Stories From VO1.2

Mona

Mona had been so old for so long that at some point it eventually stopped hurting. All of the aches and all of the pains melded together and disappeared. She knew she must be in pain, a lot of it, but her brain just didn't recognize it anymore. Just like her fingers were attached to her hand, her body was a pulsating mass of something that wasn't quite a pain.

Of course, she also suspected that her daughter was pumping her full of drugs. Those stupid pain blockers that Mona had argued against until time took her voice. It did that a lot. It took her eyesight and made everything blur. It took her arms and legs confining her to this damn bed. It took her sense of taste and dulled her sense of touch. Everything that made her alive, time was taking bit by bit. Mona was over two hundred years old and all she could do was open her eyes and view the world two inches away from her bed. She had buds stuck up her ears so she could hear but they hadn't found a way to fix her lack of speech - or if they did that damn daughter of hers was hiding it from her, that lying hateful wench - so Mona could look and listen but couldn't move or make a sound to do anything about it.

Mona wanted to die. Before they admitted her to the hospital she had told, actually begged, Trisha not to ever put her on life support. A couple of people she had rolled with really far back in the days had been admitted into the Sustained Life Program. Stuck up with needles and fed fluids until their hearts stopped beating and there was nothing the hospital staff could do to revive them. It was absolutely selfish. It was never about the person wanting to live, it was about the family not wanting to let them go. Trisha was a supporter of the program and Mona had promised she was going to make Matthew run the papers back and forth from the lawyer for her will. However, she fell asleep in her bed some years ago, maybe two or three maybe five, and had woken up in the hospital three days later. Apparently, she'd had a seizure. Trisha was crying, telling her how bad she had scared them and how she had gone and signed her up for the Sustained Life Program because she was so afraid. Mona had honestly expected Trisha to duck when she flung the tray of medical tools so she was just as surprised as her daughter when it smacked her in the face. But the shock ended pretty quickly and the cursing began right after.

Mona supposed it was her fault in the end. Her mother was a bit careless with her and Mona vowed to be the exact opposite. Martha brought Mona out on hunting expeditions and left her alone during attacks to run for the front lines. She supposed that the woman only knew how to fight and survive having done it for so long but Mona could never forgive her. She had left Mona to face the zombies on her own.

Not zombies, a voice repeated in her head, but mad men.

Mona scoffed. She had been too old and too stubborn when the re-branding efforts began. Doctors and scientists in white lab coats showed up from town to town fixing their glasses and explaining that the persons affected by VO1 weren't exactly dead. That there was no such thing as zombies.

Big shit, they were zombies true and through. They were dead, Mona believed this fully because there was no way those things could be alive, and they ate people. Freaking zombies.

But people were eager to forget and leave it. Her mother and the crew she rolled with weren't a part of those people. Even when the military overtook all official 'roundup' efforts they stayed vigilant. Mona was taught to fight, shoot, start fires, climb trees, anything her mother deemed necessary to survive. Which Mona couldn't knock because her mother had. She had survived the zombie apocalypse and lived to tell the tale. But Mona hated her for it.

Instead of a childhood filled with love and safety and protection, her mother forced her into the woods for days with a gun to deal with the zombies that slipped past the army. She had been absolutely traumatized as a kid and promised after she left her mom and had her own kids they wouldn't know anything about the losses Mona knew. But she supposed her mother was traumatized too and she could see it in her old age now lying down for years with nothing to do but think. So traumatized that Mona never even got the chance to run away. There was a sweep of pneumonia across the country when she turned eighteen. Her mother caught it, refused to go to the hospital, and gave Mona a gun.

Shoot her once she was dead.

Martha was certain it was VO1. She was sure that the zombies would return. She was sure she would die in the hospital. And Mona began to believe it too. Martha died anyway. In their house locked in her room. Unable to bring herself to shoot her own mother Mona hid in the closet for two days while Martha rotted in the room beside her. She held the gun close to her chest and prayed. Paramedics eventually broke their door down and found her and her mother. They took them both to the hospital. They gave her mother a time of death and hooked Mona up to an assortment of IVs that pumped fluids and medicine into her veins. 

It wasn't VO1, just pneumonia like everyone said. 

Mona thought on that long and hard as she spent her days staring down the ceiling in her ward. Just pneumonia. Her mother could still be here. She would never have gone through this entire ordeal if Martha had just gone to the hospital. All she had to do was listen to the medical professionals. Take a drip, get some drugs, and be on her way.

Mona hated her for it. For dying. For her childhood. For imparting one last piece of trauma before she clocked out, asking her child to shoot her in her head after she died. Mona could see her, flushed and sweating, passing her kid a murder weapon. Smiling because she believed it would save Mona's life but also because she wouldn't be subject to roaming the world rotting from the inside out. And it was just pneumonia. 

The woman may have been traumatized from the life she had to live but that didn't give her the right to traumatize Mona too. 

"It's crazy grams."

Mona didn't know when Matthew had appeared at her side. He was clutching her arms. Mona couldn't see him but she knew his voice well.

"I was supposed to go straight home but I don't think Mom will let me go anywhere once I get back so I came to tell you. There's this huge flu. People think it's VO1 again. Remember when your mom thought the same thing?"

She just was. She wanted to tell him. Why had she been thinking about it in the first place?

"They've had it up on the news everywhere. The nurses here are freaking out."

Matthew was a good boy. Coming here first. They had a comradery she could never build with Trisha. She was always such a daddy's girl. All Mona had wanted for her was love and safety. For her never to worry. Anytime Trisha sniffled she was at the doctors.

"Anyway, grams I got to go. Mom's gonna go nuts. I love you."

She loved him too. Closed her eyes to focus her attention on the place on her forehead where he always kissed her. Trisha stopped coming such a long time ago. Couldn't bare to see her like this apparently. What a hypocrite. Only Matthew came now to talk to her and hold her hand. Mona supposed all of her other friends where either dead or on sustained life like her.

For a bit, after Matthew's hand left hers, Mona wished that VO1 was back. It would mean her mother's paranoia was justified. It would mean she would finally get to die. It would mean Trisha would feel some of the hell Mona went through dying a little every day. But her mother was crazy, Trisha would never let her die, and Matthew was too young to go through anything like that.