FosterW1213


 * Tunnel** Train Cheese Ninja Dark Torch Shovel Collapse **Dystopia** **Nuts** **Squirrel** Boots Hat Boat Flood Horse Metal Engineer Building Time Limited Rations Decisions Discontentment Angel War Disease **Contagion** Borders **Border control** **Refugees** Government Oppression Military Helicopters Computers Nuclear war Navy **Army** Victorian Eliminate Boom

Bruce wants to get through a border because he wants to avoid a contagion, but militaristic lockdown of adjacent country impedes him.

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I felt like something was following us. For every one of the 17 clicks to the tunnel, it was as if something was following us.

It wasn't just that the wind swept away our footprints almost immediately after they were made.

It wasn't just that my father was trailing just a few meters behind me, and that every half a click or so he would tap me on the side so he could rest. The taps were startling at first. He was so quiet, sometimes I forgot he was following me.

Sometimes I think it was just the disease that's following me. But even if it was, I had nothing to worry about. Despite all this, I still checked behind me for the sinister monster in the shadows that grown-ups aren't supposed to believe in. Thinking back on it, it's horribly funny what the past month had done to me.

I was starting to think that coming to the border was a mistake; I was seeing more and more patrols as we went by. Of course, I had nothing to fear from them; it was my father I had concerns for. God bless his soul, he was among the First of the infected. I'm not sure if anyone truly knows how Ucerium works; maybe some some isolated Imperial biologists have figured it out. I doubt it. All that Itrall knew about the disease was that they didn't know anything. An Itrallian city-state had developed some trivial placebo vaccine which only delayed the symptoms and aggressive behavior, and they weren't even sure how that worked. Cures involved pumping enormous amounts of 3rd-party donated antibodies into the infected, something which wasn't available as much as it needed to be. And it didn't matter anyway; the disease killed the host within 36 hours anyway. The Government had nearly succeeded in eradicating its one home-grown contagion, but somehow didn't see it worth the time and money to heal the sick of those outside the city. I don't remember what I initially thought was worse: the Ascension, or the crackdown. The crackdown was brutally efficient; the GI Killed-to-Infected Killed ratio was at least one hundred to one. It left a lot of people dead, most of our equipment and vehicles destroyed, and a lot of houses collapsed. The Ascension wasn't as bad as it would have been in the city. Most wheat farmers had heard about the Government's earlier crackdown in the cities; they knew how to deal with the infected. I almost felt bad for the infected, especially when we would have to put them down. There was a rumor floating around the farmer's markets that they were dead when the rose, that the monster they became wasn't them. Many believed that after they rose, there was no cure. I didn't believe it.

So naturally, the question of my motives for trekking across a desert with a First arises.

Well, for one thing, my father wasn't just any First.

During the Ascension, he rose like the others. I'm not denying that. I'm also not going to deny that it hit me pretty hard to see him infected. I couldn't put him down; I just couldn't. I bound him up, gagged him, locked him in a closet, anything I could do to keep him from hurting people. I hid him from the crackdown, from the executions. One day, when I was inspecting his bonds, I noticed he wasn't struggling. He just looked at me with fear in his eyes, which was frankly a welcome change from the look of utter malice I had been getting from him since the Ascension. I removed his gag, and he didn't try to bite me. I was instantly filled with joy! My father had returned from the dead, and was now among the living! I cautiously removed his bonds, and he didn't attack! He sat there in his torn, bloody clothes; after about a minute, he got up, hugged me, and cried.

This is why know that the rumors are wrong. The infected are NOT dead after they rise; my father knew everything he did during those hellish days. I'm sure he'll never forgive himself.

This is why I'm walking with a First. Because the First can walk with me.

I soon found out that my father was still sick. Even without the rise, Ucerium ravages the human body throughout; my father was in pain constantly; I couldn't go on living knowing that my he might be able to be cured. So, I suppose that explains the desert. Itrall is a huge wasteland dotted by the occasional heavily industrialized city. Farming was sustained in the otherwise arid environment through an extensive pipe system and serious terraforming. My town, Lorden, was its own little oasis. Its neighbors were ravaged during the 40-year war for their resources; Itrall was left relatively untouched because of its scarcity of resources, not to mention the fact that the city-states themselves were constantly at war with each other and had subsequently mastered the art of defense.

The closest city-state to my little farming suburb, Croist, was 23 clicks away. 17 of the distance was over the wasteland, with the other 6 over mountainous terrain. Croist was situated on a plateau at least 4000 meters above sea level.

The climb up the steep incline of rock and clay was a slow one. I wasn't sure how the Government would react to my father's illness, so I decided to keep out of its sight. Doing such a thing wouldn't be easy under normal circumstances, but the amount of active soldiers on border patrol had more than doubled since the first outbreak. It took several painstaking hours to reach the walls of the city.

The sun was just beginning to paint the grey sky orange when we arrived. The thought had just dawned on me that I hadn't considered what I would do if I by some miracle made it this far when the First attacked.

My father had collapsed. His skin had turned a pale sickly pale color. He started to limp towards me with that horribly familiar awkward gate, with his mouth wide open, and his unblinking, bloodshot eyes locked on mine. I called to him, but he didn't respond. I kept trying to talk to him, but I realized what was happening. I started to scream at him, to get him to somehow break away from the disease that was killing him. But I couldn't do anything else for him; I ran.

Despite several minutes of dead sprinting, I could hear his moans, his shrieks. I started to weep, and just wanted to kill myself for letting this happen. I knew what would become of him; the Government patrols would almost certainly kill him. I fell on my face into the dirt, pounding the ground in utter rage. I decided that this was where I was to die.

I heard the engines of a helicopter overhead. There was a gunshot, a horrid shriek, then the burst of an automatic rifle. A minute later, the helicopter was directly above me. Two men in uniform were deployed from it, and they placed me on a stretcher which was hoisted back up onto the chopper.

When I came to, I was lying in a bed in a white room. There were devices and tubes attached to me from everywhere; a machine adjacent to the bed monitored my heartbeat. A television mounted on the wall was set to a news station. The anchor was talking with a soldier of Patrol Group 723, who had allegedly shot and killed the final rural resident (a bearded man in his mid-fifties) to be infected with Ucerium in the rocks right outside the city the night before.