Life Before Lysander

Life Before Lysander

The news reports on the TV shortly before it happened showed the

smiling faces of scientists in their crisp white coats, proudly

congratulating each other for the creation of this new chemical,

represented in the images before my eyes as a tiny cylinder filled

with an evanescing yellow gas. It seemed harmless to me really, just

an extra concentrated form of a new chemical compound. Developed

secretly in America, its very existence had only just been officially

declared by the U.S government, because it was deadly in smaller doses

than sionide, and more easily spread than anthrax. Lysander 3, it was

called. That was the first time I heard it. That name, those two

little words which would change our world forever.

It was April when it happened. Just a bright flash, that was all, just

a white flash in the sky, no explosion and no noise. It all seemed to

happen so fast, and from so far away, that I didn’t even have time to

jump, and no one really knew what was going on. For a few glorious

hours, people just seemed to laugh it off, going about their daily

lives, oblivious to their horrific and inevitable fates.

But then it started. Emergency news reports slicing into broadcasts

simultaneously on every channel, news reporters calmly explaining that

a phial of Lysander 3 had been stolen by a new radical terrorist group

called Avalanche. Their faces were sullen, but their voices shook with

barely contained fear, the panic to which they long to succumb being

fought back before my eyes. At that moment sitting there in my bedroom

I knew deep down that things would never be the same.

From that second, the creeping f...

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.... I don’t have my family or my friends; they were all

killed in the first wave. So all I can do now is dream that one day

there will be a new hope, not the hope that I will wake up and find

that I’ve made it through the night, but a hope that one day society

will pull through, and that the sun will be shining, the kids can go

to school, and I can breathe a sigh of relief that all the pain and

torment is finally over. Then I hear a creak on the stairs, and I

realise, its never going to be the same. When Avalanche detonated that

bomb, they turned off society’s life support machine; the old world

has gone forever, burned from the earth in a shower of flaming

shrapnel. But from the ashes, a new world has arisen, a terrifying

dystopia, a cancer on the planet, with little chance of recovery, and

even less chance of survival.