A Remembrance of Life

It had taken many years, but Alison Pickering had finally grown used to the shrill clamor of sirens waking her up every morning.

When first introduced five years earlier, the Airborne Pathogen Alert System (APAS) would sound only occasionally, leading many to doubt how worthwhile the technology would prove to be. Indeed at the time of its introduction, APAS had attracted much skepticism and ire, and many had considered the multi-billion dollar warning system a hideously over-priced white elephant at best. At worst, it was berated as an obscene cash cow for slimy politicians and the fat-cat friends to whom they'd awarded one lucrative government contract after another.

Whichever zoomorphic metaphor was employed, whether elephant, cow, or money-making motherlode for grubby fat-cats, the fact was that APAS had been widely dismissed as a costly and cumbersome animal. As a result, most people in the city chose to ignore its warnings.

"Once those in power realize that the populace is paying no heed to their wailing sirens and doomsday warnings," the detractors argued, "the useless APAS system will be thrown on the scrapheap where it belongs, and we'll never again be subjected to screeching pathogen alerts warning us to mask-up or stay indoors."

When the daily death toll rose sharply and continued to climb day after day, there was no real way of telling whether it was a particularly virulent mutation of the pathogen that was to blame or just the complacency of the general populace. But with the virus wiping out 40% of the population and leaving every cemetery within 100 miles of the city filled to capacity, such distinctions didn't really matter much.

By the time 60% of the populace had fallen, teams of men and women known colloquially as "The Cadaver Squads" (from the Centre for the Aseptic Disposal of All Virus-Infected Remains, otherwise known as CADAVIR) were forcibly removing dead bodies from houses, care homes, and hospitals as though they were vermin. As those left behind to grieve watched the corpses of their loved ones being carted far outside of the city limits for compulsory cremation, very little mattered to anyone anymore.

As the sirens continued to shriek outside her window, Alison sighed and rolled over. She reached towards the bedside table for her mobile phone so that she could check the text messages from APAS that she, like every other city-dweller, knew would be waiting; a message advising of dangerously high levels of airborne pathogen and a stark warning that any citizens found to be outdoors without full masks and body-covering clothing would be arrested on sight.

"Damn it," Alison muttered as she read the APAS Advisory. There was no way for her to avoid the outside world today, having been drafted in for a full day's shift in her local community's Food Distribution Centre. Such was the dearth of healthy citizens still living and working in the city that all residents were placed on a mandatory rota system and could be randomly assigned to essential duties by order of the government. It reminded Alison of being summoned for Jury Duty way back in the days before the disease had completely decimated the population and the life they used to know.

The wailing siren went silent. It would sound again in another fifteen minutes time — unless, of course, some miraculous intervention occurred in the interim and sent the pathogen level plummeting. In a world where hope had long ago joined the millions of casualties of the catastrophic contagion, not even one moment's worth of wishful contemplation could offer a glimmer of rose-colored optimism. Hope was no more than a chimera now; a ghostly apparition from a time long gone.

Yawning, Alison placed her mobile phone back on the nightstand and picked up the heart-shaped locket that lay beside it. Sunlight glinted off the 14-carat yellow gold with forzatina chain as Alison brought the locket close to her face and pulled open the clasp. She felt the familiar ache in her heart as she gazed upon the photo inside with a wan, tearful smile.

Smiling back at her from within the was her husband, Alexander, and their two daughters, aged eight and four when the photo had been taken. The pathogen had arrived by the end of that same year, and it had quickly claimed the four-year-old, taking Alexander only two months later.

For a long time, Alison's eldest daughter, Emilia, seemed to have been blessed with the same hardy immune system as her mother. The pair forged a new life as best they could as the virus ran rampant, devastating the populace, and for the following seven years, it seemed as though the two of them would survive the pandemic and make it out the other side. But when the latest, particularly aggressive new strain of the virus had first hit the city and Emily's normally robust health had begun to wane, Alison had known with a desolate certainty that her daughter would be dead within a matter of weeks.

In the event, it had been nine days. The Cadaver Squad had collected the body for disposal before the sun had risen on day ten.

Alison closed the locket carefully and pressed her lips against the cold metal before returning it to its place on the bedside table. All alone now, with the world outside her window empty but for a few brave or foolhardy individuals hidden behind masks and protective clothing, those three smiling faces, ghosts from a former reality now frozen inside a heart-shaped locket, were the only faces she ever saw these days.

As a solitary teardrop slipped from the corner of Alison Pickering's eye, the wailing of the APAS sirens shrieked into life once more, the eerie soundtrack to the desolate dystopia that now passed for human existence.

©️ Jupiter Grant, 2021