If I didn’t have homework to do, I’d totally be writing the ending right now! :< this is gonna be good stuff!

Word Count: 95,216

The streets that led to the pharmacy (which I only knew because Dr. Moncayo had been gracious enough to talk me into getting a local area map) were packed with people, but none so unique as those who sat on the side of the street begging. There were a million for every finger you could count. Most of them were old; far too old, it seemed to work, and much too old to remain alive long. I thought that they’d been begging for money as I walked to the pharmacy, but that wasn’t what they’d been asking for at all. I’d been slightly conned – it seems that Ushuaia’s doctors hadn’t waited for me to start using Pharand’s mixed up medicine. It also seemed that this town was already mildly torn apart.

A wrinkled hand reached out and blocked my walking path. I tried to walk around it, but the woman screamed, “Please! Pennies for purpose? Pennies for purpose? I want only to buy the death pill… give me purpose, please.” She walked back to the very edge of the road and slumped down next to a bowl, which was filled with many bright white pills. The pills stood out against the deep red brick wall the woman rested against, and stood out further in the decrepit, worn copper bowl they sat in. Was she really going to swallow one of those to the point of kill herself? Two pills would do it. Two pills, one body. Hey would remain dead, I assumed, for weeks, before waking up and taking the pill again. And if they managed to actually die in between doses, well, so much the better.

As I approached the pharmacy, the density of old (and some young) beggars increased exponentially. Outstretches arms begging for “divine white pills,” “death pills,” “all that the pharmacy carries” (which seemed to be now just this one pill), and, less popular but still shouted often, “purpose.” Nobody asked for money. They only asked for money to buy the death pill, or asked for the medicine directly. They would have taken anything. I managed to avoid their grips and enter the pharmacy, which was completely empty but for the workers managing the medicines. The shelves behind the counter were stocked with plastic orange tubes containing white capsules – whiter than any other capsule I’d ever seen. The man working at the counter wore the pharmacy uniform and looked very afraid that somebody had entered the building. It looked like the beggars outside had scared him out of his wits, like an infinitely long line that never advanced nor moved; that never had the money to move forward, but persisted for the free stuff. The line outside, the lines of beggars and pleaders, never moved, never entered the pharmacy, but gathered for miles around it. The man at the counter had plenty to be scared of – he might fall sick because of this.

“Hello,” I said. “Do you carry these items?” I handed him a list of medicines I was looking for, which he promptly examined and handed back to me.

“We’ve got none of those, sir. We only carry Malogon.”

“Malogon?”

He turned around and pointed to the bottles of white pills. Pharand had named their new product Malogon. It sounded cheap to me, but I knew that it would be a rousing success in the market, as long as it kept those people dead who needed to die. Families would be able to decide who lived and who died – temporarily. To take the drug you first had to be infected, and be either dead or alive. I thought that it was only perfect for getting rid of the family members you disliked the most, which seemed a quite underhanded use for a medicine. But I also thought that, perhaps, an entire community could use it to purge a town or village of those ill with Athan’s Disease. The sick need only be convinced that they were no longer fit to live, or that the medicine will save them. It took me until that point to realize that I’d been playing the same trick – but it had been far more convincing because I thought I’d been curing them all along. In reality, I was a tool for a despicable system that was quickly weeding out all of the sick from society, damning them to death forever. And if they woke up, they would just be put back to sleep on demand.

Malogon was useless to me. I refused to buy it, or touch it for that matter, and if I wanted a bottle of the stuff I could get it at the Regional Hospital. I left the store, and walked through the shameful lot of beggars on the side road. I couldn’t have called for a taxi there – it was too congested. No cars drove through the road of beggars. I would have to walk many blocks before I was free of them. It seemed like they had multiplied during the few minutes I was in the store! Their numbers never stopped growing – the spawned were spawning faster and faster, engulfing all of Ushuaia! I began to run in fear of these people, and I imagined all of the healthy men and women in the city did – everybody ran from Athan’s Disease, and everybody ran from those sick with it. The same would happen here that happened in Westendorf and Srinagar. Great cities would fall due to the rivalry between healthy and sick. It was a never-ending battle, as useless as any other form of segregation.

Once the roads were clear, I called for taxi. It took about five minutes before someone noticed my waves. This was the second time I’d gotten a driver who looked like he was going to die at the wheel. Strangely enough, thinking that he would die seemed perfectly normal – I didn’t even give it a second though. Had I become so spoiled by now that even death made me not wince? I took life far too much for granted by this point, and took the smaller details of life not enough for granted. My painting was still back at Pharand. This mattered more to me than the taxi driver’s life. I let him drive me back to the small hotel, never saying a word, only paying him with currency I’d exchanged at the airport. All cities were looking increasingly the same to me by that time. I was building up immunity to city life; it was still easier in the sub-city of Ushuaia. Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to be building up immunity to Athan’s Disease just yet, and neither did the world.

Ushuaia went dark quickly. I was not used to the way the days were so short. I missed the longer days at home, even though spring still meant that days weren’t very long. In Argentina, the southern tip of the country at least, the days were so short that you might have only spent five hours working in sunlight. That meant I could have five hours treating Athan’s patients, or five hours speaking with Dr. Moncayo, or five hours recreating my old antibiotic cure, which should have been out on the market by now if not for that godforsaken company. Jetlag kept me awake through the night; I was helpless and remained awake until the sun rose once more, at which time I finally succumbed to sleepiness and rested. When I awoke, the sun might have had a few hours remaining. A few hours that I could use to go straight to the hospital. I’d see if the hospital had what I needed, and if Dr. Moncayo could, perhaps, take me to all the ingredients I was looking for.

“Hola!” she shouted when she saw me. I’d walked to the hospital that day. It was far, but I could do it. It was refreshing, anyway. “You ready to get to work? I don’t see you being ready. Get to work!”

“Ah, Dr. Moncayo, I need something… remember the ingredients?”

“Yeah, get to it later. Right now we need you giving this stuff to the patients,” she said quickly, holding up the same orange bottle that I had seen in the pharmacy. She moved so quickly, as though she’d just had a few cups of black coffee, her curly brown hair bouncing as she moved her head left and right. There is no reason for me to be here, I thought, unless I’m going to actually feed those pills to people. She continued to hold the pills up to me. I swiped them away and shoved them in my left pocket – I decided to dispose of them once I reached my room.

But the room was locked when I tried to open the door. I tried again, but no luck. The door was perpetually shut. Dr. Moncayo was gone, and I couldn’t find her; she probably had they keys to open the door. A janitor, I thought, would also have the key, but I couldn’t find any of them around either. Where was the hospital staff? It wasn’t late.

I soon learned where the staff went. Most of them were gone from the previous day.. I heard talk about the dwindling number of employees around the hospital; many were becoming sick, simply by treating those with Athan’s Disease. Once they died, they were fired. Many had died, and many were fired – one couldn’t have a sick surgeon working in the hospital, especially if a man or woman happened to enter with a disease or ailment other than Athan’s Disease, which by this time was highly unlikely, but still possible, I supposed. But that didn’t change anything – the administration had fired the staff, which would soon be replaced by some of the last remaining healthy doctors in Ushuaia.

The lobby was again full. Somebody was still around administering the drugs; others were outside begging for death pills, and some were taking them directly from the hospital and leaving with them. I found the storage room, which was full of medicine – only Malogon. Boxes and boxes of Malogon; so many little orange tubes that I thought I would be blinded by their florescent glow. I kicked a box in rage and it overturned, spilling the tubes and bottles out onto the ground, but hurting my foot in the process. I still felt proud – it was one small victory for me over Pharand, and I was now just waiting for it to become a full-fledged war.

I could only think about leaving Ushuaia. The patients ceased to matter to me – they were all dead bodies. Even if they awoke from death, they would mean nothing to me. I tried as best I could to relieve myself of my Athan’s-purging duties, tried to purge my memory of all that I’d seen. But it was impossible – I’d seen too much already. I’d seen people murdered in the name of Athan’s. I’d seen people murdered in the name of shelter from the fate of Athan’s. And later that day I would see somebody murdered simply out of spite, because his spouse didn’t like Athan’s, only feared it. The last healthy people in Ushuaia feared Athan’s more than anything. They didn’t know that it would cause them a long and miserable life, away from the natural order of nature, but that was entirely irrelevant – even if they knew, the sick would still loathe the healthy, and the healthy would still attempt to destroy the sick.

However, humanity was running out of time.

People were spawning at an alarming rate in the hospital. Twelve dead men awoke in one hour that day. Six dead women an hour later. Another batch of twenty later in the day – men, women and children mixed. They simply kept dying and coming back to life; Ushuaia couldn’t decide if it wanted to live or die, but it could decide upon one thing: That it wanted everybody to be sick. Before I left Ushuaia, every being living there would be either dead or spawned, including the talkative Dr. Moncayo. When she passed, I didn’t know what to do – luckily, she was one of the last to succumb to Athan’s. In the meantime, I pretended to work. I tricked patients into thinking they would get medicine. I told some we were having a new delivery program, whereby they would receive perpetual shipments of the death pill in the mail every few weeks. If such a system were to be instated, the person would be dead when the pills came – a slight drawback to my plan, but luckily everybody was far too weak and disoriented by Athan’s Disease to care about the flaws in my lies.

By the time I left I’d single handedly gotten rid of most of the citizens waiting in the lobby. That gave me grounds to get out of the hospital quickly – Dr. Moncayo wasn’t looking around, and neither were the other few doctors still working in the hospital. I fled and tried to go straight home, but found myself sidetracked by more beggars. Their outstretched arms begged for pills, but I stood firm and never distributed a single one. I saw two of the beggars drop dead; was the whole town just falling at my feet as I walked by? I’d arrived at the worst possible time. It was too late to help any of these people, and there were just too many to treat. I kept reminding myself that my flight was only a few days away.

I was more than sidetracked, though, on my way back to the hotel.

In the street – out in the open – a man’s wife held him at gunpoint. He pleaded for mercy. “Please! I don’t know what’s going on! Please put that away and explain…” He knelt on the ground before her and wept. “I don’t know what you want from me,” he sputtered.

She didn’t care for his words. “Alleluia couldn’t help you now,” she said. “I’m sick of you, and dead scared. It’s about time that you were scared of me! Do you know what it’s like to live with a husband who came back from the dead? It’s like I’m living with some sort of zombie – but you’re no zombie, you’re my husband! Couldn’t you tell that I’m terrified of you? Couldn’t you see that I only wanted you dead again?”

“Of course I couldn’t, because I love you…”

“Shut up! I’m going to send you to hell in Alleluia, where you can rot in Prayer.” She moved the gun closer to her husband and laughed, then cried with him for a moment, before laughing again. “When you died, I couldn’t contain my grief. But you were supposed to stay dead. All the dead stay dead! So I’ll make sure of that. I’ll make sure that you and everyone like you returns from where they came – from the afterlife or wherever you visited in death – with this gun.” She moved the gun even closer now. It almost touched his temple.

Now the man was weeping uncontrollably, squirming on the ground, moving away from the gun as fast as possible. But too late – he shouted for help, and even pointed to me. Mentioned me. “You there, man! Please help me, save me from my crazy wife!” I, the only onlooker, could have saved the man if I had wanted to. Solemnly, I turned around and began to walk away. I heard the gunshot behind me, and turned around to see. He’d moved around so much that his wife had missed his head, and instead pierced his heart with that bullet. He was dead.

But not for good.

I ran from the scene. His wife cried over his body, then picked herself up and ran after me. She knew that there could be no witnesses – not that anybody would have cared that she killed her once-dead husband, because he had Athan’s – and now wanted to come and destroy me. I sighed; it seemed too typical. I would have acted calmer, if not for the fact that she actually had the gun, loaded, and was chasing after me. I turned a corner and hid, but she could hear me. We were far from beggar territory. The red brick buildings wouldn’t conceal me in my white doctor’s coat. I could have thrown the coat aside, but then she’d have found that and then found me anyway.

The chase found us, eventually, in front of the pharmacy. I’d tried to lead our chase to the most populated region I could think of that I knew, and I didn’t know much, so I could only take us to the hospital, the hotel, or the pharmacy. Once there, she panicked and ran away – she was too afraid of being around those with Athan’s Disease, too afraid of herself joining the ranks of human beings to defeat the natural course of life and death. I didn’t want to let her get away with what she’d done, so when I knew she was far off I traced my steps back to the place where she’d murdered her husband. The street was wet with blood, which trickled down the sides of the roads and into a storm drain. But the calm after the storm had not yet arrived. Something was missing from the bloody scene.

The man’s body was missing.

I searched around for his gun-toting wife. She was nowhere to be found. But then I heard footsteps – she was turning the corner. She ran towards me, looking for her husband’s dead body. “Where is he? What did you do to the body? Say one wrong word and you’ll be dead like he is!”

More footsteps, this time from behind. “I’m not dead,” said the dead husband. Both of us leaped; the wife dropped her gun, which fired into her ankle when it hit the ground, and she fell onto the asphalt screaming.

“But… but— I just killed you! You can’t still be alive!”

“I don’t remember anything,” he said, waiting for his wife’s sympathy, but she was in far too much pain from the gunshot to her ankle to respond to his words. She continued screaming while I contemplated bringing her to the hospital. But would she really want to be taken to a place filled with Athan’s patients? Would she even accept surgery there? I left her there. I knew I wouldn’t have her consent, but I knew one more thing as well – that, from all around her, Athan’s bacteria were flying to her open wound and swimming their way into her body, infecting her as quickly as possible. In less than a minute she collapsed and passed out. Now it was her blood on the street, intermingling with the blood of her now-alive husband. I knew she would not wake up. Not until she, too, was out of Mother Nature’s hands.

I wondered what she had meant when she told the man she would send him to Alleluia. That he could rot in Prayer. What did that mean? I couldn’t ask the man – he was struck dumb at the sight of his wife. He’d loved her, and couldn’t stand to see her unconscious, lying out in the open on the Ushuaia city streets. He knelt down again and wept – not out of confusion, but out of love and loss. He didn’;t dare touch the body, but I knew he was thinking of taking her to the hospital. I knew that I wouldn’t want to deal with her. She would destroy me as soon as she woke up – her malice would not diminish as Athan’s grew stronger inside her. Rather, it would fuel her anger. Perhaps it would fuel it negatively too much. I could easily imagine her committing suicide.

But after seeing what had become of her husband – that after mere minutes he’d risen from a shot in the heart – I couldn’t help but be just as afraid of the man as his wife had been. My face contorted far past what any Edward Nambet could have caused. I looked at the man – who was not returning the favor, thus eliminating my guilt in having such a face – in disgust. Just what had happened? More importantly, did it really matter? I wanted to escape the cursed city of Ushuaia now more than ever; I was deathly afraid of every living human being that roamed its streets. I feared for my life, and my sanity; most of the fear, however, was over losing my sanity. I ran straight to the hotel and never looked at the couple again.

The next day, I begged Dr. Moncayo to explain to me what it had meant. What the woman had meant when she’d said, “to hell in Alleluia.” At first, she refused to mention any of it to me; said it was none of my business, but I knew that she couldn’t resist telling me for long. She’d need the conversation. I could feel it bubbling up within her, and soon those bubbles would reach the very tip of her being and burst out of her. She would tell me what Alleluia was – what “rotting in Prayer” meant. Why any woman would have been so calm killing her husband, and so afraid at the same time when she found that he was, in fact, not dead. New expressions were developing specifically around Athan’s Disease as it spread around the world. It was my duty to continue to understand it all.

Out it came – “Alleluia,” she began, “is the name of a city. There are many rumors about it, but it is destroyed now. Supposedly, how you say… seventy years ago. Seventy years ago there was an outbreak of some disease that killed everybody in the town. Other people say there was a civil war there, and that one side locked the other in a large prison and left prisoners to rot. That is where ‘rot in Prayer’ comes from – Alleluia, the name of the town, is like a prayer, yes? I have been hearing this phrase a lot lately. Alleluia today, I think, is a tourist spot, or is just completely empty. Yeah, it is empty… Nobody goes there because they believe horrible things will happen to them if they do. I heard one man once tell me that Alleluia is the source of all Athan’s Disease bacteria, and that anybody who goes there is bound to catch the disease whether they were immune once or not.”

I was interested. Even if I wished to be through with Athan’s and everything related to it, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by such a mysterious village. “Where is it located?” I asked with utmost passion for my subject.

“Sweden, maybe. I don’t really know.” I could see that, as much as she would have liked to talk, it was a subject she wasn’t very comfortable with. It didn’t look like she was supposed to be telling me what she was. But I begged for more information. When she wouldn’t turn it over, I had to go to my computer for the rest of the details. The internet told me that Alleluia was a town in northeastern Sweden, on the ocean, that during the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century was a prospering, budding suburban community on route to become a metropolis in the future. For reasons untold, the village began refusing newcomers and, eventually, left the big picture of Earth altogether. Nobody seemed to know what, exactly, had happened to the people that had lived there, other than that something wiped them out, and that it was incredibly isolated.

I wanted to see this place. If it was supposedly the source of Athan’s Disease, perhaps I could dig up the most valuable information of all there. What it was, I didn’t know, but I was prepared to arrange one final trip with Dr. Afalsi. Perhaps he would agree – for the purpose of furthering our research. For the purpose of furthering Dr. Doradwe’s research as well. I couldn’t think of a reason not to go to Alleluia. I would find a place outside of the city to stay and find my wait into the ruins of the place the morning after arriving. It would be my true last stop before going back to the USA. There wasn’t any harm in getting sidetracked – I’d gotten sidetracked enough in my life, I thought, to justify this trip. And, of course, it had the perk of being a ghost town, a ghost ruin. There was nothing in Alleluia. No hospital. No people. Nothing to do, nobody to treat, no death pills to distribute.

At the hotel, I was about to call Dr. Afalsi, when a commercial blinked onto the television channel I was watching. “We’ve thought of many names for this disease, but there’s really only one word: Unstoppable,” a good-looking scientist in front of a beautiful transcendental background in the ad claimed. “However, there is one solution. If you or a loved one are suffering from the following symptoms, it may be time to give Malogon a chance.” A list of absurd symptoms popped up on the screen, ranging from “general fatigue” to “death” to something they improperly called “undeath.” That made all of the ill sound like the undead terror, which I knew from experience that they were not. They might have been a monstrous butchering of everything that time had once set down before us, but transcending the normal boundaries of humanity did not constitute cinema-esque stereotyping. After a long list of side effects, which were truly irrelevant given the drug’s purpose to keep the dead within their death-sleep, the good-looking male scientist turned to the audience and smiled. Below him scrolled the text, “Malogon is for everyone.” He continued smiling and began to speak. “With the help of Malogon, you can help stop this epidemic of undeath. You can help humanity – by helping yourself. Don’t let you or a loved one go untreated.”

A perpetuated smile, and a quick fade out. The television blipped and another commercial came on. I shut off the television set; I didn’t feel like watching anything anymore. I looked up flights to anywhere nearby Alleluia. I couldn’t take back my payment to the USA, so that was my loss – a small loss compared to what was happening to humankind at the time. The commercial was right in one way. People could help humanity, and salvage the lives of all the diseased people that would inevitably be murdered out of spite and fear by the healthy. While around me people continued to drop dead, and constantly wake up from that very same death, I searched for plane tickets that would take me to northeastern Sweden. I found a flight. It wasn’t direct, but it would make due. Now all I needed was the go-ahead to get out of the failing Ushuaia.

I dialed Dr. Afalsi’s number. “Hello?” a voice said from across the world.

“Doctor, it’s Ethan Hemmings. How are you?”

“I was fine, and sleeping, before you called. What do you need? Don’t you know anything about time zones, Hemmings?”

“Of course,” I said, but I honestly hadn’t thought about it at all before calling. “But this is important. Ushuaia is hopeless – I can’t do anything for the people here.”

“You can give them the pills,” he said quickly, hoping I wouldn’t argue.

“I don’t need to, they’re giving them to themselves.” I tried as hard as possible to bury my discontent with the new medicine in Afalsi’s presence. I wasn’t sure if he knew that I was knowledgeable of the antibiotic fraud Pharand was operating under. “So, as the city is now, in effect, running itself, I would like clearance from you to travel elsewhere for some last-minute research.”

“It’s a little late for that, Hemmings. And I don’t say that just because I should be sleeping right now. The entire world is experiencing Athan’s Disease as we speak. What else could you possibly need to learn about it?”

“Well, it’s just a rumor, so I’ve got no proof… but I heard of a city in Sweden that is supposedly the origin of Athan’s Disease. I would like to investigate the city for traces of the Athan’s bacteria, to see if I can find out how everything began. I think it’s worthwhile; perhaps it will lead to an easier way to purge the bacteria for good.”

He dashed my hopes, but was frozen for a minute before responding. “Don’t you dare go to that place, Hemmings. It’s not good for anybody to be there.” He sounded afraid. Afraid that I would go there and, perhaps, contract Athan’s Disease at long last. Afraid that he would lose his missionary to the same disease that the missionary had set out to destroy. But if I couldn’t get his pardon, I would go anyway. I had only really wanted to see if he would pay for the trip. If I went to Alleluia, I wouldn’t have enough money to leave. Not for a good while, anyway.

“I can’t see any reason why not to go.”

“Listen, you have to trust me. Alleluia is not safe. Not everything you’ve heard about it a lie. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but it’s well kept what is true and what is not. You don’t need to know what is true. I didn’t,” he said.

“What was that? Afalsi, I think I’m going to go regardless. If you won’t pay for it, I’ll use the last bit I’ve got in my wallet. Here’s a cheap flight I’ve found. It’ll get me there quick.” Silence followed. “Hello? Hello, Dr. Afalsi?” No response. I called his number again – his cell phone was turned off. He obviously did not want to hear anything else on the subject. Something had happened in Alleluia to him that made him afraid of the city, or of the ruins that once were a city. It only whetted my appetite to see them even more. To finally have a chance to get out of the urban environment – even if Ushuaia was mildly comfortable – and relax.

Somewhere in a distant universe, a man named Afalsi was making a late-night call to another, nameless man, to inform him that a certain associate was going somewhere quite dangerous. “Perhaps,” said the man named Afalsi, “this associate should not travel alone.”