Faceless

(Day Four, "The Plague")

I remembered something.

About my childhood.

We were eleven, twelve, and thirteen.

Me, Lucia, Eros, and Cassiopeia.

We made the brave decision to venture out into the woods near the Silence.

I was the ringleader, of course I was. Lucia didn't want to go, but Eros and Cass wanted to stay with me to make sure I didn't hurt myself, and I guess that was enough reason for Lucia to go

It was dark, and we were all terrified. Shadows followed is everywhere. Screams raced out from the undergrowth, grabbing our hearts and squeezing.

We were terrified, and we clung to each other as we walked.

Where we were going, we had no idea.

The forest fell away, eventually.

Giving away to a barren wasteland.

Well, almost barren.

Houses for the landscape, but none of them are occupied. No light spills out of the windows, and while I know that people can and do live without electricity, it just has the aura of someplace abandoned.

Carcasses litter the ground. I think they were cow or steer, but I was young enough to not know.

We all glanced at eachother. I don't know if it was fear or confusion in our eyes, but something naive was there. We didn't understand.

Only later would I realize it was the Silence.

That sounds negative.

It's not.

It was well deserved, I heard.

Very well deserved.

And so the Silence unleashed a plague on them. Died in days, the whole population.

It wasn't.

No one told me that, but I know it's true.

It has to be true.

It has...

(she trails off with a manic laugh. she coughs.)

Anyway, everyone died. Everyone not in the Silence died. It was well deserved. Anyone not in the Silence was an idiot, a blasted idiot.

The Silence was the only way to live. Obviously it was the only way to live.

Everywhere else was a dystopian hellscape.

But the Silence was a paradise among the rubble.

And they were aware of it, too.

So the scientists created a plague to kill everyone not in the Silence.

But it's okay, because everyone in the Silence is immune.

Which is why it was a totally different disease that killed Father, even if the symptoms were mostly the same.

Bloodied gums, raw skin, horrible green bruises across the knuckles, swollen eyelids.

Anyone afflicted looked to be on death's door.

They probably were.

The bodies were even worse, all shriveled up like a raisin within an hour of dying.

They got what they deserved, I suppose.

They didn't believe in the cause.

The Silence's cause.

To restabilize humanity.

They never did get far.

It would take generations and generations' worth of time to undo five year's worth of genetic modification.

Five years. That's all it took.

A team of college kids figured out how to make the smartest people, the strongest people, the most resilient people, at nearly no cost at all. And they found it out all over a dumb experiment with a few lab mice.

People jumped all over it, shelling out tons to become superior beings with little cost.

Superior.

Pfft.

More like weak.

They thought they were invincible, hence why so many gangs started, including the Curtain.

The Curtain wanted the Silence's guns in exchange for the genetic coding.

And I believed them.

I thought I was doing good.

I-

(static.)

...for working with them.

(static.)

No. N-

(static.)

Can't be back... Don't-

(end of recording.)