I Counted My Blessings, Now I'll Count This Curse

My father was the first one to fall.
Less than a day after the woman had warned us, he started shaking like a leaf, his temperature rose and he got a headache.
My mother and I knew it was too late, if my father was already infected the chance that we would soon suffer too was almost a hundred percent.
So, we stayed.
We didn’t flee or tried to do something against the disease.
We just waited and took care of my father as much as possible.

Two days after my father got infected, the boils started to show.
They were horrible, big as a fist. It was unbelievable.
I cried myself to sleep that night, knowing my mother and I would be next.

I woke up with a headache. I crawled out of my bed to check on my father and mother, who were both sleeping in the sitting room. My mother was sitting on a unstable chair with uneven legs. The chair was shaking. My mother wasn’t only shaking because she was crying, she had the symptom. She was sitting there, holding the pale hand of my father.
He was dead.

We both cried.

My mother suggested we go to the hospital, so we wouldn’t die alone in this house.

Now, I wish I would have convinced her that is was a bad idea.

We left my father behind in the house, knowing that it would be useless to take him to the hospital with us. We also wanted his body to fade away in peace, not thrown on a pile of other human beings who had already left the earth.

The first thing I did when we got to the hospital was vomit.
The stench of death was everywhere.
People were lying in the corridors, face down, while doctors ran around, trying to be as much help as possible.
Why they were still trying, I didn’t know.
Children were crying for their mums and dads, others were desperately clutching a body of a dear one against themselves.
I had never seen such chaos in my entire life.

My mother slid down a wall and started crying again.
I did the same.

My mother died the following day. For a hour or so, I sat next to her, clutching her hand as I watched more and more people coming in.

Then, I escaped the hospital.

I ran for quite a while, not knowing where I was going.
I ended up in a dark alley close to our house, a place where I definitely wouldn’t be going. I just sat down in the middle of the alley, waiting, but not knowing what I was waiting for.

I woke up.
I didn’t even remember falling asleep, but that didn’t matter.
It hit me like a bullet.

I wasn’t in the alley anymore.
Did someone find me?
Did they think I was already dead?
Where was I?
Why did this place seem so familiar?

Then, everything went pitch black.