Let me wind that back. The last six or seven years were like a blur, and things are so different now. You have to understand that at the time, people sometimes did go missing. Everyone didn't know all their neighbors. We didn't live underground. We didn't expect to find these holes, and we never saw those eyes before.
We were very shocked that they were underground, and breathing, and covered in what looked like eyes. It wasn't normal, and it was happening very quickly, you see. It even took a while before we knew they weren't really eyes.
Not long. Maybe it was recklessness when the utility worker ran a gloved hand over those blisters before calling emergency services. (Utilities were once great systems that kept the lights on. We had specialized people who responded to medical emergencies. ) His foreman told him not to touch them, but sometimes...curiosity, you understand. Wanting to know. The way you ask about what the time was like before. He had to reach in.
The skin moved with the dense fluid under the skin, but rippled like a living thing, and shining a flashlight on them, he could see they looked so much more like eggs. Like clear little eggs under the skin, and if he looked closer?
The "pupils" of the eyes had tails. Or tentacles. Or little fins, and that was enough. And that cleared out the tunnel where the first few infected were found. The CDC shut down the site, but didn't quite shut down the rumor.
Eyes. That were not eyes. That looked like other things.
Two powerful and separate interests were contending. One one hand, remember, our resources were different then. Some people had so much, and some not quite enough, but there was enough for all--for the time being. What was happening was a threat to the status quo. If people became panicked, they might do things. Take things. Order would be lost if there was no plan in place. On the other hand, human understanding is advanced cumulatively and collectively. It wouldn't do if too much information was withheld from anyone who might help.
So what did we know and when did we know it? Impossible to say. We knew different things at different times. Did we want to stay inside? Did we want to boil our water? Would antibiotics help? (A black market for them thrived.) Was it a government weapon gone horribly wrong? Was it a terrorist weapon gone horribly right? In the absence of good information, all we had was talk, and a vague hope that people who could do something knew more than the rest of us on some mystical "need-to-know" level.
The thing we eventually knew was that the blisters hatched. And the "passengers" went deeper underground, if they could. Otherwise they streamed off hospital beds and gurneys, and died in tiled hallways that smelled of disinfectant, or were dug out of drywall, or chewed through floorboards, or...
But where were they going--and where were we? And what were they?
The breaking story of the century was when they told us it was a virus. It was big, easily seen by the naked eye, but was not multicellular, and not at all like us.
At all.
It took longer for them to tell us they found them in the trees.
They worked their way up the root system. They burrowed into the bark. Loggers had cut into trees that looked perfectly fine, and yet were rotten inside. And the dust that spilled out of them was deadly.
We never quite knew how the communication broke down at that point.Were we simply not told for our own good--or were we running out of people who could tell? It might have been better--or worse--if the timing were different. If we knew what was going to happen with the retrovirus hijacking our flora. Before the black clouds of pollen filled the sky.
*****
Was it irony that we took refuge underground,where the first waves of infected also secretly dug their shallow beds or crawled instinctively into sewers and subway tunnels well away from the sun? We paired off by necessity into the households we have now, where no one must ever be alone. Pay attention--because you don't quite remember what it was like. There was a time when a person could be alone, without searching oneself, or being searched. Before the daily lancings.
We may be a scarred people, but we are tighter knit than we have ever been. Remember our watchword--I will watch your back, and you will watch mine. It may be inconvenient, and we might not know how long we can survive this way--years?
These shelters are never perfect. There must be eyes everywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment