I’ve always wanted to be a famous writer.
I don’t think that will happen now, though.
Desensitization; I’ve always wondered about that word.
Sure, now you’re just paper, but at one point you were a living and magnificent organism.
You’ve been great company to me for all of my lonesome nights.
Especially these recent ones.
It’s not either of our faults that you happen to be dead.
Now, I have decided to modernise and use the last of my allocated internet so that this account may be immortalized. Well, at least for a little while. They have allowed it as no-one will believe me, and they can gain an “inside perspective” in case this happens again. Overheard something about sending to a “different place.”
So, before I declare myself a retired wordsmith, I’ve got one final tale to share with you, my old friend.
The virus. Down to it’s last victim…it’s last host. Me, Eddy Beach. 48, single, barely any of my previously luscious blond hair left, my blue eyes dulled behind slightly clouded vision. Lived in this small town with 5, 000 people my whole life.
Four days have passed since I caught it.
If caught is the right word.
I know what awaits me now as I sit propped up in the bed of my condemned house, writing this.
I’ve lost two stone, my appetite and my five housemates; all of which I had given shelter.
Daily, I would weigh myself, not bothering to eat as I would just taste it again when it came back up.
Every day, I would wake up to a new corpse.
I would also wonder if I could see anything through the heavy, thick plastic sheets that the CDC had set up around my house three day ago. Forcefully.
Every day, you see, we are submitted to a blood test. We comply so that we are given provisions and that the whole house doesn’t get “fumigated”. With us inside. Something about toxic gas which is worse than the virus, supposedly. Perhaps not. A slow death. None of us wanted to find out.
We simply get given the supplies in a box at 10am and leave the completed blood tests outside the front door at 4pm every day. They said that keeping a routine would help keep us sane.
We don’t receive results but know that we are “clean” if no-one has visited our residence.
I theorise, though. No, in fact now I believe that the tests served no actual purpose other than a psychological tactic to think we had a chance of survival or that they had a handle on things. Or both.
Thinly veiled false hope whichever way you look at it, though, I guess.
After isolating half of the world’s population, the world’s leaders found that there were only six of us left and, since I was the last diagnosed, my home was chosen.
They didn’t want to kill us right away, as they wanted to study the virus and it’s effects. For science, of course. Just like the plot of a horror film. Except this time, the monsters are outside, and they won’t come in.
We were thrown together. Not to live, but to die.
I don’t know how they’re spinning this to the public, other than we isolated ourselves and chose this over death. That we had donated our bodies to science while we are still living, to help future generations. Perhaps false hope, or promises, that we would either be immune and therefore a glimmer of hope of a cure.
Or we die, our bodies get dissected and preserved.
Hell, maybe we are seen as heroes.
We had all the modern comforts of my spacious house. 4 bedroom, three bathrooms. We could not watch any form of current news programme or have any non-pre approved communication with the outside world.
Like I say, they are letting me share this account. Another reason is to try to help my mental state, now I am alone.
But now it is just me, all alone. With the corpses.
I wonder who will discover mine.
Anyway.
Firstly, we noticed that you went through different stages of the virus.
The infection was only detectable from blood tests, if we stayed naïve; everyone remembered a blood sample being taken as the last memory before being sealed in the house.
We also noticed that no symptoms showed until the third or fourth day of infection. It was impossible to know how near to death you were until these symptoms surfaced. But, as Shannon and I took note of, they didn’t appear in the same order, it was different every time.
We couldn’t be certain if any loss of weight and sleep was due to the stressful situation rather than the disease itself.
The first of us to go was a man called Lee; he had short black hair, was from China and could barely speak English. He drowned in a bowl of soup, Jury is out if it was intentional or not. He was on day five of infection.
The second day of our, forced, quarantine, was when a young woman named Janet from America had met her end. She quietly sobbed for the first day and then rocked in a corner mumbling to herself on the second, which is the position her corpse was in the next morning.
The third and fourth to die were identical twins Jewel and Beatrice, from Switzerland, but they spoke excellent English. They were only sixteen. Jewel was the second of them to go; all that she did was hold her twin’s corpse and cry. These girls seemed full of life.
The last to die was an Irish woman called Shannon. I felt closest to her, although we were strangers.
As Shannon grew weaker, she commented how tomorrow was her lucky day. She was very practical, dictating into an audio recorder, and I wrote everything she said down.
Together, we broke down symptoms of the contagion. Of course, these changed for everyone.
She told me of what she was experiencing, for our research. I also added my experience.
The virus lays in wait until you are in a false sense of security before it strikes.
The first symptom we noted was the loss of hearing, sometimes the ears would also bleed lightly.
Next we found the sensation of burning nostrils, as if someone was torturing you, would sporadically appear and disappear.
We also noted a sense of paranoia and anxiety crept in around day three. Mixed with a nice, healthy dose of hallucinations, sometimes audio, sometimes visual, sometimes both.
Shannon had said that the sixth day was when her hallucinations had started.
I am on day five of infection. My symptoms are that I cannot hear my typing. Cannot blink without it hurting, my vision is cloudy, I am extremely lethargic. Not too much on the hallucinations front.
I have a fever and constant hot/cold flushes, like I have the flu.
I have moved to the bathroom floor, as it is much easier than leaving a trail of blood from the bedroom to here, when my body surprises me with some blood vomit whenever it feels like it.
Furthermore, I am exhausted, my body is now rapidly losing weight, my gums are receding, and I have started to have teeth fall out randomly.
That’s pretty much it.
Not bad, if I do say so myself. Perhaps my best piece.
Yeah.
Gives you an insight into how crap my other writing is, doesn’t it?
Well, paper, thanks for the company.
I’m thinking of a title. Perhaps it should be expanded.
Maybe “Quarantine?” Shit, no, that was already a film. “Eddy?” Yeah, Why not.
Still wondering about desensitization.
Eddy by Eddy Beach. A bit too self obsessive of me, but then again, in this situation, can you blame me?
I’m sure I’ll figure it out.
One of my fingernails just….came off. Fuck, I can stand a lot of media, but that’s one thing I cannot. Time to stop typing.
Back to vomiting blood.
Tomorrow is going to be my lucky day, one way or the other.