Mimic

Chapter 3

Liz

It reeks on this bus; it's like sweaty teenage boys but worse. Mix that with moldy furniture and rust, and you'd be getting closer. It's probably because there are about fifteen filthy boys on here. The big, ancient yellow school bus came and picked me up this morning, and the smell has only gotten worse with time. Everyone seems to have a friend or have made a friend on the bus. While I listen to music on my phone—a present from my family so that I could keep in touch with them—I scan the bus again to see if there are any loners. No... wait... behind me, in the middle of the bus with a row to herself is a girl who looks like she's trying to hide from the world.

I pause the song I was listening to and wrap the earbuds, another gift, around my phone to be once again introduced to the noise of about thirty people talking around me and the bus's engine rumbling down the road. I walk back to her row, leaving my own empty, and try not to interject into conversations that I pass as I go to sit beside her. When I do, she scoots closer to the window and avoids my gaze.

"Hi," I say, trying to start a conversation.

"Hi," she replies.

"I'm Liz," I introduce myself, holding out my hand to her.

"Emily," she tells me, not seeing my outstretched hand because she is looking out the window. She's still shy.

"So, they recruited you to the school too, huh?" I ask, trying to keep a conversation going from the little feedback she's giving me.

"Yeah," she responds.

"So where are you from?" I question.

"Empi," she answers as she turns slightly to look at me out of the corner of her eye.

"I'm from the Motmer area," I tell her.

"Oh," she responds, not really interested in what I have to say.

"What's your major?" I ask.

"Biochem research."

"I'm an interior design major," I say, feeling ridiculous as I say it. My major's not one of the most practical for the society we live in.

"Cool," she says, turning to me and giving me a slight grin. I don't know what it is, but I can tell she's being sincere.

"So, what do you like to do?" I question.

"I read," she answers, starting to trust me a little more, and our conversation starts to pick up a little.

Emily and I talk for the rest of the trip to Altore. I can't wait until we get to the school, but I'm a little nervous about how many people are there. There are about five hundred people at the University of the States. Considering that we're still recovering from a worldwide epidemic that happened a few decades ago, that's a lot of people.

*** *** ***

Everyone always thought the world would end in a bang or the sound of trumpets. Instead, it ended one scream at a time. The virus broke out among a few people in a small country in what was then called Africa. It seemed like a stomach bug at first, but it spread faster than the flu, and it didn't go away. People would throw up and become dehydrated. They would run fever. Confusion would set in. Then they thought it was a mutated plague of some sort that caused delirium, but no matter what the doctors tried to cure it, nothing stopped Omega.

A month later, the first person died from it. Old news reports say that she screamed for four days before it actually took her. Within the first year, sixty-five percent of the entire planet had been infected. Another twenty-five percent was dead. Six months later, the numbers were nearly switched: sixty-five percent dead, and thirty-five percent infected. Only a fraction of a percentage of the population remained unaffected. Most of the infected people died by the time the year ended, but there were the few that survived longer than anyone thought was possible, but with chronic effects from Omega. That generation has almost entirely died out now though, and now there are only about seven million people left on the planet. It was found later that somehow our bodies developed an immunity to the virus. The chaos that Omega caused started to die down, and the remaining people on the planet tried to restart their lives. Some created new governments, others kept to themselves and lived in autonomy. Luckily, enough people survived for most countries to keep up powerplants, gas stations, hospitals, and other basic living facilities, although everything became much scarcer than pre-Omega.