Virulent

Chapter 1: Scram

Lab rats. The lot of us. Filthy, crammed, scuffing for scraps as if we haven't seen food in days.

Ezra watched the early morning scram that happened every morning outside their window. People zipped around on ancient petrol-diesel-guzzling tin boxes on the road, rusty and rattling as if they were hours late for the ration lines. Or some others – the privileged ones, flew around on their fancy, solar-powered vehicles that reminded her of rather large and rather metallic dragonflies, whizzing about in a flurry of patternless movements. Somehow, she liked to pretend they were a colony of ants, a colony of ants someone had thrown a pebble at, breaking their orderly lines, and there they go, scrambling around, full panic station as often happened during evacuation drills at university.

Hurry up, Shaki. She eyed her watch, her mother's old Citizen watch from some time in the mid-nineties. It used to be her grandmother's before that, Ezra believed. Finding a replacement battery every time it died was a pain in her backside, but in their go-go-go neon-coloured world, Mum's old analogue watch soothed her. Watching the little hands tick, not caring about the chaos. Part of her felt closer to Mum at least.

Half an hour till our train.

She bit her cheek thoughtfully, sitting there on her small bed on one side of their small room that wouldn't have qualified as a room, let alone a room big enough for two girls once upon a time. Her stomach grumbled. She bounced her leg, trying not to be distracted by the sights outside. How many neighbours did the old people have? A handful? She forced her mind on other matters, not the cries of 'feed me' from her stomach. Maybe they were lucky and had a handful on their streets. We don't even have streets, do we? Just five hundred odd residents, minimum, in each building.

With that thought, she eyed the impossibly dense 'clean living' apartment buildings around their building, resembling shoeboxes stack high in a shoe shop. What about the neighbourhood? Just the buildings I can see? Five thousand? There's what, twenty high-rise buildings—each with 100-200 apartments—if you can even call these apartments. That's what...

"Ezra?" her father's voice broke her morning ritual of sitting quietly on the edge of her bed while wondering if her little sister was done by now, with breakfast that is, was excruciating.

Oh, thank god! Ezra was starving. The sooner she could get out of the room, the sooner she'd be able to pretend to eat her food, and then run for her morning lecture. She hated the nine o'clock lectures as much as she hated the crowds and the ration lines, but walking late into Professor Archer's lectures was worse. The hundreds of eyes staring at her at once was bad enough, but the disappointed look she'd get from him as if he was saying 'Ezra Mayur, I expected better from you,' was mortifying.

"Ezra?" her dad called again. "Come have your breakfast before—"

"—it gets cold!" Ezra mimed along with him, sighing with relief, and grabbed her bag from the floor. "I'm coming, I'm coming. No need to get your knickers in a twist..."

She walked into the tiny landing that split three ways, her and Shaki's bedroom, mum and dad's bedroom, and a tiny little bathroom that could barely be called a bathroom. It was more of a cubicle where one did all their business. Worse than a shoebox, really.

She rushed down the narrow staircase that could only find one at a time. "Isn't that the saying? Knickers in a twist?" she inquired with a smile as soon as she saw Dad's thinning brown head.

She walked into the equally small living-kitchen-dining combo they called the bottom floor of what the real estate agent had described as a luxurious two-floor villa-style apartment. There was nothing luxurious about it other than that they were one of the fortunate ones. At least they could afford to live in a multi-room apartment. Until recently, that was. Ezra often lay awake at night, wondering how they'd make ends meet — the utility bills, the monthly rations, the sky-high strata alone — now that mum was gone. But that's not what she wanted to think about this morning or any other morning. Mum being gone.