It ends here

© Tony Shillitoe

They’re closing. I’ve given them a good chase but I’ve blundered into a dead end. A flimsy wire gate and a dozen musty cardboard boxes separate me from them - perhaps from death. Not that I care. I’m past caring. Death is the only friend I have left.

The Illness flows through my veins as surely as I feel the warm blood bearing it. I’m a rare one - a ‘Carrier’ they call me. I can pass the Illness on to others, but never die from it myself. I’m lucky. But it’s a poor kind of luck. So many of my people are not carriers. When the Illness is pumped into them they die. Horribly. Their bodies bloat. Skin blisters, peels away. Eyes, noses, mouths ooze blood. And they scream. And scream. Even when I block my ears I can still hear the screaming. My dreams are full of images of death.

I’m an experiment gone wrong.

I miss Eva. I miss her terribly. I miss her eyes sparkling like moonlight on a river. I miss her scent, the sweetness that drew me to her so many moons past. She, who was mother to our future - I miss her. Eva’s beautiful eyes were tinged yellow, and bloodied when I last saw her: body rotting, inside and out, flesh falling away, blood oozing from every orifice. She was conscious every day of her dying, staring at me with desperation, screaming when the pain became too much, silent when the pain dulled. Staring. They gave her the Illness: a virus they mutated, but now cannot cure. I know, because when they began experimenting on me I learned some of their language - more than they can ever suspect. It’s a side-effect. What I do know is that they are afraid of the Illness. It kills them too, just as mercilessly as it kills my people.

I wasn’t meant to happen. And yet I was. I’m what they least expected.

One of them is in the far end of the room already. I must be still. Instinct tells me to run, to fight in the open. But that would only bring death quicker, and I’m not yet ready to die. They carry killing sticks. I will not die yet. He - I think it is a he - is standing in the entrance. I have not been seen. Not yet. This box I hide in is big enough. The boxes here are big.

For years we’d heard of The Invaders, how they came and carried away our people in their glittering machines. But we never understood why. And we always believed they wouldn’t take us. It happened elsewhere, to others in other territories. We were unknown to them. We thought we were safe. We were naïve. And we were wrong.

When they made first contact, so I learned from our elders, they brought strange gifts and came in peace. That was a long time ago, in my great-grandfather’s past. There were fables about strange illnesses they also brought to our people, germs from their culture that crossed the genetic pools to mingle with ours. Some were fatal. Some adapted. This is a thing I do not know for fact. I know this more as a feeling than as logic. But then I am old to feeling. I am new to logic.

They hadn’t expected the major side-effect in a Carrier to be the rapid onset of logic. But then they never considered us more than animal primates, lower order intelligences, partially evolved beings. That way they justify using our people for their experiments. They believe that they, not us, have the right to life. We exist only to serve their ends. I exist now only to prove them wrong.

The day the sentries came to warn that The Invaders were in our territory the curious stayed, politely hidden, to see what they were really like. I was one of the curious. So was Eva. And when they came riding on machines hanging above the earth, we were surprised to see that, alien though their way of dressing and communicating are, they were not unlike us - much bigger perhaps, and paler than the lightest shades of a summer sunset - but still we could see they once could have been our own people a very long time ago. So we came out of hiding. Some of our people even dared to extend our traditional sign of greeting.

And The Invaders cut them down them with their killing sticks.

I remember after that only the hot scramble to escape, the rush of fear, the strangling grip of the nets, the screams of those trapped and those terrified. And the screams of our old ones culled and killed without mercy. And the screams of our young whose nightmares stories had suddenly become too real.

The one in the doorway has stepped out. I hear voices in the corridor beyond. They are using their logic of course - the logic that has infected me because of the Illness - to eliminate where I am not. That way, they will know where I am. They come for me, bearing a gift of death perhaps, because I have cheated death. They would call that irony.

After, The Invaders dragged us into their machines, and flew us away from our world to their world. So much was, and still is, a blur. They made us sleep away weeks of our lives, left us numb and cold and bare and lost. And when the haze lifted from our minds we found ourselves locked in cages, bars where there were no bars before. Artificial light. Day became night, night day. Nothing was as it should have been. Their world was – their world still is - an illusion. The change made many of our people sick. Some lay down and refused to eat, gave up the will to live being no longer able to walk free. Some died. Others vanished. Vanished. They fed us, watched us. Some of them even tried to talk to us in their strange voices, talked almost as if they cared.

And then the experiments started.

I must keep still. They’re arguing in the corridor now. I think they, too, have reached the point of no return. They must know I’m in here. I must face what is to happen with all my courage. The future depends on what I do or don’t do now. Courage and revenge are all I have remaining. My people are all dead or dying. Eva, poor Eva, Eva is a ghostly memory. I carry a new treasure in my cells. I am the last of my people. The Invaders took away all that was once us - studied us, experimented on us, dissected us, tortured us, maybe even ate us if the myths are true - and I am all that remains.

I would like to hear the call of the wild birds echo through the morning mist one more time.

I let them take Eva when they came for her. I didn’t have the courage to protest. We’d watched the others come and go, patches torn from their flesh, their eyes and mouths taped, hair shaven. So much fear and sadness and anger just made us numb, dead inside. We had no idea what was happening to our people. No one understood. We only had our fear, and the disorientation of being taken from one world to another, to keep as our security. So they took Eva. And I didn’t try to stop them. It wouldn’t have mattered. They would’ve taken her whatever I tried to do. And when she was brought back - limp, unconscious, smelling of chemicals like all the others, tape stuck to her limbs - before I could hold her, or tell her I was sorry, they took me.

The first time was the worst. Lights, and small eyes and pale smooth faces hidden behind glass and plastic, they measured me, weighed me, took blood samples, cut away tiny swabs of flesh outside and inside. They prodded me, pulled me, lifted me, rolled me over, and all the time kept me firmly bound so I could not move, could not struggle. And then they injected me. With the Illness.

Of course I didn’t know what it was then. None of us did. I don’t even think they really knew either.

But within a short time - I guess it was a day, but we had no way of measuring time in their world of perpetual light – the Illness began. Eva felt hot and then she broke into a long sweat. They came and looked into our cage, and all the other cages, clad in their white garbs with their shiny, bulbous, featureless heads. Within a short while Eva fell into a coma. I cradled her in my arms, begged her to open her eyes and talk to me, but I could do nothing. They came and took her again. They took all the others one by one. And I remained. Alone.

And I never got sick.

So they came to watch me constantly, searching for something they could not see in me. And still I wasn’t ill.

And they took me from my cage, and studied me again like before. And they injected me a second time. And again they waited. And still I did not get sick.

After more study, they placed me back in my cage. Eva was there. She was fine, almost healthy looking despite all that had happened. So we showed each other how much we were glad to be back with each other. And we didn’t care if they watched us as we loved one another. We no longer cared for them.

But our joy was all too bitterly brief. Within a short time - perhaps another day or two - Eva showed all the second stage symptoms of the Illness as it exploded through her body. Her skin reddened. She complained of excruciating pain inside: pain so bad she would clutch her stomach, double over, and scream and scream, kicking out with her legs. Then the blood started oozing. And all around me, from every cage, screaming rose and fell. The Invaders came, and watched, and prodded and measured everyone, studying the effects of the Illness in every facet, every detail. But mostly, they came to look at me. They took me out of the cage to study me again in the white room, bound, and blinded by the white lights. And Eva was drowning and dying in a pool of her own blood and I could do nothing. My people were dying and I could do nothing.

And they injected me with other fluids and took more of my blood, and were fascinated.

They even brought the bloody pulp of one of my people, laid him beside me, and injected me with infected blood straight from his leg.

And still I did not get sick.

So they watched me. And I watched them. And they talked. And I listened. And slowly their alien sounds began to make sense in my head as I listened. And they studied me and took blood and measured and evaluated, and they did not seem to understand what I was.

I listened and learned how scared they really were of the Illness they were testing on us. The Illness had appeared in their past, and it had killed millions of their kind. They knew only that it was a virulent mutating virus, a cruel and bloody disease that would flare again and again until they found a cure or it killed them. And they knew also that if it found its way into the blood of their kind again, it would kill them all if no cure could be found this time. So we were their experiment, their hope. My people were dying, were being systematically wiped out so they could find a way to live.

And I was the link, the bridge, the keystone to the arch that would let them go on and fulfill their place in the universe.

All this I learned in a few short days while they let my people die and kept me alive. The Illness coursed through me and I felt the changes, and though I did not understand the strange side-effect, I knew it was happening. And I changed. And they did not know.

They’re in the entrance again. I know they will be dressed in airtight suits and helmets, like the one who had guarded my cage. She made one small mistake that let me escape. One instant was all I needed. She left the gap when she tried to stroke me, and I took all my fear and hate and courage, and rolled it into a ball, and leapt at the gap. And ran.

They know I’m here. They’re coming slowly, cautiously towards the wire gate. They’re carrying a net. I’ll wait inside the box here and let one of them find me. I can hear the gate scrape open. They’re moving boxes. I have one hope. I know now they won’t kill me. I’m far too valuable. I’m still the only answer they have to the question they fear most. I am their nemesis.

My box shudders. Gloved fingers slip over the rim. One hope. Courage, do not fail me now. This is for Eva. For all my people. Not for the future but for the past. I bite hard, sink my teeth through the glove into flesh. I taste blood. It tastes warm and good. It ends here.

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