would keep killing until she killed herself.

Instead of alerting someone, I hid. I stayed in my room and I didn't leave because I couldn't bring myself to admit that my mother was gone.

Bodies kept showing up. Every morning I would peek out of the crack in my door and see one, lying there in a pool of blood. Sometimes it was a maid, sometimes a butler or a cook. But never a guard. They stayed outside, where my mother didn't dare go because of onlookers.

I would shriek and cry every time but I knew better than to go to my mother for comfort. All I would find was a broken woman with blood on her hands, shaking and crying as her thirst for blood grew.With so many of the servants dead, the others panicked. One by one, the servants that didn't die quit. They packed their things and left until one morning, I woke up with no one to feed me or dress me. And that meant I would have to leave my room.

I tiptoed down the winding staircase, my heart pounding. My knuckles were white on the railing.

There she was, sitting at the head of the dining table with a plate of eggs before her. She picked at the food. As I got closer, I saw that she was shaking.

I took a deep breath and stepped forward, "Mama?"

There was no sign that she had heard me. She didn't even blink, just kept on shaking and picking at her eggs.

"Mama? It's me," I tried again, "It's me, Evie."

Still no response.

I stepped forward again, "Evelyn? Your daughter?"

This time, she stilled. She set her fork on her plate and looked up. Her empty gaze found mine. And... I could see it in her eyes. She didn't know me. All she saw was a girl, or, better yet, another thing for her to slaughter. I felt tears gather in my eyes.

That was when I saw the knife at her side, covered with dried blood. Her steely eyes stayed locked on mine as her hand inched towards the handle of the blade.

I turned and ran.

I locked myself in my room, shaking and crying. I knew exactly what the plague could do to someone, yet I didn't think my mother would go as far as to try to kill me. But finally, the next day, hunger tightened its grip on me and forced me back down the winding stairs.

As I entered the kitchen I found my mother lying dead on the ground, a blade in her chest. I knew it was by her own hand because that is how the red plague works. It consumes you and makes you go mad, so mad that you kill yourself to stop the pain. In that moment, I hated myself because the coward in me felt a weight lift off my shoulders when I saw the body there.

That changed as soon as the first responsibilities came my way. I knew that the people needed a ruler, but I was afraid and frustrated. I was not my mother, and I was not the Queen. I didn't know how to deal with anything the way they thought she would. I couldn't meet their expectations, so I stopped. I stopped, and I let them think my mother was a coward of a leader who disappeared when the country needed her most.

I reacted the worst way possible. The public still doesn't know that the Queen is dead, but it's not only the outside world that I've stopped talking to.

It's been three long years since she died. Since then, I haven't said a single word at all.