Post Apocalypse: Tyranny & Chimpanzees

6. DEATH'S STENCH

We resumed our journey at daytime, heading to what used to be a community.

She didn't say it, but, I knew that already.

And even before we got there, our noses were stung by the pungent odor of rotting corpses.

I steeled my nerves and kept going towards the epicenter of the stench.

Neon, doing the same walked quickly, not even placing an arm over her nose like I was instinctively doing.

But once we were out of the trees, she staggered from the ridiculous concentration of the smell that emanated from the scores of corpses that were strewn all over the place, such that I had to offer her support from falling over.

You could say that the smell was very staggering.

I gave myself a serious mental scolding for making a joke out of a tragedy like this.

Ethically thinking, there's got to be a limit to the norminalization of death for a living person in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Sadly, that wasn't the case, it's simply a logical aspect of adaptation. The fact that a logical, yet unemotional part of my brain could, without effort, even not be horrified by the sight I saw, and even feel humor proved that point.

The sight itself was no better; few women, fewer men, and the most, of which were little children and teens like us, fallen over, many of the bodies twisting in agony during their final moments, terror filled dead eyes seeming to gape at us in terror, as if silently screaming for help, frozen, yet mentally, horrifyingly animate.

Their skins were tinged and splattered with purple dots, like their blood had gone haywire and their blood vessels ruptured, splashing the discolored blood all over their skin from the inside.

Not that I'm an expert on deathprocessomology, anyway. I'm just a natural medicine expert, seeing as approximately 30% of drugs brewed and prescribed by me in the past actually cured my patients.

That's like 30% more than any other I've seen.

Vultures had already began to gather, most likely bantering to themselves over the feast that was just beginning, having been invited by the aroma produced by bacterial and maggots' activities.

Then I became aware that we both were just standing there, with my incessant, dumb, dark humored thoughts;

I, without so much as a grim expression, and Neon, who I'd just noticed, was also holding on to me, sobbing into my chest.

She'd had couldn't bear the horror of coming back here to see this, in as much as she'd put up a brave front on returning here back at the other part of the island.

I placed my other arm on her shoulder, steering her away from the scene. It seemed like my nostrils could even get used to a stench this bad.

I turned around with a final glance, unfortunate enough to see the purpleish, grey, dilated, large eyeball that stared at me from the beak of a tattered, ugly, bald avian bastard, which would haunt my dreams that night.

Over the next two days, Neon was quiet. Very quiet. And I was scared. Very scared. I'd chanced Boro to get here, and if I happen to be so unlucky that the disease was airborne, and could be contracted from even the deceased, then I was doomed to die just days from whenever a symptom shows up.

We did however, proceed to our next destination, which would invoke more fear in me than rotting human corpses being eaten by vultures ever  would.

The island's volcano.