THE EXCEPTION
Author: Rot_chan
Summary: They had prayed, the preachers had preached, begged to God...but no one was exempt. Yet Uchiha Sasuke awakes a survivor of the Plague, an exception, taken in by a group of survivors trying to find other survivors in this dystopian world.
Rating: T
Pairings: SasuSaku; ShikaIno
Notes: Not sure how long I plan to make this story. I'm not sure what I'll do...it's going to be about how humanity can crumble in a lawless world, and how living in a dystopia can really change people. Horror in the near future? Definitely a traitor. I plan to have more than one group of survivors. At the end of this chapter I'll list who is in Naruto's group so far.
CHAPTER 2
It was silent - it was always silent in the larger towns, Uzumaki Naruto mused as they entered 'KONOHA: 406,259' and made their way in the rickety school bus past the sign that marked the entrance. They slowly entered the city, the bus (hijacked from an old gas station fifty miles back) jerking and shaking with each pothole and speed bump.
"Pretty void, huh," someone said softly, two seats over - it was one of their youngest, the Hyuuga girl. Naruto felt sympathetic.
Her words were more of a statement than a question, and it was clear as to why: the entire city, of which once had a population in the 400,000s, was now an empty, craggy wasteland. Cars everywhere, untouched, parked at odd angles, left in the middle of streets - there's someone always lying face down across the wheel - all in a futile attempt to outrun the Plague.
The Plague. The Sickness. A total pandemic that swept across the world in a matter of a month, unlike anything any medical researcher or scientist had ever encountered in their labs; vicious and deadly beyond imagination, as if brewed in the very satanic pits of hell themselves...
Who were exempt? Who could be saved? The preachers had started preaching, the Catholics especially hopeful, all the followers crying for redemption, oh Please God, let me be saved, letmebesaved!-
Useless pleas.
Naruto adjusted the holster on his belt. He always kept his pistol at hand. You never knew who you would encounter in places like these - places without any hope. Any food. Any shelter. There were the grateful ones, the ones who begged to be taken with them, who needed a shoulder to lean on, because they couldn't walk on alone anymore...
And then there were the wayward ones, lost of hope and soul, too desperate and listless with hunger and illness to remember it was wrong to threaten, to kill.
Their bus rolled down the empty town streets. There were some cars overturned from the mad rush to beat the illness; it had rapidly spread and killed in a matter of days, hours for some. Now it seemed that it had stopped spreading as it once had just weeks ago, but any carrier could still infect another. The weaker had went first - they couldn't fight it off. But if there had been stronger ones who had managed to live past the first few weeks of the Plague, they weren't here.
And the bodies still littered the streets, bodies from the more recent deaths. It must have swept Konoha hard, and not too long ago...
"Sure it's safe to be here right now?" It was Kiba, looking outside of the window with unease. Naruto could smell his fear. It was apparent that the boy thought they would all catch it here, that they would get sick and not know it. Welcome to a hell they'd already known.
Just miles ago they'd picked up a drifter, this sixteen year old kid who had to kill his own dog - the dog got sick, didn't want to force it to live - who had no ride and no idea where a safe house was. Just fifty miles North, past Konoha (and wasn't it too damn convenient that they had to pass through to get there?) was a shelter, one they'd radioed in on. It still had some supplies and rations, leftover food. It was one that hadn't held many survivors in the end...
The gas masks would protect them, without a doubt. Yet Naruto knew he would be lying if he told himself that it wasn't eerie entering a place stinking of the death, as they searched for a few who could be living still, who might possibly be cured.
There was the cure - one that had been created when it was too late. A miraculous sort of panacea that was produced when the virus had already, reportedly, wiped out over 89.9% of the population. And when it was produced, it only brought more chaos and an utter animosity from those who were once civil - all to obtain that cure, in case of infection, to cure loved ones, the dying.
But they had gotten it - this almost magical serum, and the syringes, at the last infirmary. In case of emergency infection with one of their own. Naruto knew were a group now, a real group and they had to trust each other and look out for one another, and they needed this plan B. Because when you caught the virus, it wasn't difficult to tell if you were infected.
They all remembered the reports. Warning signs. It was an agenda now, forever engrained in their minds. And some of them - like that girl Haruno, she'd seen it, in her own mother - had witnessed it up-close.
Sudden increase in temperature -
-fevers, the fevers would soar in hours, 101 first, then 103, then 104...
A rapid degeneration of muscle and brain function -
-the last ones they'd found when it was too late, just too late, couldn't even talk like their fucking tongues had been cut out, limp, lifeless -
And worst, a sort of insanity and an impairment to make judgement, hallucinations, aggression.
It was painful. Hard to think about.
"Stop being a chickenshit, Inzuka. Don't lose it," Naruto said offhandedly. He got a grunt of agreement from the driver, Nara Shikamaru. They'd picked him up way back in Suna when Naruto and Haruno and the other survivors had stumbled across each other and somehow formed this group with a good cause, because he was great with cars. He could repair almost anything with an engine; he'd been the one to confirm that the van's battery had been dead, no juice left.
But the school bus was better than the van. It held more people, more supplies. The extra masks were in the back with water, rations, clothing. They were gas masks, straight out of a World War II comic book, standard for infection prevention in high risk areas. Areas like Konoha.
And each passenger on the bus wore their mask - they'd had them on before they entered the city. They all resembled a tribe of aliens from Mars, Naruto mused, still able to hold on to his sense of humor even in the disaster. They'd scare the shit out of any survivors they found.
Survivors who'd most likely need a cure. Anyone living on the outside - anyone found in an outside area, like a street, or a building with broken windows or open doors, where possible disease could have spread - could need the cure. Naruto knew that if they found too many, they just wouldn't have enough to administer; not enough syringes anyway. And how could they play God? Choose which could live and die?
Naruto breathed heavily. He felt claustrophobic, despite having worn this mask dozens and dozens of times. They would be safe with these on. It was the thought of possibly finding so many who would not be able to be saved that deeply unnerved him.
It was now three oh eight and Sasuke knew that he was going to die, that soon he would be dead. Just a memory. Like he hadn't ever been here. And he himself didn't have many memories.
Sasuke was lying on the cold linoleum floors - it was the first floor because he couldn't walk, just couldn't had to lie down for a while, only a little while - but the shallow and uneven sounds of his own breathing that made something in his mind say point-blank, You are going to die.
No one wants to die, especially from something so unclear. What did he have? Was it an illness? Or only fear? Would this feeling of sinking go away? Or would it drag him under until he was actually gone?
In these last hours - how many hours have I been here? - Sasuke longed to return to that coma-like state of unawareness he had once been in. And how ironic it was, because he had wished that he had never been there in the first place, those deep depths of his mind, those dark bays of endless sleep.
And Sasuke wished to remember who he truly was and why he had been here and why he was still very cold, if he had a home here and where This Town exactly was, and if he truly was going to die now - so hard to see hard to think, so cold - and if so he might as well keep lying here, just staring out these doors, content to curl up and get colder until he was too frozen to feel it anymore...
There was time slowly drawling onwards - and then there were the footsteps, resounding echoes in this big and desolate place, his place, the burial ground, and Sasuke did not want to hear it.
"Do you think-"
It was all so thick, and slow, very slow, oddly slow, like a very slow dream...
"Maybe a survivor-"
Who were they? Who was he?
"Not too sick, not dead-"
No, not dead - was he dead or alive, or rather, was he in-between?
"Get him out, out-"
And Sasuke was being taken - oh don't get off, OFF - and everything hurt all over again, because the cold was being lifted and he was being lifted- hurts, it hurts -
- and there were the monsters looming over him, sterile, in black - dead, dead, I am dead -
But suddenly there was a awful, terrible fire in his veins creeping up, up up - hurts, fire, ON FIRE - and someone was screaming so loudly...
Then all at once the fire was out, and Sasuke was alive again.
Naruto's group:
Naruto, the leader (22), Sakura Haruno (20), Hinata Hyuuga (18), Shikamaru Nara (24), Kiba Inuzuka (16), Ino Yamanaka (20), Neji Hyuuga (19), and Uchiha Sasuke (21)
