I went to work today. It seemed like the only thing people wanted to talk about was the quarantine. Some are angry, they believe the government has no right to take away their freedom of travel. I don’t understand that. Sure I believe government lies, they lied all of yesterday saying America was safe. However, banning travel was a necessary precaution. We are doomed, yes, but I think we would want to prolong that as long as possible. What’s interesting, however, is that nobody wanted to talk about the virus itself. We all tiptoed around the topic, as if not naming it saved us from becoming infected. I think everyone is afraid, Lord knows I am, and especially those who act like they are put out by the travel ban. We know death is surrounding us, and will most likely push inward. It’s scary. Death isn’t as far away as it seemed. Like always, I watched the news again when I got home. Today they started calling the strain the “Reaper Virus”, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how accurate that was. My daughters asked me what that meant, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them death. I don’t think they really understand what’s going on. They are too young to live in this world, changed as it is. They were supposed to live their full and happy lives. They were supposed to be kids, like I got to be.

On the news this morning the President announced that both China and Russia have been infected, and the Reaper is slowly wiping out Asia. When I changed the channel, another station talked about the millions of Americans who quit their jobs in order to stay home and hide form the disease. I clicked off the TV, and walked through my front door. The city was desolate. Once again, I thought to myself, the virus hasn’t even hit America yet, and it looks like everyone disappeared. There are no cars driving down the street, no tourists, and no life. The city of Chicago looks like it was devastated by the Reaper. The quarantine got worse today. To guarantee that the virus has not reached America, the CDC sent out rubber-clad, masked men to check the health of and take blood samples from the citizens. They charged through my front door at eight o’clock in the morning, and had us take a physical test. They checked my heart rate and blood pressure, and asked us a million questions about how we feel and our medical history. The girls were crying, they don’t understand why this is happening. I have to agree, I don’t either. These “checkups” will happen weekly, and the government believes this will save America from becoming infected. My wife is terrified. She is afraid the girls are going to get sick. We barely speak to one another now. Our lives have changed so much. We went from happily married for ten years, to world weary and tired in a matter of three days. We wake up, go to work, watch the news, and worry ourselves to death until it’s time to go to sleep. It’s depressing, but there isn’t much else to do. America is different now. I guess the quarantine placed us under martial law, and the CDC and military run the government. Everything is stricter when democracy is overrun, and every move we make is monitored. What happened to our nation? We thrived on the notion of freedom, and this virus ripped it away from us. It figures, humanity is dying, and so are our human rights.

It’s airborne. We are all doomed. The CDC announced that there was a mutation in the strain. The Reaper’s path of destruction now travels through the air, and quickly it spread into Europe. They said Germany was the first european country to be hit, and predict that within a few days, America will be hit too. Our president has said nothing on the matter as of yet, I think he knows his days of empty platitudes are over. Hope cannot be restored when we don’t know how to protect ourselves. How can we survive with pathogens in the air? How can we remove death from the oxygen we breathe? Before this announcement, I thought my city seemed desolate, but now it’s worse. It’s like I am living in a ghost town. There is no noise, no movement, no faces. We don’t work anymore. This virus caused the economy to fall into a stand-still. I miss working. I miss the stink of the fumes, the unique factory smell. It was grueling work, and I never thought I would miss it. Once there was a true threat of the Reaper making it to America, my boss didn’t want to be held accountable for the “shit show” that would happen if one of us got sick, and I lost the one thing that kept my life normal. My wife came home with a box of paper masks. Apparently they are mandatory, and if we don’t wear them, we will be imprisoned. They say spreading the virus is murder, and I kind of agree. The masks are itchy, but I guess it’s a small price to pay when the alternative is peeling skin and death.

When I stepped out on my porch this morning, with the scratchy hazard mask on, I saw a lump on the street. Thinking it was one of my daughter’s toys, I walked over and went to pick it up. It wasn’t a toy. It was a pile of rotting flesh. America has officially been hit. California and New York are still under quarantine, and I guess Illinois is kind of okay, but the other forty-seven states are all dead. Chicago is no longer a ghost town. People are ravaging stores once again, and accusing people of spreading the virus. I saw people getting kicked out of their homes, people who were trusted family members. The tales of Salem came true once again. My wife and I tried to get food, but once we walked into the store, the shelves were empty. People were fighting over bread, like its 1789 and we are in the French Revolution. I am scared. Paranoia has taken over. My hands won’t stop shaking, and our neighbors won’t stop yelling. All we hear now are accusations and the screams of the infected. The Holy Cross Hospital is down the street, and we listen to the cries of pain and smell the rotting flesh. How could this happen overnight? The weekly CDC checkups are becoming daily now. They say it’s for the safety of the American people, but I think it’s all bullshit. By knocking down doors the agents are spreading the disease much faster than we all would. I think people should be left alone so we aren’t at such a high risk of infection. However, they did develop a new way to check us. Instead of doing a physical, we now prick our fingers on a scanner as it tests our blood for the pathogen. Thank God we were all negative.

They’re gone. I woke up this morning to the sound of wails. I remember rushing out of bed to the girls room, my heart throbbing out of my chest. Anna and Ellie were infected overnight, and when they woke up this morning, half of Anna’s face was already hanging off her jaw bone. Ellie was missing half of her arm, a pile of rotting flesh next to her. Their fingers were bleeding, and they were covered in blood. My wife was screaming, begging them to stop scratching so hard. I tried to stop the scratching. I tried. I held back both their arms, and one would break free. I begged and promised, but they couldn’t listen. The scratching overtook them, they didn’t even look human anymore. My beautiful girls looked like rabid animals. I tried benadryl, smeared anti-itch cream on their arms and faces, and gave them anything I could find until we made it to the hospital. Then of course the hospital wouldn’t take us. Apparently there was overcrowding, and there were too many patients. The entire hospital was in chaos, the doctors were frantic and the millions of patients were screaming in pain. When we pushed to the front of the line of sick people, the doctors said nothing could be done, and all we could do was pray. I went ballistic. How could they just let my daughters die? They were ripped away from me exactly three hours later. At 3:13 pm Anna stopped itching. There was no skin left on her forearms, just a mangled bloody mess. Her face had massive holes from where she clawed into her cheeks. She looked up at me with tears in her big blue eyes, and then there was nothing. The life faded from her eyes, and what was left of her face went slack. She’s gone. Tears slipped down my face and onto her’s as I leaned over to close her eyes. A pit of sadness opened up in my gut, as I sobbed. Ellie passed at 3:21 pm. She was crying for Anna as she teared apart her own body. She went quiet, just as Anna did, stopped itching and went completely still. My wife and I were gripping her hands, begging for her to stay awake, but it was of no use. Both of my daughters are victims of this virus. They didn’t deserve this life. Living with poor factory workers as parents and dying too early, too soon from a virus that should have never of mutated. My wife is crying, holding both Anna’s and Ellie’s hands and begging for them to come back. I watch as I write, wishing that someone, anyone, will answer one of the millions of prayers I have said. Why couldn’t it have been me instead? Anna was too brave, too smart to be a notch on the virus’s belt. Ellie was too sweet, to kind to become a victim. This shouldn’t of happened to my girls. God, I loved them so much. They were my little buddies, and now they’re more pieces than human.

My wife and I are sitting in a holding cell. Apparently it’s illegal to not burn the infected bodies immediately after death. There’s some fact about how the virus is still active, but I don’t care. I just couldn’t let them go yet. We lost both of our daughters in one day, we should be allowed to grieve. After barging through the front door to begin the checkup, the CDC agents found us asleep next to our daughters corpses. I guess we sobbed ourselves to sleep last night. They immediately began asking us a million questions. I couldn’t think, and I still can’t. My daughters are dead. Jesus. We got cuffed and were sent to the station once the agents realized the girls passed a while ago. We were pricked and scanned, both surprisingly negative still, given fresh masks, and shoved into a tiny hole in the wall. There were sensitized bars locking us inside the claustrophobic cube, but it’s not like we wanted to escape anyways. I am numb. Ever since we saw Anna and Ellie ripping off their own flesh, my wife and I haven’t spoken or moved. I remember following blankly, sitting in the cop car, and then walking into the cell. They pricked my finger, my wife’s too, but I didn’t feel anything. All I think about are Ellie’s wails of pain, and the way Anna looked at me. We’ve been in the cell for a little over an hour, waiting I guess. Everyone here seems to just wait. Maybe they are waiting to be let out. Or maybe they’re waiting to get hit by the Reaper.

We were released today. An officer took pity on us and told us leave. We must have looked horrible, because he didn’t even question it. Maybe he lost his daughters too. We went home. My wife went and sat in their bedroom, but I couldn’t. I can’t look at their stuff yet. I watched them die.

She’s infected. When the CDC came for the daily checkup, the scanner started beeping. It wasn’t me. My wife is Reaper positive. The CDC agents started handcuffing her, saying she was a danger to society. They dragged her away from me. I was yelling, fighting, doing anything I could to keep her here, keep her safe. They didn’t care. My wife was locked in the back of a hazard van, and I was told that if I wanted to see her, I would have to go to the Patient Visiting Quarters in downtown Chicago. The government is now forcing the infected to be segregated from the healthy until they die. I followed the van to the rundown building, they dragged her inside while I sat in the “visiting” section. When they finally allowed me to see her, she was itching like crazy and looked as though she aged ten years in twenty minutes. She kept scratching, and nobody was trying to help her. I watched as she peeled layer after layer of skin off her jaw. She was begging me to help her, but there was nothing I could do from behind a two-inch thick glass. She kept saying, “Shaun please make it stop”. When she started screaming in pain, the CDC agents finally took notice. They deemed her a stage three, whatever that meant, and injected her with a syringe of black liquid. Her eyes went wide, and for a moment she almost looked herself again. I thought they cured her until she crumpled to the floor. The agents swept her body away like it was nothing. I didn’t know what happened until one of the agents explained it to me. The government believes it’s inhumane to let people rot to death, so instead the new policy is to put them to sleep first. They say it takes away the pain from death, but I believe it’s murder.

Her last words won’t stop running through my head. All I see are frail hands tearing off layers of skin, and all I hear are weak voices begging for the pain to go away. I can’t take this anymore. I watched my wife get murdered and my two daughters rip their skin off until they bled to death. I want to scream, but I am numb. I want to cry, but I feel nothing. I should have been infected. I should have been the one with the rotting flesh on the brink of death. It should have been me. *** Shaun Hartman died June 11th at 5:18 pm. Overcome with grief, he marched to the top of the Patient Visiting Quarters building and jumped. His body hit the ground with a sickening crack, but nobody was there to help. The Reaper wiped out all of humanity. Chicago fell after an outbreak in the CDC, California fell after an outbreak in LA, and New York fell after an outbreak in the Bronx. There isn’t a living person left on earth, all that’s left are bloodied bodies and piles of rotting flesh. The Reaper virus killed eight billion people in ten days. Humanity is extinct.