Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

this is un-beta'd so dont kill me

This mess first started when my friend larkspur disappeared two years ago. Shortly after that all of his family had succumbed to some strange illness and mysteriously died. After his family was no more I noticed that my family began to fall ill from the same sickness that had claimed larkspurs family. It began to become like a plague. First they become weak and it approaches as a cold. After that a fever sets in for several days to a few months if you are really lucky and get a hold of some medicine that works, then a single strange mark appears under the skin. The mark is almost like a black cloud. With in hours after the mark appears on their skin it claims their lives. This has happened to my family since my best friend disappeared. One by one my family members have fallen ill and now the plague has begun to progress within my last surviving sister, Jenny.
I went into town to look for medication for my sister, there were many supposed remedies to the illness but none of them seemed to work very well, some might be good at holding it back for a little while, whereas others made the symptoms less severe. This is the second time I’ve had to come to town for medicine for Jenny. I desperately don’t want my sister to die from this sickness…she’s nearly all I have left. My mother and father have already been buried and I don’t wish to do the same thing with her. There are only three of us left in our family that have survived including my self and I fear that our baby brother, Nicky who is only four will soon follow, like my parents, into his graves.
Now that I had the medicine for my sister I was heading back into the forest to our safe house. Since it was a long ways from the town to the city I bought some food for the way back home. I stopped near a creek and sat on a rock to eat my lunch, there were ants so it was slightly unpleasant. I was just packing the rest of the food up I started to hear some voices in the distance. They were shouting about something but I couldn’t understand it because I was to far away. All of a sudden I heard something rummaging through the bushes. I stood up to see what it was. I saw that it was a boy about fifteen, covered in scratches and bruises, blondish hair that hung limply over his eyes tied back into a messy ponytail, he was loosely dressed in clothing that was torn in places and stumbled over everything. I stared in utter shock. It was larkspur, my friend that had gone missing two years ago. He stared at me for a moment, sort of quivering and looked happy upon seeing me, that is until we heard dogs and shouting. Larkspur looked horrified and shuffled in place for a moment before turning and running back the way he had come then came to a stumbling halt, remembering he was being followed and darting to the side. I followed behind him as fast as I could, it wasn’t hard, he may have been small but I had always been the faster runner out of the two of us, I speed up and ran around him, getting in front and hiding behind a tree until he came around it. Once Larkspur saw me and tried to stop, but just sort of slid into me on the loose gravel as I grasped his wrist and covered his mouth. I rolled us both under the shrubs by the base of the tree and lay very still. There was absolute silence for a moment then the horde of men that had been chasing lark came rushing past. We stayed still for the longest time “I think they’re gone” I whispered to him and he sighed in relief. “What the hell is going on?” I demanded and Lark stiffened “…um… can we talk about this…later? …They might come back,” he stammered nervously. I paused, he was right. The men were most likely trackers and once they noticed that there was no trail left by Lark in the direction that they were going they would turn around and come back. Some of them might even be smart enough to go get a couple dogs to aid in the search. I sigh and stand up tugging Lark to his feet “we can talk on the way” I tell him, then I heard crashing in the distance “Come on” I whisper.
We chattered aimlessly along the way, falling back into how we used to be around each other easily (which mainly consisted of me calling him ‘Birdi’ (his childhood nickname) every once and a while, and he in turn would stomp, scowl or yell at me in indignation for saying it) Lark stumbled over almost everything. After a while he started getting slower and slower until he finally sagged to the ground by the bank of a stream we were just about to cross, wheezing. I had noticed that his legs had been shaking when we had stopped about half a mile back, but when I asked he said he was fine. “How long were you running from those men before you, more or less crashed into me?” I asked him, crouching down to where he was sitting “…yesterday…...morning…” he panted. I winced “and when was the last time you ate?” he grinned “I’duno,” he laughed, “I guess I’m sort of…flying by the seat of my pants aren’t I?” he said gesturing wildly with his hands then leaning back against a large moss covered rock that was behind him and sighed. Lark looked kind of shaky and pale, I got out the remainder of my lunch and gave it to him I was only an apple some ham, cheese and half a loaf of bread but he inhaled it instantly, Had I blinked I would have missed the entire spectacle.