The Plague Cart
Posted by Barbanne on July 31, 2002 at 18:26:32:
THE PLAGUE CART
The year 2010.
The plague is back again.
Last evidence of it was in 1998 in Madagascar. Last big killer was 1665 when seventy thousand people died in London.
This time it is different.
It kills without warning leaving its victims unmarked.
It all started eight years ago when Bush the son was president of America.
He made a string of mistakes but two in particular were disastrous. First he persisted in supporting Israel even after they had become belligerently self destructive. The Palestinians were driven to utter despair and finally the miltant Muslims struck back detonating three nuclear warheads in the Arabian oilfields and starting the fires that burn to this day. Nobody knew they had these weapons which were remnants of the old cold war Russian arsenal. The clouds of radioactive toxic smoke blanketed Europe and the Middle East bringing death and destruction. Great piles of unburied dead lay rotting in a summer made unusually hot by global warming. The plague bacillus had waited for just such an opportunity. In that long hot summer it mutated with the aids virus to become the air borne killer we know today. It spread like wildfire and within months all of Europe was dead. That's when Bush made his second mistake. He had been unable to rein in American corporate greed and they saw the opportunity to exploit dead Europe's vast resources. The plague came to America. In the summer it wiped out Mexico in one month and the continental US in six months. It was briefly halted by the cold winter of Canada but that too was gone in two years. It spread into Africa and Asia and South America and the people were gone within five years. Now it is here at the bottom of the world.
I drive the plague cart collecting the stripped and unmarked bodies put out each evening. I got the job as did others because when the plague first arrived I was serving time in prison for prostitution. We criminals were selected to be the ones to collect the infected corpses in the vain hope that, by disposing of these promptly, the infection could be contained and the scourge of the plague could be held back. It isn't working and won't. The death toll is now over ninety percent and rising.
I should care.
I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth and my faithful nag moves forward. Yes, my cart is horse drawn because horses are immune to the ravages of the plague and petrol is gone. Behind me the four wheeled cart lurches and the naked flesh piled high on it wobbles with the movement. Its hard to believe that they are all dead. Men, women, young, old, they all look as unmarked as would any healthy person but they are gone. Killed swiftly by this dreadful affliction.
This pestilence.
The next gate has two young girls lying in front of it. Stripped of their garments which will have been burnt and lying there, one face down, her gorgeously rounded ass upthrust and the other lying face up across her legs, arms outstretched and breasts splayed and dark pubic bush and pussy lips displayed with an insouciance she would never have countenanced in life.
I am a small woman and the lifting and hefting of these dead weight bodies is beyond my meagre strength. Needless to say I can't get an assistant, although I did have one young fellow, but he got sick and died after a week. Because I must work alone I have rigged a lifting device on my cart, a sort of simple hoist, comprising a swinging arm and a pully driven sling arrangement.
I stop beside the two dead girls and swing my hoist arm out until it hovers above them. Hopping down from the cart I position the leather sling under the small of the back of the uppermost body. I shackle it securely and then return to my cart and, hauling on the ropes, lift the body off of her friend, probably her sister. As she leaves the ground her head snaps backward and dangles. Her long slim legs trail and her hair swishes back and forth. I swing her inboard and lower her onto the other bodies. When she's in place I release the sling and she plops down on top of the others. I swing the arm out again and get down and flop the other girl into the sling. As I start hauling her up she doubles over the restraining leather and her ass points skyward while her arms and legs dangle helplessly. I bring her aboard and flop her onto the others.
I move on.
When the heap of naked, lifeless, quivering flesh becomes too much for the horse I head slowly for the burial pit.
This is a huge open hole in the ground where the few carts still working dump their cargo of naked and dead victims. A handful of other prisoners work there covering the corpses we bring with quick lime.
It is all futile.
Soon they'll all be dead.
Most of the prisoners working here are showing signs of the pestilence and the bodies we are collecting become fewer and fewer every day. It won't be long and everyone will be dead. Every human that is and that will be a good thing. I see evidence all around me of how the animals are coming back. Increasing in number almost daily as the plants retake the earth, covering the decaying works of mankind with amazing speed and fertility. What a wonderful world it will then be.
If one could only see it.
I will.
Like maybe a dozen others world wide I am immune. Don't ask me how or why, it just is.
We communicate on the remnants of the internet. Power stations around the globe although dying still run a trickle of computers allowing us to communicate. The phone lines are dropping out but the satellites still whizz around space taking our messages to each other.
Me and Sam and Tom in what was the US. And Gerardy and Ivan in what was Russia and Yasser and Miriam, of course they are always arguing, in the old Middle East.
Its all futile though. There's just no way we can travel to meet each other. Sad really. When the last of the others dies here I shall be all alone. Alone to grow old and die after living as one with the animals, with nature. The internet connections can't last more than a year or two. And then I shall exist in a world without conversation, without sex, without love.
Alone and lonely and wasted.
Doesn't matter though, I always was a pessimist.
Sad though when you think about it.
Aaaah well........................