Page 10 - WordSmyth VI Summer 2020

After the Lockdown
Dark grey ash rained from the skies, blotting out the sun. A fiery red glow emanated from the desolate city, tongues of flame licking upward from the carcasses of skyscrapers. Broken corpses littered the floor, surrounding you with the stench of death. Darkness filled every corner, sinuous shadows sliding over the broken ground. Anarchy ruled the devastated landscape. The lockdown had failed.
Echoing explosions as the last of humanity fought over the last of the food, screams of the near dead. People lying in ditches, bloated with the sickness, spraying infected particles like bullets at the healthy beings. Their lungs destroyed, each cough bringing up more of their insides, every organ failing, every breath could be their last. Blood ran in torrents, swallowing cadavers and rubble alike. Sprinting people, blurs in the ash soaked air, flash past. Torch beams, brighter than the cloudy sun itself, swing side to side, revealing horrors at every pass. Screams pierce the air, echoing in the shells of burned out buildings.
Moving through the carnage I see the cause of this disaster. Everywhere bodies driven mad by the disease, blood dripping out of their mouths. I look deep into the eyes of an unfortunate soul, pleading for release from his pain. To go back to happier memories of a time when people were healthy, before the news about the disease ripping through Africa, overwhelming health systems. It’s arrival was so sudden, one day it was far away in Africa, the next there were 10,000 cases in the country. The media reported that you would be dead in a day, there was no hope.
Then the lockdown, everyone confined to their homes, mass panic buying during the hours before complete closure. Then the fights over supplies, murders and robberies, a blood-soaked world, people becoming more frantic. Water cut out, then electricity. A world plunged into darkness and fire. Suddenly, everyone seemed to have it, the lockdown had not worked, people ignored the hastily enforced rules, burning houses to stop infected following them as they scrambled to escape their hellish lives. Then it was now. I tore my gaze away from the infected body, his eyes closing, breath escaping ever gentler from his lungs, a strange mask of calm falling over his distorted features. He was gone.
I sat down on the grass, a tiny patch of green in a land of grey. Pain filled my body, in a few short hours I knew I would be no better off than the mind I had just seen leave. I relaxed, resigned to my fate, ignoring the white-hot pain that was spreading from my lungs, the congealed blood dribbling from between my parched lips. I would see my family. I would be home.
By Tom Bosworth
WordSmyth VI Summer 2020
10 | P a g e