Waiting To Die (intro)

I rose out of bed, my headache throbbing. Of course I’d grown quite used to that in the last few days. It would have been a shock to me if I hadn’t had it. Checking my clock I saw that it was already 10:30 in the morning. Knowing that ten hours of sleep was more than enough to revive me I was angry at my exhaustion. I cursed slowly, punctuating the word. I snorted and felt thick mucus slide back down my throat. I patted my bed stand thoroughly until I felt the rim of my glasses. I slipped them behind my ears and adjusted the fit by pushing them back up my nose.

I looked around at my ‘room.’ It wasn’t much, but I admitted for such a shitty government they did alright. The room lacked some of the comforts of my last bedroom, it had no computer or phone and white tile replaced my old, soft carpeting. But it was common sense. A computer and phone gave me access to the outside world. I hadn’t expected any luxurious at all when he was transported here, so I was pleased with an X-Box and a TV.

I coughed once loudly and breathed a deep breath and then snorted again, allowing the mucus into my mouth, I spat it onto my palm. It was as green as ever. My cold was getting worse.

I knew it wasn’t a cold at all though, I just liked to refer to it as one. I was a smart teen, back when I went to school I could pull of a 3.8 GPA without much effort at all. I joked about what I could do if I tried.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t try,” I said to myself, “Because seriously, it would have been a shame to put forth all that effort and just end up dieing here after all of it.”

I wiped my hand on my forearm. I laughed to myself, thinking of how disgusting what I just did was. I didn’t care though, I found it humorous and nothing else. I was on my way to the shower anyway, I’d just clean it up then.

I slide open the glass panel door of my room and took a few steps into the bathroom. I had my towel draped over my clean arm. Every time I entered the bathroom it always reminded me of something off Resident Evil. I wished that when I opened the shower curtain just once that there would be some bad ass zombie exterminator waiting for me.

“Maybe one day, big guy,” I laughed at myself.

I pulled down my boxers and stood for awhile, admiring myself in the mirror. “It’s truly a shame that some lucky women out there will never get this.” I laughed to myself as I remembered it was a double-sided mirror. I approached the mirror and huffed a breath of air onto it, just enough to fog a small patch. I then wrote YOU LIKE WHAT YOU SEE in capital letters. I imagined the scientists studying me were not amused. Maybe a little horny though, I added and smiled.

I stepped into the shower and turned the water on max immediately. I let the hot water sting my skin. I liked the heat, even when it reached painful proportions. I stopped smiling. A part of me hated myself for being so nonchalant about this. It was like they told me, I was, indeed, waiting to die. Somehow I couldn’t wrap my head around that. Still, I shouldn’t worry about it, trying to reassure myself I continued, my destination was surely heaven. I grew up in a church and didn’t question my faith all my life, but of course I’d never had it tested. Feeling a lot like Job, my confidence in God was now strained. Humans, I thought, always liked to have a scapegoat, perhaps mine was God in this tribulation.

I leaned against the shower’s metallic side, letting water and thought wash over him. Job had had everything taken from him, he and I shared that similarity. Why God ever took anything away from either of us I’d never understand. It reminded me of what my Pastor once said when I wondered the same as a child. “Mankind,” I’d been told, “Can only understand that which is less complicated then their own minds. Who are we, then, to try and comprehend God, who is far beyond our own minds?” I tried to stop thinking of my predicament. It didn’t do any good anyways. Better to die happy anyways, I told myself.

I reached for the rectangular bottle of shampoo, its labels had been stripped, although I had always thought it smelt a lot like Selsun Blue. I never liked the smell and wondered why a dandruff shampoo was the shampoo of choice for this government agency. I squeezed a portion onto my palm and ran it through my ever thinning, graying hair. Before the apocalypse struck I had fantastically thick, dark brown hair, but daily now it seemed it became more and more like my grandpa’s. Soon, I thought, I’d have none left. Of course that was the least of my concerns.

I put down the mystery shampoo, noticing that it was running out. I’d have to be sure to remind my buddies on the other side to get me some more.

I pumped a handful of body wash onto a scrub and lathered my body, watching as the white foam lingered at the drain, caught in an ever growing hairball. Inadvertently, I ran a hand through my hair and pulled out a fistful.

“That can’t be good,” I said to myself impassively.

I lethargically opened the curtain. The silence and lonesomeness was the same now as it was that day.

I opened the curtain, expecting that they’d be back now. Not expecting, hoping. Desperately hoping. They had left sometime in the night, he supposed, though I hadn’t heard a sound. The water hadn’t soothed me, like it always did. I was in the same panic as before. Tying my white towel around my waist loosely I opened the door, listening keenly. I jumped when I put my foot down on my cat’s tail that had been resting precariously under the doorway. It yelped and scampered away.

I folded my lower lip into my mouth and bit down hard, trying to control my panic. This wasn’t a good time to loose my head, I kept reminding myself, but for whatever reason my own teachings seemed to dissipate into air. A curtain of abandonment and dread trickled down my body along with the last drops of water as I left the bathroom.

Of course, though, I told myself, they’d be back. I walked out into the hallway, glancing anxiously at the family portrait hanging on the cherry red wall. Jen had then proudly clasped her son’s shoulder, smiling widely and untarnished. Obviously, it was in the spur of the moment. Now that I was sick, where was she? Apparently vanished. The evil part of me, deep down, I feared, almost wanted her to die. The infection had been called a pandemic, capable of transfer from human to human like the common cold, only much more lethal, probably more like the Black Plague. She ditched me, along with the rest of my family. When I needed them most, they were gone, and I knew the weren’t coming back, they condemned me to death and I figured they must have been okay with that.

They weren’t going to be back. Ever. And glancing down on the peach carpeting I realized that, my life, my love, had been a fleeting thing.

I placed my foot upon the moist titanium tile. It was cold and I shivered. The heat and solace of the shower was evaporated by the harshness of the cold, the silence in the air, and the knowledge that just behind the full length glass mirror a team of scientists studied my every move.

I approached the mirror, tied a towel across my waist, and knocked on the glass gently with my fist. “Hey, I’m out of shampoo.”