Memoir of Quarantine.

“It’s raining outside.”

“I can see it too you know.”

“Why are you such a buzzkill?” “Do you have no sense of humor?”

“What’s so humorous about rain?”

“I don’t know maybe it’s romantic.” I might've hurt her ego there. A slight sense of depression can be felt through her voice.

“OK bye. It’s a waste of time talking with you.”

I know why Beth called me. It’s been 20 days since I last saw her. When she was diagnosed too. Nobody is safe these days. No one knows when they will get infected. The death toll has been so high that we now have no place to bury them. No people to bury them.

Whole families got wiped. It’s a lucky few who have their close ones unscathed. The population of the world has been cut by half in the last 3 years. Now we have no food or trade or oil or anything. No one gets to eat more than two meals a day.

Those 4 billion who died? Many among them died from starvation. Died of not getting medicine in time.

At first, it was ten to fifteen a day. Then they died in hundreds. And then within weeks thousands. And now after 3 years 2 months, we have four billion dead.

I can see the crematorium from my dorm. The grayish smoke comes out of its chimney all the time. White smoke followed by gray smoke. White from human skin and then gray from the bones and fats. Now it all seems as usual.

Such horrors that I have seen. Indescribably disturbing events that have taken place, I can’t forget.

See, I am a doctor. I work for the UU, United Utopia. After the smallpox outbreak in the 1990s, The leading countries of the world called a meeting and UU was created. To handle the next bio crisis we will face.

We successfully defended SERS, MERS And BSV—black spot virus in 2010, 2018, and 2027. And now in 2033, humanity is getting wiped by COVID33.

It all started from Bavaria, the Country where we traced it back to. We always knew that this virus was mainly found in bats. Then one day it mutated. Unbeknownst to anyone that bat was sold in a popular exotic food market in Bavaria.

In a quiet morning, a bat started the fall of humanity and its precious civilization.

But Bavaria was the least affected country. While everybody around was feeling the imminent crisis that was coming, they made it look like nothing was happening. Till now, no cases of COV33 have ever been found in Bavaria. Either they were shielded by God or they were hiding something. Many questions were asked. But just before getting the answers, nations toppled and crashed in mere days.

There is nothing left as international trade. Only apocalypse and chaos reign over the world now.

I Heard about this unknown virus when I was in Morocco. In a humanitarian mission. The next day we’ve been flown over a thousand miles in the air to Bavaria. The symptoms of the disease were mild t first. Then within weeks, they died from lung failure, suffocation.

Me and Beth,we both worked on the same team. We had to create a vaccine for the virus. We had everything necessary to even cure cancer if we tried. But this one mutated twice in ten minutes.

Like a Trojan horse in the human body. As a result, we couldn’t recreate the virus when we needed it and then, no vaccine.
We’ve worked tirelessly for the past 4 years. And found no solution. Half of the people working with us died in that period.

A handful of us including beth. We survived with God’s grace till now.

And then, something amazing happened. A miracle. We successfully mapped its genetic sequence somehow. We created a vaccine last week. Till now 9 thousand factories have been producing vaccines and we hope to create 100 million more in the next weeks.

In all the mesmerizing emotional moments, we forgot to vaccinate us. What an irony. That night beth had a fever. And immediately we knew what it was.

Now we both live one block apart. Our situation is getting worse day by day while the world is getting better.

Maybe they will remember us or maybe they will not. But humanity gets to live another day. That’s what matters.