"It doesn't matter if I believe you or not. I'm leaving it to you to entertain me for the rest of the night."
Iggy lowered himself back onto the floor. There was no use wasting the energy to stand if he was expected to tell stories. Holding his chin up with a knee, he closed his eyes. "What kind of story do you want?"
A loud yawn rumbled out of Robert as he stretched his arms up toward the ceiling. "Anything! You're already putting me to sleep."
Iggy breathed out of his nose. "I'll tell you how I ended up here?"
"Oh goody," Robert replied smugly. "Another fruitful story of hope and inspiration. I wonder how it can possibly end." His arms loosely folded over his protruding belly as he leaned forward and peered into the cell, easily finding Iggy's eyes. "Surely you have thousands of stories that you could tell me. You're probably even older than I am. Fifty? Sixty? They don't make viruses like yours any more. Am I right? So, throw a number at me, already."
Iggy rested his palm across his forehead and pressed hard as if he were checking himself for a fever. "Tomorrow is my eighteenth birthday. At least... I think it is…"
Robert stared at him. The man he saw in the cell looked quite older than a teenager, but the truth was, Robert had nearly nothing to reference. He had a daughter who would have just turned eighteen if she hadn't been murdered as an infant. He imagined her youthful soft skin tanned from the sun and her soft baby brown hair long and flowing in the wind. Tall like her deceased mother with mysterious dark brown eyes. Beautiful and innocent. Although his imagination was all that he had, he still said, "you don't look eighteen."
Iggy shrugged his shoulders. "I'm infected. Why would I look my age?"
"It doesn't matter." Robert waved the images of what his own daughter could have looked like away like smoke. "Alright, tell me how you got here."
"It's all a blur," Iggy admitted to himself. "Really, blurry." He cradled his temples with his palms and pushed. "My brother infected me a few weeks ago." He buried his face in his dirty hands. "He was trying to save me."
Robert's face tightened rigidly. "Save ya? From what?"
Iggy rubbed his eyes. "I was bitten."
"You said that happened when you were a small child. You really are a liar." Robert sat back and kicked his book back open.
"No…" Iggy continued. "It wasn't the same thing. I went outside during the day. I never did that before. There was a woman in the garden. I woke up with her-" Iggy cringed "-She was on top of me. Biting my face." Robert looked up from the pages, again. "I wish that I died. Or was kept blind and uninfected. Anything would be better than what I've been through, here."
"You got that right." Robert stood up and paced back and forth. "It doesn't matter, though. Even if you were uninfected, they would've brought you in anyways. They don't discriminate between the infected and uninfected anymore. At least, not like they used to."
Iggy sought clarification, "if I was uninfected, what would they have done to me?"
Robert stopped abruptly in his tracks. "You don't want to know. Trust me."
"But, I do. If it's somehow worse, then maybe… maybe my situation won't seem so terrible."
Robert remained silent, granting him nothing more than a glance. He wasn't there to soothe him in any way, so he changed the subject. "Are they still doing the walls and the communities?"
Flabbergasted, Iggy leaned forward onto his hands. "You know about the village?!"
Robert bit his inner lip hard, not with passion, but with pain.
When he allowed himself, he could recall the colors and smells of community life, from long ago, when he still had his wife and daughter and neighbors and friends. Times were hard back then. Dark. Hopeless, but yet, he still fought on for his family.
The Mass Virus, as it had been named, infected normal healthy people and transformed them into Cannibals. Gluttonous, vicious Cannibals. And these Cannibals were not restrained by their human capacities or limitations. They were strong and fast and fierce and, of course, frightening. The sun was the only thing that protected uninfected people from them. They hadn't taken over the world, but since they stalked the night, they stole peace of mind and safety.
That's how it was up until a different sort of people emerged, who were infected and blood lusting, but intelligent. Both were at odds with the world that the Cannibals had taken, unable to find peace and live, so when the two groups combined their efforts they were a force to be reckoned with.
They made progress. Walls. Safe housing. Education. Food. Water. Extermination parties put an end to the gluttonous monsters terrorizing the walls. Finally, when the wicked howling ceased, they laid on beds of straw and rested easy, safely, happily.
The pairing seemed to be a match made in heaven. Sort of.
A few years down the line and one of the Guardians showed their real face. He attacked a villager. Thrown off early, the villager had just enough blood in his system to transform into a Cannibal, exposing the truth that the source of brainless infection came from those who were also infected.
Now, the Guardians could be blamed for the entire outbreak.
Communities were divided right down the middle. Half wanted them all to perish so to be rid of anything other than good old human, while the other half forgave the intelligent infected and sought to move on. The first half formed their own groups and deserted the communities. Although they left out of rash and angry terms, they were deemed harmless by the rest and forgotten for a decade and a half. Then, they returned with a vengeance and a name. The F.U.S.