Covid-20

“This is an emergency broadcast. We urge the public to stay indoors. Only leave your shelter if you feel it has been compromised.” The voice hissed through the static of my portable radio.

This had been playing repetitively on the radio since I woke up. An immensely different message than the one playing only a month ago when the lock-downs took full swing.

A week earlier they were urging the citizens to make sure they had enough water and non-perishable food to last at least two weeks. A request that was largely ignored, unless you considered toilet paper to be one of those things.

Watching people fight and claw their way through grocery stores to get their hands on something they didn’t need, or at least not in the amounts they needed it, was truly amazing. The store employees being powerless to enforce their items limits seemed only to encourage people to start outright looting.

I had only seen that sort of behavior once prior, back in 2020, when COVID-19 first struck.

I suppose people didn’t really care at that point. After all the majority of people were surviving it. Maybe they thought this time would be the same. I didn’t dwell on the thought for long.

“This is an emergency broadcast. We urge the public to stay indoors. Only leave your shelter if you feel it has been compromised.” I scanned through station after station trying to find anything else playing, but to no avail.

I turned it off, and walked to the kitchen. The power had been out for almost a month at this point, but fortunately the water was still running. I set up an old propane camping stove, on the now inoperable stove, and lit it. I placed a pot full of water on top and let it boil as I began to pack up my sleeping bag. I found traveling from city to city, home to home, far outweighed the risk of staying in one place for to long. The packs could smell you if your scent lingered for longer than a day or two.

I wasn’t sure who lived in this house before I came to inhabit it, but they clearly left in a hurry. Photo albums thrown about, beds devoid of pillows and blankets, and while the the fridge remained full of now decaying food, the pantry and cupboards were baron.

I gathered my few belongings and I went back to attend my water happy to find that it was boiling. I filled a few of my containers with the water and placed them, along with the stove, into a backpack.

I stepped outside into the frigid winter air. The wind bit into my face, so I pulled up my mask from around my neck. There was an unsettling silence about this neighborhood. The screaming and panic that dissolved society was completely absent. Silence, that was only broken by the sound of glass shattering not to far away from where I was standing. I stepped back inside and locked the door.

I made sure to keep myself out of obvious view and watched them pass through to eye hole in the door. It was surreal the way they moved. Aimlessly and yet with purpose. Rapidly trying to get somewhere without any idea of where it was.

I held my breath as I watched pack leader stop and the group behind it stop as well. They were directly outside of the house. Standing still in the middle of the street. I could see them sniffing the air, probing the atmosphere around them for their next victim. Unsatisfied, they continued moving forward.

I turned around and slid down the door. Sitting with my legs stretched out and let out a sigh of relief.

A sense of calm reentering my body.

I thought back to when I first encountered these things.

I was sitting in the living room of my apartment when I first heard the news.

Eyes glued to the television, praying that it was some type of joke, or misunderstanding.

The banner scrawled across the bottom of the screen read “COVID-20 variant originating in South America showing disturbing new symptoms.”

At first I remembered what they said about the COVID-19 variants found in the UK and South Africa, they were more transmissible but didn’t seem to be any more or less deadly than the parent virus. Some people didn’t make it out of that pandemic, but in the grand scheme of things the deaths were seemingly low.

Then COVID-20 came around. The mortality rate was astronomical. Half a billion dead in one month world wide. COVID-19 paled in comparison. The issue wasn’t primarily the deaths though, in that first month, almost 2 billion recorded cases around the globe. Hospitals were nothing more than a sure fire way to catch it at that point.

But I watched on in horror.

“We are seeing individuals infected by COVID-20 showing symptoms unlike any before.”

The screen changed over to a well dress woman standing next to a gate outside of a military aid station.

“That’s right, we are here outside of the National Guard medical installation, and as you can see the patients inside appear to fighting with the military personnel.”

The sight was hectic, people running and screaming. Riot control gas lobbed into clustered areas of patients. Hoards of armed military members swarming the site.

Gun fire erupted.

The screen cut back to the news station, which now void of it host.

The only thing I could make out through the now blurred camera seemed like a small amount of red liquid splashed on the green screen. That’s when power went out.

My apartment filled instantly with darkness. The piercing sounds of sirens filled the air.

I could hear helicopters flying around. The sounds of screaming and terror all blended together into incoherent white noise. The generator power kicked on as I saw the hall light from under my front door shine in. Unfortunately the individual apartments were not connected to it.

A shadow began to block the light. I watched the handle turn and the door slowly open.

There stood an emaciated figure. The silhouette of it was enough to make my stomach jump into my throat. Fear filled my body, paralyzing me for a moment as I took in the sight.

It stepped forward, its whole body was hairless. Its face heavily lacerated and dripping blood. Its arms seemed to be to long for its body. It tilted its head back, and I could hear the sound of it breathing through what was left of it’s nose. A watered down squelching noise emitted from its unnaturally gaping mouth.

It was smelling the room. Searching for its inhabitant. Trying to locate me.

I darted to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, I looked on through the small gap between my counter and cabinets. My movements didn’t seem to bother it.

It stepped forward again and lunged in my direction. It bolted face first into the wall, hard enough to break through the first layer drywall but not through the two by four that was inside of it. The crunch of bone being compacted was gut wrenching. I heard a firm thud as it hit the ground.

Against every instinct to run away, I slowly leaned my head outside of my kitchen and looked down at it. I slowly approach it realized its head was bent back unnaturally. It killed it self trying to attack me.

I looked at it a little while longer, then looked at the blood soaked wall where it made impact.

It knew where I was, but didn’t realize there was something between us.

I looked down at its arm and that’s when I saw it. A hospital band that read COVID-20 quarantine in red letters.

What I was looking at was a COVID-20 patient.