The Populace

by Patterson, Aaron M.

  Why were these people coming to my house when they knew what it would do? The road, people! Stay on the road! It’s a safe distance from the cabins. Everybody knows that.

  My inner-monologue pleas made no difference, as yet another person, this one a very young man, possibly sixteen, ran at me in a blistering Ired state. I dodged him before turning to throw him hard to the walk below. Like the large woman, I stomped on his head repeatedly. It was devastatingly important that I kill him, for he represented all evil on earth. And once the deed was done, I knelt over his body, my red view leaving, and just watched the blood drain from his crushed skull.

  Meanwhile, debris still fell around me, some of it on me. I wanted to run inside my cabin, to ensure nobody else came near and avoid another murder, let alone the potential death of myself. Still, I couldn’t stay still. Not when Haydon wouldn’t answer back. With about as much reluctance possible, I took to the road and very slowly began walking in the direction of Haydon’s cabin.

  Another explosion occurred past my cabin, apparently sparing mine. It shook me mildly, but I was already bracing for it. Whoever charged these detonations against the cabins did it methodically, and their reasons were still unknown at this time. I didn’t care anymore. I had to find Haydon.

  I was fortunate enough to be graced by the presence of no people on the road toward Haydon’s cabin. My necklace remained silent and still. It did so even as I approached Haydon’s cabin. It was not good.

  The entire cabin was ablaze, or at least what was left of it. I quickly ran inside to search for him. Well, I found him. He was dead, lying on the bed in his bedroom with flames around or on his charred body. It was my only chance to do it. I had to touch him. Void of the Ired sensation, I put my hand on his head and said, “Goodnight, friend.” The fire rapidly crawled up my hand onto my arm. My hand stayed on his head for many seconds, damn the fire. At least I could say I wasn’t without human contact of the single greatest person I’d ever known. It didn’t seem to bother me that he was dead at the moment. And I didn’t notice the sheet of paper that floated right into the pocket of my jacket.

  Well, such a sentiment would never sustain the tortures of time in the human brain. Grief nearly paralyzed me once I left the site of the burning cabin, my entire right arm burnt to a literal crisp. I bandaged my arm, took the appropriate antibiotics and pain relievers, and remained in my bed for two weeks. I think it was two weeks, can’t remember exactly. Nevertheless, that was me grieving.

  Haydon was dead one week before seeing his wife. In fact, Diane came looking for me upon hearing of her husband’s death. I didn’t want to see her. She tried calling me on my cell several times, but I ignored her. It was too painful. She could not bring him back. She gave up and probably went back to her development. I truly did not care about her anymore, and that was the monster in me, or what I had become. It was cold, callous, and utterly petty of me, but I did not care. I hurt. For some reason I blamed her. She had no part in it, but I needed someone to blame for Haydon’s death. If I’d just waited until the middle of December, I would have had the aim of my own personal ire, not the Ire.

  It was an actual video report we all received on our cells. No man in a tie at a desk, but instead just an aging guy in a black sweater in a badly lit room with a paper in his hand.

  “Opting Survivors of Minnesota Number-5 development. We have endured a tragedy here. There have been no answers in the three weeks since it happened. But I am pleased to inform you that after a thorough investigation, we have uncovered all relevant information. This was a plot by two people, Anne Glaustner and Rachael Muth, two residents of our development. They were detained yesterday and are being held in side-by-side cells at the moment. We are fiercely asking these women questions about their reasons behind killing so many people. Whereas the Ire kills as a parasite latched onto a host, this was another brand of murder, one of sheer bloodlust and malice. They are to be punished if found guilty. And since we no longer have proper courts, we will have to make this a judgment call, likely without all the facts in the case. We will be updating you through text as we know more information. Thank you, opting survivors.”

  And we had our guilty ones. Surprisingly, it really made no difference to me. Haydon was dead and detaining the people involved was not going to change that. This is when the depression I’d been repressing came on at full-force. For the first time since the Ire struck, I was filled with nothing but sadness, and it lasted a very, very long time.

  Ultimately, the women’s plot was fully discovered and described publically to our development. Anne Glaustner and Rachael Muth were actually two lovers in Avon before the Ire. They were relics of rebellion, despising all things government and organized. Regardless of the Centralized Authority’s more-than-noble intentions, it was an entity with power, and the women saw this power and construed it for tyranny. They ignored the truthful messages of the CA and formed an agenda to provide a form of anarchy in our development, the news of which would then circle around the globe and spark similar discontent in many, if not all, developments.

  With no real judicial system hanging around anymore, the CA attempted a trial very quickly. The trial was done away from our eyes, our eyes away from theirs. The cameras would come on once judgment was ruled. They were found guilty four weeks after the incident. This entire time, they were held in large concrete cells, side-by-side, meaning they felt the Ire over two weeks. They were left unwatched by cameras for fifteen days, and when the cameras came on we were greeted with quite the shock.

  Anne, the one in the left cell, lay twitching and jolting on the cold ground of her cell, blood splattered on the wall and pooling under her. Rachael, in her cell on the right, was dead. Her body was badly bloated, meaning she had been dead many days. Her cell walls, as well, were caked with her own blood. The many close-up zooms of their bodies told the story of how terrible the Ire truly was.

  If in the presence of a person but without the means to kill them, the brain does not shut off. It continues to go until the body can act no more. Whether it’s from the heart unable to work anymore upon endless hours of overexcitement, blood loss from attempts to break through the walls, or dehydration—a more likely scenario, as self-preservation is completely neglected in the midst of the Ire—death will come shortly. Based on the lack of skin on her fingers and her teeth badly cracked, many missing, Rachael’s Ire did not stop until she was dead.

  This was eye-opening for the Centralized Authority. Sure, there were details always surfacing about how prisons and jails contained much of the same situations, as people remained incarcerated near others and the Ire presented the same situations. However, they had assumed nature would take its course in such places where nobody cared about its residents. But now, after publishing these images of two women tortured by a disease afflicting everybody, the CA realized image meant something in the long run. They issued a series of apologies through textnet, the new data-only message delivery system that saved on electric resources—shortly, nearly every news story would have only words, hardly a picture, let alone a video.

  The drama of Anne and Rachael died down once the new year hit. Whereas two years prior I was drinking away with a few fair-weather friends at a pub, I did not celebrate. How could I? My only friend was no more, killed senselessly. I hurt.

  I kept the jacket I wore to find his body in the back of my bedroom closet. It was charred, the black cloth now gray and cotton inside badly exposed. It smelled of both burnt wood and flesh, the flesh portion of my own hand when I didn’t care I was being fried. I don’t know why I kept it. Perhaps I wanted to hang onto that innocence from before Anne and Rachael. I killed two people while wearing that jacket.

  Looking at it, I noticed something in the pocket. I reached in and pulled out the slightly charred and otherwise ripped sheet of white paper. There was but one phrase written in somebody’s mundane print, unfinished and glaring at me: ...on the sad wings of destiny... Nothing else. Who knows who wrote it, when t
hey wrote it, what it meant, or what else was on the sheet? Maybe a journal, maybe a new novel somebody tried to write, maybe even a train-of-thought dictation. No matter, because I liked it. Hell, I needed it. It felt as though the author were speaking directly to me at the most perfect moment. I folded it eight times over and shoved it back in the jacket I never intended to wear again. I then hung the jacket up in my closet.

  I found a pleasant surprise that New Year’s Day, and I would cherish that phrase. For I lived every day going forward, not backwards, on the sad wings of destiny brought at my feet by the goddamn Ire. Finally, grief had fully caught up to me. Life was not the same after that.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 5

  Almost Two Decades

  Things at Minnesota Number-5 development changed drastically all while staying exactly the same over the next few years. More cabins popped up, most of them to replace the cabins felled by the two angry women. Yet the cabins were exactly like all others. We would be promised new, exciting advances in potential SPMS-management drugs. One came along, but it was not tried on the population, only mentioned over and over. The birthing initiative was lit, but there were no takers from our development; rumor had it that the total number for volunteering birthers in North America totaled under one hundred women.

  Furthering the stagnancy was the fact that not only was frustration beginning to build from us opting survivors, but we were also growing damningly bored. Stories would often come along through textnet of random murders from a distance, i.e. with guns, all over the world. This was to break the monotony, and also to feel something real away from the crippling jaws of the Ire itself. To take a life and mean it, to control the hour, somehow meant the Ire was at least mildly conquered.

  I can’t say I would disagree with it either. The sensation we feel when Ired is undoubtedly the worst feeling possible. I had killed five people and I remember each one fantastically, and devastatingly. I remember how the person I aimed to destroy appeared red in sight and aura, that each was the epitome of the devil. My blood boiled, unable to cool down until the evil devil was removed from its life. All people, or 99% of the world’s population, felt this Ire according to many of the statistics. So yes, to make a kill that was void of the affliction haunting us all made some gain control. I don’t think I could do it myself, but I do understand.

  What I did not understand was the wailing and the beckoning of my sudden bout with loneliness. My life had always been about me—my world, my day, my night. As I mentioned before, it never made me upset to be alone. I was comfortable there. Then Haydon came along. Then he was taken from me and the rest changed like a knife barely puncturing my jugular, allowing me to live but in pain with the threat that any move I make could end me.

  I wanted it to be like it was before Haydon. I didn’t want friends. I didn’t want to lose a friend again, I should say. Dozens and dozens of people in my development reached out to me in the year and then some following Haydon’s death. My cell would often not stop ringing with people wanting to be my friend. Not one did I accept. Not a single call. I knew, simply knew, that losing another person so close to me would feel epically worse than not letting another person in. And in this age, when we were still mightily ignorant as to what the Ire actually was, death within the year was something of a 75% chance based on statistics.

  All said, I did not want to be alone. I wanted to allow a friend, two friends, a train of friends to come to me, remotely of course, and call me somebody they cared for. I desperately needed it. It was right in front of me to take, and still I refused it. It confused me. I believe it was summer in 2032 when I sat down in front of the window with a pile of pills, all delivered by the CA of course, in my hand ready to end it. I couldn’t take the pills. The thought of my own death honestly scared me more than my own thoughts of isolation and loneliness.

  I was an exception. That same day in the development we lost three people from suicide, part of a summer where our numbers went from 312 to 285 due to suicide. The CA attempted to put out a suicide prevention program strictly to keep the numbers up, but it was extremely half-assed and, I would contend, not heavily supported in Bern. Good intentions aside, less numbers meant less resources to expend. Even the Centralized Authority, the overarching everything of all remaining people with a proven record of benevolence, easily fell victim to obvious and unavoidable logistics.

  No, causing my own demise was not for me. That same thing from before persisted, the one indescribable thing telling me to see this thing through. Oddly, it should have become harder with the passing of the years, as complacency, boredom, loneliness, and hopelessness often ruled our lives. Things did not grow more difficult. Quite the opposite.

  I mentioned I had routines at the beginning of the cabin placement. It took a few years following the misery of losing Haydon, but the routine again surfaced sometime in the middle of 2034. I always lived in the moment, never truly thinking of the next thing other than my crops. And my crops, my farming, I was great at it. I grew delicious tomatoes, juicy potatoes, delectable corn, fine onions, and a variety of other small staples that all came out very nicely. Except eggplant. The eggplant seeds provided by the CA must have been deficient or something.

  Before long, ten years had gone by. Ten years since the Ire crushed humanity almost to a pulp. I was alive and very well in these pulpy remains of humanity, no real health issues, and growing wiser and stronger. Not that I needed strength really, but the wisdom was most welcome. Why? It let me see things, new things, brighter things. It opened my mind. Whereas at twenty-two I knew little of social norms, the thought process, and self-purpose, by thirty-two I understood people, understood thoughts, understood existence, and most of all I understood myself. I wasn’t lost. Not by any means.

  It wasn’t by accident, however. I found wisdom the hard way. Not through religion—of which it was practically dead at this point—and not through introspection. I read. I read a lot. The television in my cabin was turned on less and less with each year. I found every informational data disk I could and had the CA ship me all of them. I would slide every disk into my slate, upload it, and move on to the next one. By 2040 the entire floor of my closet was covered in disks I kept in case the slate broke and I needed to re-upload.

  I was afflicted with influenza three times in the ten years since the Ire, each quickly stricken down by the medicine provided by the CA. In fact, nearly every disease was taken care of after the Ire. The flu was rare, but it happened based on residual viral loads in the body. Strep throat, too, was practically non-existent. And perhaps miraculously, but more than likely necessarily, people infected with HIV were pretty much cured thanks to a drug that just happened to spring up following the invitation to the cabins. The same was for AIDS patients. Cancer, though, still killed, as patients had no way to seek the right brand of medical treatment.

  If not for the fact that we inherently killed each other at first sight, our society would have been deemed the most envied in the history of civilization. We didn’t have wars; we couldn’t have wars. It would not work. The only real violence, again, came from those needing the ‘controlled kill’ to feel again, and that was spotty at best.

  Finally, in 2041, we began hearing the name of the legendary drug the CA had been designing to allow us brief windows of interaction. Flegtide, as it were, came known to the opting surviving public as the possible fix. It would not be released to us until it was thoroughly tested, meaning it was years away. The test subjects, too, needed to be found. Most were former prisoners who had survived the Ire’s first hours and were forced to take the drugs.

  The tests were made public as well, some with video going beyond textnet on our slates. Initial tests were utter failures. The first stated it all. Two men, both convicted murderers—although at this point everybody was a murderer—were injected with 30mg of Flegtide and ten minutes later shoved into a room with each other. We saw the Ire hesitate in their bodies, mainly through their eyes, which literally tur
ned red as they filled with blood. The Ire held off for seventy-eight seconds as the men stood before each other three feet apart. Then the expected happened, a fight so vicious that Roman gladiators would wince.

  Upon his victory, the living man continued to stomp in the head of his victim. Even after the brain was turned to mush on the floor, he did not stop, providing us with a gargled, muffled roar that sounded anything but human. He even kicked the man’s body as he fell butt-first to the floor holding his head. Then his cheeks were greeted with an endless rush of blood from his eyes. The screams turned from angry to painful. His eyeballs slid from their sockets, dangling there on his face amongst a waterfall of blood. This gruesome scene lasted five agonizing minutes before either his heart exploded or he’d lost too much blood and died.

  Clearly, Flegtide wasn’t the answer, or at least not this first version. Imagine such a thing being released to the public, people dying in their cabins in droves. It truly almost happened, as some people at the top of the CA insisted it not be tested.

  Geneticists were certain, however, that Flegtide would eventually work without killing the host. More tests were done, all failures regardless of dosage and minor tweaks, until at last, in the Spring of 2044, a test was performed in Bern, shown live to the world like all the others in the discourse of full transparency, when the two subjects did not kill each other. Furthermore, the subjects, two volunteers as opposed to two prisoners, did not suffer the immediate violent side effects of Flegtide. They remained in a room with each other five feet apart for eight minutes. The men were both instructed to turn around and leave the other person if any sign of the Ire became prevalent. Whereas the rest of us would not have had the cognizance to recognize this, Flegtide interrupted the Ire’s normal passage through the nervous system to the brain, allowing the subject to truly think before being devoured by the affliction.