the Society

September 5th

Nell is still here. When I checked on her earlier this morning, her throat was covered in a thick, white mucus. She told me that her throat doesn't hurt, though she has been coughing. I pray to whoever is listening that it isn't bacterial pneumonia; we have no antibiotics, and the girl is only nine. Furthermore, the infection would be debilitating for the entire population, and there would be nothing we could do for the weaker among us,

In the old world, I often found myself praying in the same way – to a god in whom I never really believed – for a bacterial infection over a viral one – in a cold irony – because all we had to do was give the patient antibiotics and they would be fine. Why would we worry about a simple infection? We could cure anything. Even if the symptoms of a viral infection presented themselves as less severe than those of a bacterial infection, the patient often had to suffer them until the body fought it off on its own, and worse, sometimes, the body's immune system was not strong enough to fight it off, especially in young children.

I said only a moment ago that I used to pray the same way in the old world, but I realise in reading it myself that I have never prayed as I do now, when a life as precious as that of a young girl could be on the verge of being lost.

* * *

It is evening, now, and another little girl, Jenna, lies in a bed on the floor, not far from Nell's. Jenna is only six, and so small for her age. The two girls live within two or three houses of each other, suggesting the contagious nature of Nell's infection. Jenna, too, has been wheezing.

Nell's fever has dissipated for the most part, and I hope that it does not return. Jenna, however, seems to be replicating Nell's symptoms days after they appeared, like an echo. When I checked her before, my stomach twisted uncomfortably as I debated whether to tell Nell's parents of her worsening condition. As a doctor, my instinct is to tell them immediately, and to warn them of the danger in which their daughter is suspended, but, as a survivor, I can only imagine the panic that may ensue if the Society were to find out that an outbreak could happen at any time.

I know that there was at least one outbreak before I came here, when the survivors still came in droves and  the population of the Society much larger. I've been told that there were once nurses and perhaps a doctor or two in the population of over five hundred – I cannot know for sure; words have a way of being misguided when they are the only medium on which one can rely. Furthermore, after the disasters, records were difficult to keep, with precious few supplies and transport abilities, with no sense of online databases or encyclopedias of information relevant only to the world before the wars, there was no hope of recording the world as we once had. For these reasons, I do not know what infection befell the Society before I found it, but I know that it was devastating. The remaining population had struggled to bury the dead before the rot had entered their bodies, and those who survived were weakened, equally susceptible to the elements of the forest around the community and to the wild dogs and other scavengers drawn to the smell of dead meat. I believe this is the reason for the coils of barbed wire and discarded machinery that lines the perimeter, and why the grave sites lie inside it.

I think of Turtle again now – the sweetest creature one could fathom in even their wildest imagination – and I wonder what he would do faced with the starvation and cold of this world. I am glad he never had to suffer such choices as we have.