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Words: 14005 in 8 pages
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Infinity's Child
The sense of taste was always first to go. For a week Buckmaster had ignored the fact that everything he ate tasted like flavorless gruel. He tried to make himself believe that it was some minor disorder of his glandular system. But the eighth day his second sense--that of feeling--left him and he staggered to his telephone in blind panic. There was no doubt now but that he had the dread Plague. He was glad he had taken the precaution of isolating himself from his family. He knew there was no hope for him now.
They sent the black wagon for him.
In the hospital he found himself herded with several hundred others into a ward designed to hold less than a hundred. The beds were crowded together and he could have reached to either side of him and touched another ravaged victim of the Plague.
Next to go would be his sense of sight. Hope was a dead thing within him. Even to think of hoping made him realize how futile it would be.
He screamed when the walls of darkness began to close in around him. It was the middle of the afternoon and a shaft of sunlight fell across the grimy blankets on his bed. The sunlight paled, then darkened and was gone. He screamed again. And again.
He heard them move him to the death ward then, but he could not even feel their hands upon him.
Three days later his tongue refused to form words. He fought a nameless terror as he strove with all the power of his will to speak. If he could say only one word, he felt, the encroaching disease would have to retreat and he would be safe. But the one word would not come.
Four horrible days later the sounds around him--the screams and the muttering--became fainter, and he faced the beginning of the end.
At last it was all over. He knew he was still alive because he thought. But that was all. He could not see, hear, speak, feel, or taste. Nothing was left except thought; stark, terrible, useless thought!
Strangely the awful horror faded then and his mind experienced a grateful release. At first he suspected the outlet of his emotions had somehow become atrophied as had his senses, and that he was peaceful only because his real feelings could not break through the numbness.
However, some subtle compulsion within him--some power struggling in its birth-throes--was beginning to breed its own energy and he sensed that it was the strength of that compulsion that had subdued the terror.
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