Love in the Dark

Chapter Sixteen

Rebecca had gotten the cough. And then she got the convulsions, although she didn't remember it. She'd woken up several times, sprawled on the floor in her own foamy vomit. But then she had recovered. She was nearly dead from starvation by the time the symptoms disappeared, but she survived the plague, something she didn't even think was possible. It seemed like everyone who got the cough died soon after.

She tried scavenging, but one woman, weak and starved, could not find food in the city. Every shop had been looted, every dumpster had been dived, every restaurant had been stripped of foodstuff. People had started traveling in packs, like feral dogs, and breaking into homes, not caring if the place was occupied or not.

She finally made her way to the closest camp, the old high school. The solar panels in their parking lot glinted uselessly in the sun. They had very little food, but they tried to ration out what they did have so that everyone could eat something. They had found a bunch of MREs and other emergency food rations stored in the basement of the school. Large dry crackers smeared with peanut butter and jelly had never tasted so good.

Who knows who brought the sickness to the school? One of the escapees from the hospital, probably. It wasn't Rebecca. People were already coughing and dying days before she arrived. It appeared that people once recovered could not get the illness again, so she volunteered to take care of the sick, and bury the dead. Yesterday she'd been rewarded with a piece of chocolate and a can of Vienna sausages for her efforts.

She wasn't entirely sure when her hair started turning white, but the patches of vitiligo started appearing on her arms a couple of weeks after she joined the camp. The white patches on her skin continued to grow in size and number, spreading over her whole body. It didn't hurt or itch, so she didn't concern herself with it. She was alive, that was what counted. She noticed that everyone that survived the cough also started losing pigmentation. She wasn't a doctor, but she remembered reading somewhere that vitiligo was an autoimmune condition. It seemed like the plague had triggered some reaction in her body. Her hair began to grow in white at the roots. Her eyes were growing pale, no longer a deep chocolate brown, they were now almost amber.

She had to remember to stay out of direct sun. The first time she'd sunburned herself, she'd almost died. Her entire body had bubbled and blistered like a fried egg, and she'd been sick for days. After that, she kept her skin and her face covered. She found a greasy, stained baseball cap to pull low over her eyes, and a turtleneck to cover her arms. It wasn't pleasant, especially as the days grew warmer, but anything was better than the blistering sun burn that resulted from anything more than a few minutes of sun exposure.

Across from her, a middle-aged man named Jason began rolling the bodies into the hole. There were no coffins, no shrouds, just bodies, stiff with rigor mortis, wearing whatever clothing they died in. When the last body landed on top of the others, she picked up her shovel to start back filling the hole.

Jason did the same. His arms were a patchwork of white on his once dark, coffee-colored skin. "I guess the good thing," he said as he dug the shovel into the loose dirt, "the more we bury, the less there is to feed."

"True," Rebecca replied, using the collar of her turtle neck to wipe the sweat from her eyes.

"Pretty soon," Jason continued, "It will be just us left. The survivors will take over the camp."

She kept shoveling in silence, but her brain was mulling over the idea. It seemed like only one or two out of every hundred people that got sick survived the illness. There were even fewer people who seemed to have some kind of natural immunity. But Jason was right, the survivors would soon outnumber the immune people. They could take over the camp, control the food rations. She felt a strange fire growing in her belly. If they organized themselves, they could control everything.