A Remembrance of Life

FICTION / SHORT STORY

A photo in a locket was her sole link to a world that was gone forever

It had taken many years, but Alison Pickering had finally grown used to the shrill clamor of sirens waking her up every morning.

When first introduced five years earlier, the Airborne Pathogen Alert System (APAS) would sound only occasionally, leading many to doubt how worthwhile the technology would prove to be. Indeed at the time of its introduction, APAS had attracted much skepticism and ire, and many had considered the multi-billion dollar warning system a hideously over-priced white elephant at best. At worst, it was berated as an obscene cash cow for slimy politicians and the fat-cat friends to whom they’d awarded one lucrative government contract after another.

Whichever zoomorphic metaphor was employed, whether elephant, cow, or money-making motherlode for grubby fat-cats, the fact was that APAS had been widely dismissed as a costly and cumbersome animal. As a result, most people in the city chose to ignore its warnings.

“Once those in power realize that the populace is paying no heed to their wailing sirens and doomsday warnings,” the detractors argued, “the useless APAS system will be thrown on the scrapheap where it belongs, and we’ll never again be subjected to screeching pathogen alerts warning us to mask-up or stay indoors.”

When the daily death toll rose sharply and continued to climb day after day, there was no real way of telling whether it was a particularly virulent mutation of the pathogen that was to blame or just the complacency of the general populace. But with the virus wiping out 40% of the population and leaving every cemetery within 100 miles of the city filled to capacity, such distinctions didn’t really matter much.

By the time 60% of the populace had fallen, teams of men and women known colloquially as “The Cadaver Squads” (from the Centre for the Aseptic Disposal of All Virus-Infected Remains, otherwise known as CADAVIR) were forcibly removing dead bodies from houses, care homes, and hospitals as though they were vermin. As those left behind to grieve watched the corpses of their loved ones being carted far outside of the city limits for compulsory…

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