The Metal Room

         

         You never forget the scent of human flesh burning. You especially don’t forget when it’s your mother’s body sweltering. I could live for centuries and still never erase it from my memory. It’s all I smell when I breathe, all I see when I shut my eyes is her long crimson hair blending with the colors of the flames, all I hear is the crackling of her skin as it turned to embers, all I taste is the salt of the tears I wouldn’t let myself shed. You never forget the scent of human flesh burning. It scorches you as much as the person burning.

         We were well off, had money saved. In the beginning we were at least. So we got to burn her separately, at our own little ceremony. I won’t call it a funeral, no one cried and no one mourned. At least, not outside of locked doors or into pillows during the night. I won’t call it a funeral, because what we burned wasn’t my mother anymore.

         It had started small enough, maybe as a short article in an unpopular magazine about some tribe off in someplace we’d never heard of. Then it became one of those forgotten conspiracy theories in a Tumblr text-post people had long since stopped reposting.  Then it was in the newspaper, then it was on the radio, then it was on television, then it was everywhere. Then it was reality. They said it started subtly, a cough, a sneeze, a fever. Then you got sick. Fast.

         They said get to a doctor, get to a hospital, get to a morgue. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT HAVE CONTACT WITH ANYONE. IT IS WILDLY CONTAGIOUS, FOR THE SAFETY OF OTHERS, GET TO A DOCTOR, GET TO A HOSPITAL, GET TO A MORGUE. That’s what they said, that’s what flashed on the TV screens and was whispered through the microphones of radio show hosts. That’s what was written as the headlines on all the newspapers and was plastered on the posters they littered the earth with. We trusted them, whoever “They” were. That bodiless authority figure you turn to in a time of crisis and panic. We followed their words more religiously than we ever did those of our gods.

         We wanted to live, you see, we were afraid of death. We did everything they said, everything from not drinking the water, to not eating the meat, to staying locked indoors. There even came a point when we started turning in people who looked sick; strangers, neighbors, friends, parents, children, lovers. We would have done anything to keep ourselves alive. That was fine; it was a good social order, kept the sick off the streets and the rest of us healthy. Until the sick started doing anything to keep themselves alive as well. Hiding, lying, keeping secrets. That’s when we found out what happened when you let the sickness get too far. When the fever turned to shakes and when the shakes turned to shivers and shivers to mumbles. When the mumbles turned to pleas and the pleas turned wails, when the wails turned to silence.

         That’s when everything really went south. When the silence came…that was the beginning of the end. The silence lasted for a few days, along with the staring. Just an empty, absent stare, no light behind the person’s eyes. It was after that the violence started. Like a broken spell, they started. Started what? Killing.

         Others? No, not others. They only hurt others if you tried to stop them. No, they were trying to kill themselves. Anyway they could find to; knives, guns, ropes, anything. If they couldn’t find anything, they’d start clawing at themselves, tearing away chunks of flesh. They only hurt others if you tried to stop them.

         How could you not, though? How do you watch your friend braid herself a rope necklace to wear? Your wife drown herself in a cup of bleach? Your child bash their head against the wall? Or your mother….get a knife from the kitchen?

         My mother was the first of us to get sick; it started like we’d always heard it would. A cough and a sneeze here and there. She blamed it on her allergies, she’d always had allergies.  It was impossible that someone so close to us could have IT. She went quickly; it felt like one day she was smiling and singing as she cooked, and the next she was wrestling deftly with my father for control of my knife. She ended up succeeding in the end. I watched my mother die in my father’s arms. Not before she managed to make five long scratches down his arm; from the long, pointed nails she’d always been proud of. I remember him pulling his sleeve down to hide him the day we burned her.

         He didn’t last long after that. I didn’t try to stop him…I was too scared. I just sat in the corner crying and yelling, begging him to stop. It took him maybe ten minutes to hang himself; I didn’t stop crying for days.

         They came out with a reason, a few months after. A “why” this all was happening. It was a parasite they said, a disease. When you were infected it ate away at your mind, at your brain. Your senses began to diminish, it ate them away. Your hearing, that went first, then your sense of smell, then your sense of taste. Then your sight got worse, and worse, and worse. That’s what caused the staring they say. The last to slip away was feeling. As it slipped away they say that’s when they started fighting, fighting to die. The brain was overwhelmed with the loss of everything, it felt itself dying. So it fought to survive. It tried to create sensation, to keep feeling. It craved the most stimuli it could get but by then all the mind could feel was pain; so it hurt itself. Until that didn’t work and it hurt itself more and more and more. In trying to survive, the brain made itself die. I managed to survive it, at least until now.

          “You’ll still survive it.” The tall boy with the shortly trimmed blonde hair. He had appointed himself leader of us, I suppose. “We all will.”

         I looked around the room, this metal bunker beneath the infected earth. We, five of the straggling survivors of the contagion had found it.  The remnants of an end-of-days prepper who I suppose wasn’t as prepared as he thought he was. We’d found ourselves here, locked in for who knows how long. Telling our stories to pass the time.

          “So, that’s my story, what’s yours?” I asked, rolling my head towards the next soul to tell a tale of heartache and loss.