A Fate Worse Than Death

The breath hissed through my teeth as I fell to the floor in an agonizing spasm of pain. My body began to curl up, desperately trying to find some form of relief. None came.

Oh, God, please let me die! I thought in one of the few moments where the pain was dull enough, though still quite intense, to allow for coherent thought.

I immediately hated myself for thinking such things. I was dying. You would think that knowing an end to the pain you had been dealing with for weeks now would be a pleasant thought, and perhaps it would be if the cost were not so high. The cost, you ask? Well, it is, of course, my life.

Yes, just a mere three years before I was too old to contract it, I fell pray to the Illness. Now this illness I speak of, it is not an ordinary virus, oh no. It is something special, found only in the teenage inhabitants of our quaint little town of Lost Harbor.

It's quick, it's incurable, and it is deadly. You can go to as many doctors as you like, but they will all tell you the same thing.

You are going to die.

I am going to die...

Not a pleasant thought in the least.

I groaned as the pain began to ease. It would be back in just a few moments, far worse than it was now, but at the moment I felt nearly normal. When the pain was gone, it was simple to believe that you just had a common cold, or some other such issue. Slight headache, stuffy nose, sore throat, maybe a bit of nausea. Nothing too bad, right? But the random fits of all consuming pain, well, they make it hard to forget the truth of the matter.

And said truth is that you are dying.

No matter how many times I tell myself that, no matter the fact that I have grown up knowing about the Illness and have even lost many friends and family members to it, I just cannot seem to convince myself that I actually had contracted it.

I guess I had somehow managed to convince myself that it was impossible for me to get it. I mean, I wasn't like the other kids my age. I was not involved in any activities, and I had a private tutor in place of attending a regular school. It should have been impossible for me to catch the virus.

Funny thing about this sickness, however, it's not contagious. You can be with an infected person from the minute they become ill until they die and never feel it's affects yourself. It strikes randomly and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Nothing you can do at all actually.

Except die.

Well, that isn't entirely true. You can go to the Hospital. Like the Illness, this is no ordinary hospital. It only caters to teenagers who have fallen ill of this deadly disease. The doctors there, while not yet having found the cure, claim that they have medicines that at least stop the pain. However, to get them, you must stay at the hospital, completely isolated from everything, everyone, until you die.

So basically, once you are sent to the Hospital, that is it. You die alone with no one but a group of hostile nurses and doctors and other sick kids around you.

Sounds lovely, no?

Guess where I am going?

You guessed it, the Hospital. Lucky me.

"You ready to go, dear?" Rosa's heavily accented voice broke through my thoughts, and I forced myself to my feet as she entered the room. Her dark eyes were red around the edges, and her voice shook from barely suppressed emotion.

At least someone would miss me. My parents would hardly even know I was gone.

"No, but then I don't guess I ever will be."

Rosa was, in a sense, a nanny. She was actually the housekeeper, and the only person who had ever truly cared for my well-being. She was more of a mother to me than the woman who answered to that title ever would be. My actual parents, well, they were too busy to even realize they actually had a daughter. In fact, I could hardly remember the last time I'd had more than a two minute conversation with either of them.

Rosa, though, she was my best friend. She knew every detail of my life, and I knew hers. Leaving her was the worst part of being ill.

Even worse than dying. "Let's go Rosa." I then shouldered my bag, and left the only home I had ever known for the last time.